Europe in Winter

by Dave Hutchinson

  Rupert, who was content to use computers without having the slightest idea how they worked, nodded. “It is rather wonderful,” he said.

  “No, you don’t understand, obviously,” Lev said eagerly. “These are full-scale simulations. Virtual worlds, populated by virtual people who have no idea that they’re software agents. This... thing is probably capable of artificial intelligence. There is nothing else like it anywhere in the world. And there is nothing else like it anywhere in the world because it is impossible.”

  Rupert raised an eyebrow. It had taken him, Rudi, Seth, and all of Rudi’s resources, almost four years to infiltrate Dresden-Neustadt. There had been threats, bribery, corruption, blackmail, one brief kidnapping that he knew about, and enough adrenaline to last him a lifetime, to get information about what the machines there were doing, and all they’d come back with was a computer game. He found it difficult to understand what Lev – a very recent acquaintance whom Rudi seemed to regard with great nostalgic fondness – found so exciting about it.

  “This kind of sophistication, it’s unheard of,” Lev said patiently. “Whoever’s done this, they’ve made unimaginable leaps in computing.” He looked at Rupert, realised he was getting nowhere, and sighed. “I should speak with him about this. Face to face.”

  “He’s busy.” Although in truth, Rupert had no idea where Rudi was at the moment, or what he was doing. He’d set up this liaison with the Professor and then gone off to parts unknown; they hadn’t been in touch in months.

  Lev got up from his chair and went to the window, looked down into the bustling streets of the Siberian capital. “Advances like this don’t just appear out of nowhere,” he said to the view. “They always flow from earlier work, stuff which doesn’t seem very important in the beginning. It doesn’t matter how restricted or secret the final result is, you can always trace it back to research that’s in the public domain. And I can’t find it anywhere. And that’s impossible.”

  Rupert thought it might be perfectly possible, if the research had taken place in another universe, particularly if that universe had subsequently been bombed out of existence. He said, “Is there any mention, anywhere, of the name Mundt?”

  Lev shook his head and turned from the window. “No. There is a lot of topological calculation being done in there, though. Very out-there stuff. Or maybe not so out-there, these days, I don’t know. I’d need to show it to an expert.”

  “No,” said Rupert. “No more experts. We don’t know who we can trust. What about the owners? Is there any way to find out who built the Neustadt?”

  “I’m working on that separately,” Lev said. “I’ve identified about a dozen financial institutions who put money into the project, but really all I’ve managed to do so far is scratch the surface. I need more time if I’m to do it properly, without raising any alarms.”

  If this were some kind of entertainment, this would be roughly the point where Rupert said, “We don’t have any more time, Professor; you must complete your research as soon as possible,” but there was no great sense of urgency, no sense that it even mattered. It was just something Rudi was interested in, for his own reasons. They could be working on this for years and still not understand it, and it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference.

  He said, “Look, Professor, a lot of effort went into getting you that information. We’d be grateful if you could make some kind of sense of it reasonably soon.”

  “There is one thing I can tell you right now,” Lev said, going over to a table in the corner and pouring himself a glass of vodka. “Whoever is running this thing, they’re really interested in railways.”

  AND, WELL, WHO wasn’t, these days? When Sibir had declared its independence from European Russia twenty years ago, there had been some discussion about what to call its capital. Novosibirsk had originally been named Novonikolayevsk, in honour of both St Nicholas and the Tsar Nicholas II, and it was here basically because here was where the Trans-Siberian Railway had built a bridge over the River Ob. Back then, the Trans-Siberian Railway had seemed one of the greatest engineering projects the world had ever seen, but these days it looked a bit like a formerly major road running beside a brand-new six-lane highway. Except the highway was closed.

  Eight months after the Ufa explosion, nobody was any the wiser about its cause. The Line was in virtual lockdown, bombarding the media with denials about fusion power which no one believed. It had even managed to knock the Community off the top of the news for the first time in almost half a decade.

  In the wake of the explosion, the Trans-Siberian was enjoying something of a resurgence after years of neglect, but it had taken Rupert, who refused to fly anywhere, more than a week of rackety trains and twelve-hour waits for connections to reach Novosibirsk for his meeting with Rudi’s pet mathematician, and it took him twelve days to get back to what he considered familiar territory.

  In Prague, he checked into the Hastal in the Old Town and had a long shower to wash off the journey’s grime. Snow was starting to drift down from the low clouds as he left the hotel that evening and used his phone to navigate to a Brazilian restaurant on Malá Štupartská, a narrow, traffic-choked street not far from the Market Square.

  “I ordered churrasco,” Rudi told him after they’d sat down at a corner table. “It comes with fries, because of course it does.”

  The fries arrived, served in what appeared to be small cowboy hats, which Rudi regarded sourly. Also side salads. A waiter came to their table with metre-long skewers of barbecued meat, which he sliced with great ceremony onto octagonal slabs of wood before departing again.

  “So,” Rudi said when they were alone and the rather irritating samba from the restaurant’s music system drowned out their conversation from nearby diners.

  Rupert gave him a potted version of what Lev had told him in Novosibirsk. By the time he had finished, their platters were empty and another waiter had visited the table with a dessert menu, which Rudi had waved away after a moment’s consideration.

  “Well,” he said. “That’s interesting.”

  “Is it?” asked Rupert.

  “These are interesting times. Someone who could predict even the dozen or so most likely outcomes of an action would have something of an advantage over the rest of us. I could certainly use something like that. Thank you.” This last to yet another waiter, who served coffee.

  “He said there’s a lot of topological research going on there, too,” Rupert said. “Which means Mundt.”

  “Not necessarily. Although it may involve the work Mundt was doing before you jumped him out of the Neustadt.”

  “Anyway.” Rupert took a little hard drive from his pocket and passed it across the table. “He says everything he’s learned so far is in here. He’s nowhere near finished, though.”

  “No,” Rudi said. “We got a lot of data back. It’s going to take a while.” He pocketed the hard drive. “Did you hear the UN are offering the Community a seat on the Security Council, by the way?”

  “I haven’t seen the news in almost a fortnight,” Rupert said.

  “Have they been in touch?”

  “The Directorate? They’d have had to move fairly smartly to find me.”

  “Hm. Fair point.” Rudi sat back and looked towards a corner of the ceiling. Rupert thought he looked tired and grumpy.

  “From what I understand, a seat on the Security Council is hardly a badge of honour,” Rupert said.

  “Oh, not these days, no.” Rudi smiled wearily at him. “I just think it’s interesting. Everything is interesting; the hard part is working out how it all fits together.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Me?” Rudi shrugged. “Ah, talking to people. Asking questions. Not getting many answers.”

  “Are you asking the right questions?”

  Rudi chuckled. “Well, now, that is a question.”

  They paid for their meal and left the restaurant. Outside, the snowfall had thickened. A breeze, funnelled by the street,
carried it in swirls and whorls, brushing against car windscreens and making pedestrians hunch their shoulders. Rupert wondered just where Rudi had been asking his questions; there were alleyways in Prague which led over the border into the Community, crossings which everyone seemed to have forgotten about, although he knew the Directorate, the Community’s security service, better than that.

  “What next?” he asked, turning up the collar of his jacket.

  “We’ll let Lev continue his research,” Rudi said, stirring the tip of his cane in the millimetre or so of dry snow which had settled on the pavement just beyond the restaurant’s canopy. “I’ll keep asking questions. Something will turn up; it always does.”

  “What if it doesn’t?”

  Rudi looked out into the street, the snow dancing through the car headlights. “It will,” he said. “Eventually we’ll just start to annoy the wrong people. Then something will happen.”

  3.

  RUDI WOKE FROM a troubled sleep, stumbled out of bed and into the bathroom, used the lavatory, had a quick wash, and breakfasted on toast and cereal and coffee. He dressed in his running kit and went downstairs to the street door. And stopped.

  It was foggy outside. This was not entirely unusual for Kraków, but this was different. It was unseasonable, for one thing. And it was so thick that he couldn’t see across the street. It deadened all sound; he couldn’t hear anything. No people, no traffic, no trams. Nothing.

  Standing on the step, holding the door open behind him, he craned his neck left and right, but he could only see a few metres in either direction along the pavement before the world vanished into an impenetrable grey wall. It was as if he and his building were the only real, solid things on Earth. He thought about what the man who looked like him had said last night.

  Thinking about that made him angry. He shook his head and stepped out onto the pavement, and as he did the building behind him calmly vanished.

  1.

  ONE MORNING IN November, Spencer experienced a moment when he didn’t know where he was.

  He was on his way into town, changing trains at Euston Underground station, riding the escalator up from the Victoria Line platforms, and as he neared the top everything was suddenly unfamiliar. It was as if he had not only never been in this place before, but in this situation. What was this moving staircase? What were these tunnels? What did all these signs mean? Which language were they in? He felt a sense of fear so profound that he stopped at the top of the escalator and several people coming up behind him bumped into him and almost knocked him over.

  The jostling was enough to snap him out of whatever had happened to him, but it didn’t happen all at once; understanding faded back in like something from a film. That was a sign for the Northern Line; this was an escalator vestibule; he was at Euston.

  It only lasted a moment or so, but it was unnerving enough for him to turn and take the down escalator back to the Victoria Line, get a train to Victoria, and go to see his ex, Bethan.

  Bethan lived in Peckham, just beyond the southern edge of the London Control Zone. To the north and west and east the Zone stretched out beyond the M25, but the River was a useful border, and the boroughs immediately to the south had always had a raw deal from whoever was making the big decisions for London and the country in general. From some streets in Peckham you could see the Shard and other buildings of the City, tantalisingly close but on the other side of several security checkpoints.

  They went to a pub across the road from Rye Common and Spencer told Bethan what had happened at Euston, and Bethan shook her head sadly.

  “Have you been taking your meds, Spence?” she asked.

  “Of course I have,” he said.

  “Are you sure?”

  Well, of course, now he thought about it, Spencer wasn’t sure. He had an image in his mind of taking his tablet, but he couldn’t have sworn that it was from this morning. Or yesterday morning. Or the day before, for that matter. Yesterday and the day before were slippery concepts for Spencer, anyway, like tomorrow and the day after.

  Bethan sighed again and took out a small plastic container. “Here,” she said, “take one of mine.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Spencer.

  She rattled the container. “I’ve got plenty.”

  “But suppose I did take one this morning.”

  “Suppose you didn’t. Do you want to have another episode on the way home?” Bethan popped the top off the container with her thumb, tipped a white tablet, not much larger than an artificial sweetener, into her palm, and held it out to him. “You can’t overdose on this stuff, anyway. It’ll plateau you out.”

  Spencer took the tablet and put it in his mouth, where it dissolved into a gritty bitterness that he washed down with a mouthful of beer.

  “There you go,” Bethan said approvingly. She was a tall woman with close-cropped red hair and a penchant for vintage T-shirts. Spencer had several powerfully erotic memories of their brief time together, but he couldn’t remember how they had met, or quite why they had split up. Dr Cragoe, his therapist, considered it a form of post-traumatic stress and had prescribed yet more medication and a monthly mindfulness session which Spencer, mixing the dates up, kept forgetting to attend.

  “How’ve you been?” he asked, while he waited for the medication to come on.

  She shrugged. “Up and down. Work’s been a sod lately.”

  Bethan worked for one of the American news aggregators. Spencer tried to remember if something newsworthy had happened in the past few days, but came up blank. He said, “You need a holiday.”

  She snorted. “Everybody needs a holiday. I need another job.”

  Spencer thought things were starting to settle down; the vague sense of anxiety he’d been feeling since this morning was dissipating, objects around him were beginning to make sense. He said, “Me too.”

  Bethan looked around the bar. There was a fashion, these days, to convert gastropubs back into old-style boozers, and this one was a dreary lino-floored space with uncomfortable wooden seats and dull mass-produced beer. The closest thing it had to food was pork scratchings. The clientele, which hadn’t changed, appeared as content with this as they had been when the pub had been serving quinoa salads, but Spencer hated places like this. All he really wanted was a cup of coffee, and the nearest cup of halfway decent coffee was a walk away in East Dulwich.

  Bethan said, “Short of cash?”

  He nodded. “A bit.”

  “You’ve got the rent and the bills covered, though, right?”

  He shrugged.

  “Oh, Spence,” she sighed, and though he couldn’t quite remember the final days of their relationship, that falling, disappointed tone of voice was crushingly familiar. He felt himself shrivel inside.

  There was a silence. Bethan sat looking at him, while he sat watching the traffic go by outside, remembering other times like this.

  Finally, she said, “I know someone who’s got a job going.”

  BETHAN LIVED IN one of the streets off Bellenden Road, a name which always made Spencer snigger. The house seemed perpetually full of furniture from other homes. Passing through the living room, he noticed stuff that seemed to have washed up here since his last visit – most notably a large elephant’s foot umbrella stand, several intact turtle shells that were probably two hundred years old, and a glass-fronted case containing what appeared to be a meerkat stuffed by a taxidermist in the throes of a powerful breakdown. Any of these could have got her arrested for possession of the products of endangered species, but Bethan didn’t care. It was just Stuff. She picked it up here and there, sold some of it, kept some of it, periodically threw the rest away.

  A previous owner of the house had built a small extension on the back, probably in defiance of planning regulations. It wasn’t much more than a spare room, into which Bethan had installed the servers and monitors and other assorted hardware of her job. The walls were white and the lights were bright and it was always too warm for Spencer’s tastes in
there. It was also fantastically well soundproofed. When the four-inch-thick door was closed there was a sense of dead air, a sense of being sealed off from the rest of the world

  Bethan sat him down in front of one of the monitors and waved up an interface. She stood behind him, air-typing through menus and submenus and diallers and anonymisers and it all got a bit confusing for Spencer so he asked for another of her tablets and washed it down with a bottle of water while she talked and talked and talked calmly and quietly and then there was an image on the monitor and another voice was talking, slowly and soothingly, and Spencer felt his eyelids grow heavy and his head loll forward and it seemed such a very, very long time since he had slept properly.

  2.

  AIR TRAVEL IN Western and Central Europe could be tricky these days. If there was an appreciable lag between booking your ticket and actually taking your flight, there was an outside chance you’d discover that your destination airport was no longer actually in the country you wanted to go to. Most polities which sprang into being with a national or – the great prize – international airport were smart enough to realise that a large machine for making revenue had fallen into their laps, and swiftly renegotiated fees and timetables with the major carriers. Some, though, were bloody-minded, and Europe was dotted, here and there, with ultramodern airport architecture falling slowly into disuse and disrepair because the airlines had grown tired of various micronations’ demands and simply told them to fuck off and gone to land elsewhere.

  The situation was, if anything, even worse the further East you went. Beyond Rus – European Russia – and Sibir was a patchwork of republics and statelets and nations and kingdoms and khanates and ’stans which had been crushed out of existence by History, reconstituted, fragmented, reinvented, fragmented again, absorbed, reabsorbed and recreated. The situation was not helped by a tradition of short-lived and frankly catastrophic regional airlines, some of them flying aircraft more than a century old, many of them with a cheerfully cavalier attitude to irksome expenses like basic maintenance. Air travel east of Nizhny Novgorod, say, had always been a bit of an adventure – there had been times when getting on a flight travelling east of Moscow had been an act of considerable bravery – but airspace beyond the Urals had turned into an enterprise on a par with the early days of the Oregon Trail.