The protagonist of William Gibson’s
2014 science-fiction novel The Peripheral, Flynne
Fisher, works remotely in a way that lends a new and fuller sense
to that phrase. The novel features a double future: One set of
characters inhabits the near future, ten to fifteen years from the
present, while another lives seventy years on, after a breakdown
of the climate and multiple other systems that has apocalyptically
altered human and technological conditions around the world.
In that “further future,”1 only 20 percent of the Earth’s
human population has survived. Each of these fortunate few is well
off and able to live a life transformed by healing nanobots,
somaticized e-mail (which delivers messages and calls to the roof
of the user’s mouth), quantum computing, and clean energy. For
their amusement and profit, certain “hobbyists” in this future
have the Borgesian option of cultivating an alternative path in
history—it’s called “opening up a stub”—and mining it for
information as well as labor.
Flynne, the remote worker, lives on one of those paths. A young
woman from the American Southeast, possibly Appalachia or the
Ozarks, she favors cutoff jeans and resides in a trailer, eking
out a living as a for-hire sub playing video games for wealthy
aficionados. Recruited by a mysterious entity that is beta-testing
drones that are doing “security” in a murky skyscraper in an
unnamed city, she thinks at first that she has been taken on to
play a kind of video game in simulated reality. As it turns out,
she has been employed to work in the future as an “information
flow”—low-wage work, though the pay translates to a very high
level of remuneration in the place and time in which she lives.
What is of particular interest is the fate of Flynne’s body. Before she goes to work she must tend to its basic needs (nutrition and elimination), because during her shift it will effectively be “vacant.” Lying on a bed with a special data-transmitting helmet attached to her head, she will be elsewhere, inhabiting an ambulatory robot carapace—a “peripheral”—built out of bio-flesh that can receive her consciousness.
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