“It’s… complicated,” said Petrovitch. He jumped down, stumbled, ended up resting his bandaged hand on the road. The first sparks of sensation jagged up his arm.

Carlisle was crouched by a wall, looking out into the main road. Madeleine and Chain were in the wagon. Sonja was only a step away, but he was still forced to stand without her help.

“How much do you know about VirtualJapan?” he asked, walking away from the wagon and out of earshot of the others.

“My father would talk about it often, about how it would bring the Japanese diaspora back home. How it was the greatest computer engineering project ever undertaken.”

Despite her evident pride, it wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “I’m talking about the guts of it: how he was going to make it work. Did he ever get technical with you?”

“Once or twice.” She smiled prettily, probably the same smile she used on her father when he tried to explain the interface protocols or the physics engine to her.

“Okay, look. Most of this is guesswork, but as far as I can tell, the Jihad is the moderator part of VirtualJapan, the system that supervises people’s behavior and interaction. Your father based it on his own personality, but since he died, it’s taken on a life of its own. The really complicated bit is that it’s somehow conflated itself with actually being your father. It knows you. It wants to protect you. It will kill everyone who gets in the way. When you’re safely out of the city, it’ll destroy the Metrozone, and create something else: for all I know, that something else is Tokyo.” He dismissed the idea with a wave.

“Stop,” she said, holding up her hand. “The Jihad thinks it’s my father?”

“I don’t think it knows what it is. If it is an AI, then it’s thrashing around in the dark much like the rest of us. But it can’t distinguish between being programmed to protect you and biological imperative: it just assumes that it is your father.” Petrovitch felt tired again, a tiredness that burrowed deep into his bones. “I need to talk to it on its own territory. I need to talk it out of wiping the Metrozone off the map.”

“What do they think?” She tossed her hair in the direction of the wagon.

“They want to know how to kill it.” He looked around. “If the Jihad is the first AI to achieve full sentience, I’m not going to be the one responsible for pulling the plug. I don’t care if it thinks it’s Moses, Mohammed or Mao, it’s not getting erased.”

“The others won’t like that.”