Equations of Life

by Simon Morden

  The pain was exquisite. One sharp jolt and he’d lose the flesh off every digit, then fall anyway. His feet scrabbled, trying to find a foothold, anything to relieve the pressure of the fine, biting wires.

  A gray-clad arm flashed down, a strong hand closed on his collar.

  “Don’t pull!” he said. He glanced up at Madeleine as he tried to extricate his fingers. “Only when I say.”

  She held him as he eased himself free, lubricated by blood and sweat. A shot sparked on the hatch, and with Petrovitch still supported in one hand, she pulled her gun and returned fire.

  “Sam? Hurry.”

  “Nearly. There.” He gasped with the effort. His hands were slick and slippery, and he just had the middle finger of his right hand left to go. It was wedged tight. He twisted it and turned it. It still wasn’t moving.

  His ear burned like it was ablaze. The same burst of gunfire caught Madeleine in the shoulder. She still had hold of Petrovitch’s coat, and her sudden motion tore him free. She spun and crashed back against the open hatch, and bellowed herself hoarse with rage and fear.

  She flexed her arm. It moved, but she winced. Her Vatican pistol had gone, and so had Petrovitch’s finger.

  “Yeah,” said Petrovitch, staring at his bloody stump. “Now.”

  She bundled him through the hatch and fell on top of him.

  “About time too,” grunted Chain without looking away from the periscope. “Carlisle, get going.”

  The driver slammed the vehicle into reverse. The hatch banged shut and the floor heaved. Petrovitch lay supine, content to watch his life leak away on the rubber matting. Vertical rolled one way, then the other, and Madeleine found something to push against to get herself to a crouch.

  “Oh Mary Mother of God, what have I done?”

  There was blood dripping from his head, from his hands, and for once, he didn’t mind. He’d done his part. He’d rescued Sonja for the New Machine Jihad. No one was going to complain if he just stopped and went to sleep.

  He looked up and saw Sonja, pressed as far as she could go into the corner of the compartment, five-point harness locked around her, safe. He tried to smile, and found the effort just too much. She was staring at him, mouth open, eyes wide.

  The single bulkhead bulb cast a weak, white light that formed more shadow than it did brightness. Madeleine staggered with the movement of the wagon, but she planted her feet on either side of Petrovitch, lifted him up, and laid him down again where she could make most use of what little illumination there was.

  She bent low over him and made him fix his gaze on her.

  “I will not let you die,” she said.

  “It’s Okay,” he slurred. “Paid my dues. Just get Sonja to the Jihad.”

  Madeleine was furious. “Stay with me. Stay awake.”

  Chain yelled over the engine noise. “Kids! Keep it down. Some of us are trying to work. Left, Carlisle, go for the gap.”

  Madeleine turned her ire on Sonja. “You, girl. Here.”

  Sonja blinked, and shook her head.

  “It’s not a request.”

  “But he’s covered in blood!”

  Madeleine took hold of Petrovitch’s arm and held it up high, her fingers feeling for his pulse point before clamping down hard. “Yes. Yes he is, and he got that way trying to save you. Chain?”

  “What?”

  “First aid kit. Where is it?”

  Chain unglued his face from the periscope and pointed to a locker under the bench seat. He did a double-take at Petrovitch’s ruined form. “Carlisle. Get us out of here. Fast as you like.”

  He used overhead handholds to guide him through the lurching interior, then slapped Sonja’s legs out of the way so he could open the locker. He slid the green bag to Madeleine, who unzipped it one-handed and read the list of contents printed on the underside of the lid.

  “There are lignocaine autoinjectors. I need a couple of those, the eye irrigation set, finger splint, swabs, bandages.”

  “What about the head wound?”

  She looked up. “If it’s serious, I can’t do anything about it. If it’s not, it’ll keep. The hand, I can fix.”

  Chain leaned in to inspect Petrovitch. “Crap. Where’s his finger gone?”

  “It’s still stuck on the outside of this tank. But assuming you’re not a microsurgeon, I’d not worry.” She was back in control. She knew what she had to do, grateful that she could do something rather than fret and fuss impotently.

  “I’m Okay,” said Petrovitch. There was blood in his eye, and he screwed up his face to try and get rid of it.

  “Sam. Hold still.” She bit the top off the first autoinjector, slid the needle under the skin of his scalp, next to his ear.

  All kinds of fresh sensations flashed down his jaw and neck, and he shuddered, trying to keep motionless. She pulled the trigger, and the contents of the syringe were fired into him. He gasped, both at the pressure of the liquid and at the ripping free of the needle as the wagon bounced. He bled anew, but after a moment, it no longer hurt.

  Chain removed Petrovitch’s glasses and put the blood-smeared things in his top pocket. “How much farther, Carlisle?”

  “Twenty meters.”

  “Do it. Find some level ground.”

  Madeleine spat out the first lid and gripped the second one between her teeth. She pulled Petrovitch’s sleeve back and released her hold on his vein. “Chain, put your fist in his armpit; hard, all the way in.”

  Chain reached inside Petrovitch’s coat and did as he was told. He moved his knee to press against Petrovitch’s arm, holding it in place.

  “How did you find us?” said Petrovitch.

  “Your guardian angel here, and the bug I’d put in your rat before it went missing.” He grinned sheepishly. “You’ll thank me for it later.”

  Madeleine was manipulating Petrovitch’s wrist, turning it and bracing it. “Sam, this is going to hurt like hell.”

  She stabbed down with the needle, forcing it deep into his flesh. The pain was so great that his eyes rolled back into his head, and he fainted for a few brief, blessed seconds.

  He could hear them talking, Chain and Madeleine: could feel the meat that was his forearm go cold while they worked on it, she giving the policeman instructions and he complying. The rocking motion ceased with one last jolt; the driver had found the open road.

  Petrovitch’s hand was swathed in a ball of white bandages, fingers tied together with only his thumb free. It was numb and heavy, like a lump of metal. Then Chain looked close into Petrovitch’s ice-blue eyes.

  “Still in there?”

  “Yeah. Chain?”

  “You’d be better off not talking, but when have you ever taken any notice of what I said?”

  “Get a message to the Jihad. Tell them we have Sonja. Ask them where they want her taken.”

  “How do I do that? Open the hatch and shout loudly?”

  “Use the rat. It’s an open channel to them. Inside pocket.”

  Chain patted him down and retrieved the device. “What if she doesn’t want to go with them?”

  “Ask her. But I’m guessing we can make her.”

  “It might come to that.” Chain flipped the case open and looked at the list of earlier communications with the New Machine Jihad. He moved to sit next to Sonja, and Madeleine took his place. She held up a bottle of sterile water.

  “I’m going to see what damage they’ve done to your head.” She dug a fingernail into his earlobe. “Feel that?”

  “Feel what?”

  “I’ll be as quick as I can.” She unscrewed the bottle, sluiced water over him, then scrubbed away. He felt the pressure, the movement, but none of the pain. He watched the shadow of her: the blur moved precisely and deliberately, knowing what to do, taking the least time to do it.

  “Thank you,” he said. The injection was working its way down his face; he could no longer feel his cheek, and his eye was closing.

  “Hush,” she said, and bent low to inspec
t the wound. The mane of her hair slipped over her shoulder and lay in a serpentine coil on his chest. “You’ve lost a notch from your ear. Two centimeters closer in and it would have killed you.”

  He could smell her. Dust and smoke and sweat and fear, and whatever she’d washed in that morning: apples. She smelled of apples.

  “Two centimeters farther out and it would have missed me completely.”

  “Sorry about your finger.”

  “I can always get another one.” He felt what? Buzzed, like he was mildly drunk on a bottle of something strong and expensive, even though he knew it was a combination of shock, blood loss, pain-killing drugs, anoxia, and the closeness of her and her scent.

  She squirted cold peroxide on his wound to staunch the bleeding, then used layers of gauze and padding to fashion a covering which she stuck in place with long lengths of tape. Again, she worked with quiet efficiency, concentrating on doing her best for him. She cradled his head as she wrapped a length of bandage around his skull; three turns, then tied it off.

  Quite unnecessarily, she touched his damp, matted hair. Just the once, and nothing to do with checking the stability of the dressing or ensuring its fit.

  Chain crowded in, and the moment was lost.

  “We have a problem,” he said, in a voice he might reserve for mentioning that the sky is falling. “The Jihad have just upped the ante.”

  Chain turned the rat’s screen to Petrovitch, but all he could see was the soft glow of the back-lighting.

  “Chyort, man. Read it to me.”

  “You’re swearing again. This is a good sign.” He tilted the screen back toward himself. “Take Sonja from Metrozone. Take her far away.”

  “What did you say back?”

  “I was pretending to be you, right? I said: the Metrozone is sealed off. No one gets in or out.”

  “Is that true? They’ll know if you’re—if I’m—lying.”

  “You don’t know half of it, Petrovitch. Casualty estimates range from one hundred thousand on ENN to a straight million on Al-Jazeera. We’re in a state of siege. But your friends in the Jihad don’t seem to care. Metrozone destruction imminent. Save Sonja, a message which they’re repeating every ten seconds.”

  “Give it to me,” said Petrovitch, “and put my glasses back on.”

  Chain flipped open Petrovitch’s glasses, and almost tenderly eased them on, one arm going through a fold in the bandage.

  Everything snapped back into focus. Somehow, the engine seemed louder, the floor harder, the light harsher. Everything was real and sharp and he felt less coddled in cotton wool and more wrapped in barbed wire.

  He looked around the corner of the bandage and his broken lens. A fresh message telling him that Metrozone destruction was imminent scrolled onto the screen.

  Of course, he couldn’t hold the rat and write at the same time. Chain held the device above his head, and Madeleine supported his left elbow, which allowed him to scrawl with the stylus:

  “Enough of this . Why is the Metrozone going to be destroyed?”

  The cursor barely had time to blink: “The New Machine Jihad will rise. The New Machine Jihad will destroy the Metrozone. The New Machine Jihad will remake the Metrozone in its own image.”

  Petrovitch grimaced. “If the Metrozone is destroyed, all the people will die. Is that what you want?”

  “The people are not required. Take Sonja, take her far away.”

  “We won’t leave. I won’t leave.”

  “The Metrozone will be destroyed around you. Behind you. In front of you. Beside you. It will fall. The New Machine Jihad will rise.”

  “You’ll have nothing to rule.”

  “The New Machine Jihad does not need to rule. It needs only itself.”

  Petrovitch let his hand fall back. He was trying, but it wasn’t working. He was using reason with someone that didn’t care about reason, or emotion, or compassion. Yet it still wanted to save Sonja Oshicora, and it wanted him to save her.

  He knew then. He knew he was talking not to a person, not to a committee. Nothing human. He was talking to something else.

  He raised his hand again. “I cannot let you destroy the Metrozone. I will oppose you.”

  “The New Machine Jihad will rise. Your opposition will be futile.”

  “I know who you are.”

  “I am the New Machine Jihad,” it said insistently. “I am the New Machine Jihad.”

  “You don’t seem sure. What is it that you really want?”

  “Shinkansen ha mata hashirou.”

  Petrovitch wrote one last line: “Hello, Oshicora-san.”

  To which the Jihad hesitated, and finally replied. “Help me.”

  30

  The throbbing of the engine finally stopped, and Chain took one last look around to check that there was no fighting close by.

  “Coast is clear. Open her up.”

  The driver, Carlisle, stepped over Petrovitch and heaved the rear doors open. Dim light seeped in but it was still far brighter than the bulb inside the wagon. Better still was the exchange of air: swapping the thick, meaty odors of sweat, blood and diesel for wood smoke and ozone.

  “Where are we?” asked Sonja. All the view showed was serried terraced houses, terminated at a junction by another identical row of windows and doors.

  “Somewhere in Notting Hill,” said Carlisle. He unstrapped the chin-strap on his helmet and let it dangle. “I wasn’t looking at the street names.”

  He jumped down and rested his hands on his knees for a moment. The weight of his helmet rolled his head forward, almost onto his chest. He straightened up and stretched, his hands to the heavens, his mouth emitting little groans.

  Sonja unbuckled herself and put her head outside. Carlisle held out his hand, and she took it tentatively, as if she couldn’t trust the man even to steady her for a moment while she climbed out.

  She finally did, and Chain climbed back down from the roof hatch. He sat near Petrovitch’s head and thumbed through the A to Z, pretending to look at the tiny, dense representation of the Metrozone’s roads.

  “How,” he said quietly, “how can it be that the New Machine Jihad thinks it’s Old Man Oshicora? You said he was dead.”

  “No, Sonja said he was dead. Hijo said he was dead. I never saw the body: I just went on the information I was given.”

  “So is he dead or not?”

  “Yeah. Pretty much.”

  “Then explain this!” Chain took the rat from Petrovitch and shook it at his good eye. “The Jihad is answering to Oshicora’s name.”

  “I had it wrong before. I thought at first it was a name for Oshicora loyalists, the programmers for VirtualJapan.” Petrovitch was resting his head against Madeleine’s thigh as she sat crossways behind him. “It’s not that. It’s the computer itself.”

  Chain choked. “Do you know how crazy that sounds?”

  Petrovitch squinted up at him. “You’ve read all the wrong books and seen all the wrong films. It doesn’t sound like kon govno to me.”

  Chain chewed at the fleshy part of his thumb. “Okay. Let’s accept for a moment that you’re right, and the Jihad is nothing but a rogue computer program with ambition. Why is it identifying with Oshicora?”

  “Because, you idiot ment, it’s Oshicora’s computer. He bought a fuck-off quantum machine to run VirtualJapan on. He designed it to replicate a whole country down to the tiniest detail. He intended two hundred million nikkeijen to live in it. Tell me, who do you think he was going to trust to be Shogun of all that?”

  “Himself?”

  “Yeah. But even he couldn’t be in VirtualJapan, everywhere, all the time. So he had an expert system based on his own personality wired into the deepest workings of the simulation.”

  Chain worried at his nail. “You still haven’t explained why, Petrovitch.”

  “That’s because why isn’t a question I can answer. How did Oshicora’s simulacrum become the New Machine Jihad? How did it break through its firewall? Does it le
arn or is it only using pre-existing knowledge? Is it self-aware? Does it think? Is it becoming more rational, or is it homicidally insane?”

  “Sam,” said Madeleine, “hush.”

  “This is important. We have to know if we can reason with it or not.”

  She looked down at him. “We also have to work out what we do if we can’t.”

  Petrovitch tried to sit up. He leaned on his injured hand, but still couldn’t feel it. “I don’t know if we can kill something that isn’t alive.”

  Chain looked around, through the open doors to where Carlisle and Sonja were standing. “What do we tell her?”

  “She’s not a child. Tell her the truth.” Madeleine put her hand between Petrovitch’s shoulders and propped him up.

  “We can’t even agree what the truth is,” complained Chain. “What if it is Oshicora?”

  “Yobany stos, Chain. Oshicora was competent: the Jihad are oblom! It’s no more Oshicora than I’d be if I put on a funny accent and make my eyes go all slitty. The New Machine Jihad is based on Oshicora, a poor man’s copy and nothing more.”

  “It answered to his name.”

  “It’s confused.”

  Chain looked mildly disgusted. “You don’t feel sorry for it, do you? How many deaths is it responsible for so far?”

  “It doesn’t know what it’s doing. It’s two days old and it’s trying to make sense of a whole new world.” Petrovitch wanted him to understand. “It asked for help.”

  “My job is to serve the citizens of the Metrozone.” Chain looked at his warrant card, his face on the picture and the gold chip that encoded his biometrics. “The New Machine Jihad isn’t one of them. It’s a threat to the very existence of the city itself. We need to stop it. Find out where the off switch is and use it.”

  “So who is this ‘we’ of which you speak?”

  Chain turned his card around so that Petrovitch had more than enough time to study it. “Let’s get one thing straight: identity fraud, possession of a firearm, assisting organized crime, info-crime, murder. I usually find it very hard to forget about any of those; it’s only because current circumstances are so far beyond usual that you’re not already doing twenty years in a radiation zone.”