Equations of Life

12

They were walking down the street in front of the Oshicora Tower. Sorenson had showered, changed, and set his face hard.

“I’ll find some way to get me out of this.”

“Whatever pizdets you’re in is only going to get worse if you fight against Oshicora. He’ll flay you alive if you cross him.” Petrovitch looked up to the pinnacle of the glass dome; the park was lost behind the reflection of the sky. “If you serve loyally, he’ll be more merciful than if you get antsy about it. You’re nearly done, right?”

“Another day, or two. Debugging the beta version. I’ve never run it on a quantum platform before.”

“What’s it like?”

“The hardware? It’s a box a yard square on each side.” He looked across at Petrovitch. “That’s not what you mean, is it?”

“No,” said Petrovitch. They were at the start of the wide-open concourse, and he deliberately slowed down to stay in the crowd. “How does it feel?”

“Reality is imperfect compared to VirtualJapan. It flows, whatever the loading. I haven’t found an upper limit to its bandwidth yet. I don’t know if it even has a limit.” Sorenson gazed at the tower, and was distracted for a moment. “Now, that’s something I could do.” He left without explanation, and Petrovitch watched him make the long walk to the revolving doors. He disappeared from view.

“Hello.”

He spun around. Sonja Oshicora stood in front of him, slightly away from the edge of the pavement. She was almost alone, but was protected by a loose circle of men that now surrounded him, too. The people who walked by on their way to the towers or along the side of the road moved around the circumference: inside was empty but for the two of them.

Most of the Oshicora guards were looking out, but two of them were watching Petrovitch, and they both had their hands inside their jackets. Petrovitch moved his own hands very slowly, so that they were always in view. He made certain that they went nowhere near his bag.

“Hello,” he replied, uncertain of what else to say. Certainly nothing that would prolong the conversation.

She, however, had other ideas. “You do remember me, don’t you?”

“I… I’m not likely to forget.” He watched her tuck her exquisitely cut hair behind her ears and smile with impossibly white teeth.

“It’s good to see you well again,” she said, as if suffering multiple heart attacks was a minor inconvenience. “You are well, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. Fine.” He wanted to run again; away, as fast as he could.

“Good,” she repeated. She talked like she was fey, otherworldly. Compared to Petrovitch, she was. “I understand my father has already thanked you for your actions.”

Again, actions: fleeing through the Metrozone while Ukrainian gangsters tried to kill him. The word didn’t do it justice at all.

“Everything’s settled. No honor debt, no favors owing, nothing. It’s all fine.”

If she noticed his discomfort, she ignored it. “I wanted to thank you myself,” she said. In one step, she was pressing her lips against his. Her breath was warm, tasting of spice, smelling of flowers.

In return, he was rigid with fear. What lasted only a moment seemed to go on forever. He thought he might have another seizure there on the concourse.

She released him, and looked out from under her fringe. Her brown eyes seemed impossibly, animé large.

“Sam,” she said. “I can call you Sam, can’t I?”

“Yeah,” he squeaked. Someone had stolen all his oxygen, and he had a good idea who the culprit was.

“Thank you, Sam.” She smiled again, and that was it; his audience was over. She walked toward the Oshicora Tower, trailing her scent along with her bodyguards, leaving him pale and trembling in the humid, stinking air that blew across the city.

He stood motionless as the bubble of isolation that had surrounded him pricked. Again, he was shoulder to shoulder with the Metrozone. He wondered what Old Man Oshicora would make of it, and hoped that if he was watching, he’d make nothing of it at all.

It was a short walk to the lab. Time, finally, to do some work.

He opened the door slowly, so as not to disturb Pif. She was precisely where he’d left her, crouched over her desk, staring at sheets of minutely detailed equations. If she knew he was there, she made no sign of it.

He threw his bag on his chair, collected her empty mug and rinsed it out using bottled water and his fingers, pouring the brown-stained contents into a pot plant. Then he busied himself making coffee: spooning the granules, boiling the water, stirring and breathing the steam in.

She still hadn’t moved. Even when he delivered the fresh mug to her desk, setting it down exactly on the sticky ring left by the previous brew.

“Pif? Are you catatonic again?”

One eye twitched.

She got like this sometimes, caught up in a recursive math loop that rendered her higher functions incapable of voluntary action. Petrovitch waved his hand in front of her face; her eye twitched faster.

“Yeah, okay. A drop of the hard stuff should sort you out.” He went behind her desk and opened the drawer that contained the bottle of lemon juice. He spilled some into the palm of his hand and brought it close to her nose.

She blinked, made a face, and recoiled.

“Sam,” she said. “How long?”

“No idea. I just got in.”

She stretched extravagantly, and Petrovitch disposed of the juice the same way he’d gotten rid of the coffee dregs. She gave a cry of pain.

“You okay?”

“Pins and needles. I’ll be fine in a minute. Ow ow ow.”

“How you don’t get pressure sores is a miracle.” He wiped his hand on a suitable leaf and used a wet wipe to clear the stickiness away.

“My neck hurts too.”

“You’re not safe to be left on your own.” He pulled out two cellophane-wrapped pastries from his bag. “They’re a bit squashed, but they’re fresh. Ish. At least, I only just bought them.”

“Give me a minute to boot up.” She dug her knuckles into her left thigh and grimaced. “What’s the time?”

“Half eleven.” She clearly expected him to carry on. “On the Tuesday.”

“Good. I thought I’d wasted a whole day.” Pif tried to stand, using her desk for leverage. She wobbled like Bambi, then managed a semblance of upright. “I have good news and bad news.”

Petrovitch passed her a pastry. “Good news, please. My life is so irredeemably pizdets that I can’t cope with anything bad.”

“We haven’t got any competition. I may have been as subtle as a brick casing out the opposition, but we’re in front.”

“Stanford?”

“Out of sight.” She took a few tentative steps and didn’t find them too painful. “Are you sure you don’t want the bad news? I mean, after yesterday, how could it get worse?”

“Well, I was woken up this morning by a desperate American trying to get me to gang up on some very serious Japanese criminals. After breakfast I got picked up by the organitskaya and threatened with not one, but two guns. Then I got kissed by the daughter of the Japanese crime boss right in front of all her bodyguards. To be fair, I haven’t died today, but it’s not even lunchtime yet.”

“I can’t get from the quantum to the classical,” she said.

The gears in Petrovich’s mind spun up to speed. “It didn’t bother Maxwell.”

“Maxwell was a genius standing on the shoulders of other genii. He made a priori assumptions that happened to turn out to be right.”

“He didn’t predict wave-particle duality, or quantum effects.”

“But we can’t ignore them. Can we?” A note of doubt crept into Pif’s voice.

“Yeah. We can. Look at the gravitomagnetic equations. They do just that. And frame dragging works.”

“But… what about chromodynamics?”

Petrovitch reached forward and took one of the sheets of paper from her desk. “You’re doing this ass-backward. You’re trying to mash the electrostrong into gravity and it just won’t work. Well, it might, but remember: it’s supposed to be beautiful, not ugly. This,” he said, shaking the paper, “is ugly. I never liked it. It’s inelegant. What you cooked up yesterday is poetry.”

“If I can’t prove it, it means nothing.” She ripped at the pastry with her teeth, spitting out the cellophane and chewing on what was left.

“Start at the beginning. Ignore everything else. Gravity might not even be part of a theory of everything.”

“It is,” she said, spraying crumbs. “I feel it in my soul.”

“So did Einstein and he took two decades at the end of his life to get precisely nowhere.”

“You said it was poetry.” Pif looked at him reproachfully.

“Ass-backward poetry.” Petrovitch stood in front of the whiteboard with his coffee.

Pif started to say something, and he held up his hand.

She waited and chewed and drank.

“Can you,” he said, his voice no more than a whisper, “derive all the other forces from this equation? If we expand this to be multi-dimensional,” and he swallowed, “we can find out just how many dimensions reality has.”

She looked, and rubbed her eyes. “I… don’t know. I’m too tired to think straight anymore.”

Petrovitch shook his head. “Look, this is your baby. And your math is way better than mine. Go and get your head down: this will still be here when you get back.”

She groaned. “I don’t want to leave it. We’re so close.”

“It’ll be fine. I don’t want to come in here tomorrow and have to pry the finished proof out of your cold, dead hand. I’ll try and do some of the easy stuff—if I can manage that. That still leaves the really hard sums and most of the credit for you.”

“Don’t break the symmetry,” she warned.

“I thought I was supposed to.”

“Try without.”

“I’ll try with, then try without. And I’m going to use some real data, whether you like it or not.”

“Experimentalists. Have I told you how much I hate them?”

“Only about a thousand times.” Petrovitch shrugged. “Science: it works.”

Pif drank her coffee, and summoned enough strength to pick up her rucksack. “Are you sure about this?”

“Go,” he said. “See you in the morning. You can go through my shabby math while I cringe pathetically in a corner, then I can watch you reimagine the whole universe.”

She slung the rucksack over her shoulder. “If you put it like that, I don’t see how I can argue.”

“I might even get some of my own work done. You never know.”

“Boys and their toys,” she said, edging toward the door. “Sam, are you…?”

“Go away. There won’t be any sleep for a week if you crack this.”

She bowed her head, her beaded hair falling forward like a curtain. “Sam?”

“What?”

“I’m glad I’m sharing a room with you. You get me.”

“You mean you’re as dysfunctional as I am, just in different ways? Yeah, that’s about right. Now, in the name of whatever god you believe in, go.”

She nodded. She was halfway out into the corridor when she stopped. “What?” she said with typical directness.

“Police,” said a familiar voice.

“Chyort voz’mi!” He launched himself into his chair and folded his arms.

Pif put her head back around the door. “Sam? There’s a policeman here.”

“I know. Send him in, then go home. I’ll be fine.” He pushed his glasses up his face. “He’s not staying for longer than he absolutely needs to. Which is about a minute, if he’s lucky.”

Chain wandered in, blinking. “Petrovitch.”

“Detective Inspector Chain. Found my rat yet?”

“Ongoing inquiries,” he said. He glanced down at Pif’s desk and reached out to pick up one of her equations.

Petrovitch leaped up and slapped his hand down on top of the paper. “Touch nothing. Really.”

Chain held his hands up. “It didn’t look like it was going to break, but if you insist.” He looked around. “I was expecting big machines that sparked and hummed.”

“We keep those in the basement next to the reanimated bodies. What do you want?”

“Oh, I don’t know. How about five hundred thousand euros?”

“Back of the queue, Inspector. I have to be dead before you collect.”

“You think you’re smart?”

“I think I now stand a better chance of staying alive than I would relying on you. And thanks ever so much for sending Sorenson around. Not only did it get us both picked up by Marchenkho, I then had to get farmboy back to Oshicora before he realized his pet coder had gone awol.”

“You’re welcome,” said Chain. He opened a filing cabinet drawer and peered inside. “Interesting character, Sorenson. Did he give you his war hero spiel?”

“He might have mentioned something; it didn’t get him very far. Why?”

“That sort of stuff goes down really well in America, gets the folks onside. He tried it on me, so I thought I’d try and find out what he actually did for Uncle Sam.” He rolled the drawer shut. “It’s not pleasant reading. His civilian file is pretty thick, too. Not like your records—what little there is seems to fit together very neatly.”

“The truth has a habit of doing that.”

“So does something manufactured. You see, I can’t find any trace of a Samuil Petrovitch, aged twenty-two from St. Petersburg at all. Which could mean one of two things.”

Petrovitch pushed his glasses up his nose. “No, don’t tell me. I like games. I’m an Armageddonist with a suitcase bomb and head full of righteous fury, biding my time for, what, six years now before I set my nuke and kill you all. Or alternatively, Russian record keeping isn’t what its supposed to be. Your choice, I suppose.”

“Something’s not right, Petrovitch. I don’t like that. It makes me nervous, and when I get nervous, I get curious. Like a dog with a bone.”

“Your metaphors are all mixed, Inspector. You’d better watch out for that.” Petrovitch flexed his fingers, making his thumbs crack. “If that’s all, don’t let the door hit your zhopu on the way out.”

Chain harrumphed, then wandered to the door. He reamed at his eye, and coughed hard. When he was done, he leaned on the handle and turned back to Petrovitch.

“Is she a good kisser?”

“Ahueyet? You’ve been following me!” Petrovitch stood up and went nose to nose with the detective. “No. You followed Sorenson. No, that’s not all of it, either. You bugged Sorenson so you could follow him.”

“Calm down, Petrovitch.” Chain put his hands up between them.

“Do you know what Oshicora will do if they find a police tag on him?”

“Pretty much.”

“They’ll kill him.” Petrovitch was breathing hard.

“Careful of your heart. But of course, you’re getting a new one, so it won’t matter soon.” Chain stepped out of the way of the opening door. “I could deport Sorenson right now, but I’m increasingly interested in this VirtualJapan he’s working on. I’d lose all that.”

“And you wonder why people hate the police.”

“No,” said Chain, “I’m up to speed on that, too. Go carefully, Petrovitch.”