Equations of Life

14

On Monday morning, everything had been fine. By Tuesday lunchtime, he was teetering on the brink of disaster, and might even be over the edge of the abyss.

The thought he struggled with was that he’d walked right into Oshicora’s private park and met with the man himself without getting the once-over for weapons or wires. Or maybe he had, and the security was so discreet that he hadn’t noticed. Perhaps the inside of each and every lift was a screen.

Sorenson hadn’t been pushed against a wall and shot—not yet. It was a good but confusing omen, adding another element of doubt to a critical choice: whether to ditch his current identity and sleeve up with a new one. He’d done it once before, to get out of St. Petersburg in one piece. He’d prepared for this moment for years. He always told himself that he’d do it if it looked like someone was close to discovering who he really was. It should have been as automatic as a reflex.

Petrovitch was twelve months away from becoming Dr. Petrovitch. Petrovitch had just written down a way to combine two fundamental forces of nature. Petrovitch was about to get a free ride to glory on the coattails of a future Nobel Prize winner. None of that would matter one iota if Petrovitch got locked up for twenty years.

The drumming of his fingers on the desk was the only outward sign that he was in an agony of indecision. He’d always assumed that it’d be his past catching up with him. Instead, he’d collided catastrophically with the future. Every time he returned to the question of whether any of this was worth imprisonment or worse, he looked down at his morning’s calculations.

There was no point in prevaricating. He knew if he stayed, Chain would get him, and if not Chain, Oshicora, and if not Oshicora, someone else. It was time to say goodbye to Samuil Petrovitch.

He grabbed his bag and headed for the door. Then he reversed himself and grabbed the piece of paper from his desk. He dropped it on Pif’s, and scrawled a big question mark at the bottom of the page. She’d know what he meant, even if she never saw him again.

Now he was ready.

He took the wheezing lift down to the ground floor and out onto Exhibition Road, from where he took the travelator to the Underground. He wouldn’t normally go by tube at this time of day; if it was crowded in the early morning, by lunchtime it was unspeakable.

Since this was going to be one of the last times he’d have to endure it, he suffered the crush gladly. Where next? Somewhere cold, somewhere clean—Canada, Scandinavia, New Zealand’s southern island.

If he’d had his rat, he’d be booking plane tickets under a different name, storing data before wiping it clean away, using the unparalleled power of his machine to hack the Metrozone Authority’s database and activate a sleeper personality he’d stored on there years ago.

If he’d had his rat, he could have done it now, all in the space of a single journey to the airport: Petrovitch would vanish, and another man would arrive luggageless at the airport to fly away to a new life. Even his failing heart could be spirited away. He didn’t need a Metrozone hospital for that. Any big city would do.

If, if, if.

It was why he’d bought the rat, to cover this very event. But he didn’t have it anymore. Plan B, then.

He’d have to disappear the old-fashioned way, and that gave him time to make one last appearance as Petrovitch.

He eventually emerged from the tube, breathless and bruised, at Edgware Road: not the Bell Street exit, because it was cordoned off and sealed, but the Harrow Road one, south of the Marylebone Road.

St. Joseph’s was opposite, the bullet-scarred doors open. He sat on the steps and waited. As he listened to the service going on inside, he could hear, over the growl of the traffic, distant but distinct pops of gunfire from Paradise. The natives were restless. A black speck against the gray sky, a police drone flew in lazy circles high above the towers, and it was likely that it was the flier that the militia were aiming for.

He watched their target practice until his name was shouted out behind him.

“What are you doing here?”

He looked over his shoulder. Father John was shaking the hand of an elderly parishioner; when he released his grip, the hand went on shaking. Parkinson’s, vCJD, something like that.

“I’m saying sorry, Father.” Petrovitch stood up and dusted his backside down.

“And what are you sorry for?” Half a dozen people, all of them bowed and gray-haired, trooped by, walked slowly down the steps and vanished into the crowd that streamed past.

“You mean, apart from your church getting shot up? I’ve met the bosses of both sides: neither of them seemed too bothered about carrying on a gun-battle on holy ground. I guess you could call them yourself if you want, see if you have any luck in screwing them for some compensation.”

“Blood money, Petrovitch.” Father John wiped one sweaty palm across the other. “You do understand the concept, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” said Petrovitch with a snort. “Yeah, I do.”

“You said, apart from.” A shadow fell across the priest from behind Petrovitch. “Why are you really here?”

He looked up at Sister Madeleine, and his heart did that thing that might have been a software glitch. “I lied to you,” said Petrovitch. “Or rather, I didn’t tell you the truth.”

The sister frowned down at him, trying to remember. “Which bit?”

“All of it. But that’s not important right now. Ask me again. Ask me again why I did what I did, and I’ll tell you.”

She glanced over at Father John, covered in confusion. “He’s the priest. If you want to confess…”

“No,” said Petrovitch. “I’m not confessing. I’m not ashamed of what I’ve done.”

“Then what the hell are you talking about?”

Her choice of language startled him, he who used the most obscene insults imaginable. He pushed his glasses back up his nose to buy him some time. “I just wanted you to know that sometimes the people you hate most can change for the better.”

“I don’t hate you,” she said, equally startled. “Why would I hate you? I…”

“You will do. Go on: ask me,” he dared her.

“Excuse me,” said the father, but Petrovitch and Madeleine were staring so intensely at each other that his presence was forgotten.

“Why did you help her?”

“Because I used to be part of a gang that kidnapped people for ransom, and I didn’t want to see it happen ever again.”

Sister Madeleine’s eyes were wide open. “You?”

“Thanks. I was hoping that it wouldn’t be too hard to believe.” He adjusted his bag. “Forget about me. You won’t see me again.”

He started off down the steps, quicker than he ought. She called after him.

“Petrovitch, where are you going?”

He almost stopped. His feet dragged on the pavement. Then he picked up speed again and vanished into the crowd.

Vast, anonymous and brooding, the Regent’s Park domiks grew closer as he walked down the Marylebone Road. Petrovitch put a determined smile on his face. Even without the rat, the plan he had was pretty damn good.

Before he could put it into operation, though, he had to make sure he was free of any other little surprises that Harry Chain might have adhered to him. He needed a back-street electronics chop shop that would take his money without asking questions. Fortunately, in the shadow of the huge domik pile, such establishments were two a cent.

He negotiated the purchase of a sweeper, and got the shopkeeper to throw in a battery and a demonstration of how the lipstick-sized device worked. He paid for it with the last of the money on his card, unwrapped the tiny black wand there and then, and swept himself in front of the counter.

He was clean, from the white-blond hairs on his head to the worn soles of his feet.

The sweeper went on a lanyard around his neck and under his shirt. He shouldered his bag, and crossed the road. There were cameras at the junction, looking down at the crowds that swarmed back and forth. He looked up and fixed one with a knowing stare. The next time he passed that way, the computers that could isolate and recognize a face would put a different name to his.

He kept on walking until the pyramid of domiks showed its entrance, shaped like an ancient megalith: a tunnel constructed of upright containers with others braced on top to create a space that was as high as a cathedral, the main street that pierced the core of Regent’s Park. Sodium lights hung from above and burned orange, illuminating the hawkers, the whores and the hustlers who bought and sold everything and anything.

It was like the Nevskiy Prospekt during the darkest days of Armageddon. Winter, freezing Arctic winds howling down from Siberia, the bass rumble of generators and babble of voices, flashes of light and color, the whisper of rumors—they have bread, that stall sells poisoned vodka, those fish are radioactive—the stench of struggle. The good old days when he ran wild through the unlit streets, stealing books and candles.

He kept on through the market bustle until he got to the Inner Circle, a distribution road in the very heart of the pile. Some people, driven by madness or guilt, would walk the Circle until they dropped. There were others who would wait for them and then strip the corpses, and others still wouldn’t wait even that long.

Regent’s Park was like that.

Petrovitch found Staircase Eight and started climbing. He kept climbing until the stair-dwellers dwindled to nothing and the corridors were empty. There was one last bulkhead light, then nothing but blackness. He reached into his bag for a tiny key ring torch.

The blue light was no more than a bubble, but it was enough to see by. He walked on until he was blocked by a door equipped with a mechanical combination lock. He held the torch in his teeth and slid the lock cover aside.

The keypad was numbered zero to nine in a circle, and the code was entirely crackable by someone who knew what they were doing. What else could hide Petrovitch’s treasure but the Golden Ratio?

He pressed each button in turn, listening for the click of the mechanism: one six one eight zero three three nine eight eight seven four. There was the most subtle of noises, almost a sigh, and he leaned heavily on the handle beneath the lock. The bolts behind the door lifted clear of the frame and he swung inward.

The air was warm and stale, but dry; a pharaoh’s tomb.

Inside, he leaned on the door and felt it grate shut. The bolts dropped back into place with an echoing bang. Petrovitch held up his single spark of light: the container was empty, save for a trunk in the far corner. Everything was just as he’d left it.

He stepped up on the trunk’s lid, and felt above him. High up, on the wall, was a bolt. He pulled at it, working it from side to side until it slid across. There was another one, stiffer, but eventually it gave up and moved.

He hit between them with the flat of his hand, and forgot to turn his head or close his eyes. Light burst in, blinding him, flooding the domik, chasing out every shadow.

Petrovitch sat down on the trunk, took off his glasses and dabbed at his streaming face with his sleeves. He turned the torch off, then climbed back up to stand on tiptoe and look out.

He was in the highest level of containers, right at the very top, and he could see a swathe of the Metrozone, from southwest to northwest, hazy and indistinct at the ground, but the towers were clear and confusingly seemed closer. Oshicora’s Tower was out of sight, to the south, but if he screwed his eyes up tight and wished, he could just about make out the subtle slope of the land that lay crushed beneath the weight of buildings; the Thames valley that stretched out beyond the M25 cordon, into the uninhabited wilds of the Outzone.

He realized that it wouldn’t stay that way forever. The center could not hold.

Dreaming wouldn’t solve any of his current problems. He turned his back on the view, and climbed down to the metal floor of the domik. He wondered if there was anyone beneath him, suddenly aware of new light footsteps over their heads. Maybe.

He opened the trunk. It wasn’t locked, had no need to be locked, and the catches sprang aside easily. Inside were things of use, like a couple of blankets and bubble-wrapped electronics, and things of no use at all, just pieces of heavy paper bearing pictures of people who he’d never see again and thought him dead.

It was to those he went first, though. A pair of children playing in the low, red light of the midday sun, a girl called Irena and a boy called Alexander. A woman, the children’s mother, face lined by hard work and exhaustion. A man, lying in a hospital bed, bald, emaciated, drips in his arms and tubes up his nose, grinning and waving to the camera.

Fifteen years of life that amounted to a thin stack of photographs, and they weren’t even his own memories anymore. They belonged to someone else, even if he could remember them in ice-sharp clarity.

He shook himself free of the reverie. He gathered up the items in bubble-wrap and laid them out on the floor: a laptop computer whose case was pre-Armageddon and components most definitely not; a solar panel, rolled up; a silvered umbrella, folded; a fat cube of nanotube battery; a bundle of wires to connect them all together. This whole collection of electronics was dusty, unused, untested. Ripe for replacement, in fact. He’d been thwarted in that: now all he could do was hope that everything would work as promised.

He took a methodical approach, getting power from the panel to the battery first, plugging in the computer, extending the antenna and aiming it through the window at one of the relay stations visible on a rooftop down below.

There was a signal. He could get online. He realized that he’d been holding his breath, and he let it all out with a moan.

He typed furiously, scripting and executing program after program. One to hide his access point, one to lock down his Clapham hab, one to copy and encrypt the contents of his hard drive, and another to send it in little packages to a hundred dormant mailboxes. One more to erase itself and then fall into dormancy.

He continued with his housekeeping, ripping up history. It took a little while. Some of the computers he was targeting were well defended.

He’d dealt with the past. Now for the future. He timed his death for just after midday tomorrow. He’d kill himself, swiftly, painlessly, and arrive dead at a hospital in Greenwich: cause of death, heart failure. The body would be shipped to the crematorium, his ashes claimed, and his sad demise would be registered with the Metrozone Authority.

He bought airline tickets to Wellington under another identity. In the morning, he’d tuck the little bundle of photographs in his bag, and Samuil Petrovitch would die. No one would mourn his passing.