Three Tales from the Laundry Files

by Charles Stross

  “Of course,” I shrug, trying to look embarrassed (it’s not hard): “but HR have got a bee in their bonnet about some European Directive on workplace health and safety and long-term disability resource provisioning that requires them to appoint a patient advocate to mediate with the ombudsman in disputes over health and safety conditions”—I shrug again. “It’s bullshit. You know it and I know it. But we’ve got to comply, or Questions will be Asked. This is the civil service, after all. And they’re still technically Laundry employees, even if they’ve been remanded into long-term care, so someone has to do the job. My managers played spin-the-bottle and I got the job, so I’ve got to ask you. If you don’t mind?”

  “If you insist, I’m sure something can be arranged,” Renfield concedes. “But Matron won’t be happy about you visiting the secure wing. It’s very irregular—she likes to keep a firm grip on it. It’ll take a while to sort a visit out, and if any of them get wind…”

  “Well, then, we’d just better make it a surprise, and the sooner we get it over with, the sooner I’ll be out of your hair!” I grin like a loon. “They told me about the observation gallery. Would you mind showing me around?”

  * * *

  We do the short-stay ward first. The ward is arranged around a corridor, with bathrooms and a nursing station at either end, and individual rooms for the patients. There’s a smoking room off to one side, with a yellow patina to the white gloss paint around the door frame. The smoking room is empty but for a huddle of sad-looking leather armchairs and an imposing wall-board covered in health and safety notices (including the obligatory “Smoking is Illegal” warning). If it wasn’t for the locks and the observation windows in the doors, it could be mistaken for the day room of a genteel, slightly decaying Victorian railway hotel, fallen on hard times.

  The patients are another matter.

  “This is Henry Merriweather,” says Dr Renfield, opening the door to Bed Three. “Henry? Hello? I want you to meet Mr Howard. He’s here to conduct a routine inspection. Hello? Henry?”

  Bed Three is actually a cramped studio flat, featuring a small living room with sofa and table, and separate bedroom and toilet areas opening off it opposite the door. A wind-up gramophone with a flaring bell-shaped horn sits atop a hulking wooden sideboard, stained almost black. There’s a newspaper, neatly folded, and a bowl of fruit. The frosted window glass is threaded with wire, but otherwise there’s little to dispel the illusion of hospitality, except for the occupant.

  Henry squats, cross-legged, on top of the polished wooden table. His head is tilted in my direction, but he’s not focusing on me. He’s dressed in a set of pastel-striped pyjamas the like of which I haven’t seen this century. His attention is focused on the Sister waiting in the corridor behind us. His face is a rictus of abject terror, as if the automaton in the starched pinafore is waiting to pull his fingers to pieces, joint by joint, as soon as we leave.

  “Hello?” I say tentatively, and wave a hand in front of him.

  Henry jack-knifes to his feet and tumbles off the table backwards, making a weird gobbling noise that I mistake at first for laughter. He backs into the corner of the room, crouching, and points past me: “auditor! Auditor!”

  “Henry?” Renfield steps sideways around me. She sounds concerned. “Is this a bad time? Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “You—you—” His wobbly index finger points past me, twitching randomly. “Inspection! Inspection!”

  Renfield obviously used the wrong word and set him off. The poor bastard’s terrified, half out of his tree with fear. My stomach just about climbs out through my ribs in sympathy: the auditors are one of my personal nightmares, and Henry (that’s Senior Scientific Officer Third, Henry Merriweather, Operations Research and Development Group) may be half-catatonic and a danger to himself, but he’s got every right to be afraid of them. “It’s all right, I’m not”—There’s a squeaking grinding noise behind me.

  Whirr-Clunk. “Miss-TER MerriWEATHER. GO to your ROOM.” Click. “Time for BED. IMM-ediateLY.” Click-clunk. Behind me, Nurse Flywheel is blocking the door like a starched and pintucked Dalek: she brandishes a cast-iron sink plunger menacingly. “IMM-ediateLY!”

  “Override!” barks Renfield. “Sister! Back away!” To me, quietly: “the Sisters respond badly when inmates get upset. Follow my lead.” To the Sister, who is casting about with her stalk-like Thaumic Thixometer: “I have control!”

  Merriweather stands in the corner, shaking uncontrollably and panting as the robotic nurse points at him for a minute. We ’re at an impasse, it seems. Then: “DocTOR—Matron says the patIENT must go to bed. You have CON-trol.” Clunk-whirr. The sister withdraws, rotates on her base, and glides backward along her rails to the nursing station.

  Renfield nudges the door shut with one foot. “Mr Howard, would you mind standing with your back to the door? And your head in front of that, ah, spy-hole?”

  “You’re not, not, nuh-huh—” Merriweather gobbles for words as he stares at me.

  I spread my hands. “Not an auditor,” I say, smiling.

  “Not an—an—” His mouth falls open and his eyes shut. A moment later, I see the moisture trails on his cheeks as he begins to weep with quiet desperation.

  “He’s having a bad day,” Renfield mutters in my direction. “Here, let’s get you to bed, Henry.” She approaches him slowly, but he makes no move to resist as she steers him into the small bedroom and pulls the covers back.

  I stand with my back to the door the whole time, covering the observation window. For some reason, the back of my neck is itching. I can’t help thinking that Nurse Flywheel isn’t exactly the chatty talkative type who’s likely to put her feet up and relax with a nice cup of tea. I’ve got a feeling that somewhere in this building, an unblinking red-rimmed eye is watching me, and sooner or later I’m going to have to meet its owner.

  * * *

  Andy was afraid.

  Well, I’m not stupid; I can take a hint. So right after he asked me to go down to St Hilda’s and find out what the hell was going on, I plucked up my courage and went and knocked on Angleton’s office door.

  Angleton is not to be trifled with. I don’t know anyone else currently alive and in the organization who could get away with misappropriating the name of the CIA’s legendary chief of counter-espionage as a nom de guerre. I don’t know anyone else in the organization whose face is visible in circa-1942 photographs of the Laundry’s line-up, either, barely changed across all those years. Angleton scares the bejeezus out of most people, myself included. Study the abyss for long enough and the abyss will study you right back; Angleton’s qualified to chair a university department of necromancy—if any such existed—and meetings with him can be quite harrowing. Luckily the old ghoul seems to like me, or at least not to view me with the distaste and disdain he reserves for Human Resources or our political masters. In the wizened, desiccated corners of what passes for his pedagogical soul he evidently longs for a student, and I’m the nearest thing he’s got right now.

  Knock, knock.

  “Enter.”

  “Boss? Got a minute?”

  “Sit, boy.” I sat. Angleton bashed away at the keyboard of his device for a few more seconds, then pulled the carbon papers out from under the platen—for really secret secrets in this line of work, computers are flat-out verboten—and laid them face-down on his desk, then carefully draped a stained tea-towel over them. “What is it?”

  “Andy wants me to go and conduct an unscheduled inspection of the Funny Farm.”

  Whoa. Angleton stares at me, fully engaged. “Did he say why?” he asks, finally.

  “Well.” How to put it? “He seems to be afraid of something. And there’s some kind of complaint. From one of the inmates.”

  Angleton props his elbows on the desk and makes a steeple of his bony fingers. A minute passes before a cold wind blows across the charnel house roof: “well.”

  I have never seen Angleton nonplussed before. The effect is
disturbing, like glancing down and realizing that, like Wile E. Coyote, you’ve just run over the edge of a cliff and are standing on thin air. “Boss?”

  “What exactly did Andy say?” Angleton asks slowly.

  “We received a complaint.” I briefly outline what I know about the shit-stirring missive. “Something about one of the long-stay inmates. And I was just wondering, do you know anything about them?”

  Angleton peers at me over the rims of his bifocals. “As a matter of fact I do,” he says slowly. “I had the privilege of working with them. Hmm. Let me see.” He unfolds creakily to his feet, turns, and strides over to the shelves of ancient Eastlight files that cover the back wall of his office. “Where did I put it…”

  Angleton going to the paper files is another whoa! moment. He keeps most of his stuff in his Memex, the vast, hulking microfilm mechanism built into his desk. If it’s still printed on paper then it’s really important. “Boss?”

  “Yes?” he says, without turning away from his search.

  “We don’t know how the message got out,” I say. “Isn’t it supposed to be a secure institution?”

  “Yes, it is. Ah, that’s more like it.” Angleton pulls a box file from its niche and blows vigorously across its upper edge. Then he casually opens it. There’s a pop and a sizzle of ozone as the ward lets go, harmlessly bypassing him—he is, after all, its legitimate owner. “Hmm, in here somewhere…”

  “Isn’t it supposed to be leak-proof, by definition?”

  “I’m getting to that. Be patient, Bob.” There’s a waspish note in his voice and I shut up hastily.

  A minute later, Angleton pulls a mimeographed booklet from the file and closes the lid. He returns to the desk, and slides the booklet towards me.

  “I think you’d better read this first, then go and do what Andy wants,” he says slowly. “Be a good boy and copy me on your detailed itinerary before you depart.”

  I read the cover of the booklet, which is dog-eared and dusty. There’s a picture of a swell guy in a suit and a gal in a fifties beehive hairdo sitting in front of a piece of industrial archaeology. The title reads: POWER, COOLING, AND SUBSTATION REQUIREMENTS FOR YOUR IBM S/1602-M200. I sneeze, puzzled. “Boss?”

  “I suggest you read and memorize this booklet, Bob. It is not impossible that there will be an exam and you really wouldn’t want to fail it.”

  My skin crawls. “Boss?”

  Pause.

  “It’s not true that the Funny Farm is entirely leak-proof, Bob. It’s surrounded by an air-gap but it was designed to leak under certain very specific conditions. I find it troubling that these conditions do not appear to apply in the present circumstances. In addition to memorizing this document you might want to review the files on GIBBOUS MOON and AXIOM REFUGE before you go.” Pause. “And if you see Cantor, give my regards to the old coffin-dodger. I’m particularly interested in hearing what he’s been up to for the past thirty years…”

  * * *

  Renfield takes me back to the smoking room and shuts the door. “He’s having a bad day, I’m afraid.” She pulls out a cardboard packet and extracts a cigarette. “Smoke?”

  “Uh, no thanks.” The sash windows are nailed shut and their frames painted over. There’s a louvered vent near the top of the windows, grossly unfit for purpose: I try not to breathe too deeply. “What happened to him?”

  She strikes a match and contemplates the flame for a moment. “Let’s see. He’s forty two. Married, two kids—he talks about them. Wife’s a schoolteacher, his deep cover is that he works in MI6 clerical.” (You’re not supposed to talk about your work to your partner, but it’s difficult enough that we’ve been given dispensation to tell little white lies—and if necessary, HR will back them up.) “He’s not field-qualified—mostly he does theory—but he worked for Q Division and he was on secondment to the Abstract Attractor Working Group when he fell ill.”

  In other words, he’s a theoretical thaumaturgist. Magic being a branch of applied mathematics, when you carry out certain computational operations, it has echoes in the Platonic realm of pure mathematics—echoes audible to beings whose true nature I cannot speak of, on account of doing so being a violation of the Official Secrets Act. Theoretical Thaumaturgists are the guys who develop new efferent algorithms (or, colloquially, “spells”): it’s an occupation with a high attrition rate.

  “He’s convinced the Auditors are after him for thinking inappropriate thoughts on organization time. There’s an elaborate confabulation, and it looks a little like paranoid schizophrenia at first glance, but underneath…we sent him to our Trust hospital for an MRI scan and he’s got the characteristic lesions.”

  “Lesions?”

  She takes a deep drag from the cigarette. “His prefrontal lobes look like Swiss cheese. It’s one of the early signs of Krantzberg Syndrome. If we can keep him isolated from work for a couple more months, then retire him to a nice quiet desk job, we might be able to stabilize him. K Syndrome’s not like Alzheimer’s: if you remove the insult it frequently goes into remission. Mind you, he may also need a course of chemotherapy. At various times my predecessors tried electroconvulsive treatment, prefrontal lobotomy, neuroleptics, daytime television, LSD—none of them work consistently or reliably. The best treatment still seems to be bed rest followed by work therapy in a quiet, undemanding office environment.” Blue cloud spirals toward the ceiling. “But he’ll never run a great summoning again.”

  I’m beginning to regret not accepting her offer of a cigarette, and I don’t even smoke. My mouth’s dry. I sit down: “Do we have any idea what causes K Syndrome?” I’ve skimmed GIBBOUS MOON, but the medical jargon didn’t mean much to me; and AXIOM REFUGE was even less helpful. (It turned out to be a dense mathematical treatise introducing a notation for describing certain categories of topological defect in a twelve-dimensional space.) Only the power supply for the mainframe—presumably the one Matron used—seemed remotely relevant to the job in hand.

  “There are several theories.” Renfield twitches ash on the threadbare carpet as she paces the room. “It tends to hit theoretical computational demonologists after about twenty years: Merriweather is unusually young. It also hits people who’ve worked in high-thaum fields for too long. Initial symptoms include mild ataxia—you saw his hand shaking?—and heightened affect: it can be mistaken for bipolar disorder or hyperactivity. There’s also the disordered thinking and auditory hallucinations typical of some types of schizophrenia.” She pauses to inhale. “There are two schools of thought, if you leave out the Malleus Maleficarum stuff about souls contaminated by demonic effusions: one is that exposure to high thaum fields cause progressive brain lesions. Trouble is, it’s rare enough that we haven’t been able to quantify that, and—”

  “The other theory?” I prod.

  “My favourite.” She nearly smiles. “Computational demonology—you carry out calculations, you prove theorems; somewhere else in the platonic realm of mathematics Listeners notice your activities and respond, yes? Well, there’s some disagreement over this, but the current orthodoxy in neurophysiology is that the human brain is a computational organ. We can carry out computational tasks, yes? We’re not very good at it, and at an individual neurological level there’s no mechanism that might invoke the core Turing theorems, but…if you think too hard about certain problems you might run the risk of carrying out a minor summoning in your own head. Nothing big enough or bad enough to get out, but…those florid daydreams? And the sick feeling afterwards because you can’t quite remember what it was about? Something in another universe just sucked a microscopic lump of neural tissue right out of your intraparietal sulcus, and it won’t grow back.”

  Urk. Not so much “use it or lose it” as “use it and lose it”, then. Could be worse, could be a NAND gate in there…“Do we know why some people suffer from it and others don’t?”

  “No idea.” She drops what’s left of her cigarette and grinds it under the heel of a sensible shoe. She catches my eye: “D
on’t worry about it, the Sisters keep everything orderly,” she says. “Do you know what you want to do next?”

  “Yes,” I say, damning myself for a fool before I take the next logical step: “I want to talk to the long term inmates.”

  * * *

  I’m half hoping Renfield will put her foot down and refuse point blank to let me do it, but she only puts up a token fight: she makes me sign a personal injury claims waiver and scribble out a written order instructing her to show me the gallery. So why do I feel as if I’ve somehow been outmanoeuvred?

  After I finish signing forms to her heart’s content, she uncaps an ancient and battered speaking tube beside her desk and calls down it. “Matron, I am taking the inspector to see the observation gallery, in accordance with orders from Head Office. He will then meet with the inmates in Ward Two. We may be some time.” She screws the cap back on before turning to me apologetically: “It’s vital to keep Matron informed of our movements, otherwise she might mistake them for an escape attempt and take appropriate action.”

  I swallow. “Does that happen often?” I ask, as she opens the office door and stalks towards the corridor at the other end.

  “Once in a while a temporary patient gets stir-crazy.” She starts up the stairs. “But the long-term residents…no, not so much.”

  Upstairs, there’s a landing very similar to the one we just left—with one big exception: a narrow, white-painted metal door in one wall, stark and raw, secured by a shiny brass padlock and a set of wards so ugly and powerful that they make my skin crawl. There are no narrow-gauge rails leading under this door, no obvious conductive surfaces, nothing to act as a conduit for occult forces. Renfield fumbles with a huge key ring at her side, then unfastens the padlock. “This is the way in via the observation gallery,” she says. “There are a couple of things to bear in mind. Firstly, the Nurses can’t guarantee your safety: if you get in trouble with the prisoners, you’re on your own. Secondly, the gallery is a Faraday cage, and it’s thaumaturgically grounded too—it’d take a black mass and a multiple sacrifice to get anything going in here. You can observe the apartments via the periscopes and hearing tubes provided. That’s our preferred way—you can go into the ward by proceeding to the other end of the gallery, but I’d be very grateful if you could refrain from doing so unless it’s absolutely essential. They’re difficult enough to manage as it is. Finally, if you insist on meeting them, just try to remember that appearances can be deceptive.”