A figure turned, barely visible past the trailer, beside the trail. Carlos, she guessed. He gave them a thumbs-up sign.
“Where’s the log-in?” he asked.
“Under the table. In your tomahawk case.”
“Axe,” he corrected, opening the door and climbing in. The lights came on. He looked down at her. “I know you think this is crazy, but this just might be a way out of our basic financial situation. Ways are thin on the ground, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“I’ll talk to them.”
The Chinese chair got larger, for Burton. She got the slip of Fab paper out of the case, read Burton the log-in as he typed.
He was about to flick GO, when they had it entered, but she put her hand over his. “I’ll do it, but I can’t if you’re here. If anybody’s here. You want to listen from outside, that’s okay.”
He flipped his hand over, squeezed hers. Got up. The chair tried to find him. “Sit down before it has a breakdown,” he said, picking up the tomahawk, and then he was out the door, closing it behind him.
She sat down, the chair audibly contracting, a series of sighs and clicks. She felt the way she had at Coffee Jones, every time she’d had to go in the office in back and get shit from Byron Burchardt, the night manager.
She took her phone off, straightened it, used it as a mirror. Hair wasn’t doing so good, but she had lip gloss that Janice had brought a case of home from Hefty Mart when she’d worked there. Most of the writing was worn off the tube, just a nub left inside, but she got it out of her jeans and used it. Whoever she was going to talk to now, it wouldn’t be poor Byron, whose car had been run over by an autopiloted eighteen-wheeler on Valentine’s Day, about three months after he’d fired her.
She flicked go.
“Miss Fisher?” Just like that. Guy maybe her age, short brown hair, brushed back, expression neutral. He was in a room with a lot of very light-colored wood, or maybe plastic that looked like wood, shiny as nail polish.
“Flynne,” she told him, reminding herself to be polite.
“Flynne,” he said, then just looked at her, from behind an old-fashioned monitor. He was wearing a high black turtleneck, something she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen in real life before, and now she saw the desk was made of marble-look stuff, shot through with big veins of fake gold. Like the loan office in a grifter bank ad. Maybe that was Colombian. He didn’t look Latino to her, but neither did he have a beard or glasses, like the one Burton had described.
“How about you?” she said, sounding more testy than intended.
“Me?” He sounded startled, like he’d been lost, thinking.
“I just told you my name.”
The way he was looking at her now made her want to check over her shoulder. “Netherton,” he said, and coughed, “Wilf Netherton.” He sounded surprised.
“Burton says you want to talk to me.”
“Yes. I do.”
Like the ones Burton said he’d talked to, he sounded English.
“Why?”
“We understand that you were substituting for your brother, on his last two shifts-”
“Is it a game?” Hadn’t known what she was going to say. It just came out.
He started to open his mouth.
“Tell me if it’s a fucking game.” Whatever this was talking, she knew, was what she’d had going on since she’d quit playing Operation Northwind. Sometimes it felt like she’d caught Burton’s PTSD, sitting there on Madison and Janice’s couch.
He closed his mouth. Frowned slightly. Pursed his lips. Relaxed them. “It’s an extremely complex construct,” he said, “part of some much larger system. Milagros Coldiron provide it security. It isn’t our business to understand it.”
“So it’s a game?”
“If you like.”
“The fuck does that shit mean?” Desperate to know something but she didn’t know what. No way that that wasn’t a game.
“It’s a gamelike environment,” he said. “It isn’t real in the sense that you-”
“Are you for real?”
He tilted his head to the side.
“How would I know?” she asked. “If that was a game, how would I know you aren’t just AI?”
“Do I look like a metaphysician?”
“You look like a guy in an office. What exactly do you do there, Wilf?”
“Human resources,” he said, eyes narrowing.
If he was AI, she thought, somebody quirky had done the design. “Burton says you claim you can fix-”
“Please,” he interrupted, quickly, “this is hardly secure. We’ll find a better way to discuss that. Later.”
“What’s that blue light, on your face?”
“It’s the monitor,” he said. “Malfunctioning.” He frowned. “You took a total of two shifts for your brother?”
“Yes.”
“Will you describe them to me, please?”
“What do you want to know?”
“All you remember.”
“Why don’t you just look at the capture.”
“The capture?”
“If nobody was capturing that, what’s the point of me flying your camera?”
“That would be up to the client.” He leaned forward. “Will you help us out, here, please?” He actually looked worried.
He didn’t seem like someone she should trust, particularly, but at least he seemed like someone. “I started the first one in the back of a van or something,” she began. “Came up out of this hatch, controls on override. .”
22
Listening to her, Netherton found he lost himself, not unpleasantly. Her accent fascinated him, a voice out of pre-jackpot America.
There had been a Flynne Fisher in the world’s actual past. If she were alive now, she’d be much older. Though given the jackpot, and whatever odds of survival, that seemed unlikely. But since Lev had only touched her continuum for the first time a few months earlier, this Flynne would still be very like the real Flynne, the now old or dead Flynne, who’d been this young woman before the jackpot, then lived into it, or died in it as so many had. She wouldn’t yet have been changed by Lev’s intervention and whatever that would bring her.
“Those voices,” she said, having finished her account of the first shift, “before the twentieth floor. Couldn’t make them out. What were they?”
“I’m not familiar with the particulars of your brother’s assignment,” he said, “at all.” She was wearing what he took to be a rather severe black military shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, with epaulets, and something in scarlet, possibly cursive, above the left pocket. She had dark eyes, dark brown hair that might as well have been cut by a Michikoid. He wondered if she’d been in the same unit Lev had mentioned her brother having been in.
Ash was giving him the girl’s feed, and had centered it in his field of vision to facilitate eye contact. He was supposed to keep his head down, pretend to be viewing her on the dead monitor, but he kept forgetting to.
“Burton said they were paparazzi,” she said. “Little drones.”
“Do you have those?” She made him conscious of how vague his sense of her day actually was. History had its fascinations, but could be burdensome. Too much of it and you became Ash, obsessed with a catalog of vanished species, addicted to nostalgia for things you’d never known.
“You don’t have drones, in Colombia?”
“We do,” he said. Why, he wondered, did she appear to be seated in a submarine, or perhaps some kind of aircraft, its interior coated with self-illuminated honey?
“Ask her,” said Lev, “about what she witnessed.”
“You’ve described your first shift,” said Netherton. “But I understand there was an event, during your second. Can you describe that?”
“The backpack,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“Like a little kid’s knapsack, but made out of some shitty-looking gray plastic. Tentacle thing at four corners. Sort of legs.”
“And when did you first encounter this?”