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.

15

It was still night when he woke up, but it could never be called dark. Swaddled in blankets, he climbed up onto the trunk to look out of the window, to see the brilliant lights of the city: from the fiery orange of sodium glare that burned at street level to the three-colored laser banks that scrawled logos and messages on the underside of the clouds. In between was the white glow and moving pictures of the towers, pointing the way to salvation. Points of light slid across the umber sky and along the roads, red above and red below.

It was bright to the edge of pain, sharp enough to cast his shadow on the blank wall behind him.

His computer was blinking at him. Even with a new name, he was still an infovore. He had time to look at the news before he started for the airport. He climbed down from his perch and sat cross-legged in front of the keyboard. He flexed his fingers, cracking each joint in turn, and went to see what today had brought.

It had brought chaos. His Tuvalu-based server had been hit by a massive surge in traffic: an old-school Denial of Service attack so huge that he couldn’t get through to change the settings, reset it, or even put it to sleep. He pulled the plug on his connection and worried at his thumb.

He used a commercially available proxy, hiding his identity in amongst a mass of other anonymous browsers, and sniffed around his old local Clapham node. It was down, swamped by a tsunami of data.

He tried to connect with the university as a guest user: the host was unreachable. Several online forums he used to frequent had been rendered unreadable. Yet for the rest of the globe, it was business as usual.

Everywhere that he might have been found had been ruthlessly trashed: no finesse or subtlety, just terabytes of information thrown at any open port to clog them up completely. He was being targeted, quite deliberately.

He leaned back and wondered who might do such a thing.

Oshicora might, but it didn’t seem his style. Marchenkho definitely, but he doubted that the man could use a computer, let alone coordinate something so complicated.

Sorenson: he had no cause to get at Petrovitch, no matter how bat-shit crazy he might be under his veneer of good-ol’-boy charm. And Chain was more careful, more likely to get others to do his work for him. But this was a blocking move, not an attempt to gain intelligence. Whoever it was was trying to prevent him from communicating, from seeing electronically.

So it came down to what they were trying to hide. Even though he would be dead soon, he needed to know. If it was a feint to flush him into the real world…

He knew the number for his hardwired phone extension in the lab. He bought a virtual phone online and called it. It rang for several minutes, but he knew to wait. Eventually Pif answered.

“What? Sorry. Didn’t hear it, then couldn’t find it.” There were sounds of paper sliding to the floor, and muffled cursing. “Who is this?”

“It’s Sam.”

“You have to come in. Now.”

“Is anything wrong? You’re okay?” Petrovitch felt his pulse quicken.

“I’m okay. This note you left me…”

“Believe it or not, there’s something more important than that. Don’t go outside. In fact, call security and have them post a couple of guards at each end of the corridor. Tell them they need guns.”

“What have you done?”

“Pif: Tuesday was even worse than Monday. I have ruined my life so completely, so thoroughly, I can’t come back in. Ever. This is goodbye. But I had to warn you.”

There was almost silence: nothing but the crackles on the line and the sound of her breathing. “Sam, what about the science?”

“Sam will be dead shortly. Before he goes, he wants to say it was brilliant working with you and that he’ll miss you very much.”

“I can’t see any errors in your equation.”

“His equation. Petrovitch’s equation. And unless he’s invented a time machine, he won’t be coming back.”