Саймон Морден - Equations of Life

“Postgrad. I share an office with Doctor Ekanobi in the Blackett building.” He slowly withdrew his battered student card and held it up.

The torch beam wavered and the source moved closer. Behind the light, he could make out a gun.

“Is that the Jericho?”

“What?”

“The gun. It’s the Jericho I gave Pif. Where did you get it?” The light centered on Petrovitch’s card, then back onto his face. “It was a true likeness, once upon a time.”

“Okay. Sorry. Can’t be too careful.” Both the gun and the torch lowered, and the dark figure illuminated the makeshift sentry post set up at the rear of the foyer.

Madeleine was poised behind the other guard, her fist raised. The other woman was holding a ball-bearing catapult made from bent steel, and oblivious to anyone standing near to her.

“It’s fine!” called Petrovitch, “Maddy, stop it.”

“It was just in case,” she said, and held her hands up. “No harm done.”

“What’s going on?” asked the young man with the gun. “What’s happening?”

“I was about to ask the same thing. Where are the paycops? Who’s in charge?”

“The guards are gone. It’s just students and some of the staff. As to who’s in charge?” He shrugged and looked at his equally young colleague. “I don’t know.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Petrovitch picked his way to Madeleine. “Stay here with them. I’ll be back in five.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Arrange some insurance.” He stepped over the remains of the back doors.

She shouted at his back: “Sam, one day you’re going to have to tell me what you’re doing before you do it.”

“Yeah. We haven’t got time for a democracy.” He started down the back lane between the faculties. The high walls refracted the sounds from the city: the grinding, the roaring, the howling. The machines of the Jihad were still carving their songlines without distraction. No time for voting, perhaps, but enough for a last will and testament.

He felt his way up the stairs in the pitch black, closing his eyes and counting the landings until he’d reached his floor. There was the door, and there the corridor. He ran his hand down the wall, chanting the names of the occupants of each room until he got to his.

There was a faintest glimmer of light seeping from under the door.

“Pif? That you?” he whispered as he opened it a crack.

“Hey, Sam,” said Pif. She was surrounded by ornamental tea lights, her pen nib scratching over the page she was working on. “Almost done.”

She kept writing. Petrovitch borrowed one of the candles and carried it over to his desk. He started pulling out his drawers one by one and sorting through them. He found the night-vision goggles he’d taken from the Paradise militiaman, and his second-best pair of glasses.

The ones on his face had become part of him; the scab that covered the top of his ear also contained the spectacle arm. There was nothing for it but to break it free. It left him more breathless than he was already.

Pif put down her pen and sorted her papers out into two piles, each of which she folded in half and slid inside identical envelopes.

“That’s that,” she said, and finally looked up. “Sam. What have they done to you?”

“Yeah. You should see the other guy.” He eased on his spare glasses. He could see properly again. “We need to talk.”

“Yes,” she said, holding up one of the plain brown envelopes. “You need to take this with you.”

“Sure.” He nodded.

“It’s a mostly complete solution to the theory of everything. I’ve done as much as I can on it, but I have a feeling if I wait any longer, I won’t have time to make a copy. Now, I have some undergrads scavenging parts for a short-wave transmitter, but otherwise it’s up to you to get it out of the city.”

“Me? Pif, you don’t know…”

She held up her hand, and her palm shone in the candlelight. “We’re going to try and hold the university for as long as we can. The gangs we should be able to fight off. But those… things. We can’t stand up to them.”

“About those,” started Petrovitch, but she cut him off.

“Sam! We’ve solved the biggest problem in science for two centuries. If the proof stays here, it’ll die with us. This,” and she hit the papers with the back of her hand, “this is the most important thing in the whole world.”

“Stanford’ll work it out. Or Bern.”

“Fuck Stanford,” she yelled. “It’s our work. And there’s no guarantee of anyone ever finding this solution ever again. Three words: Fermat’s Last Theorem.”

“He lied. He didn’t have a proof. Group theory wasn’t even around in the seventeenth century.”

“How do you know? The idiot didn’t write anything down, and it took us three hundred years to do it differently.” She strode over to Petrovitch’s desk and slapped the envelope down in front of him. “Get it out of the city. Any way you can.”

“Pif,” he said, “if I had the rat, which I did for all of half an hour earlier on today, I’d try and mail it to UNESCO straight away.” He picked up the envelope and felt the weight of it before he slid it in his inside coat pocket. “I have something else I have to do. Something even more important than this.”

She stared at him as if he was mad.

“Okay. Listen, because that short-wave radio of yours is going to work and if I screw up, the outside world needs to know this: the AI known as the New Machine Jihad has its physical location in a vault below the Oshicora Tower. The vault is rad- and emp-hard, and I have to assume it has its own uninterruptible power supply. It has to be destroyed. I don’t know if it can migrate to another host, or whether it already has, but if the sun comes up and it’s still in control, someone’s going to have to nuke it.” He raised his filthy bandaged hand and nudged his glasses back up his nose. “Preferably from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”

“Sam,” said Pif, “what about science?”

“I think trying to save the world trumps even science.”

She knelt down next to him. “These equations will save more than the world. They’re going to open up the universe to us. Fusion power. Bias drives. Black hole engines if we can find something strong enough to hold one. Space elevators. O’Neill habitats. Generation ships. Colonies on Mars, around Jupiter, in other systems. Flying cars, Sam. You finally get flying cars. And they’ll all be named after you: the Ekanobi-Petrovitch laws.”

He swallowed. How would he do it? Top-of-the-range electronics shop, one that hadn’t already been stripped clean? Charge up the battery pack? Physically take the information with him, maybe. Find a boat dragged loose from its moorings by the rising river and head for mainland Europe. How long would it take? Half a day?

Petrovitch sighed. He scooped up the night-vision gear and held the goggles to his face. She appeared green and anxious on his screen. “Sorry, Pif. The moment I can, I’ll get the proof away. The moment you can, get them to hit the Oshicora Tower. It’s the best I can do.”

She patted his arm. “Good luck, Sam.”

“And you.”

He pushed his seat away and walked to the door.

“Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“An AI? Really an AI?” she asked. “And it phoned you up here?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it did.”

She grinned. “How cool is that?”

Petrovitch started to laugh. It hurt, it hurt everywhere. “It’s pretty cool,” he admitted. “Now I have to go. Maddy’s waiting for me.”

The car rolled to a stop at the edge of the flood. Madeleine pulled on the handbrake, and ran her fingers through the wires under the steering column. The engine spluttered on for a few seconds, then shuddered to a halt.