Equations of Life

31

He dared to touch her body. He rested his hand on her back and pressed between her shoulders. Muscle yielded to his touch beneath the armor.

“Maddy. Get up. If you don’t we’re going to get torn apart.”

He looked around. They were still coming. Slowly, ever so slowly.

“Madeleine?” Petrovitch bent down and put his face against hers. There was blood coming from her nose, pooling red and sticky on the ground. She looked at him with unblinking brown eyes. “Get up. You have to get up. I can’t carry you. I can’t drag you. I have six bullets in my gun and it’s not enough. I can’t protect you.”

The first of them—a man, he guessed—shuffled painfully toward Madeleine’s outstretched legs.

“I can’t do this on my own,” said Petrovitch, pressing his lips against her ear. “I thought I could, but I can’t. I need you.” He straightened up just as the man bent down, fingers clawing at Madeleine.

Petrovitch slapped him with his pistol-filled hand and the man crumpled. He looked at the gun, then at the skeletal figure on the tarmac.

“Yobany stos.”

There were three more. He dodged an outstretched arm by simply ducking under it, then planted his fist hard against one chest, two chests, three. They fell like shop-window dummies, and struggled to get up again.

Behind them, the prophet was urging them on, words of exhortation ringing through the smoke-tainted air. Petrovitch stood astride Madeleine and dared any of them to have a go.

They did. The main mass of them surged forward, surrounding him, opening and closing their mouths in silent cries, batting at him with their leathery, fluttering fingers.

And though it was awful, all he had to do was knock them down, one by one or several at a time, punching and pushing, knocking his shoulder into their wizened, starved frames and watching them tumble in a heap of bones and cloth.

They formed a circle around the two of them, a heap of still-moving bodies that any attacker had to climb over to reach them. Hands that crept out from the ring toward Madeleine were battered back with the toe of his boots.

The prophet was furious, and as the last one of his followers folded to join their fellows, he rushed Petrovitch, swinging his length of pipe. He feinted for Petrovitch’s head, then aimed low.

It caught him on the thigh, and Petrovitch staggered back, raising his bandaged hand as a shield. He tripped over Madeleine and ended up on his backside, entangled in her legs.

“Enough of this!” He brought his gun around, only to have it hammered from his nerveless grasp by another swing of the steel tube. He rolled in the direction in which it had flown, only to come face to face with a hollow-faced skull, skin stretched tight over cheeks as sharp as axe-blades. The deep-set eyes blinked dryly at him.

The Beretta slipped between the bodies and out of sight. Petrovitch rolled back as the pipe descended again. It hit him on the shoulder, rather than on the forehead, and it hurt like hell. He looked up through the bright mist of pain and crazed glass, and brought his foot up as fast as he could manage.

The prophet’s eyes bulged as an ex-army boot connected with his groin. His face contorted and he clutched himself, all thoughts of attack gone.

Petrovitch struck out again, kicking at a bent knee-cap. The prophet twisted and collapsed with a ragged, drawn-out groan.

Everyone was down. Petrovitch dragged himself toward Madeleine. Something was grating inside his shoulder. Every movement of it made him hiss what little breath he had left out through his clenched teeth.

“Sam? Sam!”

“Right here.”

“What happened?”

“I could ask you the same question, except we don’t have time.” Petrovitch closed his eyes and gasped as he moved to sitting. “The phone.”

“Whose phone?”

“The prophet’s phone.” He tried to stand, nearly vomited, and instead shuffled forward on his knees.

“Get away from me.” The prophet tried to hold Petrovitch off with one hand. Petrovitch just knelt on his legs and patted the man’s many-pocketed trousers, checking their contents.

“Got it.” He tried to wriggle it free, but the prophet was doing his own wriggling.

“I need that,” gasped the prophet. “I need the Machine!”

“Yeah. We have way too much Machine right now. Hey, Maddy: some help here.”

She lumbered to her feet, blood still dripping down her face, staining her front. She looked terrifying, a goddess of war. She put her foot on the prophet’s chest and slowly put her weight on it.

After that, the phone came free quickly, and Petrovitch held it aloft like it was first prize.

Madeleine scooped up the discarded length of pipe in one hand, and Petrovitch in the other.

He tottered like a new-born and leaned against her, light-headed and nauseous.

“Where’re the others?” she asked. She put her arm around his waist and carried him over the slowly reanimating ring of bodies.

“You don’t know? What’s the last thing you remember?” Petrovitch squinted at the phone’s screen. The battery was almost flat.

“I went to close the doors. Then something hit me. In the back.” She rubbed the back of her hand against her nose, streaking it with deep red blood.

“That would be Chain shooting you, dumping you on your ass in the street and driving off with Sonja.” He looked around. “The mudak. We have to get to the Oshicora Tower before they do, or Chain’s going to screw everything up.”

“Sam, they have an armored car. We have half a scaffolding pole.”

“We also have this phone.” He slipped it in his pocket and concentrated on walking. “I think I broke my shoulder.”

“I think I broke my nose.”

“It’s not going to get any better. Can you get us somewhere safe? I need to make a call.”

“Safe? Safe?” she said in a rising voice. She listened to the staccato gunfire that was only a few streets away. “There is nowhere safe.”

“We’re going to have to improvise, then. Down here.”

They lost sight of the prophet and his disciples, and dragged themselves down the faded white line in the middle of the road.

“Where are we?”

“Heading south. Which is good.” He spotted an overgrown garden behind a tumbledown wall. “In there.”

She lifted him over the first line of bricks and then forged ahead through the whip-like branches of the dense scrubby shrubs. There was a drop into a basement skylight; there were bars over the window, but the pit itself was accessible.

She jumped down and caught him as he tried to sit on the edge but pitched himself forward instead. She lowered him to the damp, mossy interior, and squatted beside him.

“Right. First things first.” He reached into his pocket, wincing as the ends of his clavicle ground together. “You dial.”

“The mobile network is down, Sam.”

“The Jihad will work its magic. Last number redial.”

She pressed a button and held the phone to her ear. “It’s ringing,” she said, eyes wide with wonder.

Petrovitch tried to take the device in his bandaged hand, but none of his fingers were free to grasp it. Neither could he raise his other hand high enough. She kept hold of the phone, while he leaned into it.

He could almost hear in the silence a vast machine making billions of calculations a second.

“It’s Petrovitch,” he said.

“Save Sonja,” it said, “save her.”

“Yeah, there’s been developments, not necessarily for the better. Right now, it’s saving you I’m more worried about.”

“I am the New Machine Jihad,” it said. “Prepare for the New Machine Jihad.”

“I always thought that when I finally got to talk to an AI, it’d understand what the Turing Test was and play along. But, no: not you. You have to spout gibberish and make me guess what it is you mean.”

“Save…”

“I’m running low on watts, Okay? So shut up and listen. There is a room in the Oshicora Tower, below the temple in the rooftop garden. Sonja has access to it, and Harry Chain has Sonja. He wants to turn you off, wipe your mind, take you apart bit by bit so all you can do is recite ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’ You got that? Can he do that from there?”

“I am the New Machine Jihad.”

Petrovitch growled with frustration. “Can Chain hurt you using the interface in that room? Yes or no.”

“No. He cannot.”

“But someone else can? Sonja?”

“Yes.”

“Right. Delay him: as long as you can, but remember he has Sonja, so no ninja-throwing drones or stuff like that. I’ll be there as soon as I can, but I have pieces dropping off me like I’m a hyperactive leper. One more thing: do you remember the promise you made to me when you were still flesh and blood?”

“Come the revolution, you will be spared.”

“Whatever it is you’ve heard, I’m still for you. Okay?”

“Shinkansen ha mata hashirou.”

The line went dead.

“Sam?”

“He’s… it’s gone.”

She turned the phone to her and looked at the flashing battery icon. “I don’t understand why it is that you’re taking the side of a machine that’s indiscriminately killing people?”

Petrovitch shifted uncomfortably. “I’m not. I’m lying through my teeth every time I talk to it. So far I’ve found out the New Machine Jihad is really Oshicora’s VirtualJapan supervisor, the whereabouts of the secret room, the information that yes, it can be damaged by something there, and I’ve got a promise it won’t try and kill me just yet. Tell me who else can get close enough to the Jihad to disable it?”

“You lied?” She sounded shocked, and Petrovitch was outwardly disappointed but inwardly pleased.

“Maddy, I lie all the time. About almost everything. My entire life is constructed on a lie, and if it means I get to save the Metrozone, I’ll carry on lying until my pants spontaneously combust.”

“So why did Chain get rid of us?”

“Because despite your ‘why can’t we just get along’ speech, the idiot thinks I’m pro-Jihad. In his binary mind, that means I’m willing to let the city burn, and because you’re naturally going to take my side in everything, he sees you as part of the problem.” He wanted to push his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He had no way of doing so; he’d run out of hands. “If Chain gets to the tower before I do, any advantage I might have had has gone and you can wave the city goodbye.”

She sat back on her heels, wiping the worst of the congealing gore on her face away with her armored sleeve. “There must be something we can do.”

“Short of calling down a nuclear strike, no.” He tilted his head to see her better, her worry lines, her misshapen nose, the black scab perched at the end of it and the streaks of blood on her lips and chin. “I’d do it, too, if I thought anyone would believe me.”

“I believe you.”

“All we have is some scaffolding and a phone that no longer works.” He grimaced. “And a mad computer who thinks we’re on its side. I don’t know if it’s enough.”

She ventured an uncertain smile. “I’m used to doing things knowing there’s a whole team behind me: that if I fall, there’s someone else there to pick up where I left off.”

He struggled to his feet and looked over the lip of the pit. “You have my pity: I wouldn’t like to rely on me, either.”

She joined him. “It’s getting darker,” she said, looking up at the cloud-shrouded sky. There was no hint of orange in it at all.

“This is going to be a night like no other,” said Petrovitch. “The Jihad must have cut the power completely. When it gets properly dark, it’ll be chaos.”

“Then,” she said, lifting herself up to ground level, “we’d better get moving.”

Petrovitch lifted the steel pipe onto his foot and lofted it in the air so she could catch it. “I have a plan,” he said. “We’ll need that.”

She reached down and wrapped her arm around his back. Their faces were very close. He didn’t know what to do.

“I’m lost,” he said. “I don’t know which way to turn and I have no map to guide me.”

“You think I do? Until this morning, I was a nun.” She adjusted her grip and heaved him up. “It’s like the blind leading the blind.”

The pain in his shoulder flared bright, and he closed his eyes against it. Something warm and soft pressed against his, dry, cracked and dusty lips.

He opened one eye. “Did you just kiss me?”

“Maybe,” she said, and looked away. “What’s the plan?”

“We steal a car.”

“And the Jihad…?”

“Won’t be able to touch us in a pre-Armageddon wreck. In fact, the older the better. Only, I can’t hotwire anything at the moment, so you’ll have to do it. Can you stand being ordered around by me?”

She spun the pipe over her wrist, up her arm, down the other until it slapped into her open palm. “Sam. Yes, for the last time.”

“I still don’t know why.” He started to push through the bushes back toward the street.