The Restoration Game (34 page)

“There is that,” said Ross. “There is that.”

I thought about room service, looked at the menu, then thought again. I remembered Klebov's advice to stay in the hotel, and bristled. No way, I thought, no fucking way was I going to cower in my room through a revolution, if that was what was about to happen. I considered changing, and again thought, the hell with it. I'd changed once already today, the hill-walking trousers would keep the evening chill off, and if I had to run, the boots were as good as any footwear I had. I wouldn't need the fleece, or the gloves. As I took the light but bulky gloves from my bag (and wondered again at the two enigmatic surfaces left by the two smooth slices taken from one fingertip) I thought to empty out other stuff I wouldn't have to lug around. Might as well keep the two real passports: though they'd be embarrassing in a search, I didn't want to leave them, even in a hotel safe. And the cards…I'd need the cards for cash and credit. The pink Moleskine…I physically swithered over that, tugging it out, hefting the bag to see how much difference that made to the weight, and sliding it back. As I did so, the notebook's stiff cover snagged on something.

A long white envelope, bent into a curve around the inside of the little backpack. Just as it had been in the lilac satin bag I'd emptied into this one, ten days ago when I'd been setting off. My amazing, knee-shaking gift from Alec, the open return airline ticket to New Zealand. Suddenly I missed Alec so much that I threw myself face-first on the bed and cried.

The funny thing was, up until now I hadn't missed him. The journey was in a different world than Alec. I'd tried texting him, on the first few days of the journey. After getting no replies, I'd stopped. My guess was that Alec wanted to hear me saying I was coming out to NZ, before he'd respond, because anything less than that would have meant that all of a sudden we were just friends. Something like that. I was cross with him. In the first days of trucking, my thinking was muddled. I hadn't missed him anything like as much as I'd missed Hiro, the girls, the lads, even my job. These were in a part of my mind labelled “things I do every day”—and, every day for the past ten days, these were all things I hadn't been doing. And it wasn't like a holiday. I couldn't think “wish you were here,” which (unserious though that sentiment usually is) does stop us missing people while we're away, and stops us feeling bad about not missing them.

So right now I felt guilty about not having missed Alec. On top of missing him enough to make me cry.

I rolled over and sat up, sniffling. I went into the en-suite, wiped my nose and splashed my face, and put on some makeup, just as I'd done the night of Suze's wedding, when Alec had gone away. Suitably freshened-up, I pushed the white envelope back in the bag, zipped up the bag and slung it over my shoulder, and stepped more cheerfully to the door. I'd get a good hot dinner inside me, have a look at the fringes of what was going on at Revolution Square, and—assuming the tanks didn't roll tonight—get the bus to Batumi in the morning. From there I could see about flying back to Edinburgh.

Hand on the doorknob, I stopped, struck by a thought.

Why
should I go back to Edinburgh? I didn't have my job anymore. My flatmates weren't expecting me back in less than a month. Hiro…yeah, yeah, the little bundle of fur and hunting reflexes would come over all snooty and accusing after my absence, but he did that whenever I went out, and I didn't kid myself the cat missed me anything like I missed him.

Whereas Alec must be…Oh, God. My eyes welled again. Don't waste all that hard work in front of the mirror, Lucy! Sniff. Wipe. There.

Out I went. I took a stroll down to the corner of the Prospekt, glanced left and right, and saw nothing untoward—lots of lights and loud music from Freedom Square, lots of people heading in its direction, that was all. I turned and walked back up Simkin Street, away from the Prospekt and towards the nearby bar-restaurant where Ross and I had eaten the previous night. The menu hadn't been outstanding, but I was far more hungry than fussy and in any case I didn't fancy wandering about looking for somewhere else.

I ate shashliks and rice with salad, on my own at a table for two. The place was about half empty, dim-lit, fast. I drank only water, and a coffee at the end. As I ate I thought. In the short term at least, I had serious trust issues with everyone involved in my mission. Ross and Amanda had, I couldn't help thinking, shown a less than parental regard for my safety, and—if Klebov was right, and Ross was lying—were using me and a lot of other people in a pretty instrumental manner, all things considered. As for the shadowy backers of these two…well, if I was going to report back to representatives of the agency that'd launched the rods from God at me, I wanted to set that up very carefully indeed. Flying to New Zealand looked more and more like a good option.

That settled, my mind turned to other worries. While waiting for the coffee I replayed the video of the scrolling text. Klebov had been so right not to bother about my making this recording. With the moving text itself destroyed, what did moving pictures of it matter? They weren't evidence that could convince anyone. Not much could even be learned from the statements themselves: as far as I could see they were all banal, along the lines of “If distance greater than so and so, apply calculation number one; if not, apply calculation number two.” Which, given that you didn't know what the calculations were, was not a whole lot of help. If this was a sample of the physics engine of the universe, it told us nothing about the physics.

What did it tell us? Only that if we were living in a simulation, the programmers of that simulation spoke (or at least coded in) something like Latin.

Which was, now that I came to think of it, useful information.

Lots of people are familiar with the simulation idea, if only because so many people have seen
The Matrix.
Not so many are familiar with the simulation argument. The mere
idea
that we might be living in some kind of simulation or illusion is as old as Plato's Cave. There's the veil of
maya
in religion, Descartes' demon, the more recent puzzle of how you can be sure you're not a brain in a vat being electrically stimulated by some mad scientist, Nozick's experience machine, Boltzmann brains…the list goes on. The simulation
argument
is something else.

Here's how it goes.

There's no reason known to us, in principle, why we shouldn't someday invent an artificial intelligence, and (given that) why said AI shouldn't itself invent a better AI, and so on. There's (likewise) no reason why all the experiences of a human life couldn't be simulated in (or by) such an AI. So, a bit down that road, we have vastly powerful AIs with the capacity to simulate not just one human life, but many billions of human lives. Why should they do that? Well, a machine civilisation that had come out of our civilisation might well be interested in its origins, and could test various hypotheses about what made us tick by, well, making us tick. Given that the future for thinking machines (if not, alas, for us) is indefinitely long, this experiment is likely to be done many, many times in the future history of the universe…whereas, you know, the original history of real flesh-and-blood human beings happened at most once.

So, what are the odds? How much do you fancy your chances that you're in the
one true real world
and not in one of countless simulations of it in all the billions of years to come?

(Turns out the odds are only one in three that we
are
in a simulation, because several of the premises of the argument are questionable, and you can put numbers on just how questionable they are.)

What I'd just thought of was a very small variant on this: that there's no reason why every simulated history should turn out the same, and in particular, no reason why it should turn out the same as the original. If something like Sean's Romanson-Mars scenario of a Rome where the slaves had won and gone in for capitalism instead of Christianity was the original history, then they'd be centuries ahead of us technologically, centuries ago. Might that civilisation's AIs be programmed in something like Latin (in the same way as ours are programmed in something like English)?

The more I thought about it, the more plausible that seemed. After all, it was unlikely that Latin would become again a
lingua franca
in our future, and vanishingly less likely that it'd be used by aliens in our time—and if aliens had left the message in the era Latin was widely spoken, how likely was it that they'd chosen the form of computer code? Not very, it seemed to me—contrary to my initial speculation to Klebov.

All of which raised a very troubling thought indeed, quite apart from the sheer wackiness of the postulate.

How likely was it to be a coincidence that Sean and the lads had been struggling with a game—Olympus—whose scenario had turned out to be a possible explanation for something in the real-world equivalent of the game that I'd come up with to replace that one? (And I remembered remembering the word from Arbatov's book, the word that had been on the tip of my tongue, the word that had come back to me in the Auld Hoose:
simulacrum
) Was whoever had written the Stone Text tweaking our brains? And if so, why? It seemed a very small intervention, almost undetectable, as if they didn't want to be noticed. In which case…uh-oh. But the
really
disturbing thought was that the writers of the code might be aware of, and interested in, whatever happened around it. The feeling of being watched returned to the back of my neck.

It left, along with any chance of my taking all this simulation speculation seriously, when the waiter came with the bill. I paid in cash—roubles were good, I gathered—and left. Outside I looked at my watch. 8:45. Time I had a look at the revolution.

2.

I cut through a couple of side streets on to the Prospekt, and strolled to Freedom Square. As I approached the square the sidewalks became busier, the crowd spilling over onto the roadway and forcing cars to crawl. Though hardly packed, the square itself was far more crowded than it had been in the morning, with the proportion of young people a lot lower. The majority was now people in their twenties or thirties. There were old people and parents with kids here and there. The faces reminded me of the sort of faces I used to see in this very square on the first of May and the seventh of November. The most visible difference between now and then was in their clothes: still made under Communism, but in China. Bright maple-tinted lights hung from cables strung between trees and lampposts. From the sound systems, songs alternated with speeches. Most of the flags and maple-leaf cutout placards had been picked up and were being waved about or used as sticks to lean on. The tables of leaflets were bare, and the leaflets now in hands or littering the ground. I saw a lot of those A4 woodcuts of Duram pirated from our cover art, some on the ground, some being held high. Someone had turned on, dyed, and illuminated a fountain in the middle, so that it now spouted and bubbled and splashed pinkish-red water, a colour not so much maple in autumn as blood in rain.

The mood I caught from faces and voices was enthusiastic and hopeful. Even the speeches denouncing the governing party's preelection shenanigans sounded scornful rather than angry. I paced the fringe of the crowd, alert to who was around me and to where I was in relation to the square's entrances and exits. Gemarov Street, the alley in which I'd met “Fyodor,” looked at first completely dark, and then as I saw it from a better angle, black with riot police like an insect infestation, all visored eyes and transparent shields and waving antennae.

At nine, they swarmed. They emerged from Gemarov Street and four other streets adjoining the square, and spread out along three sides, leaving the Prospekt clear. The sound system suddenly cut out. Above yells from the crowd, a bullhorn announcement told us that the permit for the demonstration in the square was only until nine o'clock. Everyone should now go home.

Quite a lot of people did, especially the old and those with young children. From where I was, up near the front, I could just make them out streaming away down the Prospekt. The PA system came back on. A Krassnian patriotic song boomed out for a couple of minutes, then a man in a light-coloured jacket took the podium and urged everyone to leave, and to return tomorrow.

Boos from the crowd. I elbowed my way to the steps of the parliament building, stepped between two riot cops—there were one-metre gaps between them at this stage, and they were letting people through—and looked back. The man in the light-coloured jacket walked away from the podium, and a man in a leather jacket took his place at the mike. I couldn't make out what he said, but I did hear an answering roar from all across the now more compact—and again younger—crowd. People in ones and twos passed between the cops, and unlike me didn't hang around on the parliament steps but walked across the corner and down to the street and away.

The previous speaker glanced over his shoulder, shook his head, and bounded up the broad shallow steps towards a gap in the line of cops. I remember his rueful smile as he approached, and the indignation on his face as a cop stuck out an arm and planted a thick-gloved hand on his chest. He took one step down and back, grimaced at the smudge the black glove had left on his open-neck white shirt, and reached inside his jacket. I distinctly saw he had two fingers curled back, two stretched out, the way you do when fishing a card or something out of a thin pocket.

At this the cop next to the one who'd stuck his hand out brought a baton, longer and thicker than a baseball bat, down hard on the top of the man's head. The sound of that crack gives me a flinch and a chill even now. The man sagged to the steps, stood up, staggered for a moment, and toppled backwards. The back of his head hit the paving at the foot of the steps with another crack I'll never forget.

The leather-jacketed guy at the podium was still ranting on, his words remixed by echoes from the surrounding buildings. Even above all that noise, I heard a collective gasp from the front of the crowd, followed by yells. Arms were outstretched, fingers pointing forward. The speaker stopped and turned around. At that point all the cops that I could see, and I guessed others I couldn't, strode forward and closer together at the same time. From where I stood, just by a pillar of the parliament's portico, their backs made a black wall.