He looked down at his hands, covered by hers. He had cracks and cuts and burns on his, and her nails had been gnawed down to the quick.

“What I’m trying to say is that he kept on asking me why I was doing this or that, risking my neck trying to find you, and telling me that the only thing that could possibly make sense of it all was that I loved you. And I wouldn’t have it. Until, eventually, it turned out he was right after all and it had taken a yebani machine to make me realize the truth of it. I never told you, because after that, everything between us got so impossible, I didn’t want to play that card; it wouldn’t have been fair. You were so very angry with me, and I wasn’t in any position to say you were wrong.”

He looked up again to find she was crying. He could do that; he could also fake it by squeezing excess lubricant over the surface of his eyes and blinking it away, but it was a cheap trick, and not worthy of either her or him.

He had rendered her completely speechless, though, so he kept on talking. “So, in answer to your question: yeah. We fucked it up. Doesn’t stop me from hoping that we have a choice about whether we keep on fucking it up or not. I choose that we don’t, but it’s really up to you. It always has been.”

Petrovitch ran out of steam entirely. Madeleine was holding his hands so tightly that the corners of the battery were making holes in his skin, and the contacts touching his damp skin were leaking current. His artificial middle finger was starting to spasm.

“Yobany stos, woman, say something.”

“Okay,” she whispered.

“Okay?”

“Okay,” and in a stronger voice, “we’ll try to stop fucking it up.” She let go of him and scrubbed at her cheeks, sniffing.

Petrovitch eased his fingers apart and managed not to wince. The battery dropped to the ground, and Madeleine picked it up.

“Remind me again why we were down here?”

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.