Hyde Park

Hyde Park is both a destination and a point of comparison in the future London scenes: a broad, geometrically laid-out park reached by greenway, where Flynne Fisher and Wilf Netherton take a walk under Ainsley Lowbeer’s direction. Its scale and connections make the landscape feel like evidence of a radically different society, while the ostensibly casual stroll doubles as part of an identification operation.

Setting and approach

The walk begins near Soho Square, where Lowbeer’s car departs and the rain has stopped. Flynne and Netherton climb the wide stairs to the greenway; the route runs through what had once been Oxford Street, now bordered by a forest leading toward Hyde Park. Netherton guides Flynne’s peripheral to a nearby bench facing that tree-lined way. The bench briefly vibrates in anticipation and sheds rainwater before the peripheral sits, so even an ordinary pause in the park is shaped by an automated environment.

From Flynne’s viewpoint, the park is startlingly large. She compares its wide lawns and paths to a geometry-class exercise, and measures it against the smaller park by the river in Clanton, with its Civil War fort. That comparison is not merely about acreage: it places an unfamiliar, highly organized urban landscape beside the constrained surroundings of her home. Flynne observes that her family and nearly everyone around them are poor, with Corbell Pickett an exception, and notes that she might have joined the Army when Burton Fisher entered the Marines had her mother not needed care.

The greenway network

Hyde Park is part of a larger network rather than an isolated green space. Netherton explains that walkers can follow greenways from there to Richmond Park and Hampstead Heath, and continue onward from either; he counts fourteen greenways in all. The route along former Oxford Street thus belongs to a citywide system that joins parks through paths and forested corridors.

The surrounding landscape also includes a hundred rivers that have been recovered. Flynne asks whether the largest are glassed over and lit up; Netherton confirms that some of the largest are. His brief smile at this exchange surprises him, and he releases Flynne’s hand only gradually. The park scene’s measured description of paths, lawns, waterways, and connections gives physical form to a future London that is both extensively redesigned and unfamiliar to its visitors.

A walk under cover

The outing is arranged as part of Lowbeer’s effort to have Flynne make an identification. Netherton is told to walk with her to Hyde Park, answer her questions as best he can, and preserve the masquerade for as long as possible. The woman’s peripheral is dressed in black tights, walking boots with large silver buckles, and a narrow graphite-colored cape. Netherton recognizes that it is performing an elaborate pretense of being an AI-driven automaton, but the person whose face it bears is not simply Flynne; Lowbeer declines to reveal the peripheral’s model, citing the privacy policy for bespoke peripherals and the risk that bypassing it might tip their hand.

The cover story casts the peripheral as a shy neoprimitive curator, supposedly overwhelmed by admiration for Flynne. The explanation depends on the distinction between neoprimitives, who either survived the Jackpot independently or opted out of the global system, and curators, who study and collect their culture. Flynne is not expected to find the impersonation wholly convincing; the practical aim is to keep the disguise viable until the intended identification can be made. Hyde Park therefore functions not just as scenery but as a controlled public setting where an apparently ordinary outing can sustain an investigative deception.

Encounter and significance

As three brightly dressed cyclists pass, Flynne takes them for children in superhero costumes and tells Netherton that he does not seem to like the greenway. When he clarifies that the future itself troubles him, she recognizes the feeling, adding that Ash also dislikes it. His unease becomes more explicit when he stops on the path and admits that the situation lies outside his experience. Flynne says it is outside hers as well, then takes his hand and squeezes it.

Netherton apologizes for the intrusion into her life and says that the place she came from was lovely. Flynne responds by naming the changes imposed on her world: they are changing everything. In this conversation the park’s cultivated scale becomes a measure of distance between their lives, but not a simple measure of superiority. Hyde Park’s greenways, parks, and restored rivers contrast with Clanton’s poverty and limited opportunities; the walk also gives Flynne and Netherton a moment of shared uncertainty, expressed through her gesture and his gradual release of her hand. The site thus joins an operational plot—a disguised outing meant to secure an identification—to a more intimate encounter with the human cost and strangeness of crossing between worlds.