I Watch TV: The Peripheral
It’s 2032 up in the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina and Flynne Fisher hustles to make money for her sick mother. Her brother Burton, a veteran, makes money playing online games, but Flynne’s the best at it. Then Burton’s contacted by a mysterious Colombian company, who have a new headset made for a new sim. He gets Flynne to do some missions, in a strange, sparsely populated futuristic London dominated by colossal statue buildings.
It's 2099 in a strange, sparsely populated futuristic London dominated by colossal statue buildings. Aelita West has used a Peripheral – an android piloted by a human – to steal data from the Research Institute. Lots of people want Aelita and the data. Lev Zubov, a Klept, one of the noble class, has an advantage thanks to employing Wilf Netherton, Aelita’s foster-brother, the two having bonded together as orphans.
Between the two time periods was The Jackpot, an ongoing poly-crisis whose roots can be seen in 2032 (and 2022 to be frank) and is still going on in the background in 2099. It’s why London is sparsely populated, and has colossal statue buildings.
The link between the two times is information. By changing the past they create a new timeline, a stub, no paradox here. Yet it is useful to 2099 to run experiments and learn about events. Information can be a phone call, or it can be feed from the headset to the Peripheral. It can be schematics, perhaps for a weapon, or for medicine.
It can be money. Learning about the Burtons, the Research Institute hire various assassins and mercenaries. It doesn’t work as well as they might hope. Burton’s marine unit were all recruited from the area, and retired there. They’re a capable and well-equipped military unit, and more than that, they have haptic links, which is revealed were introduced by Research Institute into this timeline. Meanwhile the area is run by the local car dealer/drug lord, ably assisted by the county sheriff, who does not take kindly to the Research Institutes attempts to co-opt him (thinking it’s the feds) and is being paid off by Burton. Killing Flynne etc is not a simple task.
Meanwhile 2099 is weird, with a surface polish and luxury. Yet the more we learn the more it becomes a shell, hollowed out by the deaths of billions and the ongoing cruelty and exploitation.
Both settings are deep, complex, with background characters being fleshed out from their initial sketches. Both hide violence and corruption under a layer of civilised decency and community. Both have cool people giving cool speeches*. These are both good, and the interplay between the two is even better, resolving things in one heightens the tension in the other. And there are occasional glimpses of something more, when records of the original 2032 are compared to the stub, when Wilf has to confront his forgotten past, when the artificial overlay on 2099 London reveals that the city is not repaired and recovered, but still partly the devastated ruin the historical scenes have shown us.
Watch This: A science fiction time travel virtual reality
crime thriller that never loses sight of character and emotion and trauma
Don’t Watch This: Several billion people died once and
probably will do so again
* Cherise Nuland, head of the Research Institute, before killing someone with bees, offers a proverb from Paraguay, which suggests that before you tell someone a secret you should dig a grave. Or maybe we should dig 7 billion graves Cherise? Oh no reason, they might just come in handy.
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