Equations of Life

by Simon Morden

  He still had one place of safety though, somewhere he could slip into a comfortable, familiar role without anyone asking stupid questions like “why?”

  Pif was there already, standing at the whiteboard, marker pen in hand, perfectly still but for the flick of her eyes. She was so absorbed in her work that she didn’t initially notice Petrovitch wander in and slump into a wheely chair behind her. The chair rolled back across the floor and clattered into a redundant filing cabinet, empty but for empties.

  He leaned back and pried two strips of an ancient set of Venetian blinds apart to see the world outside. “The limits on that integral should be minus infinity to plus infinity, not one to infinity,” he said. “It’s a waveform.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be,” she said, “when I wrote this stupid equation out. Where have you been?”

  “Getting shot at.” He let the blinds ping back. “Being thrown into the back of an ambulance, I think, or how else would I have got to the hospital? Having my internal defib machine poked. Nearly thrown off the top of a church by a two-meter-tall nun.”

  “Orly?” She stepped forward, made her black hand blacker by rubbing out the offending symbols and replacing them with the correct ones, using her impossibly neat copperplate.

  “Yeah. Really.” He unzipped his jacket and peered at his chest. The ends of black thread sprouted from his skin like a half-buried spider. He had a thought and scooted across the room to his desk. Buried in the bottom of a drawer was a T-shirt, the relic of a death metal concert some six months earlier.

  Pif turned around just as Petrovitch had shucked his jacket onto the back of the chair.

  “Eww,” she said. “Sam, some warning, Okay?”

  He ignored her protests and dragged the black T-shirt on over his head. It was slightly too small; it accentuated his thinness and rode up above his waistband when he raised his arms.

  “Have you got anything to eat?” he asked, looking through the rest of his desk, then under the piles of printout and monographs. “I’m not feeling so good.”

  “In a minute,” she replied, glancing back over her shoulder at the whiteboard.

  “I’ll never do your coding for you again.”

  “All right, all right.” She threw up her hands and raided her bag for an energy bar.

  When she’d launched it across the room at him, and he’d missed it, she pulled her own chair toward his and sat backward on it, resting her chin on the backrest.

  Petrovitch scrabbled on the floor for the foil-wrapped bar, and crawled awkwardly to sitting again. They looked at each other, then she reached forward and took his chin in her fine fingers, turning it left and right. Her fingernails were painted with randomly generated Mandelbrot sets.

  “How bad is it?” Her beaded hair jiggled softly as she talked.

  “Bad enough,” he said, and finally tore through the wrapping. He continued around mouthfuls of sweet, sticky crumbs. “The defib machine took too long to kick in, and then it wouldn’t stop firing. A lot of heart muscle had gone anoxic, and I won’t get that function back.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I have two options. Get a new heart or die soon.”

  She blinked slowly. “You mean cake or death?”

  “Pretty much, except the cake I want costs two hundred and fifty kiloeuros, plus expenses.”

  Pif whistled air out of her mouth. “So what are you going to do? Will the university spring for it?”

  “I’m a private student. The foundation that supplies my scholarship will cover it.” He screwed up the wrapper and dropped it in the bin. “Have you anything else?”

  “Yes, but… that’s very generous of them. You’ve talked to them already?” She rolled away and dug out another energy bar.

  “I didn’t want to hang around. I haven’t exactly got time on my side. It’ll happen next Monday, when the funds are in place.”

  Pif was distracted again by her equation. She swung around to face it. “Why did you say it was a wave?”

  Petrovitch held out his hand for the energy bar, and she placed it deftly without looking around. “I don’t know. You’ve written it like a zeta function, but it looks more like the bastard child of a Fourier transform.”

  “I should be able to solve this.” She glanced at him as he crammed his mouth with food. “Do you want second place on the paper?”

  “It can’t hurt: Ekanobi and Petrovitch, twenty twenty-five. What is it?”

  “Quantum gravity. Part of it, anyway.”

  He stopped chewing and got up slowly, energy bar lying forgotten on the edge of his desk. He walked to the board. “Which part?”

  “The last part. I’m going to do all the calculations again, from scratch, and see if I can get to this point again. I’ve got it all written down…” She was breathless, more than that, hyperventilating. “Sam, I just caught a glimpse of creation.”

  Her body started to sway, and Petrovitch caught her, and managed to get her head down between her knees.

  He crouched next to her, feeling a cold sweat spring up on his own forehead. “You’ve probably made a mistake, somewhere,” he said.

  “Probably,” she agreed. “At least one. Promise me you won’t die until I’ve gone through the proof.”

  “I’ll try not to.” He pointed at the board. “Yobany stos, if you pull this off…”

  She looked out from under her fringe. “It means I’ll never have to put up with you taking my lunch again.”

  “Yeah. But in Russia, lunch takes you.” He sat back on his haunches and squinted at the symbols on the board through half-closed eyes. He almost saw it too, the flicker of recognition of something wholly and completely true. “How certain are you of this?”

  “Certain? No. But look at it! It’s beautiful.”

  “Take a picture of it. For posterity.”

  Pif gave him her phone, and he rested his elbows on her desk to reduce the camera shake. It clicked, and she was frozen in time forever, arms folded, grinning like a loon.

  “Perfect,” he said.

  He left her bent over her notebooks. His exit elicited no more than a soft murmur and a slight inflection of her hand. He knew from past experience that she’d be like that, not moving except when absolutely necessary, blocking everything else out and using her ferocious concentration to map out all the little steps she’d made that preceded the giant leap drawn out in black marker.

  Petrovitch left the university the same way he’d entered. Home for sure this time, beating the more spread out but nevertheless impressive migration to the outer parts of the Metrozone. He passed a copy of the iconic Underground map as he glided along the travelator, squashed to one side by a phalanx of marketeers who did nothing but talk into their headset microphones and eye up their prey.

  He noticed that to get to Embankment, he’d have to go through St. James’s Gate. He shrugged his shoulders enough to be able to get into his bag, and look at the address on the evidence form he’d been left with.

  The police station was just around the corner, and getting his hardware back was starting to become urgent. How long could it take to make a fuss at the front desk, threaten Chain with non-existent lawyers and finally get his hands on it?

  He went through the screen, the turnstile, through the unconscious motions of traveling. There were three stops to go, then two, then one.

  The lights flickered in a rippling pattern, from the front of the carriage to back, came on again. Then they snapped off, all the lights, plunging the passengers into utter, tunnel-enclosed darkness.

  The train faltered, losing power to the motors, and someone banged hard into Petrovitch’s side, driving the air from his lungs and causing him to collide with half a dozen soft, yielding shapes who cushioned the impact.

  He thought he was going to fall, to slide under their feet and become trampled. At the last moment, he found vertical again.

  He was almost catapulted the other way when the lights blinked on and the train surged
forward. He snaked out an arm and held tightly on to a pole, looking back down the chasm his wild movement had carved in the crowded carriage.

  At the far end, even as the sea of people closed the gap, was a woman, a teenager with puff-ball white hair, a black jacket that was all zips and buckles, an object in her hand that was made from transparent plastic but had a single serrated edge.

  He used his free hand to press against his T-shirt; no wetness, no spreading stain. But his courier bag had a hole in it, just about kidney height. They made the damnedest things out of kevlar these days.

  She disappeared from sight as the train roared out into the next station and began to squeal to a stop. He knew she was there, her mind racing like his, trying to out think his next move even as he was trying to anticipate hers.

  Shouting “She’s got a knife” would only serve to make everyone rush away. He needed it tightly packed. She could work her way through the crowd and have another go, but he knew she knew if she got anywhere near him, he’d have nothing to lose by exposing her; if she made the hit, she’d be gunned down by the first paycop she encountered.

  He decided she’d missed her only opportunity. She should have waited, followed him out onto the platform. That’s how he would have done it. Get close, in with the blade and step away. Shriek herself hoarse and panic. No one would suspect her until very much later and she’d changed her appearance completely.

  “St. James’s Gate. Doors opening.”

  If he left the train, she’d stay on. She’d let her controller know she’d failed. There might be another attempt, another day.

  As passengers poured out onto the platform and away, he could see her watching him. He waited until he could slip along the glass partition to the door. She stayed where she was, her plastic knife hidden behind one of her zips. He was at the threshold, foot hovering over the gap between train and platform. She gave an almost imperceptible jerk of her head, an indication that she’d been thwarted, but that there were no hard feelings.

  Petrovitch walked along beside the carriage, feeling her gaze burn between his shoulder blades. The barriers opened, and people poured on. She was gone, lost from sight. The buzzer sounded, the doors closed, and the train whipped away, chased by a whirlwind of litter and stink.

  He stopped to watch the red lights slide away around the next bend, and started to shake. He gripped his bag tight and made his knuckles go white while his stomach flooded with acid that burned all the way up to his throat. He swallowed and screwed his eyes shut.

  Another train was coming, buffeting the air ahead of it. He couldn’t stand there for the rest of the day. He left the platform, the passengers from a westbound train pushing through the connecting tunnels ahead of him all the way to the surface.

  The crush around the towers of St. James’s Park was intense, but he managed to spot what he wanted within a few seconds of leaving the Underground; a basement datashop that would sell him access by the minute. He had to fight his way through to the steps down, then wrestle with the door that was swollen with heat and humidity.

  Other users were glazed and expressionless as they passively absorbed their porn of choice. While Petrovitch was being led by the manager to a free cubicle, he saw one elderly man stare with fascination at a line of windswept rock peaks, the sun rising red over the col between two of them and flooding the scene with light.

  “Real?”

  “VR. Somewhere Outzone, up north,” said the blue-turbaned proprietor. “How long do you want?”

  “Five minutes on the net. You Okay with proxy servers?”

  “I will be if I charge you for ten.”

  Petrovitch hid his location and identity behind his usual proxy, a Tuvalu-based computer whose existence seemed to have been forgotten by its true owners. From there he went after Chain’s number, and simultaneously bought a single-use virtual phone from a provider.

  “Chain,” said Chain.

  “Detective Inspector Chain? It’s Petrovitch.”

  “Petrovitch? That Petrovitch. How’s the heart?”

  “Just about intact. Yeah, Chain, look…”

  “I take it this isn’t a social call. Where are you now?”

  “Datashop. Raj Singh’s. Chain…”

  There was a brief pause while he was away from the microphone. “I can see it from the window. I take it there’s a reason you’re not at the front desk.”

  “Chain, listen. Someone just tried to kill me.”

  Chain coughed liquidly. “They did? That was quick off the mark.”

  “You knew?”

  “It was only a matter of time. There’s probably one or two things you need to know about the mess you’ve gotten yourself into. Come up and we can have a chat.”

  “If I’m being watched, I don’t want to step foot inside a police station. So the only way I want my kit back, you thieving ment, is for you to bring it here.”

  “There’s paperwork to fill in,” he said mildly. “Why don’t I meet you, and take you over to the station?”

  “You’re not listening, Chain. I’m not going to appear to be helping you. I don’t even want to be anywhere near you.” Petrovitch checked the timer. “If this conversation is going to go nowhere, tell me now so I can set some lawyers on you.”

  “You can have your whatever-it-is back. It’s clean. But there genuinely is paperwork, and you’re not worth my while cheating the system. Come on, Petrovitch, a little trust goes a long way.”

  “You stole my property just so I’d have to call you, and you talk about trust?”

  “Okay, point taken. I did want to check it, make sure you weren’t a low-level Oshicora foot soldier, but I could have done so on the quiet and brought it back to you in the hospital.” He coughed again. “I sort of believe you now, and maybe I can let the other side know you’re just some stupid kid who doesn’t know any better than to meddle in the affairs of gods. What do you reckon?”

  Petrovitch reined in his anger. “Will you do that? Will it work?”

  “Tell you what: I think I owe you, so yes. I’ll do what needs to be done, though talking to Marchenkho’s organitskaya leaves me with heartburn. Wait there, and I’ll come and collect you when it’s done.”

  “Organitskaya?” said Petrovitch. “Yobany stos.”

  “I imagine you probably are,” said Chain, and cut the connection.

  7

  Petrovitch was drinking coffee, brewed in a chipped mug in the Raj Singh back office, when Chain knocked politely on the door and let himself in.

  “Ready to go, Petrovitch?” He nodded at the Sikh. “Sran? Keeping it legal?”

  “As ever, Inspector Chain.” Sran winked.

  “One day, Sran.”

  “And until that day, Inspector, we’ll keep trading.”

  “Of course you will. Leave the coffee, Petrovitch. I’ve better in my office.” Chain looked around at all the notes pinned to the office walls, testing names, numbers, addresses for a tickle of memory.

  Sran wanted Chain out quickly: he leaned forward and took the mug from Petrovitch’s hands. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

  Petrovitch threw his bag over his shoulder, and Sran ushered them out: he shooed them all the way to the bottom of the basement steps that led up to street level to make sure the policeman didn’t have time to see clearly what some of the shop’s customers were doing.

  The door was shut firmly behind them.

  “You know him, then?” said Petrovitch, his ears adjusting to the blare of noise falling on him from above.

  “I know everyone,” said Chain, checking inside his jacket. He patted his shoulder holster, and unfastened a tab. “Let’s make this unremarkable, shall we?”

  “I thought you’d talked to whoever it was you needed to talk to.”

  “I did. You’re not the only one with a price on your head.” Chain led him up the steps, then elbowed his way into the pedestrian stream. Petrovitch was almost standing on the man’s heels so as not to lose him.


  They made it to the crossing and, on the next green light, shuffled across the road to a building that sat squat and lonely, surrounded on all sides by streets. Armed police—not paycops, but the real thing—guarded the entrance. They were tall and wide in their armor and utterly anonymous behind their targeting visors. One of them watched Petrovitch as he trailed after Chain, and Petrovitch saw his reflection in the curved faceplate.

  He wasn’t looking anywhere near as angelic as he had first thing that morning.

  He also had to sign in at the desk. The man behind the bullet-proof glass was brisk and businesslike, but Petrovitch still felt a frisson of fear as the optical scanner was pressed against his eye socket.

  His identity passed muster, and he was issued with a tag similar to the one he’d worn in the hospital.

  “It’s an offense not to keep this on while you’re in the building,” said the man as he watched Petrovitch clip it around his wrist. “Offense as in five years and a ten-thousand-euro fine.”

  “Is that all?” said Petrovitch.

  “We can choose to shoot you.” His gaze left Petrovitch and slid onto Chain. “He’s all yours.”

  “You’re a humorless bastard, George. Give the kid a break.” Chain took Petrovitch by the arm and pulled him away toward the lifts. “Nothing else in that bag I need to know about, is there?”

  “Apart from the hole where someone tried to cut me a new zhopu, no.”

  While they waited, Chain inspected the damage. “What did they use?”

  “A clear plastic knife. Behind the screen, too.”

  “Perspex. Covert weapon of choice at the moment.” The lift doors shuddered apart. “Get in, and we can have our little chat.”

  Petrovitch and Chain rode the lift to the seventh floor and walked along the corridor until they reached a door marked “DI H. Chain SCD6.” Petrovitch hadn’t seen another soul the entire time. The place was a ghost ship, adrift in the heart of the Metrozone.

  Despite his disquiet, he dropped gratefully into a leather chair opposite Chain’s desk, and watched without comment as the detective busied himself with the domestic chore of making proper coffee.