She didn’t remember sitting up but then she saw her own hands and they weren’t. Hers.
“If you need this,” the woman said, holding out a steel canister. “There’s nothing in you but some water.” Flynne leaned over, saw a face not hers reflected in the round, mirror-polished bottom. Froze. “Fuck.” The lips there forming the word as she spoke it. “What the fuck is this?” She came up off the bed fast. Not a bed. A padded ledge. She was taller. “Something’s wrong,” she heard herself say, but the voice wasn’t hers. “Colors-”
“You’re accessing input from an anthropomorphic drone,” the woman said. “A telepresence avatar. You needn’t consciously control it. Don’t try. We’re recalibrating it now. Macon’s device isn’t perfect, but it works.”
“You know Macon?”
“Virtually,” said the woman. “I’m Ash.”
“Your eyes-”
“Contact lenses.”
“Too many colors-” She meant her own vision.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “We’d missed that. Your peripheral is a tetrachromat.”
“A what?”
“It has a wider range of color vision than you do. But we’ve found the settings for that and are including them in the recalibration. Touch your face.”
“Macon told me not to.”
“This is different.”
Flynne raised her hand, touched her face, not thinking. “Shit-”
“Good. The recalibration is taking effect.”
Again, with both hands. Like touching herself through something that wasn’t quite there.
She looked up. The ceiling was pale polished wood, shiny, inset with round flat little metal light fixtures, glowing softly. Tiny room, higher than it was wide. Narrower than the Airstream. The walls were that same wood. A man stood at the far end, by a skinny open door. Dark shirt and jacket. “Hello, Flynne,” he said.
“Human resources,” she said, recognizing him.
“You don’t look like you’re going to need this,” the woman called Ash said, putting the canister down on the cushioned ledge Flynne had awakened on. Awakened? Arrived? “Would you mind speaking to Macon now?”
“How?”
“By phone. He’s concerned. I’ve reassured him, but it would help if he could speak with you.”
“You have a phone?”
“Yes,” said the woman, “but so do you.”
“Where?”
“I’m not sure. It doesn’t matter. Watch.”
Flynne saw a small circle appear. Like a badge in Badger. It was white, with a gif of a line drawing of an antelope or something, running. She moved her eyes. The circle with the gif moved with them. “What’s that?”
“My phone. You have one too. I have Macon. Now I open a feed-”
A second circle expanded, to the right of the gif and larger. She saw Macon, seated in front of Burton’s display. “Flynne?” he asked. “That you?”
“Macon! This is crazy!”
“What did you do, here, just before we did the thing?” He looked serious.
“Had a pee?”
He grinned. “Wow. .” He shook his head, grinned. “This is mission control shit!”
“He can see what I’m seeing,” said Ash.
“You okay?” Macon asked.
“Guess so.”
“You’re okay here,” he said.
“We’ll get her back to you, Macon,” Ash said, “but we need to speak with her now.”
“Send somebody up to the house to get me a sandwich,” she said to Macon, “I’ll be starving.”
Macon grinned, nodded, shrank to nothing, was gone.
“We could move to my office,” said the man.
“Not yet,” said Ash. She touched the pale wall and a section slid aside, out of sight.
A toilet, sink, shower, all steel. A mirror. Flynne moved toward it. “Holy shit,” she said, staring. “Who is she?”
“We don’t know.”
“This is a. . machine?” She touched. . someone. Stomach. Breasts. She looked in the mirror. The French girl in Operation Northwind? No. “That’s got to be somebody,” she said.
“Yes,” said Ash, “though we don’t know who. How do you feel now?”
Flynne touched the steel basin. Someone else’s hand. Her hand. “I can feel that.”
“Nausea?”
“No.”
“Vertigo?”
“No. Why is she wearing a shirt like mine, but silk or something? Has my name on it.”
“We wanted you to feel at home.”
“Where is this? Colombia?” She heard how little she thought this last might be true.
“That’s my department, so to speak,” said the human resources man, behind her. Netherton, she remembered. Wilf Netherton. “Come out to my office. It’s a bit roomier. I’ll try to answer your questions.”
She turned and saw him standing there, eyes wider than she remembered. Like someone seeing a ghost.
“Yes,” said Ash, putting her hand on Flynne’s shoulder, “let’s.”
Her hand, thought Flynne, but whose shoulder?
She let Ash guide her.
42
Flynne completely altered the peripheral’s body language, Netherton realized, as Ash directed her toward him. Inhabited, its face became not hers but somehow her.
He found himself backing down the corridor, barely shoulder-wide, away from that smallest of the Gobiwagen’s cabins. Unwilling to lose sight of her, out of something that felt at least partially like terror, he couldn’t turn his back.
Ash, earlier, had explained that peripherals, when under AI control, looked human because their faces, programmed to constantly register changing micro-expressions, were never truly still. In the absence of that, she’d said, they became uniquely disturbing objects. Flynne was now providing the peripheral with her own micro-expressions, a very different effect. “It’s fine,” he heard himself say, though whether to himself or to her he didn’t know. This was all much stranger than he’d anticipated, like some unthinkable birth or advent.
He backed into the scent of Ash’s flowers. Ash had had Ossian remove Lev’s grandfather’s displays, and the luggage as well, deeming them unnecessary, not conducive to “flow” in the space, so the flowers were at the end of the desk nearest two compact armchairs she’d raised from hidden wells in the floor. They’d reminded him of the seats in Lowbeer’s car, but slicker, unworn.
“They’re for you,” Ash said, indicating the flowers. “We can’t offer you anything to eat, or drink.”
“I’m fucking starving,” Flynne said, accent her own but the voice not as he recalled it. She looked at Ash. “I’m not? I-”
“Autonomic bleed-over,” Ash said. “That’s your own body’s hunger. Your peripheral doesn’t experience it. It doesn’t eat, has no digestive tract. Can you smell them, the flowers?”
Flynne nodded.
“Colors more normal?”
Flynne hesitated. Took two deep, slow breaths. “They hurt, before. Not now. I’m sweating.”
“You’ve flooded its adrenal system. You won’t find the transition this unsettling again. There was no way we could cushion it for you, as a first-time user, other than have you prone, eyes closed, on an empty stomach.”
Flynne turned, slowly, taking in the room. “I saw you here,” she said to Netherton. “Looked this tacky, but I thought it was bigger. Where’s that atrium?”
“Elsewhere. Take a seat?”
She ignored his suggestion, went to the window instead. He and Ash had argued over whether or not to have the blinds closed. In the end, Ash had ordered Ossian into her workspace in the garage’s corner, leaving the blinds open. With no motion in the garage, the arches had faded to their faintest luminosity. Flynne bent slightly, peering out, but now the nearest arch sensed her movement, pulsed faintly, greenly. “A parking lot?” She must have seen Lev’s father’s cars. “Are we in an RV?”
“A what?” asked Netherton.
“Camper. Recreational vehicle.” She was moving her head, trying to see more. “Your office is in an RV?”