Equations of Life

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 learn 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.”

“Let’s get something else straight, Detective Inspector Harry Chain.” Petrovitch used his good hand to draw the Beretta and press the barrel between Chain’s eyes. “I could kill you stone dead and everything you know about me would be spread across the bulkhead behind you. You’d be just one more body on the million-high pile.”

Madeleine reached forward and irresistibly steered Petrovitch’s arm aside.

“Will you two stop it?” she said. “Work out that you need each other. Threats aren’t what you want; it’s cooperation.”

“Never do that again,” said Chain to Petrovitch.

“Throw me in prison after we bring the Jihad under control, fine. Before, and God help me, I’ll pull the trigger.”

Chain found he could move again. “So what are we going to do?”

“Talk to the Jihad.”

“You’ve tried that.”

Petrovitch shook his head. “Not face to face.”

“I can’t even begin to wonder how you’re going to do that.”

“That’s because you lack imagination, Chain.” Petrovitch put his gun away, and looked around at Madeleine. “I have to talk to Sonja.”

“I’ll call her.”

“I have to talk to her alone. Just get me to my feet, and I’ll take it from there.”

Her eyes narrowed and her mouth formed a thin-lipped line. “Remember what I said, Sam.”

“I’m not likely to forget,” he said, and she pulled him up, holding him while blood surged around his neglected extremities.

“You Okay?”

“For the moment.” He walked with exaggerated care to the back of the wagon. “Sonja?”

She stopped listening to the sporadic gunfire which had attracted Carlisle to the street corner, and she turned her head to him. “Are you going to take me to the Jihad now?”

“It’s… complicated,” said Petrovitch. He jumped down, stumbled, ended up resting his bandaged hand on the road. The first sparks of sensation jagged up his arm.

Carlisle was crouched by a wall, looking out into the main road. Madeleine and Chain were in the wagon. Sonja was only a step away, but he was still forced to stand without her help.

“How much do you know about VirtualJapan?” he asked, walking away from the wagon and out of earshot of the others.

“My father would talk about it often, about how it would bring the Japanese diaspora back home. How it was the greatest computer engineering project ever undertaken.”

Despite her evident pride, it wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “I’m talking about the guts of it: how he was going to make it work. Did he ever get technical with you?”

“Once or twice.” She smiled prettily, probably the same smile she used on her father when he tried to explain the interface protocols or the physics engine to her.

“Okay, look. Most of this is guesswork, but as far as I can tell, the Jihad is the moderator part of VirtualJapan, the system that supervises people’s behavior and interaction. Your father based it on his own personality, but since he died, it’s taken on a life of its own. The really complicated bit is that it’s somehow conflated itself with actually being your father. It knows you. It wants to protect you. It will kill everyone who gets in the way. When you’re safely out of the city, it’ll destroy the Metrozone, and create something else: for all I know, that something else is Tokyo.” He dismissed the idea with a wave.

“Stop,” she said, holding up her hand. “The Jihad thinks it’s my father?”

“I don’t think it knows what it is. If it is an AI, then it’s thrashing around in the dark much like the rest of us. But it can’t distinguish between being programmed to protect you and biological imperative: it just assumes that it is your father.” Petrovitch felt tired again, a tiredness that burrowed deep into his bones. “I need to talk to it on its own territory. I need to talk it out of wiping the Metrozone off the map.”

“What do they think?” She tossed her hair in the direction of the wagon.

“They want to know how to kill it.” He looked around. “If the Jihad is the first AI to achieve full sentience, I’m not going to be the one responsible for pulling the plug. I don’t care if it thinks it’s Moses, Mohammed or Mao, it’s not getting erased.”

“The others won’t like that.”

“I’m not doing this to be popular. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever done anything to be popular.” He tweaked his bent glasses and looked out of his one good lens at her. “What I need to know is where your father went to access VirtualJapan.”

“There is…” she started. She thought about it, torn between loyalties, then gave up the information Petrovitch wanted. “There’s a room below the garden which can only be reached from the Shinto temple. From the floor underneath there’s no sign it even exists.”

Petrovitch blew air out between his teeth. The climb to the top might finish him off. “So how do I get to it?”

“You can’t. There were only ever two people who could go there. I’d have to come with you,” she said. She looked at him from under her fringe. “If the New Machine Jihad is part of my father, I won’t let anyone harm it.”

“I’ll have to work some things out if we’re going to do this. It’s not going to be easy, but considering none of this has been easy so far, I’m due a lucky break or two.”

“Should I be sorry that you ever became involved? I mean, I’m not, but I’m wondering if I should feel regret.”

“I don’t know,” said Petrovitch. “Wishing I could change the past isn’t something I do.”

“Why did Hijo kill my father?” she asked. “Why did he have to betray us?”

Petrovitch shrugged the best he could. “Maybe he was always planning to do so and was waiting for the right moment, for when Oshicora-san was too distracted by events to worry about his back.”

“And perhaps something tipped him over the edge. Like kissing you. He used to look at me sometimes—you know, like that. I’m not sure my father ever noticed, but I did.”

“I don’t know anything about that.” He was uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation. That and the gunfire which was creeping closer. “The only one who knows why is Hijo. If you ever see him again, you can ask him.”

“I will ask him,” she decided, “and then I’ll have him beheaded.”

“I’m sure that’ll concentrate his mind. We seem to have more immediate problems than getting revenge on Hijo.” He could see out of the corner of his eye, refracted by the broken lens, Carlisle beckoning them to join him.

As they reached him, he held out his hand to stop them going any farther.

“Zombies,” he said.

A sliver of ice touched Petrovitch’s spine. “Slow or fast?”

“Slow.”

“You’re pulling my peesa, right?” Petrovitch leaned around the corner.

A little way down the road—closer than he’d expected, which ramped up his mounting fear—was a gray, shambling horde. They wore both tatters of rags and new shirts, price tags still fluttering from pressed cuffs. They were eating, too, hands filled with unidentifiable food which they crammed to their faces.

“It’s all right,” he said, just to hear his own voice. “I know who these people are.” Then he stepped out into the road and raised his bandaged fist in greeting. “Prophet? Prophet!”

“Machine-man!” came the reply. The prophet barged through his followers, a steel pole in one hand and his mobile phone in the other. “You dare defy the New Machine Jihad? You traitor, you turncoat, you Judas!”

Clearly the Jihad had passed on Petrovitch’s promise to oppose it. “No. It’s not like that. I’m trying to save it—save it from itself.” He was still walking toward them, even as his pace slowed.

The prophet strode closer. He was bare-chested, better to show off the oil runes painted on his skin. “The Machine knows all, gives all, takes all. It turns its face from you, unbeliever.”

Petrovitch turned to Carlisle and Sonja, back at the turning into the side street. “This isn’t going the way I expected. Get back to the wagon. Close the doors. Start the engine.” He jerked his head. “Go. Run.”

He returned his attention to the prophet.

“I’ve done everything the Machine wants. How do you think I got to look like this?” Petrovitch started walking backward as the prophet spun his weapon like a quarterstaff. “I rescued Sonja Oshicora.”

“You are unworthy,” roared the prophet, and struck the road with the end of the pole. Sparks flashed out. “Unworthy to speak the holy one’s name. Seize him, brothers. Drag him down, sisters.”

The gray-skinned people kept coming at the same snail’s pace, even as the prophet urged them on. But some of them dropped their food, and raised their hands out toward him. Some of them moaned, deep in their throats.

Petrovitch ran, bile rising into his mouth. He turned the corner.

Madeleine was lying face down in the road, barely stirring, completely dazed. There was no wagon, merely the hint of blue diesel smoke and a distant grind of gears.

“Polniy pizdets.” He sagged to his knees next to her, the fight finally beaten out of him. And he’d lost the rat again. “Chain? Pl’uvat’na t’eb’a.”