She nodded. “Hiring people, to kill us.”
“Uh-huh. Ash says there’s two different anomalous proliferations of subsecond extreme events in the market, right now. Us and them. You understand subsecond financial shit?”
“No.”
“Markets are full of predatory trading algorithms. They’ve evolved to hunt in packs. Ash has people with the tools to turn those packs to Coldiron’s advantage, nobody the wiser. But whoever else is up there, with their own backdoor to now, they’ve got the same tools, or near enough.”
“So what’s it mean?”
“I think it’s like an invisible two-party world war, but economic. So far, anyway.”
“Macon, honey,” called Conner, from his hospital bed, framed by a corona of ragged bubble-pack, “bring a wounded warrior his catheter. It’s out on the back of my trike. Wouldn’t want some dickbag stealing it.”
“Or maybe I’m just crazy,” said Macon, turning to go.
Flynne went to the very back of the room, behind the beds and the IV stands, and stood looking at the barred, unwashed windows, dusty cobwebs in their corners, dead flies and spider eggs dangling. Imagined, behind her, kids paintballing their little robots and tanks in the big sandbox they’d had in here. Seemed forever long ago. A couple of days seemed a long time, now. She imagined the spider eggs hatching, something other than spiders coming out, she had no idea what. “Predatory algorithms,” she said.
“What?” Conner asked.
“Haven’t got a clue,” she said.
66.
DROP BEARS
She’ll ring you,” Ash said, passing Netherton a U-shaped piece of colorless transparent plastic, like something to hold back a young girl’s hair. “Put it on.”
Netherton looked at the thing, then at Ash. “On?”
“Your forehead. Haven’t eaten, I hope?”
“She suggested I wait.”
Ash had, ominously, come equipped with the polished-steel wastebasket he remembered from Flynne’s initial arrival. It stood, now, beside the crow’s nest’s longest section of gray upholstery.
Lowbeer’s sigil appeared. “Yes?” he asked, before it could pulse.
“The autonomic cutout, please,” said Lowbeer.
He saw that Ash was descending the stairway, taut wires vibrating with her every step. He gingerly settled the flimsy yoke across his forehead, nearer hairline than brows.
“Best you fully recline,” said Lowbeer, her tone reminding him of dental technicians.
Netherton did, reluctantly, the upholstered bench all too eagerly adjusting itself to more comfortably support his head.
“Eyes closed.”
“I hate this,” said Netherton, closing his eyes. Now there was nothing but the sigil.
“With your eyes closed,” said Lowbeer, “count down from fifteen. Then open them.”
Netherton closed his eyes, not bothering to count. Nothing happened. Then something did; he saw Lowbeer’s sigil, just for an instant, as though it were some ancient photographic negative. Opened his eyes.
The world inverted, slammed him down.
He lay curled on his side in an entirely gray place. The light, what little there was, was gray as every visible thing. Beneath something very low. It would have been impossible to stand, or indeed to sit up.
“Here,” said Lowbeer. Netherton craned his neck. Huddled, too near his face, was something unthinkable. A brief, whining sound, then he realized he’d made it himself. “The Australian military,” Lowbeer said, “call these drop bears.” The thing’s blunt, koala-like muzzle, unmoving when she spoke, was held slightly open, displaying a nonmammalian profusion of tiny crystalline teeth. “Reconnaissance units,” she said, “small, expendable. These two were haloed in, then guided here. How are you feeling?” Its blank gray eyes were round and featureless as buttons, the color of its hairless face. Mechanical-looking concave ears, if they were ears, swiveled fitfully, independent of one another.
“You didn’t,” said Netherton. “Not here. Please.”
“I did,” Lowbeer said. “You’re not nauseous?”
“I’m too annoyed to be sick,” Netherton said, realizing as he said it that it was true.
“Follow me.” And the thing crawled quickly away from him, toward some source of light, head low to avoid the ceiling, if it were a ceiling. Terrified of being left behind, Netherton crawled after it, gagging slightly at glimpses of his forepaws, which had opposed thumbs.
Clearing the overhang, whatever it was, Lowbeer’s peripheral rose on short hind legs. “On your feet.”
Netherton found himself standing, without being certain how that had been accomplished. He glanced back, seeing that they’d apparently crawled from beneath a bench in an alcove. Everything was that milky translucent gray. The glow ahead, he guessed, was moonlight, filtering down through however many membranes of revolting architecture.
“These units,” Lowbeer said, “are already being consumed by the island’s assemblers, which devour anything not of their own making, from flecks of drifting polymer to more complex foreign objects. As we’re currently being eaten, our time here is short.”
“I don’t want to be here at all.”
“No,” said Lowbeer, “but remember, please, that you were very recently employed in a scheme to monetize this place. You may dislike it intensely, but it’s as real as you are. More so, perhaps, as there are presently no schemes to monetize you. Now follow me.” And the koala-like form was suddenly bounding, partially on all fours, in the direction of further light. Netherton followed, immediately discovering an unexpected agility. Lowbeer led the way, across a blank, repulsive landscape, or perhaps floorscape, as they seemed to be within some enclosed structure larger than Daedra’s hall of voice mail. Vast irregular columns lined either side, much nearer on their right. The surface over which they ran was uneven, slightly rippled.
“I hope you’ve some compelling reason for this,” Netherton said, catching up with her, though he knew that people like Lowbeer didn’t need reasons, whether to put Annie Courrèges on a moby for Brazil or to bring him here.
“Whim, quite likely,” she said, confirming his thought. The bears’ exertions didn’t seem to affect her speech, or his. “Thought perhaps it will help you remember what I tell you here. For instance, that my investigation currently seems to hinge on a point of protocol.”
“Protocol?”
“The corpse of al-Habib,” she said, “if it wasn’t touched in the attack, but rather lay where it fell, makes no sense whatever in terms of protocol. The protocols of a low-orbit American attack system most particularly.”
“Why?” asked Netherton, clinging to the mere fact of conversation as to a life preserver.
“A system prioritizing her security would have immediately neutralized any possibility of his posing a posthumous threat.”
“Who?” asked Netherton.
“Al-Habib,” she said. “He might, for instance, have been implanted with a bomb. Considering his bulk, quite a powerful one. Or a swarm weapon, for that matter. The system saw to the others.” Netherton remembered the silhouette of the flying hand. “Protocol required him to be dealt with in the same fashion. He wasn’t. There must have been a strategic reason for that. Slow a bit, now.” Her hard gray forepaw tapped his chest. Distinctly, claws. “They’re nearby.”
Music. Aside from the scuffing of his and Lowbeer’s feet, the first local sound he’d heard since arriving here. Like the tones of the wind-walkers, but lower, more organized, ponderously rhythmic. “What’s that?” Netherton asked, halting entirely.
“A dirge for al-Habib, perhaps.” She’d stopped as well. Her ears rotated, searching. “This way.” She steered him to the right, toward the long base of the nearest column, then forward again, alongside it. As they neared its corner, she dropped on all fours and crept forward, to peer around it, like something from a children’s book, but gone appallingly wrong. “And here they are.”
Netherton braced
his right paw on the column and leaned over Lowbeer’s bear, until he could see around the corner. A sizable throng of small, gray, predictably horrid figures squatted, around the upright corpse of the boss patcher. He was hollow now, Netherton saw, membrane thin, like the island’s architecture. Eyeless, the cavern of his mouth agape, he appeared to be propped up with slender lengths of silvered driftwood.
“Incorporating him into the fabric of the place,” Lowbeer said. “But not about myth so much as plastic. Each cell in his body replaced with a minim of recovered polymer. He’s made his escape, you see.”
“His escape?”
“To London,” Lowbeer said. “Americans enabled that, by not destroying his apparent remains. Though he’s always been a bit of an escape artist, our Hamed. Minor Gulf klept. Dubai. But a fifth son. Quickly the black sheep. Very black indeed. Had to flee in his late teens, under a death warrant. The Saudis particularly wanted him. The aunties knew where he was, of course, though I’d quite forgotten about him myself. And we wouldn’t tell the Saudis, of course, unless it became worth our while. His mother’s Swiss, by the way, a cultural anthropologist. Neoprimitives. That would be what he based his patchers on, I imagine.”
“He faked his death?” The music, if it could be called that, was a largely subsonic auger, boring into Netherton’s brain. He straightened, stepping back from Lowbeer and the column. “I can’t do this,” he said.
“Faked it most complexly. The peripheral’s DNA is that of an imaginary individual, albeit with a now highly documented past. I imagine Hamed’s own DNA is fairly imaginary by now, for that matter, by way of keeping a step ahead of the Saudis. But I’m taking mercy on you, Mr. Netherton. I can see how difficult this is for you. Close your eyes.”
And Netherton did.
67.
BLACK BEAUTY
Their lawyers were from Klein Cruz Vermette, in Miami. One of the three who’d met them in the snack bar at Hefty was a Vermette, Brent, but not the one in the name. Son of the one in the name, not yet a full partner.
It had been Macon’s idea to sign the papers there. Otherwise they’d have been doing it in Fab, or the space next door, or in Tommy’s police car, Tommy having driven them over from the football field, where the helicopter they’d chartered in Clanton had landed. They’d flown in their own jet, from Miami to Clanton, and they were nice. So nice, she figured, that Coldiron must be paying them fuckloads of money not to show how weird they must think this all was, that she and Burton and Macon were being set up as a corporation that was buying a strip mall. But it did make it easier, the niceness. Brent, who had an even more expensive-looking tan than Pickett’s, had put away a plate of pork nubbins, while the other two had Hefty lattes.
She’d only seen Tommy when he’d walked them in from the parking lot, hadn’t had a chance to speak with him. She guessed driving and being security was part of his job now, or part of the part about Jackman’s deal with Pickett. He’d given her a nod, when he went back to the car. She’d smiled at him.
She’d have thought having Tommy drive the lawyers to a meeting in Hefty Mart was too obvious, but now she figured his relationship with the town had always been funny. Plenty of people must know about Jackman and Pickett, and more than she wanted to imagine must be making money off building, though maybe not that directly. So if you saw Tommy drive some people in business clothes to Hefty, then sit there in the parking lot while they had a meeting inside, maybe you’d ignore it. Or maybe you’d go over and say hello, and Tommy would give you something from the Coffee Jones machine, but you wouldn’t ask him what he was doing.
Now it was just her and Macon there, Burton having gone with Tommy to take them back to their helicopter. She’d gotten herself a half-order of chicken nubbins, which she sometimes liked more than she’d admit.
“We could all have had two heads,” Macon said, “and they wouldn’t have mentioned it.” He had his Viz in, and she guessed he was literally keeping an eye on news and the market.
“They were nice, though.”
“You wouldn’t want to be on their bad side.”
“You’re Chief Technical Officer, huh?” she asked him.
“Yep.”
“Shaylene’s not on the board? That Burton’s idea?”
“I don’t think it was his call. My guess is they’re looking at who’s essential to whatever makes this worthwhile to them. You’re essential, Burton is, evidently I am, and Conner.”
“Conner?”
“Not on the board either, but it looks like he’s essential.”
“Why does it?”
“He’s already swallowed one of these.” He took a small plastic box from the front pocket of his new blue shirt and put it on the table between them. Clear, flat, square. Inside, white foam with a single cutout, fitting a glossy black pill. “You’ll want some water.”
“What is it?” She looked at him.
“Tracker. That’s not it. Gel cap around it, makes it less easy to lose, easier to swallow. Barely big enough to see, on its own. Ash ordered them from Belgium. Bonds to your stomach lining, good for six months, then it disassembles itself and nature takes its course. Company makes it has its own string of low-altitude satellites. Have to keep putting ’em up, but they make that a feature, not a bug, ’cause they get to keep changing their hardwired encryption.”
“To keep track of where I’m at?”
“Pretty well anywhere, unless somebody sticks you in a Faraday cage, or way down in a mine. A little more robust than Badger”—he smiled—“and you could lose your phone. Want some water?”
She opened the box, shook the thing out. Didn’t feel any different than any other pill. Tiny little reflections of the snack bar lights in the deep glossy black. “Don’t bother,” she said, putting it on her tongue and washing it down with half a short cup of black coffee Burton had left on the table. “Wish it meant somebody in Belgium could tell me where the fuck I am,” she said. “In terms of all the rest of it, I mean.”
“Know what ‘collateral damage’ means?”
“People get hurt because they happen to be near something that somebody needs to happen?”
“Think that’s us,” he said. “None of this is happening because any of us are who we are, what we are. Accident, or it started with one, and now we’ve got people who might as well be able to suspend basic laws of physics, or anyway finance, doing whatever it is they’re doing, whatever reason they’re doing it for. So we could get rich, or killed, and it would all still just be collateral.”
“Sounds about right. What do you say we do, with that?”
“Try not to get damaged. Let it go where it’s going, otherwise, because we can’t stop it anyway. And because it’s interesting. And I’m glad you swallowed that. You get lost, it’ll tell us where to find you.”
“But what if I wanted to get lost?”
“They aren’t the ones trying to kill you, are they?” He took his Viz off, looked her in the eye. “You’ve met them. Think they’d be trying to kill you, if you stood to get them in some kind of very deep shit, or lose them a bunch of money?”
“No. Couldn’t tell you exactly why. But they could still completely screw up the world, just by dicking around with it. Couldn’t they?”
His fingers closed around the tangled, rigid, silvery filaments. She looked down and saw the lights of the projectors, moving in there. She looked up at him.
He nodded.
68.
ANTIBODY
Netherton, eyes screwed shut, viscerally dreading the gray light of the patchers’ island, became aware of a honeyed scent, warm yet faintly metallic.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Netherton,” Lowbeer said, from nearby. “I suppose that was very unpleasant for you. Not to mention unnecessary.”
“I’m not opening my eyes,” he said, “until I’m sure we’re no longer there.” He opened his right, fractionally. She was seated opposite where he lay.
“We’re in the cupola of the land-yacht,” she s
aid. “Not peripherally.”
Opening both eyes, he saw that she’d lit her candle. “Were you here, before?”
“I was in Ash’s tent,” she said. “Had I come in earlier, you’d have asked where we were going. And refused, possibly.”
“Revolting place,” he said, meaning the island, though equally true of Ash’s tent. He sat up, the cushion that had supported his head lowering itself as he did.
“Ash,” said Lowbeer, fingers extended around the candle as if for warmth, “imagines you a conservative.”
“Does she?”
“Or a romantic, perhaps. She sees your distaste for the present rooted in the sense of a fall from grace. That some prior order, or perhaps the lack of one, afforded a more authentic existence.”
The autonomic cutout slid down Netherton’s forehead, over his eyes. He plucked it off, resisted the urge to snap it in half, put it aside. “She’s the one mourning mass extinctions. I simply imagine things were less tedious generally.”
“I personally recall that world, which you can only imagine was preferable to this one,” she said. “Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.”
“I’ve no idea how anything could be otherwise,” he said. “I simply don’t like the way things are. Neither does Ash, apparently.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s in your dossier.”
“What is?”
“That you’re a chronic malcontent, albeit quite a purposeless one. Otherwise we might have met earlier.” Periwinkles quite sharp, just then.
“And why, exactly, do you think al-Habib is here?” Netherton asked, a change of topic seeming suddenly welcome.
“That was a peripheral, that you saw her stick her thumb into,” she said. “He’d been peripherally there for years, though not with the peri you and Rainey saw. Very expensively bespoke, the one you saw die. It had only been there for a few days. Complete genome, full complement of organs, fingerprints. The formal forensic signatures of a legal death, waiting to be ticked off. The island’s history assigned to an imaginary figure. His previous peripheral, most likely, was weighted and dropped into the water column, to be consumed by their assemblers. None of his immediate cohort would have been privy to that, nor to his real identity, and now, conveniently, courtesy of the Americans, they’re all dead. But we saw the survivors, didn’t we? Mortaring him into the fabric of the place. Memorializing what he’d pretended to be.”