The Peripheral Read Online Free

that?” he asked.
    “It’s so much of the feel of the place. I want our audience to have that.”
    Something was moving in the distance, to his left. “What’s that?”
    “Wind-powered walker.”
    Four meters tall, headless, with some indeterminate number of legs, it was that same hollow milky plastic. Like the discarded carapace of something else, moving as if animated by an awkward puppetry. It rocked from side to side as it advanced, a garden of tubes atop its length no doubt contributing to the song of the plastic island.
    “Have they sent it here?”
    “No,” she said. “They set them free, to wander with the wind.”
    “I don’t want it in the frame.”
    “Now you’re the director?”
    “You don’t want it in the frame,” he said.
    “The wind’s taking care of that.”
    The thing went stiffly on, swaying, on its hollow translucent legs.
    On the upper deck of the moby, he saw, her support staff had been withdrawn. The white china Michikoid remained, checking the parafoil, hands and fingers moving with inhuman speed and precision. The ribbon on its sailor cap fluttered in the breeze. A real one, the cam with the fan absent now.
    “And here we are,” said Rainey, and he saw the first of the patchers, one cam shifting focus.
    A child. Or something the size of one. Hunched over the handlebars of a ghostly little bike, the bike’s frame the same salt-crusted translucence as the city and the wind-walker. Unpowered, it seemed to lack pedals as well. The patcher progressed by repeatedly scuffing at the avenue’s surface.
    The patchers repelled Netherton even more than their island. Their skin was overgrown with a tweaked variant on actinic keratosis, paradoxically protecting them from UV cancers. “There’s only the one?”
    “Satellite shows them converging on the square. One dozen, counting this one. As agreed.”
    He watched the patcher, gender indeterminate, advancing on its kick-bike, its eyes, or possibly goggles, a single lateral smudge.

7.
    SURVEILLANT
     
    T hey were prepping for a party, behind the frosted glass. She knew because it was clear now, like that trick Burton taught her with two pairs of sunglasses.
    The bugs were right on it, so she was right on them, doing what she could to vary the angle of attack. She’d found a pull-down for hotdogging, so she could make the copter behave in ways they were less ready for. She’d almost gotten one that way, dropping on it. Proximity had triggered image-capture, bug in extreme close, but that was gone right away, no way of calling it up. Looked like something Shaylene might print at Forever Fab. A toy, or a really ugly piece of jewelry.
    She was supposed to chase bugs, not catch them. They’d have a record of everything she did anyway. So she’d just shoo bugs, but while she did that, she was getting more than a glimpse of what was going on inside.
    The couple who’d been up against the window weren’t there. Nobody human was. Robots, little low beige things that moved almost too fast to see, were vacuuming the floor, while three almost identical robot girls were arranging food on a long table. Classic anime robot babes, white china faces almost featureless. They’d built three big flower arrangements and now they were transferring food from carts to trays on the table. When the carts came in, rolling themselves to the table, the blur of beige parted just enough to let them through. Flowed around them like mechanical water, perfectly tight right-angle turns.
    She was enjoying this a lot more than Burton would have. She wanted to see the party.
    There were shows where you watched people prep for weddings, funerals, the end of the world. She’d never liked any of them. But they hadn’t had robot girls, or super-fast Roombas. She’d seen videos of factory robots assembling things, almost that fast, but nothing the kids had Shaylene print out for them ever moved that way.
    She dropped toward two bugs, hovered, scoping one of the robot girls