Agency

“You the app whisperer.”

“Who is she?” asked Manuela.
“That’s gotten more complicated since I just told you it was complicated,” said Verity.

I’m back.
Superimposed over the drone’s feed, like a caption. It vanished.
Speed lines.
The white Helvetica surrounded by actual speed lines, white ones, radiating out around it, manga-style. It vanished.
“Holy fucking shit,” Verity heard herself say, flatly.
“You okay?” asked Manuela.
“You come back from the dead one more fucking time,” Verity said, “you disappear on me again, I’ll kill you.”

With the drone on its back in the alley, the squashed-circle display looked to Netherton like something Rainey might have taken him to see at the Tate, its lower half filled with nothing but the luminously featureless San Francisco night sky above it, the upper half a high-resolution night-vision close-up of the pavement beneath it, greenly glowing.

headless Cubist orangutan surveying its savannah.

“You’re policing our perimeter, right?” he asked the drone.
“Shit no,” said Conner. “Just admiring cows.”

Riddled not with dreams, exactly, but slow-moving trains of thought

’Kay,” she said, which he understood as a low-intensity affirmative. No one else responded. He removed the controller and set it down beside him on the couch.

“What does it do there?”
“It sleeps,” Lowbeer said, “receives nutrition, does aerobics and yoga, and is cosmetically maintained.”
Had she added sex and recreational drugs, it occurred to him, she might have been describing the lifestyles of any number of acquaintances from his bachelor days.

likes me to check if the translation from future-ese to folk wisdom’s solid.