“It’s not that much, but if he does, we’re onto something.”
“You weren’t here last night, after I talked to Milagros Coldiron.”
“Carlos needed some help, tightening the pattern. Who was it?”
“Neither of the ones you talked to. Name’s Netherton. Said he was human resources.”
“And?”
“Wanted to hear what happened. Told him, same as I told you.”
“And?”
“He said they’d be in touch. Burton?”
“Yeah?”
“If it’s a game, why would anybody want to kill you, just for seeing something happen in a game?”
“Games cost, to build. That’s some kind of beta version. They keep all that shit secret.”
“There wasn’t anything that special about it,” she said. “Plenty of kills that ugly, in lots of games.” Though she wasn’t so sure about that.
“We don’t know what it was, about what you saw, that they’d think was special.”
“Okay,” she said, handing him the ticket. “I’m taking a shower.”
She went back into the house, through the kitchen, and out to the shower.
She was taking off her bathrobe when her phone buzzed on her wrist. “Hey,” she said.
“Macon. How you doing?”
“Okay. How’re you?”
“Shaylene says you’re looking for me. Hope it’s not a user satisfaction issue.” He didn’t sound worried.
“More like tech support, but it’ll have to wait till I can see you.”
“I am just now holding a little salon, as it happens, in the snack bar here. We have Hefty’s famous pork nubbins. Pretty much all of them.”
“Confidential.”
“Absolutely.”
“I’ll be over on my bike. Don’t leave.”
“You got it.”
She showered, then dressed in the jeans she’d worn the day before and a loose gray t-shirt. Left the robe and towel and flip-flops on the shelf outside. Headed around the house to her bike.
Didn’t see any of Burton’s posse, but assumed they were there, more settled in. And the drones would be up too. None of that seemed very real to her. Neither did the gaudy ticket with Leon’s hologram and retina on it. Maybe Conner wasn’t the only one batshit, she thought.
She unlocked her bike, got on it, seeing that Leon had somehow managed to not actually deplete her battery, and pedaled away, smelling the roadside pines in the warm afternoon.
She was about a third of the way along Porter, when the Tarantula passed her in the opposite direction, engine whining, too fast for her to get even a glimpse of Conner.
She rode on, through the fried-chicken smell, until that thinned and was gone, and forty-five minutes later was locking her bike outside of Hefty Mart.
Macon had his own table in the snack bar, furthest from where you paid. It was because he could troubleshoot for the local management, handle things the chain’s headquarters in Delhi didn’t have a handle on. When things went wrong with inventory tracking, or with the shoplifter blimps, Macon could fix it on-site. He wasn’t on any payroll, but part of the deal was that he got to use the table in the snack bar as his office, with an open tab on snacks and drinks.
He wouldn’t do anything, for anybody, that had to do with building drugs, not the usual position for someone in his line of work. It could make things tricky for him, if people who built drugs had something that needed fixing, but it could make other things easier. Deputy Tommy Constantine, in Flynne’s opinion the closest thing in town to an attractive single man, had told her the Sheriff’s Department called on Macon if they couldn’t get their shit fixed otherwise
The snack bar smelled of nubbins, the pork ones. The chicken ones didn’t smell as much, maybe because they lacked the traditional red dye. Macon was working his way through a plate of the pork ones as she came up to the table. His back was to the wall, as always, and Edward, to his left, was fixing something that wasn’t there.
Edward had a Viz in either eye, she assumed for the depth perception, and a lavender satin sleep mask over them both, to block out the light. He wore a pair of tight flu-orange gloves, with what looked like black Egyptian writing all over them. She could almost see the thing he was working on, but of course she couldn’t, because it wasn’t there. It might be in the manager’s office upstairs, or for that matter in Delhi, but Edward could see it, and control the pair of plastic hands that held it, wherever that was.
“Hey,” said Macon, looking up from his nubbins.
“Hey,” she said, pulling up a chair. The chairs here all looked like they were molded from the stuff Burton had coated the inside of the trailer with, but less flexy.
Edward frowned, carefully placed the invisible object six inches above the tabletop, and reached up to raise the sleep mask to his forehead. He looked out at her through the silver webbing of the two Vizs, grinned. A grin was a lot, from him.
“Nubbins?” Macon asked.
“No thanks,” she said.
“They’re fresh!”
“All the way from China.”
“Nobody grows pork nubbins juicy as China.” Macon, lighter skinned than Edward, sort of freckled, had very beautiful eyes, irises mottled greenish brown. The left one, now, was behind his Viz. “Phone’s bricked, huh?”
“Don’t you worry about those things?” she asked, meaning the Viz. “Seeing everything.”
“Ours have been pretty thoroughly fiddled with,” he said. “Right out the box, you’d be wise to worry.”
“Mine hasn’t bricked,” she said, knowing he knew perfectly well that it hadn’t. “Thing is, Homes stuck Burton out on the athletic field at Davisville High, to keep him from beating on Luke 4:5.”
“Sorry to hear,” he said. “He didn’t get to beat on them at all?”
“Enough to get taken into protective custody. So they had his phone overnight. What worries me is that they might have looked at mine while they had his.”
“In that case,” he said, “they’d have looked at mine as well. Your brother and I pretty much in a way of business.”
“You tell, if they had?”
“Maybe. Some bored Homes in a big white truck, looking for porn, I could probably tell. To be frank, if they did, I’d know. But some panoptic motherfucker federal AI? Fuck only knows.”
“Would they see my phone was funny?”
“They could,” said Edward, “but something would have to be looking at you, something that really specially wanted to know about certain people’s phones.”
“Actually,” said Macon, “we did you quite the job. Manufacturer in China hasn’t spotted one of ours yet.”
“That we know of,” said Edward.
“True,” said Macon, “but usually we hear if they do.”
“Basically, you don’t know?”
“Basically, no. But I’ll give you permission not to worry about it. Free.”
“You get anything for Conner Penske lately?”
Macon and Edward gave each other a look. Edward lowered the sleep shade over his Vizs and picked up the thing that wasn’t there. Turned it over. Prodded it with an orange and black forefinger. “What sorta anything you thinking of?” Macon asked.
“I was over at Jimmy’s last night. Looking for you.”
“Sorry I missed you.”
“Conner was there, getting into it with a couple of high school dicks. Had something on the back of his trike.”
“Yellow ribbon?”
“Kinda robot snake-spine? Hooked up to a monocle-looking thing.”
“We didn’t fab him that,” Macon said. “Surplus off eBay. Legal. We got him a servo interface and circuitry, is all.”
“What’s on the business end?”
“Nothing we know of,” he said. “Arm’s length.”
“He could wind up in some serious trouble. You know that?”
Macon nodded. “Conner, he’s a compelling motherfucker, you know? Hard to say no to. That trike and shit’s all he got now.”
“That and wakey and drinking. If it was just the trike and some toys, it maybe wouldn’t be so bad.”
Macon looked at her, sadly. “Little manipulator on the end,” he said, “like Edward’s using, but fewer degrees of freedom.”