by Simon Morden
“They all have palmtops, Sam. You’re not talking about a bunch of dinosaurs here.”
“We’re going to have to disagree on something. It may as well be that. Tell them to hold.” He switched his attention. “Michael: showtime. Geolocate the signals at the Jesuit mission on Mount Street. Give them your undivided attention and remember, this is your interview for entrance into the human race. Good luck.”
[No pressure, then.]
“Hah.”
He felt the AI’s presence dwindle to a pinpoint. He knew that, in the future, the record of Michael’s conversation with the cardinals would become an historical document of infinite worth. For good or ill. And it was entirely out of his hands.
“Doctor Petrovitch?”
It just wasn’t getting any better. “Hello, Miss Surur.”
“Are you ready?” she asked, anxious in case he found something else that might take precedence.
He looked at the passport in his hand, and covered it with his palm before slipping it back into his courier bag. “No, no I’m not. But I suppose we ought to get on with it.”
Petrovitch raised his head. The reporter looked impossibly bright. Now that; that was a skill he didn’t have. Whatever he was feeling, he showed.
“How do you want to do this?”
“Unedited. I want you to broadcast everything. No commercial breaks, no studio commentary. Station ident and a scrolling translation if you need it, but you’re not voicing me over. We both reserve the right to end the transmission when we feel like it. I’ll answer any question you want. I can’t promise I won’t lie to you. I can monitor your output myself, and I’m aware you sometimes make different versions of the same program, depending on your intended audience. I want this to be the same wherever you broadcast—at least the first time. Think you can manage that?” He spun in his chair, then back the other way so as not to tangle his cables.
“I’ll have to talk to my manager. If I can have my satellite feed back, that is.” She looked down at the trailing cable snaking all the way back to the car park. “I’m assuming that’s what I think it is.”
“Why don’t you save the questions for the interview? I’ll be more spontaneous.” Petrovitch cleared the mobile studio’s computers of the memory of the last quarter hour, and rebooted them all.
“Can you at least try and not swear?” Surur reattached her earpiece from where it dangled around her neck. “Your use of colorful language will more than likely get us taken off the air by local regulators, and there’ll be nothing either of us can do about that.”
Petrovitch flashed her a lupine grin. “You’d be surprised at what I can do these days. But okay, I wouldn’t want anyone’s burka spontaneously catching fire because of something I’ve said.”
She reached behind her for the radio transmitter tucked in her waistband. She played with the controls and, on finding the channel she wanted, put her hand over her mouth mic.
“Doctor Petrovitch? The Freezone is not a high-profile posting, and I’m just a village girl from outside Karachi. There are better interviewers than me, a lot more experienced who would kill for the chance to talk to you for five minutes. This is the biggest thing I’ve ever done. Please…” She pressed both her hands together in supplication.
Before she turned away to talk to whoever made decisions in her organization, he nodded his acquiescence. The cameraman raised his video rig in preparation, framing his shot of Petrovitch slumped in the doorway of the van, bleeding electricity from the fuel cells, wires coiling around him.
He looked up. Lucy was between Tabletop and Valentina, standing together in a huddle a little way off. He had to quickly stare back down at the ground again. They reminded him of how much responsibility he now had, not just to them, but to everyone.
He felt sick with dread.
25
Okay.”
They were live. Sound and vision were digitized, compressed, and beamed up to geostationary orbit, thirty-six thousand kilometers away: trivial, really. All the cool kids could do it.
Surur had peeled off the veneer of utter professionalism only briefly. That she could paste it down again so that the joins didn’t show warned Petrovitch that he was going to find the whole episode a genuinely horrible experience.
“This is Yasmina Surur reporting live from the Freezone with an exclusive Al Jazeera interview with Doctor Samuil Petrovitch.”
He watched it play in his head. He was taking two feeds: one from Europe, one from Indonesia. There was a slight time delay between them, a lag that was inherent in the system, but the time codes were the same. No one was interfering with the broadcast so far.
The frame was centered on her, then it started to slide until it was all him. He started to shrink away, then remembered he’d agreed to do this—that Valentina had told him that he had to do it, to present himself as continuity, as the safe pair of hands to steer the Freezone home.
Pizdets.
“Doctor Petrovitch, who’s in control of the Freezone?”
She was, to be fair, getting straight to the point. He didn’t know whether to look at her, or the black hole of the camera lens. He found after a few moments of trying that he couldn’t focus on the camera, that his eyes flickered as they tried to see through the glass to the substrate below. He blinked slowly and turned his head to face Surur.
“I am.” He felt he should apologize, so he did. “Sorry.”
“For the past year, you’ve always been determined to stay outside the Freezone executive. And now with less than two weeks of the mandate left to go, you seize power. Why is that?”
“Yeah, about that. It’s less deliberate than you think. Monday morning was a different world to Wednesday afternoon.” He used his exoskeletal arm to demonstrate the point, scratching the bridge of his nose with one of the pylons protruding from his wrist. “I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want it. I still don’t. But the Freezone is important, Miss Surur. Too important to sit back and watch it fail.”
“Why was it in danger of failing, Doctor Petrovitch?”
“This,” he said, and stopped. “This is complicated. I’m sure some of the people watching will know what it’s like when those who have power—political, bureaucratic, financial, military, cultural, whatever—use it to get what they want, over the lives and sometimes the bodies of those who stand in their way. I was…” He stopped again, overly conscious of the millions who were logging in. He could feel the surge in traffic, and wondered if the television station’s servers would cope with the strain.
“You were what, Doctor Petrovitch?”
“I was conned. Scammed. Tricked. Fooled. Played. Whichever word you want to use. Set up. And the person who set me up was Sonja Oshicora.”
Would she see this, he wondered? Michael had disabled her comms; phones, computers, everything; but there was still a chance she’d managed to log on anonymously.
“Sonja Oshicora, the Freezone president. You count her as a personal friend.”
“I did, didn’t I?” He scratched at his face again. “I won’t be making that mistake again. A relationship tends to die when they frame you as a nuclear terrorist then try and have you arrested.”
“Container Zero? The Armageddonist’s bomb?”
“Never happened. Sorry, that’s confusing as an answer. It was made to look that way. God only knows where they got the body from; for all I know they’d been pulling out desiccated mummies from the lower tiers of Regent’s Park for months. You say ‘Container Zero’ to anyone who lived through Armageddon, and they have an instant picture of what it looks like. The wrecking crew didn’t question its veracity. My wife didn’t. I didn’t. Everyone who saw it, believed. Except none of it was true. Even this,” and he brandished his left arm. “I thought I was lucky not to have my head smashed open. I was almost grateful I’d only been crippled. All done for effect, just to make it look more real.”
“Can you prove any of this?”
“Yeah. We got hold of the bomb
. Eventually. We got to it before the CIA did—in your face, Mackensie—and before the New Machine Jihad could drive it into the central Freezone. We opened it up, and it was packed with high explosives, but no fissile material at all. This phone,” he said, fishing around in his pocket. It wasn’t there. A moment of panic followed before he remembered Lucy had taken it. He waved her over and held out his hand, “This phone was the trigger. When I did a last number redial, Sonja Oshicora picked up.”
The reporter did a series of rapid eyeblinks.
“Go on,” said Petrovitch, “ask me what she said.”
“What did she say?”
“She said, ‘I can explain.’ I didn’t give her a chance to explain. I kind of, well: in the circumstances, getting a bit shouty was probably understandable. Tell you what, when you’re done with me, why don’t you drive over to the Telecom Tower and ask her yourself?”
“I…” Surur struggled to maintain her composure. “The CIA?”
“They attacked the New Machine Jihad at a school up in Hendon, I think. We were there a few minutes ahead of them, trying to locate the bomb. Three agents; killed two, left one injured. Maybe thirty or forty unarmed Jihadis killed before we stopped the slaughter. I did call for help, but we were kind of busy chasing after a van heading this way. Which is why we couldn’t stick around.”
“How did you know they were CIA?”
“Look: point the yebani camera over there. That way.” He pointed to Tabletop and Valentina. “The woman on the left is ex-CIA, wearing a CIA stealth suit which comes with the secret CIA decoder ring built in. Her suit lit up like a Christmas tree and in walked three people wearing exactly the same outfits, shooting everything with a pulse. Send someone up to the school. Check the emergency logs. I wish I was yanking your chain, but no: I’m afraid not.”
Surur took several breaths; noisy, thready ones that had to come out over her own open mic. In contrast, Petrovitch was actually beginning to enjoy himself. When the camera had swung back around to face him, he felt he had its measure.
“What are your plans for the Freezone now, Doctor Petrovitch?”
“Plans? Hand it over, on time, on budget, to the Metrozone authority. Whether I’ll be allowed to do that is up to other people. All those workers you can hear, and thousands more you can’t—the ones who are defying this bogus state of emergency and putting in a hard day’s labor? They want what I want. I’m going to try and make sure they have everything they need to do their jobs. That’s it. That’s what I hope will happen. When the Freezone disappears a week on Saturday, it’ll become someone else’s problem and they’ll be welcome to it.” He fixed the camera with a stare, stabilized his eyes and beckoned ever so slightly. The man with the video rig actually stepped closer, mesmerized. “I don’t want trouble. I don’t want a fight. I know we have the CIA in town, and I’d like to make a personal request to President Mackensie. Call. Them. Off. Stand them down. There’s too much at stake to have my lot and your lot running around, shooting at each other. And no missiles this time, either. It won’t do you any good. We learned, and we’re prepared. Vrubatsa?”
Unlike with Sonja, he knew Mackensie was watching. Probably in his Situation Room, surrounded by Reconstructionist hawks all suggesting different levels of tactical strikes, as if partial destruction of the Freezone was going to be less of a cause of war than just nuking everything from orbit.
“Can we discuss the artificial intelligence you call Michael?”
Petrovitch twitched in irritation. “I call him Michael because that’s the name he chose for himself. What about him?”
“Have you reconnected Michael to the global communications network?”
“Yeah.”
“Despite the UN resolutions?”
“Which are both illegal and immoral. Michael had no chance to speak to the Security Council before it came to its conclusion—which was by no means unanimous. Besides, the UN doesn’t have the authority to call for what amounts to the death penalty. I appreciate that there are no rules on how we deal with non-human intelligences, but I’m pretty certain that if we could sit around a table and talk rationally about it, we could come up with something just a bit more humane.” He shifted himself in his seat, then got up. His leg had gone mostly to sleep, and he hung out of the van’s door while trying to massage life back into it. “We give more rights to a brain-dead crash victim. That’s not to argue that we should take away the rights they have, but that we should extend them to something that is demonstrably a unique person.”
Surur considered her next question carefully. “Do you think Michael is a threat?”
“To who?” Petrovitch shot back.
“To… us.”
He got down off the van, and sat in the doorway, his leg outstretched in front of him.
“Look at it this way: in around ten minutes, we could be hit by ballistic missiles fired from the continental United States. Less if they’ve a sub in range. Michael is not watching for that. He’s spending his time talking to a delegation sent by the Pope, trying to find out if he is only the sum of his parts, merely a fancy computer program with delusions of grandeur, or whether he could be considered to be alive.” He grimaced as the pins and needles started to subside. “Imagine you’ve been buried underground for a year, cut off completely from the outside world, and left there to rot. When you finally get out, you’re told that it’s been the fault of a whole bunch of powerful people, either because they actively want you dead, or because they’re too spineless to stand up on your behalf. What is it that you’re going to want to do?”
“Is that a rhetorical question?”
“Of course it is, but we have an audience measured in the tens of millions and I’m kind of hoping some of them are thinking hard about the answer. I know what my first reaction would be. That’s because I’m a very bad man who has poor impulse control and a moral compass that’s lost its needle. Revenge, that’s what I’m talking about. If I was a seriously pissed-off AI, I could cause all sorts of trouble, and yeah, maybe you’d get me in the end but that wouldn’t be before I’d delivered a whole world of pain fresh to the doorsteps of the great and the good. What is it that Michael is actually doing?”
“He’s talking to a Papal delegation?”
“He’s talking to a Papal delegation. He’s so furious with everyone, he’s such a yebani threat, he’s discussing theology with a bunch of Jesuit priests. By the way, if any imams want to get in on the act, give me a call. Or if you’re the Dalai Lama. I don’t exactly have any staff at the moment, so I can’t guarantee I’ll get straight back to you, but I’ll do what I can.” He shrugged. “To conclude: no, he’s not a threat.”
“What are you going to do now, Doctor Petrovitch?”
He leaned his head against the side of the door. “Sorry, what?”
Surur repeated the question, and he frowned.
“I’m tired, hungry, I’ve got half a ton of metalwork hanging off me. I’ve been shot at repeatedly, I’ve been run all over town, I’ve defused a big fu… a big bomb, I’ve led a popular uprising against a corrupt government and I’ve freed my friend from his prison. What I’d like to do now is have something to eat, preferably involving bacon—not a popular choice, I know—and a lake of black coffee. I’d make sure that no one was going to come and kill us all, then I’d go to sleep until morning. Frankly, I’ve had enough of today, Miss Surur.”
“You won’t get the chance to do that, though, will you?”
“I won’t get much of a chance to do anything. I’m here for a week, that’s all. The Freezone is designed to pretty much run itself. I’m happy for that to happen. I’d ask all our contractors and suppliers to do whatever it is they’re supposed to do, without taking advantage of the situation to squeeze a few extra euros out of the budget. I’ll come down hard on that. If you’ve got any problems, I’ll try and sort them out, though you’d probably prefer it if I didn’t. Feel free to find a solution yourselves.”
“What will you
do about Sonja Oshicora?”
“Do I have to do anything? No one’s taking her orders. She doesn’t have the authority anymore to propose, vote on or sign anything on behalf of the Freezone. She can sit in her tower and paint herself purple for all I care. Sure, I might get around to throwing her sorry arse out onto the street at some point, but I’ve got better things to do, and so have the people who make up the Freezone. Perhaps I should just leave her up there and let the Metrozone deal with her. After all, it’s their contracts she was trying to screw with.”
“Doctor Petrovitch, the one thing you do seem reluctant to say is why you think your former friend turned against you. You must have an opinion on that.”
“I’m reluctant because I’m embarrassed. No one wants their private life dragged out into the open; no one who’s sane, anyway. Sonja always wanted to be more than a friend, and I’m as married as you can get. You’re a smart woman, Miss Surur. Go figure it out yourself.”
Then there was the sound of distant gunfire, echoing across the rooftops. It would have been easy to mistake it for something else, unless those hearing it hadn’t already been intimately acquainted with it.
Petrovitch stood up sharply. “Chyort. Where’s that coming from?”
Surur’s head turned to look down Piccadilly, but the way the echoes worked, it could be almost anywhere.
“Sorry. I’m needed.” He grabbed his bag, and started to run to where Lucy and Tabletop were standing, Valentina already going to get the car. The cables that attached him to the van stretched, and with a little more effort, broke. He trailed the ends behind him.
He glanced around, and the camera was still tracking him. “Michael? I’m interrupting. There’s small arms fire and I can’t tell where.”
[One moment.] That moment stretched to breaking point. Valentina screeched the tires of the car, and the three of them piled in, Petrovitch in the front, the other two behind. He pulled out his automatic and checked the magazine. He hadn’t reloaded since the school.