The Apocalypse Codex

by Charles Stross

  I stick the PDF of the page images on a public file sharing site, then I phone Pete and Sandy at home.

  Ring-ring. Ring-ring. Ring. “Wha, who—Bob? It’s one in the morning! What’s up?” Sandy sounds confused and as befuddled as I’d be if you woke me in the wee hours with a phone call. I scrunch up my eyes and wish that I believed in a god I could pray to for forgiveness.

  “Sandy, is Pete awake?”

  “Yes, but is it an emergency?”

  “Sort of. Can I talk to him, please?”

  “Hang on.” There’s a muffled noise, as of a phone being passed from one hand to another.

  “Bob?” It’s Pete. He doesn’t sound very awake.

  “Pete? Can we talk privately? I’ve got a problem.”

  “What sort of—of course. Hold on.” There follows a period of muffled thudding as, presumably, Pete disentangles himself from his bedding and leaves Sandy to go back to sleep. “There, I’m on my own. I assume this couldn’t wait for morning?”

  “It’s sort of urgent.” I pause. “What I’m going to say mustn’t go any further.”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die: you know what I do for a living, right? Pastoral care a speciality, spiritual care, too, although I guess that’s not what you’re looking for…”

  There is an eerie pins and needles prickling at the back of my tongue. I am going to have to watch what I say very carefully: my immortal soul is very much in danger, and I’m not speaking metaphorically. The consequences of betraying my oath of office are immediate, personal, and quite hideous.

  “You’ve probably guessed that, uh, I’m not allowed to talk about my job. But that it’s a bit different from what I’m required to lead people to believe.”

  The hair on the back of my neck is all but standing on end, but the ward doesn’t clamp down on me—yet. To some extent it’s driven by my own conscience, by my own knowledge of wrongdoing. And as I’m not actually planning on betraying any secrets, I still have a clean conscience. But. I’m wearing saltwater-soaked shoes and walking alongside the third rail.

  “I’ve recently come into possession of an interesting document, and I badly need a sanity check. Unfortunately, the only person I know with the right background to give it to me is you.”

  (Which is entirely true: while the Laundry can probably cough up a doctor of theology with a security clearance and a background in Essene apocalyptic eschatology, it might take them a couple of weeks. Whereas Pete wrote the dissertation and I’ve got him on speed dial.)

  “A document.” He sounds doubtful. “And you want a sanity check.” And you got me out of bed at one in the morning.

  “It’s a, a non-standard biblical text. Not your regular apocrypha. I’m having to do due diligence on people who are, uh, believers. I’d normally write them off as your regular American evangelical types, but they aren’t reading from your standard King James version. And it’s kind of urgent: I’m meeting with them in the morning.”

  “You’re meeting with—” I can almost hear the audible clunk from the mechanism between his ears as his brain jolts into gear. But you work in computer support in a civil service department, he’s thinking. And almost certainly putting two plus two together and getting five, which is just fine by my oath of office, if not my conscience…“Okay, I think.”

  “I’ve got a PDF of a scan of the variant bits of their Bible,” I say. “Mostly it’s the King James version plus a bunch of standard apocrypha, but this stuff is entirely different. I’m going to email you a link to it as soon as I get off the phone. It runs to about eighty pages. If you can take a peek and email me back, what I need to know is: If you start out from a bog-standard Pentecostalist position and add these extra books, what does it do to their doctrine and outlook? What do they believe and what are they going to want to do?”

  “That’s horribly vague! I—” He swallows. “You really want an opinion from me?”

  “Pete.” I pause, feeling like a complete shit. “You’re the guy with the PhD in whacked-out millenarian sects from the first century, right? Work could probably put me in touch with someone else, but they’d take weeks. And I’ve got to do—business—with these people tomorrow.”

  “What time tomorrow?”

  “I’m in America. Mountain Time Zone. Tomorrow morning—call it three p.m., your time.”

  Pete whistles quietly. “You’re in luck; I was planning on spending the morning working on a sermon.”

  “I’ll email you that link,” I promise. “Text me when you’ve got it, then go back to bed?”

  “Sure. God bless.”

  “And you,” I say automatically. Then he hangs up, and I get the shakes. I haven’t blown my oath of office—I’m still upright and breathing, not smoldering and crispy around the edges—but I’ve just bent it creatively. I haven’t told Pete about the Laundry, but at a minimum I’ve suggested to him that I’m not just a boring IT guy, that my job takes me to strange places and involves dealing with very odd people. If the Operational Oversight—no, scratch that. External Assets doesn’t normally answer to them. But if Gerald Lockhart decides I’ve exceeded my authority…well, he probably will, but it is easier to ask forgiveness than to request permission, especially if the gambit works. It’s possible I’ll be up before the Auditors again. And in the absolute worst case, the Laundry can probably find a use for a Vicar with a PhD in Unmentionable Mythology. They aren’t going to be motivated to dump on Pete. I hope. Not with Pete and Sandy expecting a kid. Not because I’ve gone and fucked up and dragged my work home with me to smear around my social circle.

  I feel soiled. I hope I’m not wrong about the significance of that Apocalypse Codex. It would suck to be hauled up before the Black Assizes. It would suck even harder to have gotten my friends into trouble because of a false positive. Mo would never forgive me; worse, neither would I.

  I’M BUSY TRACING A SECOND CONTAINMENT GRID ON THE pizza box lid containing Crusty McNightmare when my mobile rings. It’s Persephone. “Yes?” I say.

  “I’m in the car park. Dinner’s on you.”

  I glance at the gray, many-legged thing snoozing on the oily corrugated cardboard. It’s quiescent, but I know better than to poke it—I don’t want to risk breaking the ward. The primary pentacle serves much the same function as a Faraday cage: as long as it’s locked down this way, whoever owns it can’t connect to it and see through its sensory organs. But if it’s locked down like that, I can’t use it to feed misinformation to said owner. Hence the second, outer ward I’m working on.

  Once it’s in place I can set up a bridge between the inner and outer containments to let it phone home while I snoop on its communication and introduce material of my own: a man-in-the-middle (or, more accurately, a thing-in-the-middle) attack. But it’s a delicate job, I haven’t actually tested this particular configuration in the lab, and there’s no way I’m getting it down before dessert. So I double-check the outer diagram for flaws in the logic, ensure that it’s fully powered up—rechargeable batteries and a frequency generator disguised as a pocket digital multimeter take care of that—and grab my coat. On the way out the door I grab my shoulder bag, complete with phone, camera, and passport; you can never be too prepared.

  By the time I get to the car park night is falling, and with it a light dusting of snow. There’s a convertible drawn up near the entrance, headlights on and roof up. I walk around the passenger side and Persephone pops the door. “Get in,” she says. I obey and I barely have time to get my seat belt fastened before she’s moving, fishtailing into the road with a harsh scrabble of grit and ice under the wheels.

  “What have you been up to?”

  “I got you a laptop.” She gestures at the back seat. “And I bought ammunition at Walmart. Then I went for a drive, up north. I tried I-76. Ran into a diversion and checkpoint out past E-470. So I drove around the beltway until I hit I-70. Same deal. The north- and eastbound interstates all detour back into the city. The airport is shut,” she adds. “I double-c
hecked in case you have no-fly cooties. They gave me some crap about a frontal system coming down from Canada that’s due to dump a meter of snow on us overnight. It’s all lies: I checked the NOAA aviation weather reports and NOTAMs. There’s a front coming, but it’s not carrying snow. So I tried a couple of general aviation fields, even a helicopter taxi service, but they’re all grounded.”

  “But—” I stop dead.

  “I drove out to Meadow Lake Airport,” she adds. “I went in two offices. The front desk staff were all infected.”

  I tense. “How did you handle it?”

  “There was nothing to handle. I didn’t go in and say, Hi, I’m the Big Bad your pastor told you about and I want to hire an escape plane. One air taxi firm have an enquiry from a dentist’s wife called Lonnie Williams on file, and a helicopter company have a phone number for a lawyer’s secretary who is setting up a day trip to the Grand Canyon for an office party. Unless Schiller mobilizes the entire population of Colorado to hunt us door-to-door with torches and pitchforks, I left them no leads.”

  “They’ll be looking for—” I stop. She’s not driving the stolen pickup, and somehow while I haven’t been looking she’s changed her clothing and hairstyle from off-shift nursing scrubs to suburban American soccer mom. In jeans and a skiing jacket, ponytail and sunglasses, she’s just about unrecognizable as the rich socialite Schiller’s people will remember. Still glamorous, though. “You’ve got paperwork for that cover?”

  She nods. “I probably have more experience of escape and evasion than you do.” She checks the mirrors and slows, turns towards a downtown thickening of concrete and flags. “I thought perhaps we might try a small brasserie I’ve heard good things about. Their Kobe steaks are said to be excellent.”

  Kobe beef? The soccer mom is trying to upgrade to premier league WAG territory. My wallet cringes: despite Lockhart’s scandalously liberal approach to expenses I’m probably going to be called upon to justify this in writing, then cough up for it out of my own pay packet. (Unless I can convince the small-A auditor that Kobe is a kind of cheeseburger…) “If you insist.”

  “I insist.” Is that an impish gleam behind her shades? “We are not flying out tomorrow, Mr. Howard. Better get a full meal while the meal is to be had.”

  “What about trains? Driving?”

  “Amtrak runs one train daily to Salt Lake City or Omaha, it takes a day either way, and they insist on checking ID. Driving—it’s possible, but we’d have to cut cross-country and run past those road blocks. I do not advise it: we would be too obvious, even if we didn’t get stuck in a snowdrift and die of hypothermia. If they are infiltrating the general aviation companies, what about the highway patrol?”

  I shiver, and not from cold. “You think Schiller’s locked down half the state?”

  We slow, and Persephone pulls in at the roadside. “Yes. The real question is how soon he’ll be in a position to extend it to the entire continental United States.”

  As she kills the engine I try to force my brain to shift gears. It’s painful. “Back up. You think he’s organized a total lock-down, blocking escape by air and probably by road, because of us? And he’s going to what?”

  “It’s not just us, and I have a very bad feeling.” She opens her door and climbs out. I join her on the pavement. “We know he has ambitions.” She heads for the parking meter. “We know he has a powerful sponsor, and a supply of these parasites, and a messianic desire to bring his salvation to everyone. The Omega Course I attended—it wasn’t the first, or even the tenth. He’s been saving the souls of the rich and powerful for many years, working his way up. He must know that the higher he goes, the greater the risk of exposure. So if he is trying to suborn governments at the highest level, he must be nearly ready to move. And now something has just come up that convinced him to bring his plans forward. Possibly us, I fear.”

  My stomach rumbles, but I’m not sure I’m hungry. It feels as if Persephone is dredging these fears out of the depths of my own imagination. “He won’t be doing this on a whim. Whatever he’s planning is close enough to completion that he can’t back off and try again later. At the same time, he thinks he can hold the lid down for long enough to—how long can you lock down a city without anyone noticing, anyway? A few hours? A couple of days?”

  Persephone shoves quarters into the meter. “If he can conjure up a weather anomaly that matches the weather warning, he might manage a week-long clampdown. And nobody would question what had happened afterwards—especially if we disappear in the middle of it.” Light snowflakes swirl in her misting breath. “Winter is not over yet; there can be savage cold snaps.”

  “Where’s he going to get the bandwidth to create an entropy sink that big?” Then my eyes widen involuntarily because I’m having an unwelcome flashback to something that happened more than a decade ago in Amsterdam.

  YOU’VE SEEN THE SETTING IN A THOUSAND GANGSTER MOVIES: the unfurnished room in an abandoned house, empty but for the wooden chair in the middle of the floor, centered in a pool of light beneath an electric lantern hanging from the low, paper-peeling ceiling. A man sits on the chair, his arms cuffed behind the back and his ankles tied to the legs.

  In the movies he’d be a good guy, a cop or an investigator perhaps. And the figure in the shadows, the interrogator preparing to ask him questions, would be a killer and a thug. In that respect, this scene is a movie cliché.

  The interrogator walks up behind the slumped figure in the chair and grabs a handful of hair. He pulls the prisoner’s head back, and with his free hand he smears a ball of cotton wool and baby oil across the prisoner’s forehead.

  “You can wake up now.”

  The prisoner snorts incoherently, coughs, drools, and twitches as awareness returns in fits and starts. It’s a messy process, never as neat and clean-cut as cinematography portrays. But the prisoner is waking from sleep unnaturally enforced by the ward the interrogator has just erased from his forehead. There’s no concussion or intracranial bleeding to complicate things here.

  “Would you like a glass of water?”

  The victim coughs again and tries to look round at the speaker. Chooses the other direction. Begins to nod, then stops, suspicious.

  The interrogator produces a bottle of water and a paper cup. Still standing behind the victim’s chair, he half-fills the cup. He holds it in front of the man’s mouth and tilts, slowly, taking pains to stay out of his prisoner’s field of vision.

  After a moment, the prisoner sucks greedily, gulping down the contents of the cup. There is no Mickey Finn moment, no dramatic double take: it’s just water. The interrogator re-fills the cup and lets his subject empty it once more before he walks away and deposits it at the other side of the room.

  “Do you know who I am?” he asks conversationally.

  “Yuh”—cough—“you’re in too deep.” Arm muscles tense, come up against handcuffs. “Let me go now and lessee if’n we can sort this out so you get a day in court, huh? Because if you don’t—”

  There is a scraping of metal on concrete. The interrogator drags up a chair behind the prisoner and sits, just outside the geometric design sketched on the bare boards around the other’s chair. The prisoner, uncertain, trails off.

  “Do go on, son.” The interrogator sounds amused rather than afraid.

  “Hss.” There’s an odd undertone to the sibilant.

  “You can stop pretending.” The interrogator leans forward. “Because I know what you are, minion.”

  The prisoner’s voice shifts: “You should join us. Life eternal awaits the brethren of the chosen, perdition and damnation the apostate. For I am the light and the way, sayeth the Lord—”

  The interrogator listens to the godbabble for a couple of minutes. It has a nice stirring ring to it, sonorous phrases honed by centuries of preachers: the shock and awe programmed into generations of believers by their priests. But it falls on willfully deaf ears, for though the interrogator grew up thoroughly churched he has long since shed
the naive belief in the trinity and the gospels and the crucifixion and the resurrection and the Church triumphant. He knows the truth, knows the creed of the One True Religion, the nature of its worshipers and what passes for its deities.

  Right now what interests the interrogator is the state of his prisoner’s mind. Because it’s certainly not what it ought to be under these circumstances—knocked unconscious and brought round in a situation designed to intimidate, a situation familiar from a thousand entertainments and notorious for ending badly—indeed, the prisoner’s attitude is positively abnormal. A normal reaction might run the gamut from panic, fear, and offers of cooperation, through self-pity and ingratiation to anger, even defiant threats. A well-prepared subject might be grimly committed to silence. But a small-town cop accustomed to the casual exercise of force-backed authority will not be well-prepared for capture and debriefing; he’ll bluster or break. So: first evangelism, then…what?

  After a while, the prisoner begins to repeat his offers. The interrogator waits a minute to be sure, then moves on to the next stage: he tosses a small object onto the floor before his prisoner. It’s about the size of a severed human tongue, a silvery banded carapace or husk of chitin, somewhat flattened by repeated encounters with a rifle butt. It sparks and sizzles briefly as it touches the ward. “You can stop now,” he says in a steady tone that gives no hint of his own state of mind. “Just put me through to head office.”

  The prisoner falls silent. Then the light flickers.

  “Faithlesssss…” There is little humanity in the prisoner’s voice, but an odd sharp clicking as of dozens of chitinous legs tapping against the teeth in a dead man’s jawbone, a buzzing as of the wings of a thousand flying insects.

  “Do you remember me?” Johnny’s tone is light, almost mocking. “Father?”