The Petrovitch Trilogy

by Simon Morden

  “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 ri
ght 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.”

  22

  Petrovitch opened first one eye, then the other. He stood swaying slightly for a moment, then tried to walk forward a couple of steps.

  They were tentative, a questioning toe pressed against the sharp ballast before he committed his whole weight.

  “Weird,” he said, and even as he said it, it felt like he was writing a line of code and sending it to his vocal cords.

  Miyamoto had his sword in his hand, watching him from a safe distance, poised to strike him down.

  When Petrovitch turned his head, he could feel the cable drag: an unnatural connection from skull to computer was one thing, but it was more than that. He felt full to bursting. Ripe.

  He focused on the samurai, and was aware of the embedded electronics in the man’s clothing—nothing more complicated than a phone searching for a signal, but he could see it as an icon he could touch, open, alter and activate if he knew the right commands.

  “This is going to take some getting used to.”

  “You should not have done this,” said Miyamoto. “There are too many unknowns involved.”

  Petrovitch looked over the top of his glasses. The shine off the sword blurred, then sharpened as the rat processed the raw data and fed it back. The resulting image wasn’t perfect, but it was close. “We can argue about it later. Right now, I’m looking for a bus.”

  He slid one sleeve of his coat off, and threaded the rat over his shoulder, then back around to his front. He slipped the rat into his inside coat pocket, coiling up the excess cable, and put his arm back in. The connector was mostly hidden by his hair. When he turned his collar up, it was all but invisible.

  His simultaneous search of the satellite images found him several buses, which he matched with a picture gallery to discard all the ones without automatic navigation. He could have used cars, of which there were many more, and closer—but a big modern coach with tall sides would offer more protection to its occupants.

  There were two that fitted his requirements, both in the depot of a private hire firm up at Highgate, near the cemetery. He was going to have to free them from behind the locked gates.

  “Are you ready?”

  “For what?”

  “Revolution. I suppose they all start like this, with one person thinking that things could be different. Then it grows. They persuade others to join in, and it gains a momentum all of its own. It either overwhelms the old order, or gets crushed.” Petrovitch pushed his glasses back up his nose, and felt his eyesight compensate again. He took the info shades off and pocketed them: he’d probably never need them again. “This is my revolution. This is where we sweep away the past and the future breaks in. This is what the New Machine Jihad should have been.”

  “The Jihad killed hundreds of thousands,” said Miyamoto.

  “It’s going to do it again, too. Back then, when it was stupid, ignorant, and no more than an urge, it attacked us. But now it’s got smarts. It knows everything. It’s guided. It can make amends for the wrong things it did. It’s going to take back the city for us.”

  “It is a weapon, and it is in your hands alone.” Miyamoto flexed his fingers around his sword hilt. “No one man should have so much power.”

  “Before you try and stop me, why don’t you talk to Miss Sonja? I have and, despite her misgivings, she’s with me. Which reminds me.”

  Petrovitch turned away from Miyamoto, and searched for Valentina. As well as talk to her, he could see her, see all around her: her phone pinpointed her location on the approaches to Tower Bridge.

  The EDF had done the smart thing, the thing they should have done much earlier: they’d stopped the traffic, and made people get out and walk with only what they could carry. Cars were crushed in all around her, abandoned, some still with their motors running. She was with a gaggle of Olgas, pushing ahead through the slowly moving crowds with Marchenkho in their wake. He didn’t look happy.

  “I see you,” he said in Valentina’s ear.

  “Petrovitch. Where are you?” Her neck craned and tried to spot him.

  “Look up, to your left. There’s a lamp-post with a camera.” He waggled the camera’s housing to attract her attention. “Though I’m pretty much everywhere now.”

  “We did not find Daniels,” she said. “Is madness here, and Outies are not far behind.”

  “I know. I can see them, too. Listen: when you said you would help me, did you mean it? Rather, how much did you mean it?”

  Without hesitating, she replied, “What is it you need me to do?”

  “I need Waterloo Bridge. I need it clear for northbound traffic. I can help, but I’m not there.”

  He zoomed in so he could try and read her face. She nodded. “Hmm. Is done,” she said. “Should I talk to Marchenkho?”

  “I’ve delegated this to you. If you want him, fine. If not, fine. I need to make one thing clear, though. He works for you, and you work for me. If he can’t handle that, then cut him loose.”

  “Da,” she said. “How long before you need bridge?”

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  She raised her sculpted eyebrows.

  Petrovitch shrugged to no one in particular. “Yeah. I didn’t say it was going to be easy.”

  “Then I had better hurry. Good hunting.” She cut the connection, and he followed her for a few moments more as she glanced at her watch and made a little head-jiggle as she weighed up matters in her mind. Then she started to climb on top of a car.

  Waterloo Bridge was as good as his, so he returned his attention to where his body was. He’d walked to the end of the tunnel on automatic: he’d have to watch for that by writing some sort of script, though he barely knew where to start. He could hack into his own heart if he wanted to.

  The avatar was again waiting for him, but he was looking out over a landscape that had been strangely changed. The layers of information he’d seen on Miyamoto were replicated everywhere. Most of the electronics was locked, rendered inert by the Outies destroying the power grid as they advanced.

  But some were not. Battery-powered devices glowed green, almost begging to be used. Discarded phones on standby, handheld computers, solar-powered street furniture, and best of all, the cars.

  One of the Jihad’s first manifestations had been the processions of automated cars, used as a child’s playthings. Petrovitch could do so much more with them. The station on the far side of the tunnel was formed either of solid brick or transparent glass, but it mattered little which. He could stretch out beyond the reach of his hand.

  [I have done as you asked,] said the AI. [EDF command in Brussels is being fed an alterable, delayed feed. How do you want your forces deployed?]

  “I need to give Sonja time to gather her nikkeijin. Put a third of them on the Marylebone flyover, another third at the far end of Euston Road. Send the rest of them to Primrose Hill. There are tanks there al
ready, but they need infantry support. Divide them up with a mix of units, and keep them concentrated. Standard military doctrine is that they should spread out, so if they show signs of that, yell at them.”

  [Do you want to know what we have?]

  “No. Either it’s enough and they’ll hold, or it isn’t and I’m sending them to their deaths. How’s the network holding up?”

  [Bandwidth is a problem. I am making great demands on it, even with outsourcing many of my routine processing functions.] He looked sulky. [The NSA is aware of the unusual activity, but the United States has the highest density of computer resources on the planet. I have no choice but to use them.]

  “They’ll use their giant axe at some point and try to isolate their network. We’re going to have to think of something else you can run on.” Petrovitch flexed his arms. “How are you?”

  [Busy. I have never felt stretched before.]

  “That’s very human.” Petrovitch smiled. He patted the avatar on its back. He could feel it. He could feel the cloth, and the body under it. “It’s hard for both of us.”

  [Will we win?]

  “We haven’t lost yet.”

  He walked on, and hauled himself up onto a platform, with Miyamoto springing up behind him. The access to the outside was through a deactivated screen and a set of turnstiles. Petrovitch thought he should be able to just stroll through the wall.

  “Madeleine’s mother’s around here somewhere. Or was earlier on this week. She’s an Outie now.”

  “You know this how?” Miyamoto sheathed his sword and slid across the top of the turnstiles.

  “She shot Maddy. Not something either of them are likely to be mistaken about.” Petrovitch followed him over and dropped to the tiled floor. “We’ll stick to the roads from now on.”

  “We would be less obvious crossing the parkland to the north of here.”

  “Yeah. That doesn’t matter anymore. Let them notice us.” He walked out of the station entrance to the curb, to the new registration white Ford. He didn’t have to, but he laid the palm of his hand on its roof.