Simon Morden - Theories of Flight

As she ran past him, he turned again.

“What do I call him?” she called as she vanished into the dark.

“Michael, apparently.” Lucy had gone, and there was no one to hear him add, “After the archangel, the leader of the Army of God.”

T hey passed each other in the tunnel, a string of blue-white lights swinging and shading in the darkness. Lucy moved up and down the line, urging the old men on, exhorting the old women to keep going.

And Petrovitch knew that she was destined for something greater. He moved aside, catching her luminous grin as she held up the lantern to illuminate both him and her.

“We’ll wait.”

“You’d better,” he said.

He made his way back to the abandoned train. Climbing up took all his remaining strength. He lay there, stranded, gasping, as the one last light lowered itself down toward his face.

“You found a coach,” said the doctor.

“I won a coach. I fought for it and I won it.” Petrovitch looked up and saw the doctor’s shoes. “You could have done pretty much the same, except it would have been easier for you because when you would’ve been looking, you wouldn’t have had the Outies.”

“And then what? Where would I have taken them? And why aren’t you getting up?”

“Because my back’s full of shrapnel and I’m bleeding heavily from a dozen places.”

The light moved, and there was a sharp intake of breath.

“What? I need a doctor? I kind of thought I’d found one.”

The man pulled a face. “I did A and E for six months, five years ago.”

“I’m reluctant to threaten the only person in a position to help me. But I have a gun in my pocket that I’m very tempted to use on you.”

“This is beyond what I can do here. You need a hospital. You need a scan, a transfusion, fresh skin. I haven’t even got sterile water so I can see what I’m doing.”

“What do you have?”

“A bag of stuff I threw together at the last minute.” Petrovitch could see it, packed and ready to go, sitting in the aisle.

“Then that’ll have to do. We don’t have time to get fancy.”

“I could kill you if I get it wrong.”

“Then,” said Petrovitch, “you’d better start praying to whatever god you believe in you get it right. Or right enough that I live for another few hours.”

The doctor looked skeptical and went to his bag. He brought out a pair of surgical scissors.

“I’m going to have to cut you out of what’s left of your clothes.”

“Yeah. Figured.” Petrovitch started to wriggle out of his long leather coat. “I’m sentimentally attached to this, though.”

He felt tearing: more than sentimentality, then. Actual flesh and blood. He dragged it to one side, and the doctor kicked it further with his foot.

“Got a name?” The scissors started to click.

“Petrovitch.”

“That’s it. The antigravity man.” Snip, snip, snip.

Petrovitch gasped as his back was exposed, the bloodied cloth peeled away. “It’s not… doesn’t matter.”

The doctor went quiet as he surveyed the ruins. “I don’t have a spare pair of trousers.”

“Showing my yielda to the world is the least of my worries.”

The doctor knelt again beside him and clipped his way through the waistband. “I did mean what I said about you needing a hospital. You’ve got multiple penetration wounds, and only some of them have visible fragments. Those foreign objects I can’t remove will continue to do damage the longer they stay in. Nick a vein or an artery, and you’ll bleed out in under a minute. Depending on the depth, you could be bleeding internally already. You have burns and abrasions, and you’re losing fluid from those, too.”

“My turn,” said Petrovitch. “What’s your name?”

“Stephanopolis. Alex Stephanopolis.”

“Right, Doctor Stephanopolis: I don’t want you to stop and listen to me, you can do and listen at the same time.” He shifted uncomfortably. “You see that hole in the back of my head? That connects to the experimental cyberware I used to defeat the New Machine Jihad six months ago. Today, I’m using it to direct a modified version of the Jihad to help defend the Metrozone from the Outies. As you may notice, there is nothing plugged in at the moment. That is because the satellite uplink I have to the Jihad won’t work underground. Joined the dots yet, Doctor?”

The doctor worked his scissors down the back of one leg. “If I believed you, you’d be telling me that the New Machine Jihad is loose again and you’re the only person who can control it.”

“No. It’s more subtle than that. I’m the only person it trusts. I’m the only one it will follow. And on its own, the Jihad will screw up. We get no second chances on this one. Either we win today or we lose forever.” Petrovitch gasped as the dried blood that had welded his skin to his trousers relinquished its grip. He unclenched his fists, a finger at a time. “The longer I spend under the knife, the worse the situation gets. So make it quick. I don’t care about dirt, fragments, bodies foreign or domestic. Patch me up enough to get me back out there. After that, you’re absolved.”

The doctor worked in silence for a while, revealing the full extent of Petrovitch’s wounds.

“I can’t… I.” He stopped and started again. “This, this doesn’t make sense. Why would you be doing this if you weren’t telling me the truth, and yet I can’t possibly trust what you’re saying.”

“Willing to take the risk that I’m full of govno ?”

“No.” He dug into his bag again and retrieved a sterile syringe and a bottle of straw-colored liquid. “Any heart problems?”

“It’s in a jar somewhere in a lab. It hasn’t caused me a problem since the surgeon ripped it, still beating, from my chest.”

“What model do you have?”

“American. Prototype. You wouldn’t have heard of it.”

“What I’m asking is, if I stick you full of morphine, will you die?” The doctor drew off the liquid into the syringe. “Weight?”

“No idea.”

“You’re not making this easy.”

“Just guess and get to work, man.” Petrovitch grunted as the needle went in his backside. “I haven’t got all day.”

He could feel it, every last bit of it: the widening of wounds and the probing jaws of the forceps; the drag and cut of shards of plastic and metal and glass as they slid from his flesh, oiled with his blood; the cold tunnel air reaching deep, alien places inside him. But he didn’t care. He was immune to care for the duration of the injection.

“Tell me you haven’t got Hep or HIV,” said the doctor. His hands were bloodied up to the wrists.

“No. You?”

“No. I had a needlestick once. Scared the crap out of me. I had to wait six weeks for a repeat test. When it showed up clear, I nearly wrecked my liver on cheap whisky anyway.” He flicked his fingers and another piece of plastic clattered against the window, where it stuck briefly before sliding down. “I’m getting to the point where I’ve found all the obvious debris. The rest of it… I don’t think I can get it out. The light, the blood, it’s just impossible.”

“You got a needle and thread?”

“You need skin.”

“Got any?”

The doctor sighed. “It’s not going to be pretty. I can guarantee that you’re going to end up looking like Frankenstein.”

“The monster. Frankenstein’s monster. Frankenstein was the creator.”

“So why are you doing this? What’s so important?”

“Everything.” The needle punctured his already scarred back and the thread drew through. “Everything. The whole of modern history is collapsing on this exact moment. Everything since the first steam engine, since the first telegraph, first radio, first aeroplane, first rocket, first computer. We can go one of two ways, and we get to choose. We can stay where we are, we can decline and die. Or we can embrace the future like a long-lost lover, and we can live forever.”