The Curve of the Earth

39




He was patient, and he waited. He was aware of the waiting, and at the same time unaware of just how long that waiting was. One moment it was interminable, an eternity. The next, a blink, the moment between breaths. Both were the same.

He was nowhere, either. Or somewhere. It was dark – no, not dark, just not there. Then it was light, and he was in a white landscape with no features, no beginning, no end. Again, it was both.

There was nothing to do but wait. He’d chosen this path. He’d choose it again. No point in feeling anything like anger, denial, despair. He’d been right to do what he’d done. Time ran on like a shinkansen or crawled like a slug.

He couldn’t feel or see or smell or hear. He thought to himself that it was very odd: when Michael had slept, he’d dreamed of a whole universe. Empires that spanned entire galaxies had been born within his imagination. Those same empires had withered and died there, too. Yet Petrovitch seemed to be stuck in this trance, where all moments met and collapsed into timelessness.

But now he could remember that thought. That put it in the past. Unless it had always been in the past, and he had only just remembered it now. Or he had forgotten it a million times, and was surprising himself anew with the memory.

Metaphysics had never been his strong point. If he had had a throat, and lungs, he would have growled.

A tear, a rip, a sharp dragging sensation that felt like half his head coming away. It faded, and it left a row of numbers behind. They clicked over in a steady progression. One was followed by two.

A chequered pattern appeared. Lines. Circles. Colours.

A reboot. That was what was happening. He was rebooting. That information was coming from his eyes.

He’d annoyed himself alive.

Everything was happening in a rush: he was being lifted, thrown up in the air, then falling and landing with such a crack that the abruptness shocked him.

He was in a room. A ward. In a hospital. There were other beds, other patients. There was a ceiling, and ceiling lights, and another really bright burning light that was being shone directly into his right eye.

He tried to jerk his head away. Not only could he not, the light travelled the short distance across his face to burn out some of the receptors in his left eye as well.

He wanted to tell the light to go away. He couldn’t talk either. There was a snake in his mouth.

That would be stupid. Snakes didn’t do that. It had to be a tube. A tube attached to a ventilator that was hissing away on a trolley next to him. He could just make out the shape of it, but as he couldn’t move his eyes, he wasn’t sure.

The light receded. It belong to a man in blue scrubs who put it away in his top pocket. He shook his head, walked out of view, and away.

Another figure appeared. As he bent down and peered at Petrovitch, his mop of black hair fell forward over his face.

[It worked, then.]

The voice echoed in his head. He answered the same way. “I don’t know yet. Why can’t I move? Or feel anything?”

Michael stood in the middle of the bed, his waist projecting above the sheets. He raised a speculative eyebrow. [Considering you have been dead for thirty-three hours, a lengthy recovery is to be expected.]

“Thirty-three? Okay. Best comeback since Lazarus.”

Michael’s avatar walked through the rest of the bed and affected to look at the equipment surrounding him. The heart monitor registered zero beats, as it ought, and no blood pressure, which it ought not. [Did you dream?] he asked.

“No. I thought I would. I just… was.”

[Should I tell the others you are awake?]

“Give me a minute first.” He tried to blink. It wasn’t happening. The heart thing worried him, though. “Is that machine connected? Hang on. I think I need to spin up.”

[Your core temperature is still below normal. In fully human patients, therapeutic hypothermia protocols suggest restarting the heart only when thawing is complete. Please go slowly: I am standing by to record the results of this experiment for posterity.]

“So I’m still clinically dead?”

[I believe the diagnosis is mostly dead. Which was the effect you were trying to achieve, after all.]

“I’ll take it to a quarter-revolutions, then.”

Michael peered down at Petrovitch again. [Welcome back.]

“Yeah. I haven’t been dead for years. Can’t say I miss it.” He willed his heart controls into virtual being, and examined the interface carefully. “Here goes.”

He slowly nudged the controls forward, and everything started tingling. All sorts of electronic alarms sounded around him, and he was suddenly surrounded by a flurry of medical personnel shouting obscure cant at each other.

On Petrovitch’s part, he ignored them because it felt like he was being eaten alive by ants. Pain from one or other part of his body he could deal with. The whole of him? It was tempting just to slow his heart down again, but he wasn’t quite done with the meat. Not yet. Not today.

He was cold, unspeakably, indescribably cold. He hadn’t realised just how cool they’d kept him, how carefully they were defrosting him. But Michael hadn’t gainsaid his course of action, and he trusted his friend wouldn’t let him do something that might actually kill him, properly this time.

“Dr Petrovitch?” It was that madman with his torch again. This time, though, his irises closed to pinpoints when it was aimed at him. “Blink if you can hear me.”

“Of course I can hear you, you balvan. Now get this yebani tube out of my gullet before I vomit into my lungs.” That was what he wanted to say. Instead, he blinked, slowly and obviously.

“You’ve woken up early. We need to warm you up carefully, so bear with us.” A nurse impaled the canula set in his forearm with a syringe, and squirted the contents into his sluggish bloodstream.

He immediately felt himself slipping away again. “Michael? Is this okay? Am I doing it right?”

Michael’s avatar appeared behind the technician who was turning up the heating elements for the pads he was lying between. [You realise the reason they know what your core temperature is is because you’ve a probe in your anus?]

“Terrific. I have wires up my zhopu, and I feel like crap.”

[You feel like crap because you are alive, Sasha. I have given the medical team all the information they need to effect your successful recovery and, unsurprisingly, they have previous experience of this procedure. Let them do their jobs.]

The pain continued to flay his skin, but at least he could move his eyes now, and he let his gaze wander. At the far end of the ward, behind the locked double doors, he could see a face pressed against the glass. Madeleine’s.

“What happened after I went under the ice?” [There was, inevitably, a firefight, in which one of our lifters crashed and Lucy used the alien weapon to disintegrate parts of Alaska.]

“Disintegrate?”

[Whilst we have not been able to conduct experiments under laboratory conditions, the device appears to produce a beam that disrupts matter at a molecular level. Energetically.]

“Is she…?”

[Lucy Petrovitch is well. The designers were thoughtful enough to include shielding to protect the user. She is currently in the local police station under armed guard. Tabletop is with her. She will come to no harm.]

“So how long was I under the ice for?”

[Twenty-nine minutes and seventeen seconds. You drifted, and they had to make a new hole in the ice. You floated past, eventually.]

Madeleine’s expression was set firmly to neutral as she watched. Her arms were above her head, resting on the top of the door frame. Perhaps she’d run out of emotion after pulling her drowned husband out of the frozen sea, and the faint scowl she wore was the only remnant of her grief.

“She knew what I was trying to do, right? That I would have bled out otherwise?”

[Knowing that you had to and watching you do it are, I understand, two very different concepts. One is of the mind. The other is of the heart. She was distraught. She had to be stopped from diving in after you.] Michael walked through the techie to Petrovitch’s bedside. [Another thing. Your leg.]

He remembered being shot. At least twice. One bullet had passed clean through his thigh, missing his femoral artery. Another had hit his lower leg, and the only thing holding his foot on had been the friction between his socks and his trousers.

“Is it off?”

[From the lower thigh. The surgeon wanted to try and save the knee, but I persuaded him it would be better for you not to have to undergo long-term and potentially unsuccessful reconstructive surgery.]

They looked at each other, man and machine. “I’m running out of body parts,” said Petrovitch.

[If you want, I can show you a graph that predicts your complete replacement with cybernetics within thirty years.]

“Maybe later.” At last the burning pain started to recede. “Why are my ears cold?”

[You are wearing a cap which circulates cold water. It is usually used so that chemotherapy patients keep their hair. I suggested it might be useful here.] The avatar shrugged in a very familiar way. [I became an expert in your condition; it was necessary in order to ensure your survival. I would, however, like to discuss my earlier offer of reconstituting your personality as a virtual construct at some point.]

“Earlier offer? That was a decade ago.”

[You declined then. Perhaps recent events will cause you to reconsider.]

The doctor came back to Petrovitch’s face. He got out his torch again.

“Can you tell him to stop that? I’ll shove it up his nose and illuminate the inside of his skull in a minute.”

[That would require voluntary movement on your part. Something you lack to a great extent.]

Petrovitch didn’t need to move, though. The doctor’s phone beeped. He ignored it and carried on with his examination. It chimed again, more insistently, and eventually he pulled back to answer it.

He looked at the screen, and the message on it. He looked at the bed, then back to the phone. He frowned and approached.

“Dr Petrovitch?”

“Yeah. Thanks,” Petrovitch typed. “Can we lose the ventilator? It feels wrong. And don’t shine your little light in my eyes again. It hurts. And while you’re on, I’m f*cking freezing and I can feel everything.”

“I was warned about this,” said the doctor. He told the rest of the intensive care team to stop for a moment, then put his mouth next to Petrovitch’s ear. “You’re my patient. You’ll do as I say.”

The phone buzzed with an incoming message. “You’ll be saying next you preferred me dead.”

“Or I could just let your wife in to see you, and you can sort out who’s in charge here with her.” He glanced at the door, and Madeleine’s gaze flicked from Petrovitch to the phone, and back to Petrovitch. Her expression didn’t change. The doctor’s did, though. “As next of kin, she gave me written consent. And frankly, I don’t want to be the one to piss her off, because she looks ready to take someone’s – anyone’s – head off with her bare hands. I’d rather that wasn’t me.”

“I surrender.”

“Good. Because we’re not set up for repairing decapitations. Now shut up and stop harassing me. You seem to be in control of your faculties, but not your body. That part is my job, and I’ll do it the best I can.” He muttered something about governments and guns, then put the phone back in his scrubs.

As he retreated, the rest of the staff moved back in to continue what they’d started.

“Michael, I thought she’d be happy.”

[She was happy, Sasha. She was happy that for ten years no one was shooting at you or trying to blow you up. Now, as a result of what Lucy has done, everybody will be trying to shoot you and blow you up. And not just you, but her and Lucy, together with the rest of the Freezone. While you were dead, the President of the United States of America called us “the single most dangerous organisation in the history of civilisation”. Even accounting for hyperbole, that puts us in a difficult position.]

“Yeah, that’s good coming from him. Mudak.” Petrovitch programmed his heart to spin a little faster. “I wasn’t the one who shot down our First Contact.”

[All Madeleine can see is a war without end and an immediate future without you. Sooner, rather than later, she believes you will die, and there will be nothing she can do about it. She is already in mourning for you.]

The doctor had gone to the door, and Madeleine had stepped away to let him out. Petrovitch could see them through the glass, her with her head down, listening, and him with his head up, explaining what was going on.

When they were done, she resumed her vigil.

Petrovitch checked to see what was happening outside. The hospital was surrounded by camera crews and reporters, and he dipped into their broadcasts to catch a flavour of what they were saying.

“Yobany stos.”

[Did you expect people to react differently?]

“To be honest, I didn’t think about how they’d react at all. Who leaked it?”

[There was no leak. Marcus went to the UN, talked to the Secretary General, and addressed the Security Council even before you arrived at hospital.]

“And?”

[There is a very real risk of the United Nations expelling the United States. That pressure is likely to increase over the coming days as governments formulate their official response, rather than just preliminary reactions from their representatives in New York.] Michael’s avatar raised his eyebrows. [There is no other news. Some people believe us. Others do not, either because they prefer the lies or they hold, like Joseph Newcomen, that we must be alone in the universe. I change my mind when the facts change. Why won’t they?]

“No one said we were a wholly rational species.” Petrovitch could move his index finger. Just a little. The sooner he was out of this bed – which was where? Whitehorse? – the sooner he could get to work. It was a good job he didn’t need much sleep.

Valentina looked though into the intensive care ward, her thin face even more pinched and pale than usual. As she turned, he could see her kalash over her shoulder. This was what it had come to. All because of him.

No: all because of Lucy.

“Good girl,” he said.