The Delirium Brief

by Charles Stross

  “I was under the impression that you had a concrete proposal.” He’s still polite, but there is a barely restrained impatience to Michaels’s tone.

  “I do.” Schiller drops the smile. “As you will have become aware, the US government has its own agencies for containing the sort of threat you confronted so recently. And as Mr. Redmayne has doubtless told you, much of my business is concerned with providing private sector support to the Operational Phenomenology Agency—the name is deliberately anodyne—in combating similar demonic incursions. Which is why you haven’t seen one in the United States. We have a twenty-three-year track record of activity in this sector, with a fully security-cleared organization that can offer a full range of supporting security functions ranging from base and perimeter patrols to large-scale exorcisms and witchcraft interdiction. More importantly, we’re used to working with the big boys—the OPA alone has a larger budget than your GCHQ, MI5, and SIS combined—and we’re used to working as a junior contractor on outsourced agency projects managed by federal and enterprise-level service entities such as Halliburton, Carlyle Group, and Serco, and security specialists like Xe and G4S.”

  He pauses to take another sip of water. He has the PM’s undivided attention; behind Michaels’s shoulder, the Cabinet Secretary is giving Schiller the indulgent smile of a waiter expecting a fat tip from a happy customer.

  “Do go on,” purrs the Prime Minister.

  “I don’t presume to tell you how to handle the current situation,” Schiller says carefully. “Nor is it my place to make any suggestion over how your security agencies should be managed. But I can’t help noting that SOE is entirely self-governed, operating almost completely outside the normal Civil Service guidelines. They are in effect a rogue agency with a strong institutional culture of keeping everything in-house and using no external support organizations. This is both a strength and a weakness; groupthink can lead to failure to respond to new threats in a timely manner, as happened in Leeds. Anyway, you know now that alternatives exist, and as the largest private-sector specialist contractor employed by the US government, my company stands ready to deliver the full portfolio of services you will need if you decide to make a clean break with the past…”

  * * *

  The drive from Chequers back to London’s Docklands takes over an hour and a half. Schiller spends the time cocooned in the twilit back of the stretch limo, protected by a soundproofed privacy screen and blacked-out windows. The first meeting with the Prime Minister went adequately well, he decides: the man is pompous and vain, but he understands all too clearly the need to dissociate himself from failure. He’ll take the bait, with a little nudging from Redmayne, who is already hooked. By the time Michaels realizes the price it’ll be too late for second thoughts. Or any thoughts at all, come to think of it. “A good day’s work,” he says contentedly.

  “Yes, Father.”

  Anneka sits beside Schiller, outwardly composed, knees close together and head bowed. He can feel her mind, the bright and fervent clarity of her belief in the Mission, her joyful acceptance of the inner doctrine that will bring about the arrival of the New Lord, her dissatisfaction … dissatisfaction?

  “I sense that something ails you, Daughter,” he murmurs. “Rest assured, you have not failed our Lord: your efficiency is beyond reproach.” A telling pause. “Or is there something else?”

  Anneka draws breath, but then falls silent—a virtuous woman, she is quiet save when he bids her speak—but he can feel the tension fluttering in her chest like a caged bird seeking flight, and he thinks it would be so easy to set her free; but then she lets her breath out explosively, and quietly wails, “Why has our Lord not taken me yet, Father? He claimed Virginia and Sarah last month! They’re so happy now they know the Lord in all his glory. And Lucile and Mary the month before. They are no more devout than I”—she blushes suddenly—“I’m sorry I spoke out of turn. But I keep praying and, and…”

  Oh, that. Schiller smiles contentedly and stares at the window opposite, deliberately avoiding direct eye contact with her. Reassurance first: “You’re quite right, you are every bit as deserving as they are. In fact, your patience is an inspiration to everyone who knows you, and will be reflected in the magnitude of the reward our Father in Heaven intends bestow upon you.” He sees the slight rise of her blouse as her shoulders tense, reflected in the glass, darkly. “But I thought it necessary to maintain your purity because the stigmata of the chosen may be recognized by those who fear and hate our Lord’s servants. Just as the communicants of the Middle Temple are obvious to the prying unbelievers, so too are the chosen of the Inner Temple recognizable to the enemies of the Lord. I place too much value on your ability to travel freely among the unbelievers without detection, as a trusted servant of the Mission, to Elevate you lightly.” Her shoulders begin to slump. He pauses a moment before adding, “But now we are in England, and our Lord has a very special mission in mind for you. One that none of his handmaids in Colorado can accomplish.”

  “A”—almost a hiccup—“mission?”

  “Yes. And to carry out this mission you must first be Elevated.”

  “Oh, Father!” She clasps her hands before her, eyes brimming with the joy of a willing martyr. “Will you do—will it hurt?”

  “Only a little, my daughter,” he says gently. He glances at his Patek Philippe: an hour and twenty minutes until we get there. Should be long enough. “Unfasten your seat belt and disrobe, for our Lord desires to return you to the natural purity of humanity before Eve’s fall, and for that we must both be naked.”

  As Anneka unzips her skirt, the thing that cleaves to the remains of his original sin is already uncoiling and inflating, leaving him headachy and prickly hot as it suckles on his bulbourethral artery. He slides out of his jacket and removes his tie. “How must we do this, Father?” Anneka asks nervously. It’s her first time, of course: as a virtuous girl raised in the chaste bosom of Schiller’s ministry, she has never been alone with a man who was not an initiate of the Middle or Inner Temples. (Nor is sex education on the school curriculum in Schiller’s compound in Colorado.)

  “First we undress, then we pray together,” Schiller reassures her. While she peels off her pantyhose and unhooks her brassiere, he removes his shirt and trousers, then he ducks across the aisle to the wide bench seat opposite. He kneels on the floor of the car and leads her through a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and the Celebration of the Mission. Schiller still wears his boxers, and Anneka is naked save for a somewhat unchaste G-string. Her garment distracts him with visions of a sinful nature, but Schiller has done this before, so many times that the prayers of the ritual come naturally to him in his sleep; and in any case, this is the one situation where such sinful imaginings might be forgiven by his Lord, for the purpose is procreation, after a fashion.

  Finally, it is time. “Recline the seat,” Schiller directs her—Anneka’s hand goes to the button that turns the rear bench into a bed almost before he finishes the phrase—“then render yourself as naked as Eve, close your eyes, and imagine your body to be the tabernacle of the Lord.” As she obeys he shoves his underpants down, hands shaking with the urgent need to obey the commands of his little master, who has not fed for far too long and who shares with Schiller a keen appreciation of the fair and virtuous woman who spreads her legs before him. She’s virginal, but shaved: evidently she anticipated her long-deferred Elevation. It’s almost more than Schiller can bear. He growls softly in the back of his throat, then crawls forward to commence the act of communion that will Elevate Anneka into the ranks of the Inner Temple.

  Many years ago, plagued by nocturnal visions of succubi and tormented by sinful urges, Schiller found solace in the Inner Codex of his faith. It came to him after much study that he must become the gateway to his Lord’s re-emergence into the world: and so, to open the way, he took a razor blade and cut away his manhood, flensing aside all that which was unclean from his life. Then and only then were his prayers answered by the Lo
rd.

  As he lowers himself atop the still-willing Anneka, Raymond Schiller rejoices in his renewed virility. Through long years of bleak despair after his premature self-mutilation, he doubted himself; but then he found his way to the Lord in His Inner Temple. There, his Lord blessed him by making him the first to be united with the little master, the New Flesh that replaces the Sin of Adam. Now it is his duty to guide the handmaids through the eye of the needle, to initiate them into the Inner Temple where all shall dwell in joyous submission to the will of the Lord. Once inducted, the Lord’s beneficence takes root in their bodies. Thus impregnated, the Temple Maidens are thereby equipped to Elevate the men of power that Schiller needs beside him to fight the good fight and return the Lord to His rightful place astride the Throne of Earth.

  Raymond’s New Flesh stiffens gratifyingly as he eases her thighs apart, then squeezes its way into her vagina. She heaves against him and sighs wordlessly as his little master’s segmented head pushes inside her for the first time, but her desire for communion stills her initial instinct to resist and by the time the pain begins her limbs are paralyzed. There is a slight rasp in her throat when it reaches her cervix and pushes inside—shedding the grace of her virginity is no doubt uncomfortable. Schiller prays silently for her in sympathy, sharing her last moments of isolated humanity. Then his little master splits, the distal segments pulling away halfway along its length. The proximal segments stay wedded to Schiller’s crotch; the rest remain inside Anneka, in whose womb they will take root, to feed and grow new segments in safety.

  The limousine’s soundproofing is excellent. As the little master shoots tendrils into her pudendal nerve and thence up the spinal cord to take control of her brain stem, Anneka’s scream is muffled against Raymond’s shoulder. By the time they reach the underground parking garage beneath the apartment they are sitting up again, shaky and drained but presentable. The wet wipes in the console suffice to clean up most of the blood, allowing them to make it to the private elevator. And if Schiller’s New Flesh is truncated to little more than a weeping stump, and Anneka’s eyes are bloodshot and her expression is slackly poleaxed, well, they will both recover from her initiation soon enough.

  PART II

  LIQUIDATION

  FOUR

  TERMINATION

  We British pride ourselves on our lack of corruption in civil life. Nobody takes bribes. We hold that sort of thing in contempt and view it as utterly beyond the pale in polite society. Merely offering something that might be misconstrued as a corporate favor invites prosecution under the Bribery Act (2010).

  And if you believe that, I’ve got a very nice bridge you might be interested in buying. (It leads to Brooklyn, you may have heard of it?)

  Of course, if I were the government and I really had a bridge to sell …

  Listen, there’s nothing corrupt about it. At least there’s nothing provably corrupt about the way outsourcing contracts are handled. That’s because corruption is defined in narrow terms to nail the poor deluded fool who slips a £20 note inside the cover of their passport before handing it to the Border Force officer who is checking travel documents with a CCTV camera looking over her shoulder. There’s nothing corrupt about the government minister who announces new and impossible performance targets for a hitherto just-about-coping agency that manages transport infrastructure, drives it into a smoking hole in the ground, and three years later retires and joins the board of the corporation that subsequently took over responsibility for maintaining all the bridges on behalf of the state—for a tidy annual fee, of course. After all, the minister is a demonstrable expert on the ownership and management of bridges, and there’s no provable link between their having set up the agency for failure and their subsequently being granted a nonexecutive directorship that gets them their share of the rental income from the privatized bridge, is there?

  All of this happens very discreetly. Air gaps, Chinese walls, and plausible deniability are baked into the process. But the general pattern is out in the open for those with eyes to see.

  First, identify a department with an essential function or significant capital assets on the books. Second, define ambitious performance targets they can’t possibly meet with the resources available, hire a bunch of nonexec directors to “provide valuable insights from the private sector” to the board, and in case that’s not enough, cut the budget until they fail to perform. Third, the minister moves on and a new minister parachutes in, with lots of heroic rhetoric about radical change and accountability. Fourth, the non-exec directors leave, returning to their private sector posts with the large outsourcing company they originally came from, taking with them everything they’ve learned about how the agency is run. Fifthly and finally, the work is put out to public tender, and the usual outsourcing contractors, who now know how the agency works in intimate detail, make a—surprise!—winning bid. Finally, the usual suspects show up on the golf course a year or two later and buy trebles all round.

  What greases the wheels is that the capital assets managed by the agency are transferred to the new owners, thus taking them off the government’s books, thereby thinning the property portfolio the Crown can borrow against. It looks good to get all that debt off the balance sheet. Meanwhile, tax revenue continues to roll in and some of it is now siphoned off to rent back the former government assets.

  You might think, “That’s insanely inefficient!” and you would be right. But you’re not seeing it through the wonderful rose-tinted lenses of high finance. Viewed in the right light, a little sprinkle of free market pixie dust can turn the drabbest of public sector services (sewerage, for example) into a rainbow-hued profit unicorn. Certainly, sewage farms are something you can float as an investment: they’re valuable infrastructure and once you own them you can rent them back to the government until people learn to shit in their hands.

  No, I’m not bitter or anything about the post office fire sale, or the roads, or the way they’re flying kites about turning the fire service and police into employee-owned companies. I couldn’t care less whether the nation’s air defense interceptors are maintained by a blue-suiter or by a former blue-suiter working as a private sector contractor at five times the hourly rate. The worst case for any of the above is that parcels don’t get delivered, buildings burn down, or Vladimir Putin parks a tank in Downing Street. Stuff breaks, people die, maybe there’s a small nuclear war, boo hoo.

  But if they pull that stunt on the Laundry or an equivalent agency the worst-case outcome is drastically worse, because the adversaries we face are not remotely human. And the DELIRIUM brief that Bill handed me gives us a working example of exactly that happening, in the shape of the shutdown of the US Postal Service Inspectorate Occult Texts Division by the Operational Phenomenology Agency, aka the Black Chamber, via a private sector cut out in the shape of GP Services.

  This is how it went down, according to our leaker:

  GP Services (and other companies) have been lobbying Congress to privatize the US Postal Service for years now. There are any number of beneficiaries: the private parcel carrier services, the phone and cable networks and internet service providers, and the obvious corporate interests who can do without the nonprofit competition. And there are any number of politicians who can make political hay by being seen to cut government spending on a basic infrastructure service that doesn’t turn a profit and that isn’t able to defend itself politically. Nothing has officially happened yet—the inertia of the US government is astonishing—but it’s obvious that the fix is in: too many people want the post office to die. And so they’re already chewing lumps off the periphery of the still-living organism.

  Taking on the outsourced contract to deliver the mail is one thing, but there are related tasks that can’t be so easily privatized. The US Postal Service Inspectorate’s role is mandated by Act of Congress, so someone has to do it. But a private corporate mail service is something else, and they’re monitored by Homeland Security. So as a cost-cutting measure the Insp
ectorate is one of the first units to be axed, and its residual assets transferred to corporate contractors with a security clearance. Eighty percent of its staff are downsized and the remainder, the folks who manage the remaining assets, are replaced by private sector contractors employed by GP Services. And of course GP Services supplies contractors to the OPA.

  And then there was one fewer agency standing between the public and the things that want to eat their souls.

  * * *

  Monday morning:

  Raymond Schiller is a traditionalist in many ways, both in business and in faith. Not for him the modern conveniences of teleconferencing, hot-desking, and virtual workspaces: he insists on in-person meetings with his subordinates, on emails printed out and presented to him for a response dictated and transcribed by one of his handmaids, and in office suites that can be swept for bugs and secured against surveillance by the agents of apostasy.

  The GP Services headquarters in the UK is located in a windowless warehouse-like shed near the cargo terminal at Heathrow. There is a wilderness of rectilinear roads, surveilled by cameras and patrolled by armed police, entirely within the perimeter security cordon of Europe’s largest airport. It’s inconveniently far from the center of the British capital by ground transport, but Schiller’s serviced apartment is close by Docklands airport and a charter helicopter is waiting to whisk him across London in privacy and comfort—and if security is a priority, a major airport is the next best thing to a military installation.