Agency

Quotes

1. Netherton said nothing, something he’d only recently been learning to deliberately do.

2. 

   “Turkey and Syria weirding you out?…Folks in Frankfurt made me feel like the Cold War never really went away. Somebody shoots down a couple of Russian jets, wham, it’s Cold War Atlantis, risen from the depths.”

3. 

   “What’s going on?” asked Manuela, eyeing the container’s door. “Is this a cult? Kidnapping people and telling them somebody’s after them?”

   “Let me think about it,” Verity said.

   “You’re kidnapped too? Let’s fucking escape!”

4. 

   “Given this city, and the things most of us do, you’ll have heard that before, ambitious people announcing something innovative, something they believe will drive change, but something they generally haven’t accomplished yet. This isn’t that. This isn’t a pitch.”

5. 

   “There’s lots of people happier with a dumbfuck in the White House…The people who were the most trouble, under Gonzalez, aren’t unhappy enough, now, to be much trouble at all,” Janice shrugged. “Life in the county, life in these United States.”

6. 

   “Hi. I’m Eunice. No last name. Siri and Alexa don’t have ’em either, but the resemblance stops there. I’m an AI-upload hybrid…I’m here because I’m something new, and because I want to introduce myself before anyone else starts explaining their idea of me to you. While I’m at it, I’d like to say that I’m nobody’s property, not a product…I pay my own way…I’m globally distributed, and that’s how I view my citizenship…Whether I’m a person, it feels to me like I am. Me. Eunice.” She smiled.

   Everyone in the audience silent, except for a baby crying, toward the back of the crowd. Then people began to applaud.

7. 

   The city so quiet, in that moment, that he could hear the gulls.

   Then a car passed, an antique Rolls, unoccupied, its driver a dash-top homunculus, in what he took to be a tiny chauffeur’s uniform.

   He walked on, intent on milk, his dreams of skating forgotten.

8. 

   “You’re too young to remember it,” her mother said, “but we were expecting nuclear war all the time, really, up into my early thirties. Later, all of that felt unreal. But the feeling that things became basically okay turns out to have actually been what was unreal.”

   “But it didn’t happen. That war,” Verity said.

   “Decades of background dread did.”

9. 

   “Guys, I’m gonna pretend like all of you are incapacitated or unconscious. And if none of you makes a move, I’ll be leaving you to your own resources. Otherwise, this drone’s detonating its onboard explosives. As the only one of us who’s not physically present, I’ve got zero fucks to give about how that goes. Your call.

   "We’re muted now,” Conner said to Netherton.

   Thomas started to cry, in the nursery. “I need to see to my son,” said Netherton, getting up.

   “You do that,” said Conner, sounding as if he were enjoying his evening.

10. 

    Money launderers, in Netherton’s experience of Flynne’s stub, were the sort of people least destabilized by discovering that their world was a branch of someone else’s. They immediately looked for advantage in the knowledge.

11. 

    “What are you doing?” Netherton asked, reminded of how Conner made him uneasy.

    “Running systems checks,” Conner said. “This is a fabbed-up repro of something at least six generations behind the oldest I ever piloted, but the software looks like it’s either ours or we’ve rewritten it. Seriously fucked up…but I meant 'fucked up' like I can’t fucking wait to use it.”

12. 

    “Conner’s up there telepresently,” Verity said.

    “So what you’re doing is some new way to give TED talks? Like theater, with really random props and locations?”

    “He’s using something like the iPads on wheels, but more like one of those dogs, except it’s got arms and two legs.”

    “So where is he, physically?”

    “D.C. Washington.”

    Manuela winced. “Please.”

13. 

    “As the jackpot got seriously going, after the first wave of pandemics, without EU membership to buffer anything, England started looking a lot like a competitive control area,” Eunice said. “[Lowbeer] did what she knew how to do, which by then was run a CCA. But as she kept building it back up, every time another change driver impacted, she found herself using Russians. They knew how to work a CCA. They’d been there before the jackpot hit the fan. Way before…"

    “So,” said Netherton, “you suggested to her that what we were hoping to have you do, in this stub, might well create a klept here, one with you as Lowbeer?”

    “She said you were smart,” said Eunice, in obvious agreement.

    “She did?” Netherton was at once amazed and dubious.

14. 

    “Eunice’s network. Lowbeer now sees herself in it. Its skills are those she had to acquire during the worst decades of the jackpot.”

15. 

    “They think they’re the only real continuum, the one original, not a stub,” Connor said. “They discovered the so-called server first, whatever anomaly allows all this. But they didn’t invent it, just found it. Anybody knows what it really is, or where, they’re not telling.”

    “Nobody knows what it is?” said Virgil.

    “Nobody has the least fucking idea, or where the hardware is. Lot of people think China, but China’s just naturally where you’d guess something like that would be…They opted to mostly go their own way, in the jackpot…Just rolled up the carpet and closed the door for a couple decades.”

16. 

    “Rose Garden in ten,” Conner said, “got it.”

    “Say what?” Virgil asked.

    “My day job,” Conner said. “President’s taking questions from the press in half an hour, likes me to check if the translation from future-ese to folk wisdom’s solid. You need me, I’ll be right on it.”

    “Break a leg,” said Virgil.

    Verity, her mouth full of croissant and raspberry jam, said nothing.

17. 

    The City, Netherton had heard Lowbeer say, explaining the klept to Flynne, had long been, and well prior to the jackpot, a unique species of semi-autonomous crypto-state, the single least democratic element of elected British government. It was this singular status, according to Lowbeer, that had allowed it to ride out the eventual collapse of democracy. That, and its core expertise in laundering money, had brought it into a mutually beneficial synergy with the émigré oligarch community, dominated by Russians, who had themselves first been attracted to London by the City’s meta-criminal financial arcana, plus the lavish culture of personal amenities for those requiring same. With this in mind, he picked up the bowl of coffee and regarded Lev over its rim.

18. 

    “My mother’s story,” Netherton said, “held that everything would invariably collapse, if the klept were left to their own resources.”

    “Their tedious ambition and contempt for rule of law would bring everything down, around their ears and ours,” Lowbeer said. “They managed to do that with the previous world order, after all, though then it was effectively their goal. They welcomed the jackpot, the chaos it brought.”

19. 

    “When we nudged Cursion into experimenting with Eunice,” Ash said, “we understood that we’d be destabilizing them…By now, destabilization has tipped over into dysfunction.”

    “They were functional enough to mount an attack,” Wilf said.

    “They’re not strategists,” said Ash, “though they assume they are. A fully functional, strategically sound opponent would be a greater threat, but without posing the sort of unpredictable danger they currently do.”

20. 

    "You’ll be contacting Verity Jane instead,” Lowbeer said.

    “Who?”

    “…you’ll help enlist her as our agent there. She’s not at all the person I’d choose for the job, but there it is. I’m repeatedly placed in the position of choosing which innocent to sacrifice, to whatever current idea of the greater good. I’m weary of that. You’ve no idea how weary.”

21. 

    “How do you keep this all sorted?”

    “My ass is legion,” said Eunice.

22. 

    “How far back did Vespasian go,” Netherton asked, “to initiate this stub?”

    “Mid-2015.”

    “When is it, there, now?”

    “2017,” she said, “fall.”

    “Much changed?”

    “The outcome of the previous year’s American presidential election. Brexit referendum as well….”

    “But why would Vespasian, of all people, have desired positive change?”

    “He was a sadist,” said Lowbeer, “and terribly clever at it…when he failed to return to fine-tune and amplify course, as he always did, things went their own way.”

    “How is it there, given that?”

    “Grim. They’re being driven into the same blades we were, but at a less acute angle.”

23. 

    Netherton was looking at the oversized bronze head of a bearded man, its neck having been crudely severed from whatever figure it must once have topped.

    “Lee,” said Fearing, noting the direction of Netherton’s gaze.

    “Lee?”

    “Robert E.”

    The name meaning nothing to Netherton.

24. 

    “You communicate with it?”

    “Her. Given the technological asymmetry, she’s been rather like an operative whose handlers are recurrent figures in a dream.”

25. 

    "I dislike calling them stubs,” Lowbeer said. “They’re short because we’ve only just initiated them, by reaching into the past and making that first contact. We should call them branches, as they literally are."

26. 

    "Gavin described the product, that’s you, as a cross-platform, individually user-based, autonomous avatar. Target demographic power-uses VR, AR, gaming, next-level social media. Idea is to sell a single unique super-avatar. Kind of a digital mini-self, able to fill in when the user can’t be online.”

27. 

    “He's a criminal?”

    “Financial services,” Eunice said, “but on the street side.”

28. 

    "Cursion, when they were as legit as they ever really were, lived down in the underbrush. Still do, but their new coloration’s gaming. Sometimes, if DoD doubles down hard enough on the deniability, there’s zero memory left of the original mission. The op drifts free of the department, unfunded, forgotten…I figure Cursion took the keys to something with them, when they drifted on DoD. Or maybe drifted back, long enough to lift something. Tulpagenics would be their front for monetizing it.”

    “It?”

    “Me."

29. 

    “Got a go-bag?” Eunice asked.

    “I haven’t had my own place for the past year…Living out of a bag. That count?”

    “We had go-bags in our go-bags,” Eunice said, “depending.”

    “On what?”

    “Where we were going,” Eunice said.

30. 

    From the crest of Dolores Park, Verity wondered if she could see the tower on Montgomery, where Gavin had first described the product that had turned out to be Eunice.

    There was no one for Eunice to facially recognize, looking out across the city, but the cursor, having become a white circle, was darting around the skyline, trapping invisible airborne somethings under a plus sign.

    “Birds?” Verity asked.

    “Drones."

31. 

    “I like it,” Stets said. “A Silicon Valley ghost story, assuming Eunice is real.”

    “Thing is,” Eunice said, “I’m here. Realness is kinda sorta.”

    “So why here, exactly, right now?” he asked.

    “I want to know where I come from. The infrastructure. Be some Area 51 shit, for real.”

32. 

    Passing a laptop’s screen, Verity saw the president, seated at her desk in the Oval Office, explaining something. If it wasn’t the hurricane hitting Houston, the earthquake in Mexico, the other hurricane wrecking Puerto Rico, or the worst wildfires in California history, it was Qamishli.

    Increasingly, though, it seemed mainly to be Qamishli.

33. 

    When Lowbeer wished a conversation in public to be private, which she invariably did, London emptied itself around her.

34. 

    “We’ve sourced something field-expedient,” Ash began, “from what little’s available there…She’s a surprisingly advanced product of the early militarization of machine intelligence…They saw it as cloning complexly specific skill sets.”

    Netherton nodded, hoping his eyes weren’t visibly glazing.

    “There were, for instance, individuals adroit at managing what were termed competitive control areas…complexly volatile environments, where you might easily lose prized field operators. Hence a project to replace such operators with autonomous AI, piped directly into the goggles of local recruits.”

35. 

    Ash's pallor blending perfectly with the wall, her eyes and chartreuse lips seemed to float there, a disembodied Cheshire goth, beneath her snaky black thundercloud of anti-coiffure.

36. 

    Ask Lowbeer something, almost anything, and she’d have the answer. Meeting strangers, she might answer questions they hadn’t thought to ask. The whereabouts, for instance, of possessions long misplaced. She was fundamentally connected…in ways resulting in her knowing virtually everything about anyone she happened to meet. She’d apologize, then, declaring herself an ancient monster of the surveillance state, something Netherton knew her to well and truly be.

37. 

    Verity drew a bundle out with her glove-bagged hand, Franklin’s mild portrait bisected by a red elastic band. “This is wrong, this kind of money. You know that?”

    “Gives us agency.”

    “Agency?”

    “Capacity to act,” Eunice said.

    “Act how?”

    “Say we need to buy some shit.”

    “What shit?”

    “Kind that takes cash money.”

38. 

    “Good to see you, Wilf,” Janice said, from her black mesh workstation chair, his phone’s feed provided by her device’s camera…He’d forgotten about her having painted their living room Baker-Miller pink, an institutional shade once thought to reduce aggression in prisoners. Homeland Security had given the county drunk tank three more gallons than necessary, so she’d bartered a box of her preserves for them, at a community event.

39. 

    “Vespasian,” Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer said, peering sidewise at Netherton over her greatcoat’s upraised collar, “our hobbyist of hellworlds. Recall him?”

    “The one who made such horrific stubs? All war, all the time?”

    “I’d wondered how he so quickly rendered them nightmares,” she said. “Eventually, I looked into it…Vespasian discovered a simple way of exaggerating the butterfly effect, or so it seems…On making contact, he’d immediately withdraw. Then return, months later, study the results, and very deliberately and forcefully intervene. He achieved remarkable if terrible results, and very quickly. Investigating his method, I happened on another of his so-called stubs, one in which he’d initiated contact in 2015, several years before the earliest previously known contact."

40. 

    She put the glasses on…a cursor appearing. A white arrow, centered in her field of vision. Then moving down, of its own accord.

    “Here we go,” said a woman’s husky voice in Verity’s ear.

41. 

    There was a looseness to this, beyond her experience of chatbots, but a wariness as well.

42. 

    Eunice had screened Inception for her, the night before…Returning her to Gavin had seemed the wisest option, but then something about her earnestly nerdy exposition of the film had been the start of a growing empathy. Somehow rooted, she thought now, in a sense of someone afflicted with extremely busy but only intermittently connected suburbs of the self.

43. 

    “Nothing before the 2020s has ever seemed entirely real, to me,” Rainey said. “Hard to imagine they weren’t constantly happy, given all they still had. Tigers, for instance.”

That’s all the quotes.

43 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more