The Delirium Brief

by Charles Stross

  “Oh, I have Freeview, all the public-to-air channels.” The prisoner’s disdain is clear. “Is this something to do with that business up north? I gather the Intelligence and Security Committee is all in a tizzy. What on earth did your people do to get them so worked up?”

  He’s playing with Dr. Armstrong, almost taunting him. The SA frowns momentarily, then forces himself to relax. “I think you know perfectly well what just happened.”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised how far out of the loop it’s possible to be when you’re banged up in the Tower of London, Doctor. It’s frustrating, I will admit. The first few days were relaxing enough, but … I have so much to contribute.” He sighs unhappily. “An elven invasion indeed! Then a cabinet reshuffle and a panicky order in council! That would never have happened on my watch, you may mark my words.”

  “Yes, but you didn’t exactly start off on the best footing, did you?” the SA says with some asperity. “Perhaps a little more respect for institutional procedures and a little less ambition would have stood you in good stead.”

  “Mistakes were made,” the prisoner says blandly, letting the admission slide. “Won’t happen again, I can assure you.”

  “I’m very glad to hear it. Not that you’re going to get the chance to make any mistakes.”

  “Oh, really?” The prisoner smiles blindingly, like the sun rising: an unshielded nuclear holocaust beyond a distant horizon. “Why are you here, then?”

  “I’m here to ask what you want, Fabian. It’s as simple as that.” The SA laces his fingers around his knee and rocks forward slightly, his expression intent. “Good governance is in short supply these days, but it has to be trustworthy or it’s valueless. Obedience to the law, respect for the rule of Parliament, loyalty to the Crown, that sort of thing.”

  “I note that you are not referring to the Crown-in-Parliament.” The prisoner looks amused. “Leviathan has a lot to answer for.”

  The SA sniffs. “The Crown that binds our oath is older and bloodier than that, as you well know.” He pauses for a moment. “But back to the business in hand. What do you want?”

  “I want”—the prisoner turns his face towards the ceiling and smiles ever wider, beatific—“everything. You know what I want: a parliamentary mandate and a seat of power. The respect and envy of my peers, the adulation of the masses, and the authority with which to enact my destiny. Which as you well know is to become Prime Minister of these sceptered isles, by hook or by crook, and to shepherd this nation into the future it deserves.

  “The fate of this nation does not lie in the choice between a Labour government or the Conservatives, or in the membership of a Labour cabinet or that of the current Coalition. What I am contending against is not the form of politics as such, but its ignominious content. I want to create in this nation the precondition which alone will make it impossible for our enemies—the iron grip of the enemies you and yours stand against—to be removed from us. To this end I wanted to restore order to the state, throw out the drones, take up the fight against the ancient nightmares, against our whole nation being overrun by the Quislings of alien evil, against the destruction of the agencies of our struggle—such as your own—and above all, for the highest honorable duty that we, as free citizens, know we should be held to—the duty of collective self-defense against the monsters from beyond the stars. And now I ask you: Is what I want high treason?”

  Fabian pauses in his peroration and fixes the SA with a stare as unblinking as a laser’s beam. “Is it?” he demands, voice booming, an ancient and terrible power stealing into it as he sounds forth. “Because if that be treason, the courts of this land may pronounce me guilty a thousand times, but the Goddess who presides over the Eternal Court of History will with a smile tear in pieces the charge of the prosecution and the verdict of the court! For she acquits me.”

  Dr. Armstrong rises to leave. “I’ve heard those words before, in another mouth,” he says drily. “They ended in tears last time around. Why should they end any differently this time round, if we let you out of your box?”

  “Because”—the prisoner’s expression is fey—“you have no alternative.” He smiles again, in evident pleasure. “I won’t fail you, Michael, if what you want is to protect this nation from the true threats that beset it. I’ve learned my lesson and I won’t make the same mistakes twice, I assure you. Unlike the public-relations-obsessed opportunist currently running the show, I understand the coming storm better than anyone in politics—and once I move into Number Ten, my top priority will be to attend to the parlous state of the nation’s occult defenses. After all, there’s not much point in my being PM if all I have to rule over is ashes, is there?”

  The SA pauses. “Promise me you will stick within the letter of the law,” he says, “and I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Is that all?” The prisoner snorts. “Of course I promise to obey the law! As you made perfectly clear, it was very shortsighted of me to ignore that requirement earlier. I, Fabian Everyman, also known as the Mandate, swear by my true name to obey the law of the land,” he swears. “There! Satisfied?”

  “It’ll have to do.” The SA nods at the prison officer, and mimes turning a door handle; the fellow nods back and rests a hand on the doorknob. “Be seeing you, Fabian…”

  * * *

  Nearly a week has passed since Johnny and I broke Cassie and Alex out of Camp Tolkien. I’m parked in a different ex-council maisonette in Hemel, courtesy of Airbnb, and I’m sleeping badly. It’s my conscience: whenever I’m not working I feel as if I’m going up the wall, but there’s a limited amount of work to be done, and I can’t run away from the back of my own head. While I can hide from the police I can’t hide from my own guilt. I’m effectively under house arrest, and I’m sinking a bottle of cheap supermarket plonk before bedtime each night to try and wash the taste of dying soldiers and brain-bruised friends out of my cortex.

  Then the doorbell rings.

  This is no immediate cause for concern, because my meals are being delivered in supermarket prepacks off the back of a delivery van, but I’m pretty certain today’s drop-off isn’t due for another couple of hours, so I approach the front door with caution. I open my mind’s eye and see that there’s somebody on the doorstep, the only person within a dozen meters (if you don’t count the neighbor’s bored and whiny King Charles spaniel, depressively chewing on a shoe as it awaits its owner’s return from work) … and they’re warded, but there’s something familiar about them. Very familiar. In fact … with a stab of apprehensive excitement I yank the door open and Mo stumbles into my arms. She’s wearing a cardigan over a frumpy maxi dress and the wig doesn’t suit her but she’s still the loveliest thing I’ve ever seen.

  “Quickly! Inside.” We stumble-waltz sideways as I kick the front door shut again.

  “Bob—” She hugs me tight.

  “What are you—”

  “Stand down, I finally convinced the SA to give me permission to come and visit, I’m clean—they’re not hunting for accountants yet—and nobody followed me, and I’ve got a surprise for you.” I hug her back and then without warning she kisses me as if she’s trying to make up for all our lost time in a few stolen seconds, and I kiss her right back. Everything—and I mean everything—goes out of my head except for the desperate lonely need to bury myself in her arms, and from the way she’s responding she feels the same way.

  We hold each other tight for a while, and one thing leads to another and we end up upstairs, and what happens next isn’t going in my work diary.

  (To clarify: We have been together and/or married for nearly a decade, albeit lately separated, but the cause of our separation is not a lack of love but of safety. Her violin—now, thankfully, banished—tried to kill me. And in the other direction, I sometimes sleepwalk, or levitate, and my eyes glow when I’m not home in my own head. The thing I’ve become, or the thing that is becoming me, is quite capable of lashing out and killing, and while I don’t know what I’d do if I woke up on
e night to find her lying dead beside me, I know that it wouldn’t be anything good.)

  More than an hour passes before we’re ready to talk at greater length than urgent monosyllables. We’re spooning on what’s left of the bedding, me wrapped around her back, nuzzling her neck with one palm pressed between her breasts. There’s a pile of discarded clothing and a wig on the carpet and I can feel her pulse, butterfly-fast but gradually slowing, the sweat sticky on her thighs.

  She sighs.

  “I know,” I say, and cuddle her closer.

  (It’s surprising how much meaning you can unpack from a tender intake of breath when you know the other person well enough.)

  “It doesn’t get easier. Still don’t think I should stay, but…”

  “Here.”

  (Interpreting monosyllables is a lot of work, so from now on I shall unpack them for you.)

  “Sleepy, only mustn’t. Bathroom?” (“I want nothing more than to drift off to sleep in your embrace, only I’m terrified that the psychotic death-clown who stalks your dreams will take you over in the middle of the night and eat my face. Also, my crotch feels disgusting and I want to shower.”)

  “Derp.” (“Derp.”)

  She elbows me in the ribs. “Seriously, now!”

  I sigh (“If you must”), and let go of her. We pull apart, the drying sweat itching, and as she rolls to her feet my eyes are drawn to her behind. “Turn left, it’s the second door along.” I begin to sit up. “Oh fuck.”

  “What?”

  “The johnny burst.”

  “Fuck!”

  Of an instant we’re both wide awake, tense, and not feeling even remotely monosyllabic. It’s been around a year since I had to move out, and staying on the pill at her age without a good reason isn’t a great idea, but we’re sensible grown-ups, and suddenly I have a sick sense of doubt in my stomach. I pulled out afterwards, but now I see that the condom’s tip has split neatly, as if razored, probably while we were at our most joyfully inattentive, which is why I didn’t notice at the time. “Shower,” I say on autopilot as she stumbles out of the bedroom and I follow, then divert into the cramped toilet cubicle to ditch the treacherous rubber.

  (Personal hygiene interlude.)

  Listen, there is a very good reason why Mo and I agreed never to have children. Leaving aside the fact that she’s forty-three—dangerously late to even try—there is the small fact that we are both Laundry operatives and we know the fate that lies in store for any child of ours. Maybe if we’d met when we were twenty and ignorant things could have been different, but if there’s anything that could make facing the probable end of humanity together even worse, it would be the sheer reckless stupidity of bringing new life into being at a time like this. So we clean up with gritted teeth, holding our tongues—recriminations would be pointless, we both know the score—and I fetch out a clean towel for her and we get dressed before traipsing downstairs again in guilty complicit silence, as if nothing had happened.

  “Morning-after pill?” I ask.

  She grimaces. “There’s probably no point; at this age I’m well past it, I’m about as likely to conceive as that”—she gestures at the kitchen table—“thing.” She takes a deep breath. “But I’ll try Boots tomorrow. Or today, if they’re still open later.”

  Well fuck. This isn’t what I wanted, but we don’t always get what we want, do we? “Mo—” I move towards her tentatively, then pause.

  “I know.” She blows out her cheeks, momentarily resembling a frowsy hamster. “Not your fault, not my fault, nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I’ll go eat worms.” She manages a wan chuckle.

  “Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?”

  She drags out a kitchen chair and sits down. I sit down opposite her. “Loved the climax, could have done without the ending. Oh Bob.” She shakes her head at my answering grin.

  “Was this”—I steel myself—“just a conjugal visit while I’m under house arrest, or was there anything else?”

  “Anything else? Oh, yeah, that.”

  “That?”

  “We’re homeless, dear.”

  “What?”

  She drums her fingers on the tabletop, gazing pensively past my shoulder. “We’re losing the house. Technically we’ve got until the end of the month, but we’re supposed to get out as soon as possible, seeing we’re no longer entitled to a key workers property owned by the Crown Estate via our doesn’t-exist-anymore employing agency. But”—she nibbles delicately on one fingernail, and that’s how I know the news is really bad—“the police want a word with me about bookkeeping irregularities, so I’m couch-surfing with the aid of the SA’s little helpers right now.”

  “But, but—”

  She misinterprets: “Spooky is going to be all right; I’ve parked him at your parents’ place.”

  “But Dad doesn’t like cats—”

  “Tough.” In the face of Mo’s implacable lack of sympathy I can see even my father sucking it up and hitting the antihistamines.

  It all hits me at once. I take a deep breath. I’m homeless, jobless—at least, officially—on the run from the police, who have good and sufficient reasons to drop me in a hole and throw away the key, separated from my wife who may be—but almost certainly isn’t—pregnant (which is just pregnant enough to be really disturbing), one of my worst nightmares seems to be taking over the country from the top down, and I can’t sleep properly at night because of the things I’ve done. I take another deep breath, and another.

  “Bob—”

  “Can’t—”

  “I know how this script plays out and you’re not going there, love, too many of us are depending on you,” she says fiercely. “Bob! Come here!” She stands up and leans over me and I grab her and bury my face between her breasts, feeling about four years old, and I begin to grizzle like a toddler with a grazed knee, letting it all hang out. “Not letting you go,” she mumbles into my hair, and suddenly I’m sobbing, grief for all the souls I’ve eaten and the untimely ends I’ve brought to those who didn’t deserve it, all of that swamping my own fucked-up life. “Don’t need to, not anymore, that’s why the visit. Being an Auditor gets me into—got me into—lots of closed files. And I went digging and I found what they used to bind TEAPOT back in the 1920s. So I pestered Persephone until she made me a better ward, just for you.” She fumbles in the pocket of that ridiculous cardigan and pulls out a pouch on a leather thong that hums with some kind of unearthly energy. “Had a long heart-to-heart with her. Should have done it ages ago. I owe her for this.” She pushes me gently back for just long enough to drop it over my head and the world around us goes numb and quiet, peaceful even.

  “What?” I look up at her face and blink, puzzled.

  “It’s a new ward,” she explains. “Necromantic immobilization. Wear it when we go to bed.” She’s speaking clearly and slowly as if I’m a very small child. “We can stay together.”

  “But if it doesn’t work—”

  “It’s going to work. It’s the same schematic they used when they first summoned the Eater of Souls, before they bound it via the oath of office. See? It’s been tested.”

  “But I might take it off—”

  “You won’t.”

  “But I’m too dangerous, I’m not sure I’m even human anymore!”

  “Bob!” She steps back and glares at me with her fists on her hips. “Are you trying to drive me away?”

  (Reader, this is why I married her.)

  * * *

  As Terry Pratchett observed, inside every eighty-year-old man is an eight-year-old wondering what the hell just happened to him; in my experience this remains true even if you divide his age by two. While my inner four-year-old is having a meltdown and Mo explains that love can find a way (with a bit of technical help from one of the most powerful occult practitioners in London), events are marching on.

  This week, the cabinet reshuffle continues. A minister, Norman Grove, has been appointed to head a shiny new Departm
ent for Paratechnological Affairs, which exists entirely as an org chart with lots of empty directorship-sized bubbles, a bunch of PowerPoint presentations, and a press conference. Most of DPA’s immediate needs are to be outsourced to private-sector contractors and indeed two of the usual large outsourcing conglomerates are supposed to be prepping shiny new offices to hold the three-thousand-odd civil servants that DPA will eventually employ. Grove optimistically declares that this will be a clean sheet exercise in developing a leaner, more agile, twenty-first-century organization. In the fine print below the announcement it is mentioned that anyone who held anything above a surprisingly low grade in the predecessor agency will be barred from hiring until their background, culpability, and share of guilt for the fiasco in Leeds can be established, sometime after the Commons Select Committee Enquiry delivers its findings. (Early in the twenty-second century, then.)

  In the meantime, private-sector contractors have been identified entering the New Annex. Presumably they’re having some issues with site security—Residual Human Resources, being dead, are not on payroll and were not covered by the shutdown order—but after a couple of days the new arrivals no longer wear body armor, and body bags stop leaving in ambulances so the GP Security people must be assumed to have the free run of the building. I wish them much luck dealing with some of the more baroque and deadly non-Euclidean spaces such as Angleton’s office, the eldritch singularity in Briefing Room 202, the hole where Andy’s lab used to be, and so on. Babes in the wood, babes in the fucking wood—and I’m not shedding any tears over their screaming.

  But none of this can make up for the fact that we’ve lost access to the archive stacks, Angelton’s Memex, our in-house network and labs, and a bunch of other vital resources. Some of that stuff is priceless. Ditto a bunch of less obvious facilities. Persephone’s top-floor lab, for example, with the humongous containment grid—I don’t think it’s safe to drop round there right now. All the remote facilities that have gone dark represent an imponderable hit to our ability to resume operations. And some of the side effects are worse.