Flynne remembered Pickett saying he’d have her call Netherton, try to get more money for her than the others were offering.
“Macon said Pickett has fancy lawyers, in Nassau,” Janice said, “but not as fancy as yours, and not as many.”
“All of three, that I know of.”
“Lots more now, in town. Housing and feeding them’s a growth industry. Timely one, too.”
“He put my apps and stuff on it?” Flynne raised her new phone, sniffed. Fresh.
“Yeah, plus some major encryption, runs in background. He says to change your passwords on everything. And don’t just use your birthday or your name backwards. And there’s a Hefty Wheelie Boy for you, in that tote there, on your desk.”
“A what?”
“Wheelie Boy.”
“The fuck?”
“Macon got it off eBay. New old stock. Mint in box.”
“Huh?”
“Back in grade school. Like a tablet on a stick? Bottom’s like a little Segway. Remember those things? Motors, two wheels, gyros to keep ’em upright.”
“Looked stupid,” Flynne said, remembering them now.
Janice’s phone chimed. She checked it, the screen lighting her face. “Ella needs me.”
“If it’s anything serious, get me. Otherwise, I’m going to try to sleep.”
“I’m glad they got you back okay. You know that?”
“I love you, Janice,” Flynne said.
When Janice had gone downstairs, she got up, put on her bedside light, brought the tote back to the bed. There was a box inside with a picture of a Hefty Wheelie Boy on the lid. Like a red plastic flyswatter stuck into a softball the same color, two fat black toy tractor tires on either side of that. Swatter part was a mini-tablet with a cam, on a stick. Marketed as toys, baby monitors, long-distance friendship or sad romance platforms, or even a kind of low-rent virtual vacation. You could buy or rent one in Vegas or Paris, say, drive it around a casino or a museum, see what it saw. And while you did, and this was the part that had put her off, it showed your face on the tablet. You wore a headpiece with a camera on a little boom, which captured your reaction as you saw things through the Wheelie, and people who were looking at it saw you seeing that, or them, and you could have conversations with them. She remembered Leon trying to gross her out, telling her how people were getting sexy with them, all of which she’d hoped he’d made up.
Back on the bed, opening the box, she thought this must have been part of where peripherals were going to come from. Wheelie Boy, in its cheap-ass way, had been one.
There was a yellow sheet from a Forever Fab notepad inside. DR’S ORDERS, FULLY CHARGED + HARDASS NCRYPT-M in thick flu-pink marker.
She lifted the thing out and tried to stand it up, but it fell over backward, tablet in the moonlight like a black hand mirror. On the bottom of the red ball, a white button. She pressed it. Gyros spun themselves up with a little squawk, the red plastic rod with the tablet on the end suddenly upright on the bed, black wheels moving independently in the sheets, turning it left, then right.
She poked the black screen with her finger, knocking it back, the gyros righting it.
Then it lit, Netherton’s face on it, too close to the cam, eyes wide, nose too big. “Flynne?” he said, through a cheap little speaker.
“Shit the living fuck,” she said, almost laughing, then had to yank the sheet over her legs because she just had her underpants and the sweatshirt on.
78
Feed from the thing’s cam, in full binocular, reminded him of still images from an era prior to hers, though he couldn’t remember the platform’s name. She looked down at him, over knees draped in pale fabric.
“It’s me,” he said.
“No shit,” she said, reaching out, fingertip becoming enormous, to flick him, the cam platform, whatever it was, backward. To be arrested by whatever it stood on. Briefly showing him a low, artisanal-looking surface he assumed must be the ceiling. A horizontal seam, as if glued paper were starting to peel. Then it righted itself, with an audible whirr.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Know what you look like?” Leaning over her knees.
“No,” he said, though the emulation software’s sigil depicted something spherical, two-wheeled, with a topmost rectangle upright on a thin projection. She reached past him, arm growing huge, and the feed filled with a promotional image of the thing on the sigil, rectangular screen tightly framing an eager child’s face.
“No hot synthetic bods, back here in Frontierland,” she said, “but we got Wheelie Boy. Where are you?”
“In the Gobiwagen.”
“The RV?”
“At my desk,” he said.
“That really your desk?”
“No.”
“Ugly-ass desk. Never was really any Coldiron?”
“There are companies, registered in that name, in your Colombia, your Panama,” he said. “And now in your United States of America. You’re an executive of that one.”
“But not there.”
“No.”
“Just Lev’s hobby? With your fuck-up and Lowbeer’s murder investigation on top of it?”
“To my knowledge.”
“Why are you here?”
“Lowbeer suggested it,” he said. “And I wanted to see. Is it day? Is there a window? Where are we?”
“Night,” she said. “My room. Bright moon.” She reached to the side, turning off a light source. Instantly, she was differently beautiful. Dark eyes larger. Daguerreotype, he remembered. “Turn around,” she said, doing it for him. “I have to put my jeans on.”
Her room, rotating the cam as far as he could, was like the interior of some nomadic yurt. Nondescript furniture, tumuli of clothing, printed matter. This actual moment in the past, decades before his birth. A world he’d imagined, but now, somehow, in its reality, unimaginable. “Have you always lived here?”
She bent, plucked him up, carrying him toward the window, into moonlight. “Sure.”
And then the moon. “I know this is real,” he said, “it must be, but I can’t believe it.”
“I can believe in yours, Wilf. Have to. You should try stretching a little.”
“Before the jackpot,” he said, instantly regretting it.
She turned him around then, away from the moon. Stood staring, moonlit, grave, into his eyes. “What’s that, Wilf, the jackpot?”
Something stilled the part of him that knitted narrative, that grew the underbrush of lies in which he lived.
79
She sat with him on her lap, in the old wooden chair under the oak in the front yard.
Ben Carter, the youngest of Burton’s soldiers, who looked like he should still be in high school, sat on the front porch steps, bullpup across his lap, Viz in his eye, drinking coffee from a Thermos. She wanted some, but knew she’d never sleep at all if she had it, and Wilf Netherton was explaining the end of the world, or anyway of hers, this one, which seemed to have been the beginning of his.
Wilf’s face, on the Wheelie’s tablet, had lit her way downstairs. She’d found Ben on the porch steps, guarding the house, and he’d been all embarrassed, getting up with his rifle and trying to remember where not to point it, and she’d seen he had a cap like Reece had had, with the pixilated camo that moved around. He hadn’t known whether to say hello to Wilf or not. She told him they were going to sit out under the tree and talk. He told her he’d let the others know where she was, but please not to go anywhere else, and not to mind any drones. So she’d gone out to the chair and sat in it with Wilf in the Wheelie Boy, and he’d started to explain what he called the jackpot.
And first of all that it was no one thing. That it was multicausal, with no particular beginning and no end. More a climate than an event, so not the way apocalypse stories liked to have a big event, after which everybody ran around with guns, looking like Burton and his posse, or else were eaten alive by something caused by the big event. Not like that.