This statement seemed to require a reply, so Rudi said, “Oh?”
“Not respect,” the Hungarian said, shaking his head sadly. His expression suddenly brightened. “Here, Restaurant Max, we got respect!”
“We always respect our customers,” Max murmured, moving soundlessly up beside Rudi.
“Fuck right!” the Hungarian said loudly. “Fuck right. Restaurant Max more respect.”
“And your meal?” Max inquired, smiling.
“Good fuck meal,” the Hungarian said. There was a general nodding of heads around the table. He looked at Rudi and belched. “Good fuck cook. Polish food for fuck pigs, but good fuck cook.”
Rudi smiled. “Thank you,” he said.
The Hungarian’s eyes suddenly came into focus. “Good,” he said. “We gone.” He snapped a few words and the others around the table stood up, all save the one who had thrown the chair, who was slumped over with his cheek pressed to the tablecloth, snoring gently. Two of his friends grasped him by the shoulders and elbows and lifted him up. Bits of food adhered to the side of his face.
“Food good,” the Polish-speaker told Rudi. He took his jacket from the back of his chair and shrugged into it. He dipped a hand into his breast pocket and came up with a business card held between his first two fingers. “You need working, you call.”
Rudi took the card. “Thank you,” he said again.
“Okay.” He put both hands to his face and swept them up and back in a movement that magically rearranged his hair and seemed to sober him up at the same time. “We gone.” He looked at Max. “Clever fuck Pole.” He reached into an inside jacket pocket and brought out a wallet the size and shape of a housebrick. “What is?”
“On the house,” Max said. “A gift.”
Rudi looked at his boss and wondered what went on underneath that shaved scalp.
The Hungarian regarded the restaurant. “We break much.”
Max shrugged carelessly.
“Okay.” The Hungarian removed a centimetre-thick wad of złotys from the wallet and held it out. “You take,” he said. Max smiled and bowed slightly and took the money, then the Hungarians were moving towards the exit. A last burst of raucous singing, one last bar stool hurled across the restaurant, a puff of cold air through the open door, and they were gone. Rudi heard Max locking the doors behind them.
“Well,” Max said, coming back down the stairs. “That was an interesting evening.”
Rudi picked up an overturned stool, righted it, and sat at the bar. He had, he discovered, sweated entirely through his chef’s whites.
“Anyway, no one was hurt.” Max went behind the bar. He bent down and started to search the shelves, straightened up holding half a bottle of Starka and two glasses.
Rudi took his lighter and a tin of small cigars from his pocket. He lit one and looked at the restaurant. If he was objective about it, there was actually very little damage. Just a lot of mess for the cleaners to tackle, and they’d had wedding receptions that had been messier.
Max filled the two glasses with vodka and held one up in a toast. “Good fuck meal,” he said.
Rudi looked at him for a moment. Then he picked up the other glass, returned the toast, and drained it in one go. Then they both started to laugh.
“What if they come back?” Rudi asked.
But Max was still laughing. “Good fuck meal,” he repeated, shaking his head and refilling the glasses.
THE NEXT MORNING, Rudi got up before dawn, pulled on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and went out for a run. He liked the early-morning streets of Poland’s old capital, before the shoppers arrived. It was a landscape of beautiful old buildings and delivery drivers and early-morning workers huddled sleepily in trams. On the Market Square, three Stra˚z miejska, civilian City Guards, were standing looking at a naked man who had been handcuffed to a rubbish bin. The naked man was looking up in fuddled incomprehension while two of the Stra˚z shouted at him in Polish. The guardsmen didn’t seem in any great hurry to help him, or even tase him. Shouting, for the moment, appeared quite satisfactory. It was hardly the worst outcome of a stag weekend they’d ever seen.
He veered off across the square, along the front of the Sukiennice, the mediaeval Cloth Hall in the middle, and out towards the river. He skirted Wawel Hill, the Castle all spotlit high above on its crag, and through the riverside gardens at its feet. The Poles had recently repaired the statue of Smok Wawelski, the dragon supposedly slain – by feeding it a dead sheep stuffed with sulphur, which Rudi had always found a quintessentially Polish story – by Krak, the city’s legendary founder, and now it breathed a jet of flame every five minutes or so, via a hidden gas-pipe which emerged in its mouth. A series of unfortunate incidents involving the light toasting of drunken revellers and one small child had led to a large area in front of the statue being fenced off. Krakowians, because they were Krakowians, kept pulling the fence down, and the city authorities kept putting it back up; the whole thing had turned into a minor sport, with neither side prepared to back down.
Rudi liked the Poles for a lot of things like that; it was one of the reasons he stayed rather than moving on to another city and another restaurant. There was a building near the Mogilskie Roundabout whose construction, begun way back in the 1970s, had been permanently interrupted by lack of money and Martial Law in the ’80s. Once upon a time it had been the tallest building in Kraków. It had never been finished, but instead of knocking it down the Poles had turned it into a huge billboard display. They called it ‘Szkieletor,’ after a children’s cartoon character. Nobody now knew who owned it.
He did a threequarter-circuit of Wawel Hill, then back along Grodzka into the Market Square. The drunken tourist was still there, still being goodnaturedly yelled at by the guardsmen. There were more people about now; some of them had gathered to watch and make helpful suggestions. Others were walking across the Square, heading for work. As Rudi rounded the Mariacki Church, he saw from the corner of his eye someone standing on the opposite corner, watching him, and for a confusing moment there was something so familiar about their body language that he almost stumbled. By the time he regained his footing and managed to look properly, the figure was gone.
At the restaurant, there was much activity following the previous night’s excitement. One of Max’s many relatives was standing on a stepladder replacing the smashed sconce, and a small team of professional cleaners was using a machine which resembled a stunted Dalek to clean the trodden-in mess of food and broken glass and crockery from the carpet. Max was standing near the bar, dolefully regarding a broken chair.
“Can’t find one to match it,” he said when Rudi arrived, freshly-showered and ready for the day. “The firm that made them went bust two years ago.”
“And you didn’t know?” asked Rudi.
Max looked at him. “Do I look like a man who pays attention to every furniture manufacturer who goes out of business?”
“So we’re down one place setting now.”
“I’ll find something similar,” said Max. “Put it at one of the tables over in that corner. No one will ever notice. And if they do, no one will ever mention it.”
Rudi thought this was somehow emblematic of Max’s attitude to the restaurant business; he had a laudable faith in the power of good food cooked well to bring in customers, but everything else was a struggle for him. It was at times like this – and really only at times like this – that Rudi missed the presence of the sainted Pani Stasia, the restaurant’s former chef and Max’s mother.
He said, “At least we have replacements for all the broken tableware.”
Max looked at the chair again and shrugged. Tableware was constantly having to be replaced; there were boxes of plates and cups and saucers and cutlery in one of the storerooms, bought cheap in large quantities at a bankruptcy sale a couple of years ago. Eventually, that was going to start running out too, Max would equivocate about replacing it, and then another bankruptcy sale would come along and solve the problem
. You never had to wait long for a bankruptcy sale in the catering business, these days.
Rudi left Max to puzzle out the chair problem. It would, as these things usually did, become his problem soon enough. He went into the kitchen, where the crew were prepping for the day’s service.
THE DAY PASSED as they always did. There were minor crises and minor triumphs. Out in the restaurant, a child, unwillingly dining with his parents, enacted a spectacular temper-tantrum which Max defused with nothing more sophisticated than native charm and a lollipop. Max found the nuts and bolts of being a restaurateur a bit of a chore, but he was wonderful with people, particularly children.
As the afternoon diners were gradually replaced by the evening crowd, most of them coming in for an early dinner before going on to the theatre or a club, Rudi went out to the loading bay in the courtyard behind the building for a smoke. The courtyard was small and narrow, just wide enough for a van to reverse through the archway at the other end for deliveries. It was surrounded by tall, old buildings, and on rainy days he felt as if he was standing at the bottom of a chimney lined with windows.
Stubbing out his cigar in the bucket of damp sand beside the back door of the restaurant, he had the strangest sense of being watched. He looked across the courtyard and thought he caught the barest scrap of movement, but it was gone so quickly that he couldn’t be sure. He walked across to the archway, stepped through into the street, and looked left and right, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. Just another day when you think people are looking at you; everyone has them, now and again.
There was a brief lull in custom around seven. Rudi had a quick dinner of kotlet schabowy and potatoes with pickled red cabbage and apple at the private table by the kitchen door, and when he got up to take his plate back into the kitchen he looked across the restaurant and found himself looking at himself.
For a few moments he stood there, completely flatfooted, all manner of scenarios running through his head. Then the person sitting at the table on the other side of the restaurant smiled and beckoned cheerily, and he felt as if a trapdoor had opened beneath his feet but he hadn’t yet quite fallen through it.
He shouldered the kitchen door open, put his plate and coffee mug on the worktop just inside, and walked across the restaurant and stood beside the newcomer’s table.
And it really was him. Or rather an older, slightly more worn-out him, with wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and grey in his hair. There was a cane propped against the table beside him, and he was partway through a bowl of flaczki. Rudi felt that sense of standing on thin air even more acutely.
“Oh, sit down,” said the older him in an avuncular manner. He indicated the bowl of tripe stew in front of him. “This is really good, but you’ve got to stop putting so much pepper in it; not even the Poles like it with this much pepper.” He smiled. “Sit.”
Rudi sat. “Who are you?”
The older Rudi was buttering a slice of rye bread. “I’m you,” he said, “obviously.”
“No you’re not.” It was the only thing he could think of to say.
“Yes I am. A version of you, at any rate.”
Rudi shook his head. “No, I’m sorry,” he said, “this doesn’t make any sense.” He made to stand, but the older Rudi waved him down.
“Some of what I’m about to tell you will be quite hard to believe,” he said, laying the slice of bread down on a side plate and picking up his wineglass. He took a sip of wine. “Actually, pretty much everything I’m about to tell you will be hard to believe.”
“Is this some kind of joke?” Rudi glanced around the restaurant, hoping to spot a couple of hidden cameras and a group of friends waiting to spring a late birthday surprise.
“I suppose the easiest way to start is to say that this is like The Matrix. Do you have The Matrix here?” He saw the look of incomprehension on Rudi’s face and shook his head. “Keanu Reeves? Laurence Fishburne?” He blinked. “How can there be a world without Laurence Fishburne?”
Rudi stood up. “I’m going to call the police,” he said. “I’ll give you two minutes’ head start, but I’m going to call the police.”
Elder Rudi looked up at him, not at all concerned. “You, and your entire world, are very, very sophisticated computer programs,” he said. He added brightly, “And in fact, so am I.”
Rudi turned for the kitchen. “You’ve had your two minutes’ head start,” he said.
“You’ve got a scar on your arm where you fell over on a paring knife in the Turk’s kitchen,” Elder Rudi called. “How do I know that? Because I have one too. Look.”
Rudi turned back, saw that Elder Rudi had rolled up his sleeve and was showing him a familiar-looking scar. Then Elder Rudi unbuttoned his shirt and exposed another scar that started on his chest and disappeared from view. “Skinheads,” he said. “Warnemünde.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Come and sit down,” he said reasonably. “I don’t mean you any harm. I just have some things to ask you.”
Rudi went back to the table and sat.
“The best way I can explain it is that there is a place in Germany,” Elder Rudi said. “It’s called the Republic of Dresden-Neustadt. You’ve never heard of it, because it doesn’t exist here, but that doesn’t matter. Basically it’s a little walled city-state and it contains the densest concentration of computing power on Earth. The people who built it meant it to be a data haven for oligarchs, a place to keep all their dirty little digital secrets, but that stuff only occupies a tiny percentage of the Republic’s capacity and a number of people have been wondering what else goes on in there.”
Rudi sat staring.
Elder Rudi took a mouthful of flaczki, chewed, shook his head, swallowed. “Too much pepper,” he said again sadly. “Anyway. Yes, the Republic. After a lot of hard work and chicanery and not a little derring-do, it was possible to install a number of software agents on the Republic’s systems.” He tapped himself on the chest. “Autonomous programs designed to adapt to the system, scrape data about what’s going on inside, and report back.”
“This is fucking crazy,” Rudi murmured.
“Now, I can’t speak for the other servers in the Republic,” Elder Rudi went on briskly, “but this one seems to be running exquisitely detailed simulations of Europe.” He looked about him. “It really is wonderful work.” He smiled at Rudi. “Oh, incidentally, I’m not nearly this sophisticated usually; I’m borrowing a lot of processing power from the server running this simulation, and I look like you because I copied the server’s rendering of you. With a few somatic changes.” He beamed. “There,” he said. “I knew you’d take this well. I’ve always congratulated myself on being adaptable, if nothing else.”
“I’m not taking this well,” Rudi said. “I’m not taking it at all.”
Elder Rudi said, “They run the simulations in batches of about a thousand at a time, at really high speed, compressing a year of elapsed time into a few hundredths of a second. And all the simulations are ever so slightly different. If they’re using all their spare capacity to run simulations that’s an insane amount of computation. Whole worlds.”
“Why?” Rudi couldn’t help himself.
Elder Rudi grinned. “I have no idea. I’m a computer program; I’m tasked to observe and record, not to come to conclusions. I’m not AI.”
Rudi felt himself starting to fall through the trapdoor. “You said you had some questions.”
“Yes, yes I do.” Elder Rudi leaned forward slightly. “Have you ever,” he asked, “heard of Les Coureurs des Bois?”
“What?”
“I’ll take that as a no. Does the European Union still exist?”
“Of course it does.”
“Have you heard of the Community?”
“What community?”
“Has there been a flu pandemic in Europe in the past forty years?”
“No. What kind of questions are these?”
“Does the name Mundt mean anything to you? No? How about Andrew Molson?”
>
Rudi shook his head.
“Where does your father work?”
“I’m not going to answer any more of these questions. Why do you want to know these things?”
Elder Rudi smiled and shrugged. “It’s what I do. I collect data and return it to my creator. A bit like V’ger.” He sat back. “No!” he said. “You don’t have Star Trek? What kind of monsters programmed this place?”
“Nobody.” Rudi stood up. “Nobody programmed this place. I don’t know who you are or what you think you’re doing, but I’m going to call the police now. The real police, not the Stra˚z.”
“Of course,” said Elder Rudi, sitting back in his chair and grinning – did he ever stop smiling? “Go right ahead. I should warn you, though, this... interaction might have some effect on the simulation. It might skew the data. They might let it run to the end, or they might abandon it and start again. I’d say I was sorry about that, but I don’t feel compassion, and it doesn’t matter anyway because none of this is real.”
Rudi strode back across the restaurant and pushed through the kitchen door. But he didn’t call the police. He stood where he was for a couple of minutes, then he looked back through the door, but the man who had claimed to be him was gone. He’d left a big tip, though.
2.
“IT’S A PREDICTION engine,” said Lev.
“A what?” asked Rupert.
“It’s a machine for predicting the future.”
“I’m sorry, Professor,” Rupert said, shifting in his chair, “but you’re going to have to do better than that.” He didn’t trust the Russian; there was something ever so slightly broken about him, although he seemed, on the surface at least, to be doing all right. His flat, in one of the more upscale neighbourhoods of Novosibirsk, was tastefully austere in a way that only moderately successful people can achieve.
“They’re running all possible scenarios of European history, over and over again,” Lev explained with a happy smile. “Can you imagine the processing power they must have in there?”
Europe in Winter Page 3
