The Annihilation Score (Laundry Files)

by Charles Stross

  Stanwick gestures at the glass wall separating us from the ops room. “You’ve got all the pieces: five minutes’ time out won’t hurt. Tell me what your hypotheses are and I’ll set you straight.”

  “Hypotheses?” I shrug. “You’re part of a working group within ACPO, the Association of Chief Police Officers. A clearing house and information exchange between territorial forces, operating at the very highest level, with some staff seconded from other forces, that also undertakes operations directly on behalf of the Home Office. Your command has responsibility for a bunch of major security briefs – you run the counter-terrorism command, what used to be Special Branch, among other things. You’re therefore the logical person to put in charge of responding to the imminent threat to law and order posed by a, a” – I check with my internal censor: it grants permission for me to continue, which is in itself worrying – “sudden sharp spike in the prevalence of both ritual magic and informal paranormal powers, commonly interpreted by those on the receiving end as making them superheroes.”

  She nods minutely, so I continue, listening for the caution of a still, small inner voice. “You plotted the same graphs that my employers have been sweating over for the past few months. You saw the sudden upswing and worried that before long everyone would be casting fireballs, levitating, building space stations, and generally getting in the way of community policing. So you began looking for a solution to the problem, framed tightly as a superpowered public order issue. Then my people came along. Have you signed section three?”

  She nods. “I know who you are,” she says, with a surprising level of quiet vehemence. “SOE. Another wartime relic.” Her cheek twitches. “We are out of the unlawful activities business, Dr. O’Brien. We’re part of the Home Office, not the Ministry of Defense. Unlike your employers we attempt to do everything by the book. Sometimes we fail, and then it’s time for Professional Standards and the IPCC to work out what went wrong, but the point is, we don’t cut corners.”

  I roll my eyes. “Sure. And we deal with threats you can’t handle. Existential threats. Your job is to enforce the law, but the law in question applies to human beings here on this Earth. It doesn’t work so well after a nuclear war, which is the only sane comparison for what my organization is responsible for heading off —”

  “That’s where you’re wrong.” She gives me a brief, feral smile and taps the disastrous letter again. It’s lawful, it’s signed by the Home Secretary herself, and I’m not willing to bet that my Laundry warrant card can trump it: short of getting it countersigned by the Queen, it doesn’t go much higher than this. “Civil Contingencies Act, Dr. O’Brien. It was drafted to govern exactly that sort of situation.”

  Shit. She is, of course, technically correct: the CCA is the overarching piece of civil defense and disaster preparedness legislation that governs how the United Kingdom would be ruled in the aftermath of a nuclear war or an invasion by undead alien gods. She’s got me bang to rights. And she continues, remorselessly: “You agree that it’s my organization’s job to enforce the law, don’t you?”

  Where is she going with this? “Yes.”

  “Well, we consider the outbreak of three- to five-sigma superpowers to be a critical problem. An out of context problem for the practice of policing, if you’re familiar with the term.” Oh God. “We have to take preventative action to stop it from turning into a tidal wave of lawlessness. And we have to do it as soon as possible, before disasters like the EDL march in Oldham become daily occurrences. Your sock-puppet public relations superhero team isn’t going to provide a constructive role model for our superpowered youth – it’s just going to be the butt of their jokes. Don’t think it hasn’t been tried before any number of times, during various panics over juvenile delinquency. We’re facing Armageddon, Dr. O’Brien; we’ve got to head it off before it happens. A nightmare of lawless rioting lumpenproletariat with superpowers is just around the corner. You may be concerned with the defense of the realm, but I’m concerned with ensuring there’s a realm left to defend.”

  “Aren’t you exaggerating a bit?” I ask.

  That’s a mistake. Laura proceeds to deliver the smackdown, in the shape of a canned three-minute lecture on Law And Disorder In The Big City: “Our total overall detection rate is just twenty-four percent, Dr. O’Brien. Less than a quarter of reported crimes for which we get a confirmed clear-up. In some areas – offenses against vehicles, burglary, theft, and criminal damage – we’re under fifteen percent. In reality most of those crimes are the work of a hard core of serial offenders, so we get them eventually – but in the meantime it creates a chilling climate. It creates the impression that we are institutionally incapable of preventing crime. Law-abiding citizens like yourself go about in a state of fear out of all proportion to the scale of the problem, fanned by the tabloid media. Meanwhile, real criminals feel empowered and invulnerable. If some of them subsequently become invulnerable in reality, we will have a desperately serious problem. Bad enough if they were to be robbing sleepy banks who pay insufficient attention to securing their vaults —” She reaches into the folio and produces a Police evidence baggie containing a pair of DLT tapes. “Think of the climate of fear! We can’t afford to let go for a split second, Doctor. We’re all that stands between you and anarchy red in tooth and claw.”

  I know where Laura is coming from, now: she’s a member of the you couldn’t handle the truth/thin blue line saving you from drowning in a sea of filth school of police opinion. Which is all very well, but better policing and more powers to stop and search isn’t going to protect us when the Sleeper in the Pyramid wakes up. “That’s not going to happen,” I point out. “I don’t know if you’ve been briefed yet, but the superpowered are at risk of K-type dementia. The more power they use, the faster they’re going to come down with —”

  “Doesn’t matter, Doctor. A malevolent five sigma who succumbs to a neurodegenerative condition after two weeks is still a disaster.” Her eyes widen slightly. “Is Jim Grey at risk?” I nod. “Oh dear.” “We – the Laundry – have some experience in managing this condition. There are techniques that can reduce an occult practitioner’s susceptibility: they may work for superpowers, too. After all, they’re just informal ritual practitioners with an intuitive/somatic interface… But. But. If you want to tackle the superpowered, you need to build hospitals, not super-dungeons.”

  “Nevertheless.” She swallows, looking appalled: she’s genuinely rattled, if I’m any judge of character at all. “If I give full credit to what you’re telling me, that just makes your willing participation in Operation Freudstein all the more important.”

  Tell me more: I’m fascinated. “Why the name?”

  “It’s a portmanteau: the twentieth century was book-ended by the nightmares of Freud and Einstein. Freudstein is a high-profile awareness-raising exercise, to show everyone just how dangerous a five-sigma criminal can be: we can point to his activities and say, that’s why we need these special contingency powers. Before it’s too late. For a project simulating a Mad Scientist, whose goal is to provide the impetus and the mechanism for performing surgery on the collective subconscious of a nation, what could be more appropriate?”

  I nod encouragement. “Let me guess. This sonata you want me to play. It’s from The King in Yellow, isn’t it? The second act? Or the third?”

  “Yes.” The Assistant Commissioner looks past me, at something happening in the control room. “You know the Last Night is being broadcast live: audio on Radio Three and television on BBC One? We can push this broadcast a bit further – we can tie in to the backbone routers at Telehouse Docklands using the same interconnect GCHQ use for their MTI surveillance. And we can transparently redirect the DNS queries from any computer in the UK to point wherever we want them to. In a nutshell, we’re going to piggyback your solo on every YouTube video session in the country. At the same time, we will push a Playout update to Sky and Virgin.” The satellite and cable monopolists for the UK. “We won’t get everyone,
but a good thirty percent of the population should receive saturation coverage. Maybe even half.” She smiles encouragingly: “Just think, you’ll have the biggest audience of any live event in Britain since the Royal Wedding.”

  I frown; her smile goes away. “What’s the payload?” I ask.

  She leans forward. “Peel’s Nine Principles of Policing.” The lightning grin comes out again: “We’re not stupid, you know. We know about the risks of installing a firmware upgrade in somebody’s brain. So the core message is very simple: The police are the public and the public are the police. I can hardly believe you’ve – I mean, your organization – been sitting on such an incredibly powerful tool for decades and nobody’s thought of doing this before? We’re facing a crisis of law enforcement: just getting a third of the population to work with us, including a third of the superpowered, is going to go a huge way towards mitigating the —”

  She keeps on wittering away, but I am half past listening. I make pleasant face contortions and nod occasionally while I try and work out what to do. In the distance I hear Lecter crying out, single-stringed moans of hunger and need. There’s been no response from my ring: for all I can tell it’s a piece of inert jewelry. I can tell her the instrument is cursed until I go blue in the face: it won’t help. The Assistant Commissioner has a PhD in Criminology and runs on Home Office–dictated rails. She doesn’t hold with antiquated beliefs in curses or intrinsically evil instruments, and I doubt she can sight-read sheet music well enough to know what The King in Yellow is all about. Hand her a tool that can install a rootkit in twenty million brains and she doesn’t see any risk that isn’t outweighed by the promise of installing a Police state machine in those heads.

  She’s running out of exhortations and starting to look at me askance, as if wondering why I’m not agreeing with her more enthusiastically. I’m out of time. “It’s feasible in principle,” I admit reluctantly. “The trouble is, the violin is very hard to control —”

  “I don’t think so.” She stands up. “I’ve read your personnel file. You’re the most powerful wielder that instrument has had in decades: You’ve outlasted all but one of your predecessors, haven’t you? You can sight-read; I’m assured it’s not a very complicated piece. For its impact it depends as much on the instrument as on the score.”

  “But I can’t —”

  “Can’t, or don’t want to?” she demands sharply. “Dr. O’Brien, I’m not asking you to play that sonata; I’m ordering you to.”

  “But —”

  “Keith, Martin, get her on stage —” She addresses the armed cops on the door. “Interval’s nearly over and she’s on next.” To me: “You will do as I say,” she says, holding up the letter, the words on the page crawling before my eyes as with blue fire: “By the power vested in me, I command and compel you.” And as the geas on the page gets its fingers into my head, I feel myself standing involuntarily, grip tightening on my violin case. I turn towards the door, unable to help myself.

  “Jim will hold the score for you,” she tells me. “Now get up there and do your job, Officer.”

  I can’t stop myself: and as my feet carry me towards the steps leading up to the back of the stage in the Albert Hall, unready and unwilling to give the performance of my life, I work out why. The geas working against me is my own oath of office. I was lawfully assigned to the Security Service and thence to the Home Office: so Deputy Commissioner Stanwick is lawfully able to order me to do this, with authority right from the top of my secondment! It’d take the SA himself suspending me from active duty to break me out of this trap, and in the meantime —

  — I’m climbing the stairs with Lecter crooning tuneless alien phrases in the back of my mind, and then the spotlight leads my unwilling feet towards the violin soloist’s podium. And I’m out of time.

  19: THE KING IN YELLOW

  That nightmare I had, weeks ago, about performing naked on stage at the Albert Hall in front of an audience of empty police uniforms?

  Too realistic for comfort: the nascent sense of panic is chokingly familiar, but there’s no escape through waking up this time around.

  As I walk out onto the stage, past the percussion, then forward to the strings, I can’t see the audience. We’re lit brightly from above, but the whistles and chatter and applause and the crackle of party poppers all take place beyond the footlights. There’s a burst of clapping as I walk towards the front, and the odd appreciative wolf whistle. The other musicians are in formal concert black, the soloists in evening gowns and tuxes, our conductor in white tie and tails; my superhero drag marks me out as if I was naked —

  There is a music stand waiting for me. Jim stands stiffly beside it, perspiration glistening on his forehead. The other violinists look at me with ill-concealed incredulity as an announcer hurries up to the conductor and they confer quietly.

  I can’t break out of this walking nightmare however hard I try. I find my hands are full, busily unlocking my violin case and extracting the bow and body without my conscious volition getting a look-in. Fuck it, Mhari, where are you? Why aren’t you here? I glance at Jim. Maybe I can talk to him: “Jim?” He doesn’t make eye contact. He looks slightly glassy, swaying in place as if anchored to the ocean floor in the grip of a watery current: Another geas? “Jim? Snap out of it!”

  His hand reaches out towards the music stand, adjusts the somewhat tattered, brown-covered score that waits for me, and Lecter snarls, triumphant.

  The young, incredibly pretty, and astonishingly talented soloist who carried me away with her brilliance during the first half – she’s barely twenty and she’s already better than I’ll ever be – leans towards me and peers at my instrument in perplexity. “Who made this?” she asks, raising one perfectly threaded eyebrow. “I haven’t seen one of these before —”

  I manage to tear my eyes away from the cover of the score and stare at her. “If you value your life, run,” I hiss at her, and she recoils, eyes wide. “I mean it! Get out now, before it’s too late!” I raise my bow and lay it across Lecter’s strings, and he responds, just a faint ripple of lightning blue running up and down the fingerboard, which is incredibly sensitive tonight.

  “Who are you?” she asks.

  “Trafalgar Square. The Mayor, remember? Things are going to break bad. Get as many people out as you can —”

  The lights are going down on the audience, and the background of noise changes. Jim is still swaying slightly, and after a moment I realize he isn’t blinking: faint tear tracks run down his cheeks, but that’s an autonomic reflex. “If you’ve done anything to him,” I warn Lecter, “I’ll —”

  ***Not me.*** Lecter sounds awfully smug. ***Play now?*** His anticipation fills me with an awful, dull foreboding.

  Beside the conductor, the announcer clears his throat, then raises a cordless microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to announce a change of program for the second half.”

  He pauses. You could hear a pin drop. Changes of program are not normal during the Last Night of the Proms. “We will, of course, be concluding the evening as usual with a round of ‘Rule, Britannia!’ then Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 in D major, ‘Jerusalem,’ and the national anthem. But first —

  “First, we have something very special for you tonight. It has never been played before in a concert hall: indeed, the score of this piece was thought to have been lost until, barely a month ago, a copy came to light in the rare manuscripts archive during the clean-up after the Mad Scientist Professor Freudstein’s robbery of the British Library! Some of you may have heard of a famously obscure play called The King in Yellow – it was in part the subject of a television crime drama last year. The King in Yellow was converted to an opera but never performed in full; Franz Kafka prepared the libretto and a score was subsequently written by his collaborator, the violinist Erich Zahn, for performance on specially adapted instruments of his own devising, but the rise of fascism put an end to all attempts to perform it until after the war. During
the early 1960s, Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop attempted to rescore the concerto for electronic instruments, but the controversial nature of the piece resisted attempts to bring it to a mainstream audience.

  “Until now, that is. With the recovery of the original score we are delighted to present, for the first time, the extraordinary violin sonata from the second act that marked the zenith of Erich Zahn’s career. Our special guest soloist for tonight is Dr. Dominique O’Brien, lecturer in music at Birkbeck College, who is not only a leading authority on atonality in modernist composition during the Weimar period, but a talented soloist in her own right and one of the few musicians who performs with an original Zahn instrument. Accompanying her on percussion, wind, and brass is the BBC Philharmonic orchestra, while elements of the text will be narrated as prose by…”

  Jim reaches out jerkily, as if not in control of his own arm muscles, and turns back the cover to reveal the first page. My nerveless feet shuffle sideways, positioning me before the stand. I turn to face the invisible audience, wishing that my own superpower would manifest right now and vanish me from their purview – wishing the very earth would open up beneath my feet and swallow me. My guts are loose with fear; this is not stage fright but something far, far worse: the sum of all my nightmares.

  I can’t stop myself: I read the bracketed staves of the first line, see how the movement begins with the wind section, and where I’m supposed to come in. A will not my own compels me to seat my instrument properly between shoulder and chin, and pushing past my terror, brushing my pathetic resistance aside, Lecter takes control of my wrists and fingertips. My traitor hands begin to play.

  I have been playing the violin since I was eight years old, and I’ve practiced virtually every day with Lecter for the past decade. I’ve published papers on the intersection of music theory and occult inference systems; I came to the attention of the Laundry for my research – and the Black Chamber, too – so I know whereof I speak when I say that music has power. I also know what I’m on about when I assert, with some certainty, that while I am a reasonably proficient musician, I am in no way up to the standard of a guest soloist performing before the Last Night audience at the Albert Hall. (Third violin, maybe – at a pinch, if I really worked at it and the orchestra director was hard up for talent.)