The Peripheral: A Novel - Hardcover

Gibson, William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0399158448 ISBN 13: 9780399158445

Verlag: Penguin LCC US, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

The New York Times bestselling author of Neuromancer and Zero History presents a fast-paced sci-fi thriller that takes a terrifying look into the future...

Flynne Fisher lives down a country road, in a rural America where jobs are scarce, unless you count illegal drug manufacture, which she's trying to avoid. Her brother Burton lives on money from the Veterans Administration, for neurological damage suffered in the Marines' elite Haptic Recon unit. Flynne earns what she can by assembling product at the local 3D printshop. She made more as a combat scout in an online game, playing for a rich man, but she's had to let the shooter games go.

Wilf Netherton lives in London, seventy-some years later, on the far side of decades of slow-motion apocalypse. Things are pretty good now, for the haves, and there aren't many have-nots left. Wilf, a high-powered publicist and celebrity-minder, fancies himself a romantic misfit, in a society where reaching into the past is just another hobby.

Burton's been moonlighting online, secretly working security in some game prototype, a virtual world that looks vaguely like London, but a lot weirder. He's got Flynne taking over shifts, promised her the game's not a shooter. Still, the crime she witnesses there is plenty bad.

Flynne and Wilf are about to meet one another. Her world will be altered utterly, irrevocably, and Wilf's, for all its decadence and power, will learn that some of these third-world types from the past can be badass.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

William Gibson’s first novel, Neuromancer, won the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and the Nebula Award in 1984. He is also the New York Times bestselling author of Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Burning Chrome, Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History, Distrust That Particular Flavor, and The Peripheral. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife.

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1.
The Haptics

They didn't think Flynne's brother had PTSD, but that sometimes the haptics glitched him. They said it was like phantom limb, ghosts of the tattoos he'd worn in the war, put there to tell him when to run,

when to be still, when to do the bad-ass dance, which direction and

what range. So they allowed him some disability for that, and he lived in the trailer down by the creek. An alcoholic uncle lived there when they were little, veteran of some other war, their father's older brother. She and Burton and Leon used it for a fort, the summer she was ten. Leon tried to take girls there, later on, but it smelled too bad. When Burton got his discharge, it was empty, except for the biggest wasp nest any of them had ever seen. Most valuable thing on their property, Leon said. Airstream, 1977. He showed her ones on eBay that looked like blunt rif le slugs, went for crazy money in any condition at all. The uncle had gooped this one over with white expansion foam, gone gray and dirty now, to stop it leaking and for insulation. Leon said that had saved it from pickers. She thought it looked like a big old grub, but with tunnels back through it to the windows.

Coming down the path, she saw stray crumbs of that foam, packed down hard in the dark earth. He had the trailer's lights turned up, and closer, through a window, she partly saw him stand, turn, and on his spine and side the marks where they took the haptics off, like the skin was dusted with something dead-fish silver. They said they could get that off too, but he didn't want to keep going back.

"Hey, Burton," she called.

"Easy Ice," he answered, her gamer tag, one hand bumping the door open, the other tugging a new white t-shirt down, over that chest the Corps gave him, covering the silvered patch above his navel, size and shape of a playing card.

Inside, the trailer was the color of Vaseline, LEDs buried in it, bed- ded in Hefty Mart amber. She'd helped him sweep it out, before he moved in. He hadn't bothered to bring the shop vac down from the garage, just bombed the inside a good inch thick with this Chinese polymer, dried glassy and f lexible. You could see stubs of burnt matches down inside that, or the cork-patterned paper on the squashed filter of a legally sold cigarette, older than she was. She knew where to find a rusty jeweler's screwdriver, and somewhere else a 2009 quarter.

Now he just got his stuff out before he hosed the inside, every week

or two, like washing out Tupperware. Leon said the polymer was curatorial, how you could peel it all out before you put your American classic up on eBay. Let it take the dirt with it.

Burton took her hand, squeezed, pulling her up and in.

"You going to Davisville?" she asked. "Leon's picking me up."

"Luke 4:5's protesting there. Shaylene said."

He shrugged, moving a lot of muscle but not by much.

"That was you, Burton. Last month. On the news. That funeral, in

Carolina."

He didn't quite smile.

"You might've killed that boy."

He shook his head, just a fraction, eyes narrowed. "Scares me, you do that shit."

"You still walking point, for that lawyer in Tulsa?"

"He isn't playing. Busy lawyering, I guess." "You're the best he had. Showed him that." "Just a game." Telling herself, more than him. "Might as well been getting himself a Marine."

She thought she saw that thing the haptics did, then, that shiver, then gone.

"Need you to sub for me," he said, like nothing had happened. "Five-hour shift. Fly a quadcopter."

She looked past him to his display. Some Danish supermodel's legs, retracting into some brand of car nobody she knew would ever drive, or likely even see on the road. "You're on disability," she said. "Aren't supposed to work."

He looked at her.

"Where's the job?" she asked. "No idea."

"Outsourced? VA'll catch you."

"Game," he said. "Beta of some game."

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin LCC US
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0399158448
• ISBN 13: 9780399158445
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 496
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: BERKLEY; https://www.penguin.com/?s=BERKLEY; ; Unit 2 Limavady Business Park; Limavady; County Londonderry; BT49 0HR; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar