The Peripheral (Jackpot #1)

by William Gibson

“You’re a publicist,” she said. “She’s a celebrity. That’s interspecies.”

“Careful,” said Macon, “but curious. Got to be a balance.”

“Miss Rainey,” said Lowbeer, “I am Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer, of the Metropolitan Police. You do understand that you are present here, legally, under the Android Avatar Act?”

“The use of explosives is unusual, and we prefer to keep it so. Too much like asymmetric warfare.” “Terrorism,” said the rental. “We prefer not to use that term,” said Lowbeer, studying her candle flame with something that looked to Netherton to be regret, “if only because terror should remain the sole prerogative of the state.”

And what, and this is what I’ve really been wanting to ask somebody for the last little while, the actual fuck is going on out here?”

He tilted his hat forward a little, to let a couple of little pools of rain roll off the plastic-covered brim. “Haven’t met the man. Haven’t had anything directly to do with him before. He gets Jackman reelected, so Jackman has ways of making it clear to me what’s Corbell’s business and what isn’t, and I do my best, around that, to enforce the law in this county. Because somebody’s got to. And if we all woke up one day and Corbell and that building economy had been taken up to heaven, after a few weeks most people around here wouldn’t have any money for food. So that’s complicated too, and sad if you ask me, but there it is. How about you?”

“The basic flow of cash in the county’s changed, Flynne, and I mean overnight. Your brother’s paying Corbell to fuck with elected officials at the statehouse. There hasn’t really been much of any other kind of cash around here, not for quite a while. So pardon my jumping to conclusions.”

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there.

I made a few discreet inquiries. Now anyone I asked about her, however privately, no longer knows me. Retroactively. Never have. Some have gone to the trouble of scrubbing me from group images. As metrics of caution go, that one’s telling.”

Exciting and problematic. Why did the two seem so often to be inextricably linked, he wondered?

I imagine you’re actually rather good at what you do, in spite of certain disadvantages. Disadvantage and peculiar competence can go hand in hand, I find.”

“You’re someone who only pretends to be unintelligent,” Netherton said. “It serves you simultaneously as protective coloration and a medium for passive aggression. It won’t work with me.”

“Okay,” she said, “she your girlfriend?” “Who?” “Daedra.” “No,” he said. “But was she?” “No.” She looked at him. “You two were doing it?” “Yes.” “Girlfriend. Unless you’re an asshole.”

“If you can look like the boss patcher, and then look like that,” said Netherton, to the bearded man, “why didn’t you simply change your appearance again, after you realized that you’d been seen?” “Branding,” said the bearded man. “Investment in persona. I represent the product. I’m known to the investors.”