Empire Games Series, Book 1

by Charles Stross

  “We won, 4-2.” He’d noticed no sign of surveillance on his way to the meet. The set of her shoulders relaxed infinitesimally. “We have maybe fifteen minutes—no longer. It’s not safe: they’re rolling out more and more networked cameras.” The safe duration for contact was narrowing all the time.

  “Damn.” Her expression was pinched. Too much tension there, he thought. He’d known Paulie for years, almost since before the Clan survivor’s exile in the Commonwealth: she’d been a protegé of Miriam herself. “That’s not good. I’m not sure I can cope if it falls below five minutes.”

  He took a mouthful of soda. As ever, it tasted oddly alien—almost familiar, but not quite right, too sweet. It was the high-fructose corn syrup they put in everything, he decided; it tasted weird if you were used to cane sugar. “You don’t have to. You do a good and valuable job here, but if you think they’re onto you, or if it’s too stressful, all you have to do is say so: we can arrange an extraction to time line three whenever you want. There’s no reason for you to risk detection.”

  She shook her head, very slightly. “I have family. Two nieces and a nephew who just married.” She paused. “Also, this is my country. It’s been good to my family, and good for me: I can’t just leave.”

  He put the drink down, allowed his bag to slide down to the floor by the side of the booth. “Nevertheless, the offer remains open. She said I was to remind you that extraction is the lesser evil, compared to spending the rest of your life in a supermax prison cell for assisting supposed terrorists.” He paused. “I don’t like to be the bringer of bad news, but the risk level is becoming unacceptable. We’re going to have to stop meeting like this soon, possibly in as little as three months. We can work out another protocol for risk mitigation in the short term that’ll keep things going a bit longer, but…” He shrugged.

  “I don’t want to relocate if I can avoid it.” She twitched: her expression was haunted. “I know how stupid that sounds. I ought to take you up on your offer: if I was sensible, I would. I mean, you’re winding down your operations over here, aren’t you? But part of me keeps thinking it’s about me. That I’m too old and unstable and you’re just saying this to cut me loose gently.”

  “Eighteen million lives,” he said. “That’s what the antibiotic factories bought us.” The factories whose plans she’d researched and packaged for her world-walking employers, years earlier. “You asked last time, so I went and looked it up. Paulie, we’re not firing you. We owe you too much.”

  She relaxed very slightly. “You’re just flattering me now.”

  “There is a faraway land where you are known and honored as a hero of the revolution.” He didn’t have to fake sincerity. Then force of habit prompted him to glance at his antique windup wristwatch: “Nine minutes left.”

  “The shopping bag is full,” she said. A moment later he felt something nudge against his ankle: a messenger bag, identical to his own, but considerably heavier. “I was unable to obtain a couple of the items on the list: I hope the substitutions are appropriate.”

  “Thank you,” said the spy, reaching down to move her bulging bag closer to his feet. “They almost always are; you should know that by now.” Paulette was a very experienced supplier: she knew exactly what interested Hulius and his bosses. He nudged his own bag toward her. It was empty but for a block of increasingly useless $20 bills and the usual burner phone, battery physically disconnected, with a shopping list stored in its memory. When she got home she’d turn it on and use the stored credit in it to purchase items on the list, whereupon she’d arrange for delivery to a friendly local bodega. When the job was done she’d turn the phone off again for good, using a hammer. Once sterilized with acetone, the fragments could be safely flushed down a storm drain.

  “They’ve discontinued the specific power supply model required for item eleven. I ordered a replacement device,” she said.

  “Thank you.” He smiled for her and tried to put some warmth into the expression. Isolation took its toll on the sanity and sense of self-worth of the long-distance agent. “I really mean that. What you do here is making a huge difference. More than you can imagine.”

  She sighed pensively, picked up her glass, and drained it. “I should go now,” she said.

  He checked his watch. Four minutes remaining. “Yes, I think so.” He stood up and shouldered the messenger bag: it was far heavier than the one he’d walked in with. “The next rendezvous is in memory. Queens, I think. I’ll take the front entrance, you take the back.”

  “Goodbye, Hulius,” she said, sounding sad. “Give my best to Miriam.”

  “I will,” he replied. “Good luck, Colonel.” He stood and left, heading toward his bicycle.

  The spy watched through the window for a couple of minutes, until she could stand the tension no longer. Rising, she walked to the back of the diner and then through a door, the exit into the alleyway behind. The cameras overlooking the dumpsters had been carefully tagged with graffiti the week before: blinded by paint. Nobody saw her leave.

  Fifteen years of my life for eighteen million lives, she thought. From anyone but Miriam’s messenger she wouldn’t have taken it: she’d have sneered. The offer of extraction and a fresh start in a new world felt like a cynical joke. Who would she be, over there? A fifty-year-old spinster with no family and no life, just a pension and a medal to wear at alien parades: a life sacrificed on the altar of an undeclared war. Whereas this was her country: it had taken in her great-grandparents, the GI Bill had put her father through college, and she’d grown up and lived her entire life here. The thought of moving away was almost unbearable. Then the claustrophobic threat of exposure, the fear of omnipresent surveillance, closed in on her once more. Sometimes it felt like a noose around her neck, threatening to strangle the breath in her throat. Sometimes she wanted to scream. Is this all there’s ever going to be for me? Paulette wondered. Where did it all go so wrong?

  PALACE OF THE PEOPLE’S DEPUTIES, NEW LONDON, TIME LINE THREE, JULY 2005

  Forget musketry. Forget aviation carriers. You’re going to need washing machines. Lots of washing machines.

  There’s a saying that goes something like this: “Lieutenants study tactics, colonels study strategy, generals study logistics, and field marshals study economics.” But economists—the smart ones—study education. We’ve got three hundred and eighty million people on two continents, and another thirty to fifty million overseas, and these people are the foundation on which you are building your Commonwealth. Half of them are women. Of those, more than half are of working age … but they typically spend fifteen hours a week slaving over washboards or banging cloth on rocks, and another five to ten hours a week sewing.

  That’s a hundred and ninety million women, a hundred million workers, spending a third of their working time unproductively. Roll out free laundry services inside every factory gate and you gain the equivalent of thirty million extra full-time workers. Or you can use the time not spent on drudgery to upgrade those women’s education by about one high school year per twelve months. If you do that, it is an investment that pays off in the future. No productivity gain for five years, but then thirty million extra skilled workers become available. Or twenty million skilled workers, and an army of teachers to educate the next generation. In military terms, that’s enough to increase our economic base by about twenty percent. Enough to support a hundred divisions. Or a spare navy and a half. Or the nuclear—uh, corpuscular weapons program.

  You’re going to need the working women, because the United States is coming.

  They have aircraft that can cross between time lines. They have corpuscular petards—atomic weapons, they call them. We face a development gap of roughly sixty years. That’s how far ahead of us they are, in terms of science and engineering. It’s not insurmountable, but there’s more to it than just better nutritional supplements and technological toys: a lot of it is psychological. They have different ways of looking at things, better cognitive models for underst
anding certain types of problems. And they’re vastly more efficient at logistics and training than we are. Unfortunately for us, their government is frightened and angry, and they have already incinerated time line one, the first other inhabited time line they discovered.

  We can’t afford to get this wrong. Sooner or later they will discover the Commonwealth: and they are a far deadlier threat to the Revolution than the French Empire or the remnants of the old regime.

  If we don’t deploy those extra thirty million workers, then we’ve lost a quarter of our workforce before we even begin. We also need to educate our people. Many of those workers could be teachers instead. We need those teachers to educate in turn the generation of skilled workers and specialists that we’ll need in twenty years’ time. And they will be vital to our tertiary education system, which will equip that next generation for the high-technology jobs that are coming. These in turn will be generated by the series of industrial revolutions we’re going to embark upon.

  Yes, I said industrial “revolutions.” Plural. Technologies are not neutral: they come with attached agendas, with associated ways of thinking. Industrial revolutions are inherently political revolutions. Today’s ironworkers and coal miners will find it hard to adapt to tomorrow’s automated factories and thinking machines. It would be very difficult for an entrenched empire to survive such a series of revolutions without experiencing serious unrest, but you—we, gathered here today—are the party of revolution. Our whole raison d’être is to ride the tidal wave of change and use it to build a better future. This should not be beyond us.

  If we try and make a sixty-year leap forward in, say, thirty years, we’ll still be behind the Americans when we get there—they’ll have moved another thirty years ahead of us. So what I’m proposing to do is to aim ahead of the target. Merely modernizing the New American Commonwealth on an industrial level should be achievable in thirty years, but we must also build in social structures that enable our successors to maintain the pace of progress, to make it an ongoing process. Modernization can become the engine of continuing revolution.

  Radical citizenship and a universal franchise are a good start, but that’s not enough. We need to produce an educated, skilled workforce, and to do that we need to deliver full female emancipation—for which family planning services are essential. Workplace nurseries are also essential. And health care and school support are both essential too. They are also popular with women who vote. And they will vote.

  Next slide, please.

  Some of you are thinking that if we need more workers, we should simply breed them. That all that’s needed is to focus our efforts on reducing childhood mortality through inoculation campaigns and the new antibiotics. But the change I’m proposing isn’t just about numbers, it’s about quality. I’m proposing that we engineer a demographic transition, from a society with a high birth rate and a high death rate to one with a low birth rate and low death rate. Once we get there it becomes cost-effective to train and educate everyone to a high level, because we’ll recoup the investment over their working life. That’s one of the keys to rapid development: a transition to smaller families, much higher educational attainment, and new technologies. These factors combine to produce a generation that can work far more efficiently than their predecessors.

  In time line two, this happened decades ago in the United States and Europe. It’s happening right now in China and India. Their economies are growing at a sustained average of more than ten percent a year. In five decades they have gone from peasant agriculture to placing spaceships in orbit around Mars. But you can’t do that with unskilled labor and a workforce that systematically excludes half the population. Or with ill-educated women who are too busy and too fatigued to give their babies the attention they need to stretch their minds, teaching them to learn how to learn.

  Next slide, please.

  Communications and information technology is the next key area where the USA is notionally ahead of us; arguably, this is the most significant area of all. Right now we’re barely aware of its existence, but it’s the main engine behind the recent runaway growth in the USA, amounting to a new industrial revolution. It has also led to a number of negative problems there, including increasing structural unemployment, a ridiculously hypertrophied police state, and fiscal instability. But forewarned is forearmed, and therefore I propose that we make an end run around their worst mistakes by setting up the security frameworks for our Commonwealth’s communication networks a decade before we need them …

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, TIME LINE TWO, MARCH 2020

  To get to his exfiltration site, Hulius needed to take his bike on the subway for three stops. It was a calculated risk: his mission planners had decided it was faster and marginally less dangerous than requiring him to ride for fifteen blocks through Brooklyn, and if the weather was inclement it was clearly preferable. But this was where he ran into trouble.

  To get to the subway station he pedaled uphill along a couple of residential roads, then turned onto a main street. It was an uneventful, if effortful, ride. He was in good shape for his age, but the way the Americans had taken to neglecting their road surfaces was shameful, and by the end of the trip he was glad for the front and rear shocks on the mountain bike. Every second he spent in time line two gave him a crawling gunsight sensation between his shoulder blades, as if one of the Americans’ invisible flying killer robots was stalking him across the streets of the city. While his path took him past no fewer than nineteen CCTV cameras, most of these were domestic or commercial alarm systems: only one was connected to the municipal surveillance system, and that via the Department of Transport automatic number plate lookup system. Even in the United States, bicycles were not yet expected to bear plates.

  But the entrance to the subway station took Hulius down a flight of drab concrete steps, into an underground vestibule with ticket machines and barriers, and here things changed. The city of New York had become extremely sensitive to terrorist threats since the turn of the twenty-first century, and the subway was seen as a primary target. Not only that: it was a highly efficient checkpoint—after all, almost everybody used it.

  Entering the station, Hulius passed under the lenses of cameras on the staircase, of cameras fronting the ticket machines, of cameras watching the faces of everybody passing through the barriers, and, finally, of the cameras on the platform and on the subway train itself. These cameras had just enough onboard intelligence to match faces against a database of persons of interest, and to call for help if they scored a hit.

  And, all unbeknowst to him, Hulius had become a person of interest.

  It wasn’t because he had been detected making contact with Paulette Milan on a previous visit. Hulius’s tradecraft was watertight, his organization’s doctrine as good as any. It wasn’t because he’d been observed behaving oddly. It was simply that bigger memory cards made it practical to store more faces on each camera node, and in addition to the FBI’s Most Wanted, the cameras now looked for a wide range of interesting people. Hulius was a person of interest because he’d been observed on numerous previous occasions and never identified. His face was known, his biometrics logged; but he was never associated with the same cell phone ID, or with RFID tags in an ID card (or the washing instruction labels in his clothing), or even with the same bicycle. Hulius was a blind spot in the surveillance network’s purview, like the 600-mile-per-hour moving hole in the radar reflection of a rain cloud that betrays the passage of a stealth bomber.

  And as he walked toward the back of the platform for a train to Forest Hills, phones began to buzz.

  As it happened, Hulius didn’t have to cool his heels for long: after just four minutes a 7 train screeched and rattled its way to a halt beside the platform, and he rolled his bike aboard.

  The organization had run couriers through the city before, equipped with carefully configured sensors, programmed to record the distribution of monitoring cameras. They carried wi-fi receivers in promiscuous mode, sniffing f
or buried ubicomp cells. They also used jail-broken phones with baseband chips hacked to help them map cell towers. The results were alarming. In the past three years, the density of surveillance devices scattered through New York City had skyrocketed tenfold, and there was no sign that this increase would slow down until every square meter of sidewalk and road had its own secret police machine, vigilant for signs of subversion.

  What the organization hadn’t done was to run the same tests on subway trains.

  Fortieth Street, Queens Boulevard. Three stations ahead, four Transit Police stopped what they were doing and paused, listening to their earpieces. Walking, not running—there was plenty of time—they began to converge on the nearest eastbound platform. (Two other cops, busy with a random search, declined the call.)

  Forty-sixth Street station. Hulius had, over many years, developed an almost supernatural sensitivity to the signs and portents of operations on hostile soil. Right now, he wasn’t on full alert; but he was never entirely relaxed when on a mission, and some instinct he couldn’t name made him tense up and glance surreptitiously up and down the almost deserted subway car.

  Too long, he thought, his skin crawling. The train sat at the platform edge, brakes ticking, transformer fans humming. Something’s wrong. Ten seconds stretched into twenty, then thirty. Uh-oh. It might just be a signaling fault, he told himself; that’s probably all it is. But the MTA had in-cab signaling these days, didn’t it? They’d just completed a monstrously expensive upgrade to the entire network.

  Hulius took a lurching step to one side just as the doors hissed and rattled closed. Cold sweat burst out up and down his spine. The train began to move. He looked around quickly. Reasons for delaying a train: (1) signal at red, (2) mechanical fault, (3) allowing someone to get into position ahead. Scheiss, time to bail! Maybe he was spooking at shadows, but instinct told him otherwise.