Wilf Netherton—Lev Zubov

Wilf Netherton—Lev Zubov is a friendship formed before the novel’s central crisis and turned into practical collaboration across the boundary between future London and the Stub. Their connection gives Wilf access to Lev’s household, money, and decisions; in return, Wilf brings personal investment and firsthand involvement in the remote world Lev is trying to influence. The partnership offers protection and leverage, but its limits emerge whenever Lev’s sense of ownership meets the dangers and obligations of a shared undertaking.

Friendship and Access

Lev identifies Wilf as someone he knew at school, a compact explanation for the familiarity that underlies their present relationship. Wilf’s access is not merely social: he visits Lev at the Notting Hill house, which serves as a private refuge amid the family’s other London properties. At ten at night, the two are in the kitchen of the house, a place associated with Lev’s father’s art collection and with a history that reaches back to the family’s first London real estate acquisition. The visit places Wilf inside the older, secluded world behind Lev’s contemporary operations.

The intimacy of that setting is sharpened by its refusal of ordinary convenience. The Notting Hill house has no cleaners, cameras, or Assemblers, and nothing is remotely controlled from outside. Its protections and peculiarities are part of the family’s inherited privilege; Wilf knows that Lev’s brothers are better suited to maintain the influence that keeps such a property outside ordinary systems. Wilf is therefore not simply a guest in a friend’s home. He is moving through a family environment whose private arrangements and resources form part of the power behind Lev’s work.

Trust in a Private World

The household scenes show familiarity without making the relationship uncomplicated. Lev prepares scrambled eggs with chives and broiled tomato, then tells Wilf that Ash’s Medici indicates he is doing very badly. The medical assessment arrives in the midst of domestic hospitality: Lev sets a plate in front of Wilf and sits opposite him. Wilf tries to change the subject by asking whether Dominika will join them, but Lev ignores the question and returns to the issue of his brother Anton’s treatment. Their conversation suggests that Lev is willing to speak plainly to Wilf about family matters, while Wilf’s reflexive redirection hints at the awkwardness of being present inside that family’s private tensions.

Wilf’s trust in Lev also appears in how he understands the Stub’s danger. When Ash and Lev identify Burton Fisher as Wilf’s polt, Lev uses the possessive relationship as a shorthand that makes the human stakes legible. The visitors have hired someone to find Burton, apparently to kill him; Lev adds that Burton was on duty during Aelita’s reception. Wilf’s connection to Lev thus becomes entangled with the risk to a person in the Stub, turning the distant operation into a matter of personal concern rather than abstract strategy.

Collaboration and Unequal Stakes

That concern becomes operational when Wilf helps present Lev’s interests to the Stub. He is preparing to appear as an executive of Milagros Coldiron SA, a largely imaginary company registered by Lev in the Stub versions of Colombia and Panama. The shell corporations consist of a few documents and bank accounts managed through a Panama City law firm. Wilf’s role depends on adopting a constructed business identity, but the scheme rests on Lev’s ability to create and finance that identity across realities.

The arrangement is unequal in resources but not in commitment. Ash says that capital will be needed in the Stub because Ossian is reaching the limit of what he can improvise. She frames the question as whether Lev wishes to maintain a presence there; Lev rejects that description and says the Stub is his. Ash corrects him: it is not exclusively his. Their visitors have already arranged an assassination, and if they outcapitalize Lev’s side, Wilf and the others will be helpless. The possibility of using the family’s financial modules makes Lev’s inherited wealth a potential instrument of protection, but it also raises the stakes of admitting the family’s power into the operation. Wilf recognizes that persuading Lev will not be easy.

Devices, Embodiment, and Shared Work

The partnership operates through technologies that make distance feel immediate without erasing it. When Wilf encounters the anthropomorphic drone, Ash explains that it is a telepresence avatar that need not be consciously controlled; Macon’s device is imperfect, but it works. Wilf’s own experience of remote embodiment begins in disorientation: he sees unfamiliar hands and a face reflected in a steel canister, then learns that he is receiving input from a different body. The technical interface allows people in future London to enter the Stub’s affairs, but it does not make their positions identical. Lev supplies resources and direction, while Ash calibrates the system and Wilf becomes involved through a body and identity that are not his own.

The language used for these systems reflects the same gap between participants. When Wilf calls the interface a game controller, the description is corrected to a telepresent interface requiring no hands. What can look like a toy or a peripheral to one person is a means of entering another world to another. Their collaboration depends on such shared instruments, even as the instruments expose differences in knowledge, experience, and control. Wilf’s involvement is personal and embodied; Lev’s is also financial and strategic.

A Friendship Under Pressure

The relationship’s central tension is not a lack of loyalty but a disagreement over what loyalty entitles someone to claim. Lev regards the Stub as his; Ash insists that a shared danger makes it a shared concern. Wilf stands between those positions as both Lev’s old friend and a participant whose interests extend beyond Lev’s ownership. His distress over the killing of the patchers and his fear that he may be dismissed bring him to Lev seeking company, but the relationship quickly becomes a channel for urgent decisions about money, intervention, and the safety of people in the Stub.

The friendship consequently functions as a working alliance rather than a simple refuge. Lev can offer Wilf access, hospitality, and the reach of his family’s capital; Wilf’s presence connects Lev’s plans to lived consequences in the Stub. Their old school bond supplies trust, but trust does not settle the question of who controls a world that others can alter or attack. The partnership matters because it brings private friendship into contact with power: a shared past opens the door, while a threatened present forces both men to decide what the collaboration is for.