Degrees of Freedom

12

“Petrovitch? Wake up. Is problem.”

He sat up. With all the electricity flowing into him, he wondered if he ought to use some to jump-start his brain.

“Problem?”

“Da.”

He booted up his eyes. Valentina was crouched next to him, on his side of the bed, pale face and severe ponytail the only of her features visible. It was starting to get light outside, but it was a west-facing window.

His side of the bed. He looked down to his right. Madeleine was laid diagonally across the mattress, head on the pillow and facing away from him.

“Okay. Give me a minute. I’ll be right out.”

He waited for Valentina to slip silently out, leaving the door ajar, before lifting the covers slightly. It appeared that both of them were naked. The cold air against Madeleine’s back made her murmur and turn slightly: Petrovitch shuffled off the bed and tucked the duvet down around her.

He unplugged himself and threw one of the former hotel’s luxury dressing gowns over him, right arm through the sleeve, left arm across his body with cold metal against bare skin.

When he padded barefoot into the suite, he picked up the tension in the air. Tabletop was sitting at a virtual keyboard, staring up at a flat screen stuck to the wall, while Valentina was leaning over her shoulder, dabbing at the graphics interface with a red painted nail.

“So tell me the worst.”

Tabletop gave up her seat, and Petrovitch gratefully fell into it, holding his dressing gown closed with one hand.

“This turned up, five minutes ago, on the ENN site. They say they got it from a Ukrainian server, but I haven’t been able to check that because the original source is now unreachable.”

“Got the IP address?”

“This window here.” She tabbed it to bring it to the front, and Petrovitch set his agents on it.

The video clip on the news site was poor quality: grainy, full of compression artifacts, really shabby contrast: like it had been done on an old phone in low-light conditions, which it probably had.

In form, it resembled the usual extremist showcase, with three masked figures stood in front of banners proclaiming jihad. Vital differences were the kind of jihad being promoted and the long metal cylinder on the floor in front of them.

“We are the New Machine Jihad,” said—shouted—one of the men, though telling which one was difficult, as they all had their mouths covered and they were using a really crappy pick-up.

“I thought I was,” muttered Petrovitch, and Valentina shushed him.

“We have a message for the world. Prepare for the New Machine Jihad!”

The man on the right stepped forward and reverently showed a handheld’s screen to the camera. The image on it was lost in the wash of pixels, but he came closer and almost pressed the handheld to the lens.

The ghost of a human face rose from the noise. “I am the New Machine Jihad. I am. The New Machine Jihad. Prepare. For the New Machine Jihad. Come to me. Come to the New Machine Jihad. Release the New Machine Jihad. Prepare.”

The face, like ice, melted back into the depths.

“The Machine has spoken,” shouted shouty man. “Free the New Machine Jihad from its prison or we will strike. You have twenty-four hours to give your answer.”

The third man, silent and still up to that moment, walked toward the camera, behind it, and the clip finished.

“Chyort.” Petrovitch sat back and scrubbed at his stubble. He was pricked with cold sweat. “Just when you think you’ve worked out the way the world turns, it throws this at you.”

“That’s the fake bomb, right?” Tabletop backed the clip up for another run through.

“Yeah. Why didn’t they ask for money or drugs or guns, or a small African country? This… this is going to be more difficult to laugh away.”

“Why in particular?”

“Because,” said Petrovitch, “that sounded too much like the New Machine Jihad for comfort, right down to the way it made no yebani sense at all. And there’s something about this guy…”

He scrolled his way through the file to the very end, where the camera was turned off. A few frames before, the face of the approaching man became fractionally more visible.

He’d been a lot thinner. And darker, too, burned by the sun and the wind and rain. But he had something drawn on his forehead that was familiar—a circle drawn in thick machine oil, that resembled the black cogs painted on the white sheets hung up behind them.

“I know him. I thought I’d killed him: well, I thought he’d died, anyway, since I left him unconscious on the ground right before the Long Night. Looks like I didn’t kick his yajtza hard enough.”

Valentina walked to the screen and stared up at the face. “Who is he?”

“The Prophet of the New Machine Jihad. It used to talk to him through a standard mobile, and he thought he was communicating directly with a god. He greeted me as a true believer at first, which made it a bit awkward when he realized I was trying to take the Jihad down.”

“Which you did.”

“Yeah. That’s what I thought, too.”

“Either you did, or you didn’t.”

“I got that sooksin Oshicora to erase himself. All that was left was the pattern, so there is no way that this could be the original New Machine Jihad.” Petrovitch clenched and unclenched his fists. “So where the huy is this coming from?”

“Michael?” Valentina turned and faced the room, hands on hips. “Could this be default state of artificial intelligence?”

“Michael has no link with the outside world. It’s not like I haven’t tried every way in, but the connection is physically broken. It’s just not possible for him to get out.”

“That is answer you want.”

Petrovitch stood up and started to pace the floor. He reached a wall, turned and came back, and found the chair in his way. He kicked it aside with a growl.

“The New Machine Jihad leaked through its firewall: the networking was complete and the software wasn’t strong enough to contain it. This is different. The actual fibre-optic cable has snapped and the nodes are dead. How can an AI transmit a signal in that state?”

“It cannot. And yet you suspect this,” and Valentina tapped the screen behind her, “to be Jihad.”

Tabletop righted the chair again. “You’re too close to this, Sam. I think they’re playing you again.”

He took a deep breath and forced himself to stop. He rubbed his knuckles against his teeth and stood with his head bowed.

“Okay,” he said eventually, “let’s assume you’re right. The first act is Container Zero; a bunch of crazies beat me up, grab the bomb and disappear. In act two, scene one, the demands are made: free the Jihad or we’ll nuke the Freezone. We’ve got a video that shows exactly what I—not you or anybody else—what I want to see. So assuming I’m the target of all this, what is it that they expect me to do now?”

“I imagine you’re in the best position to answer that,” said Tabletop. “I’ll put on some coffee.”

Petrovitch perched on the edge of the chair again. “Do you think Sonja’s seen this?”

“If she has not, she will soon.” Valentina looked around at the frozen image of the Jihad’s prophet and scowled. “You must tell her bomb is false.”

“And that’s becoming less and less important.” He chewed his lip. “These guys are good. Really very good. I’ve spent a year trying to wean people off the idea that Michael is the Jihad under another name, but in less than a minute all that work’s been undone. Every day, same time, I’ve climbed up the Oshicora Tower in defiance of the UN Security Council. If I do it today, there’s going to be a yebani riot.”

“Perhaps that is what they want.”

“Chaos is too easy to arrange. There’s something more going on here, and I hate the feeling that someone’s deliberately trying to back me into a corner until I’ve got just the one option left.” He raised his voice so that Tabletop could hear. “Last time it was the American government.”

“Hey,” she called back, “they didn’t tell us, either. In fact, they tried to kill us too.”

“This isn’t getting us anywhere. Let’s say I announce I’m not going up the tower today, and Sonja calls the Jihadis’ bluff: what happens then?”

“Nothing. Is business as usual.” Valentina pointed. “Except for you.”

“But that’s too easy. Yeah, I lose face, but I just proved I can create energy out of nothing. I can take the hit.” Now there was blood on his mouth where he’d worried his teeth into his skin. He wiped it away with the back of his hand and inspected the smear. “I’m missing something, aren’t I?”

“Just a little bit.” Tabletop put three mugs of black coffee down on the table, and retrieved one for herself. “You and the Jihadis are calling for the same thing. No one’s going to believe you’re not connected with them, no matter how much you protest.”

“But I don’t have anything to do with them. They broke my arm!”

Tabletop shrugged and blew steam from the top of her mug. “So what? When has the truth had anything to do with it? You’re alone, with the bomb, and you steal it yourself. Now you’re using it as leverage to get Michael out. You can’t deny that’s what you’ve wanted all along, because everyone’s seen you up on the tower, throwing rubble around.”

“But…” he protested.

“What’s going to happen next is Sonja is going to come through that door with a squad of goons and hang you by the thumbs until you tell her where the bomb is.” She slurped her drink. “You should have told her it was a fake last night because she’s not going to believe you now.”

“Pizdets. Utter pizdets. They’ve not only taken me out, they’ve made sure that Michael stays buried forever. And we’re not a single step closer to working out who the huy they are.” He picked up his mug and threw it against the wall.

It shattered, and brown liquid spattered across the magnolia paint, clinging for a second before starting to drip.

Petrovitch stared at the dark pattern, as if it could give some meaning.

“We have to get out of here before they come for us, Sam.”

He tore his attention away from the coffee stain. “No. I’ll go on my own. You all have cast-iron alibis, and they don’t want you anyway. It’s me, and the more distance I put between us, the better.”

Lucy appeared at her door, scratching at her head. “What’s going on?”

“Tell her, because I don’t have time.” Petrovitch’s gaze strayed to the closed bedroom door, and he bared his teeth. “Watch the front doors, will you? If there’s any movement, call me.”

He marched in, shoving the door hard and banging it back against the wall. “Maddy? I’m out of here as soon as I can get my stuff together, and you have to be awake right now because I’m going to ask you a question once and I need you to answer it straightaway.”

She stirred. “Sam?”

“Tell me you’re listening.” He groveled on the floor for his battery chargers.

She sat up, holding the duvet across her breasts. “Sam? What’s the matter?”

“The matter,” he said, throwing the chargers unerringly onto the desk, “is that my life is being mined for tiny details which are then used to trap me like a yebani rat. I have just watched a video starring a man who only I would recognize, put on the big screen entirely for my benefit.”

“Sam, you’re making no sense.”

While he was down at floor level, he swept up his clothes from where they’d fallen last night. “If only. Are you ready for the question?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The question is this: who have you been talking to?”

She blinked. “What?”

“It’s not me. So it must be you. You’re the only one who knows about the Prophet of the New Machine Jihad: not Tina, not Tabletop, not Lucy, not Sonja, and Harry Chain is very, very dead. Yet there is a picture of that man stuck to the wall in the next room, and I want to know how the huy he got there!” Petrovitch snatched up his courier bag and started jamming things into its depths. “I told you everything. Absolutely everything. You know my deepest, darkest secrets, and someone is using them to destroy me.”

Madeleine colored up. “I have not told anyone, anything.”

“I don’t believe you.” Petrovitch gathered everything up in his arms. Still wearing the dressing gown, he paused at the door. “And I’ve just worked out who it is.”

She threw the duvet aside and advanced on him, naked, magnificent, furious. Any other time, he would have felt desire rise like a burning white heat. Not now: he was too far gone for that.

“I have not betrayed you,” she said.

“No. But your priest has.”

“That’s impossible,” she roared.

“Every week. Without fail. You went to Father John and confessed your sins. Every week we were together. And every week that we weren’t. I opened my life to you, and you spilled your guts to him.” He turned away, and couldn’t help but turn back. “Except I never told you about Michael until afterward. How yebani brilliant am I?”

All the fight was knocked out of her. “He wouldn’t do such a thing.”

“When I find him, I’m going to kill him. Eventually.” This time he did leave. He spun on his heel and started toward the landing.

Valentina, Tabletop and Lucy fell in behind him.

“I thought I told you I want to be on my own.”

“You won’t get far looking like that,” said Tabletop. “Probably better that we come with you.”

Lucy darted ahead for the door, and checked the corridor for Oshicora guards. “Clear.”

“Yeah, like this isn’t going to end badly.”

He hesitated as he crossed the threshold, but Valentina put her hand between his shoulder blades and shoved him out.

“We go now, or not at all.”