Theories of Flight

21

What is it that you are intending to do?”

Petrovitch stamped toward the tunnel’s exit and refused to answer.

“You must tell me.” Miyamoto caught him up, put a hand on his shoulder and spun him around. “What madness affects you now?”

“I,” said Petrovitch, “don’t have to tell you anything. Anything at all. Your job is to keep me alive. That’s it. My job seems to be considerably more complicated, so why don’t you shut up and let me get on with it?”

When he made to turn away again, Miyamoto could barely restrain himself.

“No. No: you cannot do this. If you die—when you die—I will be blamed. Miss Sonja will send me away. If I am to keep you safe, you must reconsider this madness.” He could think of nothing else to say. “I beg you.”

Petrovitch stood with his back to him. “You’re putting too much store in a relationship that’s a figment of your imagination. Sonja is using your devotion to her like a queen would a knight. Wake up, man! She doesn’t want you.”

“No, she wants you.”

The corner of Petrovich’s mouth twisted into a grimace. “She can’t have me. I’m promised to another.”

“Your wife will not survive this. You know that. And when she is gone…” Miyamoto’s voice finished in a strangled grunt of frustration and bitterness.

“If you say that again, I will shoot you dead and damn the consequences.” Petrovitch brought his arm up straight and pointed the gun at Miyamoto’s head. “We are going to fight, and we are going to win. Got that?”

“Truly, you are insane.”

“What’s it all for, then? What is it I’m meant to do? What’s the point of being the smartest guy I know if I don’t use those smarts to do something?” Petrovitch lowered the gun.

“We have gone in a full circle,” said Miyamoto. “What do you propose to do that will save not just Lucy, and those elders, but your wife too?”

“I’m going to use the One Ring, even though I might have left it too late: I might not have enough time, or enough people, or enough anythings.” He put the gun away and got out the rat. There was still no connection. “We have to get closer to daylight.”

Slowly, the tunnel grew brighter, and there was a slouching youth waiting for him in the distance, standing between the rails, tapping his foot.

“Hey.”

[What happened? I expected you to be out of contact for no more than three minutes.]

“There were people in the tunnel. Hospital patients, and a doctor who’s going to give them all a lethal injection whether the Outies come for them or not.”

[Why does this concern you? You knew when you set out to find Madeleine that you would find those left behind. You can save one, perhaps. You cannot save them all.]

“Yeah, we’ll see about that.” He pulled the hem of his coat up. He could feel a stiff wire inside the lining, coiled like a snake, and he passed the material through his fingers until he came to a tear. He dug out the end of the cable Sonja had sent with Miyamoto, and threaded it all through the gap. “I’d convinced myself I didn’t care about anyone, and perhaps getting married would make me care. Which was why, I suppose, I wanted to cross the Metrozone against the biggest flow of refugees since Japan sank: just to show I cared about another human being.” He contemplated the end of the cable, the plastic plug with its connectors that went into the rat.

[And you find that you do not?]

“The opposite: I’ve found that I do. I care about everyone.” Petrovitch clicked the cable into place. At its other end was a silver jack, long and thin and ridged, designed to lock into its socket with a half-turn. “So here’s the deal. You get your citizenship. I get my wife.”

[With you, Samuil Petrovitch, there is always a price to pay. What will this cost me?]

“Do you trust me?”

[No] it answered baldly. The avatar walked in a circle across the tracks, head bowed. [You are meat. You get tired, hungry, weak, scared. You have a flexible notion of morality. I know you will change your mind, not once, not twice, but a hundred times before this is over. You do not tell me the cost because I know the cost is everything.]

“Do you trust me?” he asked again.

[No. Your motives are hidden to me. Your thought processes are opaque. You are ruled by your passions. How can I possibly trust you when so much is in the balance? If I lose, I lose my very existence.]

“I don’t want anyone to say I forced you. I don’t want you to think that, either. This—this is me. It’s time to risk everything on a throw of the dice. But I can load those dice in our favor. I can manipulate chance, defy fate, do the impossible.” Petrovitch held up the jack in front of his face. The avatar couldn’t see it, couldn’t possibly know what he was planning. The AI wasn’t stupid, but it lacked imagination. “Do you,” Petrovitch said once last time, a smile on his lips, “do you trust me?”

It stopped walking, and raised its face to the light at the end of the tunnel. [I have no reason to do so, except this: it is you who is asking. What choice do you leave me?]

“Good enough for me.” He felt around the back of his head and started to push the jack home.

Miyamoto tried to stop him, but he’d realized too late what Petrovitch was up to. He was too far away to do anything. Petrovitch saw him lunge toward him, hands outstretched, but the jack was in and twisted.

Everything went white.

He was blind and senseless, but he expected that. It would take a few moments for the rat to recognize that there was new hardware installed, and then fire up the right program—the Sorensons’ mitigator program—to mediate the virtual experience for him, fitting like a filter between meat and metal. It had been a simple matter to turn the interface around, so that input and output could be reversed.

Lines. He could see lines, as thin as wires. Colored circles and shapes paraded around him, blurred at first, with too much blue, but there was some feedback from his optical center and they snapped into focus, becoming warmer and redder.

His skin ran through heat and cold, dull and sharp, feather-light pressure and painful grip. His hearing was tested for stereo. The five tastes were applied to his tongue, and a basic array of aromas assaulted his nose.

Petrovitch blinked, slowly. Dark, light. He was somewhere inside the rat, in a machine that wasn’t a digitized world but a workaday handheld computer. Perhaps the mitigator couldn’t cope with the unexpected. Perhaps he needed to code a solution for himself, out of nothing.

He voiced a keyboard into existence, scrawled some basic commands glowing into the air, and created an interface: pull-down menus that worked like blinds, a window for the outside world, a schematic for connections outside of the rat.

The avatar watched him intently over his shoulder.

“Hey. Almost done,” said Petrovitch.

[You could have told me.]

“Then it wouldn’t have been a surprise.” His body was as it had been in VirtualJapan: a chrome mannequin, featureless and naked. Oshicora had given him form and substance then, but right now he was busy. “We have work to do.”

[Am I going to have to reveal my presence to the world?] The AI looked pensive.

“Yeah. If everything goes right, it won’t matter. If everything goes wrong, it won’t matter either. Ready?”

[What do you want me to do?]

Petrovitch tried to push his glasses up his nose. They weren’t there. Dissatisfied, he drew a sandtable with his finger, and populated it with all the information he could gather on the Metrozone. Layers upon layers of info: topography, architecture, utilities, transport, cameras, people, and more: the positions of troops, artillery pieces, command-and-control centers. Still more, the Outies, the breaches in the M25 cordon where they’d flooded through, the abandoned towns of the Outzone.

“Your predecessor unconsciously attacked a city and brought it to its knees. It destroyed buildings and killed using the city’s own automatic systems and giant robots it built in co-opted factories. This time, it’s going to be different, because I’m going to show you how to do it properly.”

The AI pondered the living map. [To control all this will take more processing capacity than I have.]

“We have to code it. Distribute our agents, give them commands and let them carry them out. We want autonomous cars? We write the script, broadcast it, modify it on the fly. We want to take over the EDF forces? Place a diversion between the units and the generals. Fake it so that the top brass see what they think they should be seeing, while we direct the troops to do what we want them to do. We take the resources we need to do the job. We’ll give them back later. Do it. Do it now.”

The AI’s avatar blurred and became pixelated as its attention turned elsewhere. Petrovitch called Sonja.

“You did it, then,” she said.

“I decided it was time.”

“You could make that decision yourself, of course.” She brushed her fringe aside and stared at his silvery outline. “What else have you done without talking to me?”

“I got the AI up and running again. It’s been online for three, four months now. It’s a smart kid. Your dad would be proud.”

“Oh, Sam. Is Miyamoto with you?”

“Yes. In real-space.”

“I’m going to have to order him to kill you. And he’ll do it, too.”

“I know. Gladly, I expect. Where are you?”

She moved to one side to show the park at the top of her tower. “I told you I wouldn’t leave.”

“The Outies are almost on the northern edge of Regent’s Park.”

“Yes. I can hear them,” she said. “There are too many of them for the EDF to hold back, and I suppose it won’t be long before they’re here. But I’m ready for them, Sam. I was serious when I said I was going to protect my father’s legacy.”

“Were you serious enough to arm as many of your workgangs as you could?”

When she didn’t answer him, he knew.

“I’m glad, because I want to borrow them. How many have you got?”

“No. I need them, Sam. Every last one of them. I need them for here.”

“However many you have, it won’t be enough. You’ve got what, a couple of thousand? You’re still outnumbered a hundred to one.”

“It’s enough to do what I need them to do!”

“But it’s not for what I want them for, and my need is greater.”

Her face went pale and pinched. “You can’t have them. They’re mine.”

Petrovitch shook his head. “Not anymore. You can only give them something to die for. I can give them a reason to live.”

She banged her fists on the desk in front of her in frustration. “Don’t do this to me. I swear, I’ll give Miyamoto the order to take your head.”

He remained perfectly calm. “If you still want to have hold of anything by the end of today, you have to give me everything you have now. How many nikkeijin in the Metrozone?”

“What?” She was suddenly on the back foot, unsure of how to answer in case she ended up trapping herself.

“Half a million, and I can give you their phone numbers. You’re going to contact them all, and get them back across the Thames to you. Tell them to use Waterloo Bridge—you can’t get cars across it, so the only obstructions are a govno -load of people, but we’ll clear that. I’m going to throw a defensive semicircle going from,” and he looked at the map, “Hammersmith to Blackfriars, as far up as the Westway. We can afford to lose the rest, at least temporarily. Sonja? Tell me you’re keeping up.”

“You betrayed me.” She was furious. “And now you’re trying to humiliate me?”

“It just looks like that at the moment. If I have to do this myself, then it won’t work as well, and it won’t end how it should. Call in favors, promise them the world, resort to blind nationalistic rhetoric—I don’t care. I need them, and you can get them for me.” It wasn’t working, and he wondered what would. “Do you remember? When you said we should run away together?”

“It was only the day before yesterday.”

“I just realized we don’t have to run anywhere. All we have to do is plant our flag right here in the Metrozone, and see who stands up to salute it.”

“Stop,” she shouted, and she held up her shaking hands as a physical barrier to his altered visage. “Just… stop. What are you saying? That we take control of the whole city?”

“Yobany stos, Sonya! No: just the half the MEA have abandoned.”

“But.” She realized she had no objections left, though she felt she should try. “But what about the Outies?”

“What about them? Defeating them is the cost of still having somewhere to live when the sun goes down. Now,” he said, “yes or no?”

She gave up arguing. “We’ll never win,” she sighed.

“Three words say we will.” Petrovitch sorted the Metrozone database for Japanese refugees: a simple place-of-birth search, nothing complicated once he’d hacked his way into the system. He bundled up the information and threw it down the wire to Sonja.

She waited, for longer than he anticipated. He thought maybe he was losing his touch, but then she relented and asked:

“Which three words?”

“These ones: New, Machine, Jihad.” He grinned. “See you.”