Empire Games Series, Book 1

by Charles Stross

  COL. SMITH: I think we’re going to need superego handles.

  AGENT O’NEILL: What?

  DR. SCRANTON: Do tell.

  COL. SMITH: We’ve got her relationship with her family. That’s a subconscious drive; call it her id. We’ve got her organizational relationship with us—ego level, she knows we trained her and pay her. And there’s a bit of idealism going on behind that carefully controlled shell—if BLACK RAIN is a closed society, I think we can count on her basic loyalty to bring her home. But to cement it on top, I want to give her a superego drive. A rational long-term explanation for why she should stick with us and not defect or desert. So I’m going to run her through the Valley of the Gate, give her the dog and pony tour, and see if the implications spook her as much as they spook everyone else.

  AGENT GOMEZ: This is your motivational big stick, huh? It’s a bit limp—

  COL. SMITH: On the contrary. Once she knows about the Valley, she’ll know rationally that she can run as far as she wants but she can’t hide. She can hide from us, but she can’t hide from them.

  AGENT GOMEZ: Tenuous, very tenuous.

  COL. SMITH: You really think so? Listen, I’ve spent some time with Rita now, and I think I’ve got her measure. She’s a high-functioning introvert, so she doesn’t open up easily—this is a good profile in a HUMINT asset. It means she’s deceptively compliant, even slippery. But she’s not a perfectly spherical human-shaped object of uniform density. Beckstein’s meddling counterculture mother picked the adoption family well. What Rita’s really about is her grandfather. She pretty much worships him, and my team finally worked out why Beckstein mère picked him—

  AGENT O’NEILL: This is Kurt Douglas we’re talking about, yes?

  DR. SCRANTON: We already investigated him.

  COL. SMITH: Yes, I expect the FBI checked him out when he first arrived here. He came from the German Democratic Republic—over the Wall, or rather, over the fence—in the late sixties. After his compulsory military service he volunteered for the Grenztruppen, the border troops, just to get into a position to defect. He deserted—drugged his unit’s dog team—then figured out his way through a minefield. Stole a map, as I recall.

  DR. SCRANTON: Yes, that showed a lot of initiative. The FBI backgrounder was quite positive about him …

  COL. SMITH: Well, I detailed a couple of people to do some digging, because I thought it was a bit suspicious, and I was right. The Grenztruppen weren’t like our Customs and Border Protection. CBP are cops; the GDR’s border troops were military, and elite military at that. If they’d caught him in the act, they’d have shot him. If he survived, he faced five years in jail and probably espionage charges on top. He claimed to be a motivated political dissident, but back then everyone did. It went down well with the FBI and they rubber-stamped his Green Card and didn’t flag him when he applied for citizenship. What caught my attention is that he left family behind. His mother and father, grandmother, two sisters, plenty of cousins.

  AGENT O’NEILL: Huh? He broke his handles?

  COL. SMITH: That’s what got me wondering.

  DR. SCRANTON: What are you suggesting?

  COL. SMITH: He had a plan, he had the means—why didn’t he bring them with him?

  AGENT GOMEZ: What did you dig up?

  COL. SMITH: I put through a request to our friends in the BfV, the German security agency, to look for signs of Kurt Douglas in the archives they inherited from the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung—the Stasi’s foreign intelligence division. They didn’t find a case file as such, so there’s no evidence that he was a spy, but it turns out that Kurt wasn’t just a border guard either. He was a member of a Pass and Control Unit—the special troops who controlled crossing points, not just securing the border itself—and the Pass and Control Unit troops were all members of the 6th Main Department of the Stasi.

  AGENT O’NEILL: Ouch!

  AGENT GOMEZ: So Kurt is ex-Stasi? That means his immigration status is—

  COL. SMITH: Don’t say it. You’re thinking we could use this as a handle on Rita, aren’t you? Threaten her beloved grandfather with deportation if she steps out of line.

  AGENT GOMEZ: Yes, but—

  COL. SMITH: Deportation to that well-known starving hellhole and backwater, Germany.

  AGENT GOMEZ: Oh.

  COL. SMITH: Where he has relatives, will be received with open arms as one who turned against the GDR for moral reasons, and can probably claim a pension.

  AGENT GOMEZ: Isn’t lying on your naturalization form a felony? Or, or, we could nail him for conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the US Attorney General—

  COL. SMITH: We’d have to convince a judge to play along. There’s no positive evidence that Kurt was a sleeper, and in any case the GDR collapsed more than thirty years ago. It’s ancient history.

  DR. SCRANTON: FISA has plenty of judges. We could pick one who lost relatives during the cold war, if we really had to.

  COL. SMITH: But it’d be better all round if we didn’t. I can’t think of a better way to break Rita—to make her hate us—than threatening her family. The reason I brought this up … Rita imprinted on a guy who clearly had some exposure to tradecraft at an early age. Beckstein Senior probably picked the adoptive family precisely because she was looking for someone with the right skill set, and she hit the jackpot. Do you realize what this means?

  DR. SCRANTON: (slowly) We’ve won the lottery on a rollover.

  AGENT GOMEZ: You’re saying she—

  DR. SCRANTON: Our prototype candidate doesn’t match the personality profile for a world-walking intelligence asset by accident. She matches it because she’s been trained for it since birth! Trained by a professional paranoid who learned how to operate in a totalitarian police state. Trained to keep her head down, trained how to avoid attention. Admittedly she was trained by a role model with limited experience of a modern ubiquitous computing panopticon, but—

  COL. SMITH: We don’t need DRAGON’S TEETH—and JAUNT BLUE—equipped agents to get us intel on adversaries who have Facebook and Google. We have full-spectrum infowar dominance in that sector. We’re trying to develop a world-walking intel capability targeting adversaries who are old-school.

  DR. SCRANTON: Handle her with kid gloves, Colonel. It takes a generation to breed a resource like this—they don’t grow on trees. You were absolutely right to draw this to my attention. Give her the Valley tour if you think it’ll help motivate her: hell, give her anything she wants, if you think it’ll make her love us. But you don’t have a lot of time. We need to get this show on the road.

  COL. SMITH: How long do I have?

  DR. SCRANTON: A week, Colonel. Just one week. Then you need to start her mission training.

  END TRANSCRIPT

  BALTIMORE, TIME LINE TWO, JULY 2020

  Two days later they discharged Rita from the clinic and drove her down to Brooklyn in the back of a van with blacked-out windows. The day after that, they put her on a train to D.C., with orders to overnight in a hotel room, then report to an office in Baltimore the following day. The e-mail came attached to a DHS-backed credit vCard for her fatphone, and stern instructions for how to record subsistence expenses. Traveling on the government’s tab: I’ve come up in the world, she realized. Shame it’s economy class all the way. (Except on the high-speed train, which was business class only.)

  Being at semiliberty felt strange after months on a training course and two weeks in a clinic, like release from an unusual incarceration. On the train, she whiled away a couple of hours catching up with her FB friends: seeing who’d changed jobs, married, gotten ill, had babies, gotten cats. But there was something curiously distancing about observing her ex-classmates from college and high school at this remove, as if she were watching them in a zoo, from the other side of a wired glass window. It felt dishonest. I’m on my own, she realized. When she’d been struggling for acting gigs and casual employment, she’d just been another Generation Zer. But now she was loc
ked into something much larger, a cog in a huge, invisible machine. Even if she broke security and tried to explain herself to her friends, most of them wouldn’t understand: they’d be like dogs barking at a lecture on the semiotics of Shakespeare. If they did understand her, it would be even worse. It would mean they were wolves in the night, hunting for security leaks.

  When FB got old, she logged on to a couple of geocachers’ boards. But then second thoughts arrived. She had a job that involved working for professional paranoids. It had been bad enough explaining geocaching during that polygraph interrogation: what if they were watching her? Worse, what if the watchers didn’t know it was harmless? Geocaching had gotten started as a popular hobby that mimicked old-school tradecraft. Then—as group activities tend to over time—it had gotten more complicated. These days, teams competed to muggle each other’s caches and intercept cyphered communications in travel bugs; it looked so like the real thing that the risk of coming to the attention of people with absolutely no sense of humor whatsoever could not be discounted, just as one who works for the post office might want to rethink the wisdom of using photographs of their coworkers as targets on the firing range.

  Rita was beginning to realize that the DHS had inadvertently dropped a neutron bomb on her social life, destroying her personal relationships—even her hobbies—but leaving the bare-walled buildings of her experiences and skills intact. It didn’t hurt: like waking up to a tooth with a dead root that hadn’t succumbed to infection yet, the pain lay in the future.

  The next morning, she repacked her bags, checked out, and headed for the office address she’d been given. It turned out to be located in yet another anonymous concrete ten-story cube, part of the constellation of government buildings that had sprung up in Baltimore as government overflowed from the downtown D.C. fallout zone.

  She wasn’t sure what to expect of her posting at first. What she found was an office building shared between a bunch of DHS back-end divisions: everything from procurement services to HR and IT support. But there were uniformed officers at the front desk, sitting under a huge gold-fringed flag, and they were expecting her. “Please spit here, ma’am,” said one of the guards, proffering a tube. Rita spat to order. “Thank you. Please take a seat and wait over there while we authenticate you, ma’am. Bags go on the belt.”

  There were DNA scanners everywhere. Fly’s-eye arrays of webcams goggled from the corners of the ceiling. The turnstile led to an area with X-ray belts for bags and T-wave booths for bodies. Her phone rolled over onto a red FEDERAL OVERRIDE network ID instantly. Nobody wanted terrorists to be able to bring phone-controlled bombs into federal buildings, not after 7/16. Not that smartphones or fatphones had existed back then, or that the terrorists who nuked D.C. had used phones of any kind at all, but—Rita flashed back to her own kidnapping and felt a sudden spike of remembered terror and pain.

  “Ma’am?” Rita looked up, broken out of her reverie. “Your badge is ready.” She approached the desk. “Fingerprints, please.” She spread her hands on the glass plates. “This is your visitor badge. Wear it at all times and go where it tells you. If you lose it or it’s taken from you, report to security immediately. You may now proceed to security screening, then go to room W4. The badge will show you the way. Do not cross any red lines on the floor or try to enter any doors the badge shows in red.”

  Rita took the smart badge and lanyard, looped it round her neck, and managed a weak smile: “Thanks.” She flipped the badge so she could see the animated arrows on the map display on its backside, and followed them down the rabbit hole. At least the security checkpoint here was less overloaded than the ones at Penn Station.

  Room W4 turned out to be a conference room on the fourth floor. As Rita let herself in, her phone vibrated. She stared at the message from Colonel Smith: Running late, be with you in 30. “Huh,” she said under her breath. There was nobody around, just a conference table and a sideboard with a coffee vending machine. Hurry up and wait.

  Smith took closer to an hour than thirty minutes to show up. “Sorry I’m late: I was in a meeting with the boss.” He glanced at her suitcase. “You’ll need that. Everything packed? Excellent, let’s go.”

  “Where are we going?” Rita asked, hurrying to keep up with him as he headed for the lift to the parking garage.

  “It’s called Camp Singularity, and it’s in time line four.” Elevator doors closed around them. She saw herself and the Colonel in the walls of the lift, reflected to infinity by a wilderness of mirrors. “You’ll be staying there for a couple of days.”

  “More training?”

  The elevator doors opened onto concrete and cars. “Not exactly: more like a background briefing. Stuff we want you to be aware of.”

  “Stuff.”

  “Stuff we shouldn’t talk about outside of a secure conference room—or outside of Camp Singularity.” A Mercury winked its sidelights and rolled out of its parking bay, turning toward them. Doors slid open. “Get in.” They sat in the back as the sedan made its way to the exit, steering wheel spinning eerily under the fingertips of an invisible AI driver. “We’ve got one more body to pick up, then we’ll go—”

  The car stopped at the top of the ramp, and the front passenger door opened. A few seconds later, Julie from HaptoTech climbed in. “Reporting for duty, sir! Hi, Rita.” The smile she sent Rita was just faintly apologetic.

  “Make yourself at home,” said Smith, ignoring Rita’s frozen face. Julie’s door closed; a second later the car moved off, heading for I-83. “Transit point’s about an hour out of town. Julie, you’ve seen the Valley, haven’t you? Why don’t you fill Rita in on it.”

  “Sure! Prepare to have your mind blown, Rita. Uh, sir, I assume she’s…”

  “She wouldn’t be in this car if she wasn’t cleared.” Smith closed his eyes. He looks tired, Rita realized. Like he’s been up all night. “Tell her about your first time out.” The car turned onto Charles Street and ground to a halt in the sudden snarl of traffic. “I’m going to catch thirty winks.”

  Rita wasn’t exactly feeling receptive. She fumed quietly behind a polite mask as Julie prattled on about the mind-expanding experience of a trip to some archaeological site in a capital-V Valley, somewhere over the rainbow. You set me up, she thought grimly, not sure whether to direct her venom at Julie, who was merely a pawn, or at the Colonel, snoring quietly beside her, his mouth disarmingly ajar, whose will was almost certainly the one in question: You set me up. There was no other plausible explanation for Julie to surface as a DHS undercover agent reporting to the Colonel. You had me under observation all the time I was at HaptoTech, and you want me to know it! But why?

  “—Climate in time line four is a lot cooler than here, because it’s in an ice age right now. The climatologists say it began about two thousand years ago because of anthropogenic change caused by an, uh, nuclear winter—” Julie was surreally lucid. For the trade show in Seattle she’d done a convincing impersonation of a bottle-blond bubblehead. Since then she’d lost the perm, dyed her hair back to a more natural chestnut, and acquired a set of rimless aug-reality specs. In office-casual she was almost unrecognizable. But she still wore a gold pin on her lapel, a hieroglyph of a scarab beetle. “They had a nuclear war back when the Roman Empire was at its peak. Freaky, no?”

  “I’m sorry?” Rita shook her head. “I didn’t catch that.”

  “I’ll show you when we arrive.” Julie gave her a worried smile. “Is he asleep?”

  Rita glanced sideways. “Yes for now.” Smith was in fact out cold, but she was not prepared to share a dust mote more than was strictly necessary with Julie right now.

  “I hope you’re not sore at me. I was just following orders—nobody even told me to keep an eye out for you!”

  “Well, that makes it all right.” Rita kept her tone even. “You don’t need my forgiveness, anyway.” Just the Colonel’s paycheck.

  “Like that matters? Listen, in this organization you go where you’re told and follow ord
ers. That’s all I was doing. No need to make it something personal!”

  Rita nodded, reluctantly. Julie had a point: once you took the agency’s coin you couldn’t really blame anyone else for the consequences.

  “Anyway, the Valley we’re going to really is a headfuck because those people were so far ahead of us it’s not even funny—”

  “Wait.” Rita struggled with the phantoms of her distraction: “People? We’re talking about another time line here, right? One that was nuked?”

  “Yes.” Julie was beginning to sound just slightly impatient with her. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  “But … hang on. I’ve been to time line four.” The safe room in the clinic had been located in that time line. So was Camp Graceland. “Isn’t it uninhabited?”

  “Yes! At least, it’s uninhabited now. We’re going to Camp Singularity, in the Valley.”

  “But if they’re—are there ruins?”

  “You bet,” said Julie, her voice rising slightly to match her fervor. “It’s every archaeologist’s dream, and more besides. You won’t believe your eyes!”

  CAMP SINGULARITY, TIME LINE FOUR, JULY 2020

  Camp Singularity was another DHS installation, a grim little cluster of prefab buildings huddled behind fences and surveillance cams that straddled the ridgeline of a forest valley. The trees were mostly conifers, dark green and spiny, and the weather was chill. A New England autumn transplanted to the latitude of Baltimore in early summer.

  By early afternoon, Rita had been checked in and assigned sleeping quarters, and had caught a late lunch with Julie—not a terribly sociable affair, despite the latter’s attempts at conversation. As Rita deposited her tray at the collection point, Julie was checking her glasses. “Come on,” she said. “Time for the tour.”

  There was a compact SUV waiting outside. Julie swung up into the driver’s seat; Rita took the passenger side. They bumped off toward the edge of the asphalt apron, then onto a dirt track that meandered toward the radar dishes and guard tower at the gatehouse. Rita finally cracked. “Is it far?”