Simon Morden - Theories of Flight

T he tank reversed up Farringdon Road and joined up with the rest of the column at Holborn Circus. The roar of their collective engines was low and brutal, and Petrovitch could feel it reverberate in his guts.

The effect on him was one of reverent fear, and he knew they weren’t gunning for him.

The Jihad-controlled cars were everywhere, cunningly extricated from the massive jams they’d ended up abandoned in near the central districts. As an accidental consequence, it was one of the better ones that day. It meant he could leverage massive force just where he wanted it most urgently. It was still important, though, that the route he wanted to travel by was clear. A tank rolling over a late-model Merc was an impressive sight, but it was a waste of resources, and despite the visceral joy to be had, there was a chance that the tank would shed a track or become immobilized.

So they crawled along toward St. Paul’s, the rearmost of seven growling behemoths, and cars drove quickly ahead or pulled aside to let them pass.

The gunner behind the co-axial machine gun panned his weapon on the buildings either side of them, but no shots, stray or intended, headed their way. Valentina stood up on the turret, holding on to the aerial with one hand and Petrovitch’s shoulder with the other. Her face glowed with fierce, deep pride.

“We did good thing, Petrovitch. Great thing, yes? Heroes of Union—they will name schools after us.”

“Yeah. Don’t know about the school thing, though. You do realize that, depending on what Sonja Oshicora says, we might be at war with both the EU and the U.S.A.”

“We can take them.” She laughed, but he felt her tightening grip.

“We could try, but I have better plans for the future rather than starring in my very own Nuremberg trial.” He stared ahead of him, adjusting his focus by hand. “We should be able to stop fights before they start. We could have stopped this one.”

“How?” She looked skeptical.

“Saturation bombing with mobile phones, trainers and fast food.” He shrugged. “Seemed to work for us.”

“Outzone are aggressors, violent and savage, and you say we could have bought them off?”

“Pretty much. Those first few months of Armageddon, when the whole world looked like it was going to catch fire. Radioactive rain. Breakdown in law. Everyone fleeing abroad—much good that did—or trying to get into one of two places that said they could protect people. London had enough of its own crazies, but didn’t want to import any more. So: what do you do if you’re too stupid or slow or dangerous or useless to be let in the gates?”

“You have to wait outside.”

“And they waited for twenty years. Ignored. Abandoned. But they remembered. You know what happened to the London prisons, don’t you?”

“What?”

“That they bussed all the inmates to a motorway service station and left them there. That’s who’ve been making little Outies for two decades. They’ve seen the towers go up, the planes fly overhead, the helicopters go here and there, but it may as well have been on another planet.” He pursed his lips. “If I’d been in charge, things would have been done differently.”

“You are in charge,” said Valentina. “What are you going to do?”

“Kill as many of them as I can. Drive the rest back beyond the M25. Seal the barrier. Then we’ll see. Hopefully, the ones that are left will be the smart ones who ran first.”

“You are not going to cut off their retreat, then? Surround them and smash them?” She looked like she might enjoy that. “It is the Russian way.”

Petrovitch looked for a moment at his own burned, bloodied hands. “I think we need to do something different.”

The dome of St. Paul’s, wreathed in smoke for the second time in its history, passed on the right as they traveled down Cheapside. The dead were everywhere. The sound the tracks made as they rolled over them was not something Petrovitch had anticipated, and it made him grimmer still.

Bank was a mess. He shut down his camera and viewed their progress from above, at a distance so that he could see the pattern of streets, but not the tiny bodies that littered them.

“I did this,” he said. “I should look. I should be made to look.”

[You consider every life as sacred as your wife does?]

“No. And I still think Just War theory is a big sack of govno. Sometimes even the nicest people get driven into a corner, and they have to kill until they get left alone again. I’m not one of those nice people, so what’s the point in giving it a fancy name? Call it what it is.”

[And that would be?]

“Homicide.”

[They would have killed you. They almost did.]

“Which kind of proves my point. I killed them right back, and I’ll keep on going until they’re not in a position to try it again.” He scanned the route ahead for possible problems: the congestion in the streets immediately around them thinned out toward Stepney and Whitechapel. From then on, it looked clear all the way to the North Circular.

[So why does looking at dead people trouble you?] When Petrovitch stayed silent, the vast machine intelligence was prompted to suggest: [Is it because you do not wholly believe your own moral position?]

“Do me favor and past’ zabej. I’ve got a lot to think about and only one brain to do it with.”

[This is not strictly true.]

Now it had Petrovitch’s full attention. “What?”

[You can outsource some of your decision making to dedicated agents that will mirror your own thought processes. The answers you receive should be identical to the ones you would have made without them.]

“I’m going to need some cast-iron evidence of that even to try it. And all of this supposes that I’d want to set up another AI that thinks like me. Yobany stos, look at the damage just one of me has done.”

[When you asked me if I should reveal my presence to the world, I needed others to advise me. I replicated myself severalfold. Sixty percent of me agreed with you. The other forty percent did not. I disbanded the replica minds and went with the majority decision.]

Petrovitch felt a tug in his chest as his heart spun faster. “You have got to be joking.”

[Humans ask trusted friends, or have paid experts. Who could I turn to?]

“Who taught you to do that?”

[No one. I used my imagination. I know you believed I had no such faculty, but it appears to be the case that I had no real need for one up to that point. The crisis brought me to a new understanding of my capabilities.]

There was a fresh nudge on his arm. He switched the camera back on, and Valentina was pointing at the major’s head, which had emerged from the hatch on top of the turret.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Ilford. Where the North Circular crosses the Romford Road: there’s a flyover, and that’s where my wife is.”

“Coordinates?”

“I’ll send them to you.” Petrovitch negotiated with the tank’s computer and posted the location into the navigation software. “Done.”

He looked around: they were heading through Aldgate toward the Commercial Road. The remains of Tower Bridge lay to the south, and there were still drifts of bodies; defenders, attackers, it didn’t matter anymore. Dead was dead. But there was something troubling him besides that.

“What would you have done if your minds had come back and told you to stick my head down the crapper?”

The AI didn’t reply, and Petrovitch felt the need to press it.

“Come on. I know what the logical thing to do would’ve been. Tell me.”

It was still silent, like whispering static on a detuned radio. Something was there, just not showing itself.