Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(10)

Rudi strode back across the restaurant and pushed through the kitchen door. But he didn’t call the police. He stood where he was for a couple of minutes, then he looked back through the door, but the man who had claimed to be him was gone. He’d left a big tip, though.





2.





“IT’S A PREDICTION engine,” said Lev.

“A what?” asked Rupert.

“It’s a machine for predicting the future.”

“I’m sorry, Professor,” Rupert said, shifting in his chair, “but you’re going to have to do better than that.” He didn’t trust the Russian; there was something ever so slightly broken about him, although he seemed, on the surface at least, to be doing all right. His flat, in one of the more upscale neighbourhoods of Novosibirsk, was tastefully austere in a way that only moderately successful people can achieve.

“They’re running all possible scenarios of European history, over and over again,” Lev explained with a happy smile. “Can you imagine the processing power they must have in there?”

Rupert, who was content to use computers without having the slightest idea how they worked, nodded. “It is rather wonderful,” he said.

“No, you don’t understand, obviously,” Lev said eagerly. “These are full-scale simulations. Virtual worlds, populated by virtual people who have no idea that they’re software agents. This... thing is probably capable of artificial intelligence. There is nothing else like it anywhere in the world. And there is nothing else like it anywhere in the world because it is impossible.”

Rupert raised an eyebrow. It had taken him, Rudi, Seth, and all of Rudi’s resources, almost four years to infiltrate Dresden-Neustadt. There had been threats, bribery, corruption, blackmail, one brief kidnapping that he knew about, and enough adrenaline to last him a lifetime, to get information about what the machines there were doing, and all they’d come back with was a computer game. He found it difficult to understand what Lev – a very recent acquaintance whom Rudi seemed to regard with great nostalgic fondness – found so exciting about it.

“This kind of sophistication, it’s unheard of,” Lev said patiently. “Whoever’s done this, they’ve made unimaginable leaps in computing.” He looked at Rupert, realised he was getting nowhere, and sighed. “I should speak with him about this. Face to face.”

“He’s busy.” Although in truth, Rupert had no idea where Rudi was at the moment, or what he was doing. He’d set up this liaison with the Professor and then gone off to parts unknown; they hadn’t been in touch in months.

Lev got up from his chair and went to the window, looked down into the bustling streets of the Siberian capital. “Advances like this don’t just appear out of nowhere,” he said to the view. “They always flow from earlier work, stuff which doesn’t seem very important in the beginning. It doesn’t matter how restricted or secret the final result is, you can always trace it back to research that’s in the public domain. And I can’t find it anywhere. And that’s impossible.”

Rupert thought it might be perfectly possible, if the research had taken place in another universe, particularly if that universe had subsequently been bombed out of existence. He said, “Is there any mention, anywhere, of the name Mundt?”

Lev shook his head and turned from the window. “No. There is a lot of topological calculation being done in there, though. Very out-there stuff. Or maybe not so out-there, these days, I don’t know. I’d need to show it to an expert.”

“No,” said Rupert. “No more experts. We don’t know who we can trust. What about the owners? Is there any way to find out who built the Neustadt?”

“I’m working on that separately,” Lev said. “I’ve identified about a dozen financial institutions who put money into the project, but really all I’ve managed to do so far is scratch the surface. I need more time if I’m to do it properly, without raising any alarms.”

If this were some kind of entertainment, this would be roughly the point where Rupert said, “We don’t have any more time, Professor; you must complete your research as soon as possible,” but there was no great sense of urgency, no sense that it even mattered. It was just something Rudi was interested in, for his own reasons. They could be working on this for years and still not understand it, and it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference.

He said, “Look, Professor, a lot of effort went into getting you that information. We’d be grateful if you could make some kind of sense of it reasonably soon.”

“There is one thing I can tell you right now,” Lev said, going over to a table in the corner and pouring himself a glass of vodka. “Whoever is running this thing, they’re really interested in railways.”





AND, WELL, WHO wasn’t, these days? When Sibir had declared its independence from European Russia twenty years ago, there had been some discussion about what to call its capital. Novosibirsk had originally been named Novonikolayevsk, in honour of both St Nicholas and the Tsar Nicholas II, and it was here basically because here was where the Trans-Siberian Railway had built a bridge over the River Ob. Back then, the Trans-Siberian Railway had seemed one of the greatest engineering projects the world had ever seen, but these days it looked a bit like a formerly major road running beside a brand-new six-lane highway. Except the highway was closed.