The Annihilation Score

by Charles Stross

  I have email, lots of email. Temporary office space has been assigned in one of our outlying buildings just south of the river, under the shadow of the glittering green glass block-pile that is Legoland, the Secret Intelligence Service headquarters building. (That’s MI6 to you.) A memo from Emma MacDougal: she’s going to spend the morning trawling for available staff to assign to my department and she’ll send them across as soon as possible. Damn, I’ll have to get in to the new office early to head them off at the pass. Another email, this time from the secure Metropolitan Police intranet: Jo Sullivan wants to talk to me. Well, that’s good to know, because I want to talk to her. The shortest route to an arrested villain in an interview room is through his arresting officer’s boss, and Strip Jack Spratt is currently the only lead I’ve got on this Freudstein character.

  Of course I’m not totally naive, so I google Freudstein before I even think about going downstairs and seeing if my room tariff includes breakfast. First hit: an EBM/techno band from Brighton. Second hit: the villain in an obscure Italian cult horror movie from 1981. Somehow neither of these seem like promising candidates for the sort of lunatic who’d break into the Bank of England. I rub my forehead and groan. Usually when I go to sleep, all the crises of the day look better—or at least more distant—the next morning. This is that rare and unwelcome exception: a day when I wake up to find that yesterday’s bad news is still rumbling downhill, gathering momentum like a giant snowball.

  Despair, dismay, disorientation, and delusion: the four horsemen of the bureaucratic apocalypse are coming my way. I want to crawl back under the covers and hide from the world, but somehow I don’t think the world is going to let me escape so easily. So I roll sideways out of bed (a day older and a day creakier) and shuffle towards the compact hotel bathroom.

  Someone has been kind enough to send my suitcase over. I raid it for a change of underwear, then dress in my work weeds and head downstairs. I discover that I am set up for breakfast. Unfortunately the hotel buffet is pretty much wall-to-wall fried meat and carbs. I manage to choke down a bowl of muesli and some diabolically bad coffee before giving up and retreating back to my room. A quick call to the front desk confirms that I’ve got the room for two more nights, thanks to the SA: bless his little cotton socks for thinking it through. (By Friday the tabloids will begin to lose interest, and by Saturday I might be able to sneak back into my own home through the kitchen window without being mugged by paparazzi.) So I collect my violin case, shoehorn my laptop into my handbag, and head for the nearest tube station. It’s time to go to work.

  Work turns out to be a rented office suite in a refurbished warehouse in Hoxton, an odd survivor left over from the Silicon Roundabout boom. (The local council helpfully kicked out all the startups to make room for student flats: apparently rented accommodation is better for the post-housing boom economy than creating new businesses.) I get there a whisker before ten o’clock. There’s an anonymous-looking steel door with an entryphone system and reinforced bolts; behind it there’s a security desk, two unlabelled doorways with complex locks on them, and a blue-suiter who failed to hop on the G4S gravy train when it rolled past. “Dr. O’Brien,” I introduce myself, showing my warrant card. “I gather I have an office here.”

  The security officer stirs himself for long enough to look at my card, then does a double take. “I’m sorry, ma’am—Director—let me sign you in.” He takes my card and scans it, then unlocks a drawer and hands the card back to me, along with a lanyard and badge. I freeze for a moment, eyeball-to-eyeball with a glassy-eyed version of me who looks as if she’s just swallowed a frog. “Please come this way.”

  We go through the left door (which unlocks when you hold your ID badge against the sensor and face a camera at eye level). Behind it, the guard ushers me along a narrow windowless corridor, up the elevator to the fourth floor, and out into a stairwell with a glass-fronted interior reception area beyond it. “All yours, ma’am. I’d better get back to the front desk.”

  All mine? It feels very strange. There’s a bog-standard bleached-pine desk in the lobby area, but no PC or chair yet. A pile of flat-pack furniture boxes stacked up behind it appear to have been abandoned by the previous occupants. There are the usual false floor and ceiling tiles, beige carpet for the one and off-white polystyrene for the other. I use my badge to let myself into the offices beyond, noting that the door might be made of glass but it’s more than two centimeters thick and the copper-and-wire-mesh gasket of a Faraday cage is visible in the door frame, a security precaution intended to block wireless emissions.

  A completely empty office suite is more than a little eerie. I walk a circuit of the rectangular corridor, noting office doors, toilets, cafeteria. The cafeteria is bare, cupboard doors hanging open like hungry mouths. The only office with any distinguishing features at all is at the far corner: there’s a discreet plaque on the door that says DIRECTOR.

  I go in.

  As Director, I apparently rate a spacious, airy corner office with thick pile carpet and tinted windows that overlook the high street. More than that: before I get to it I have to run the gauntlet of a medium-sized outer office that is clearly intended for the director’s personal assistant. My offices are bigger than the top floor of my house. Alas, the effect is slightly spoiled by the profound lack of any visible furniture. Raised floor panels show where the phones and network cables will be plumbed in: but I suppose they think I’m such an elevated personage that I can just levitate in lotus position until such time as someone delivers my desk and chair.

  I pull out my phone to call Facilities back at the New Annex, but just as I’m about to dial, it vibrates to announce an incoming call. (So much for the Faraday cage.) There’s a familiar face on the screen and for a heart-stabbing moment I consider not answering: but no, that’s not an option.

  “Bob?”

  “Mo? How are you? I heard about the news—”

  “Where are you? Where are you staying? I haven’t been back home since yesterday lunchtime—”

  Our words collide and overlap in a birefringent sheen of ripples: or perhaps that’s just my eyes. I stop and listen, clinging to the phone as if it’s a life-saver.

  “I’m in the New Annex, Mo. It’s a real mess here; the fire extinguishers were triggered, there’s water damage and other stuff. Second floor’s utterly inaccessible while the crime scene folks work it over. I’m crashing on my office floor: I’ve got a sleeping bag. They want me to disarm all the traps in Angleton’s office and get into the Memex. It could take some time. How about you?”

  I twirl in place, very slowly. Is he sleeping in the office to avoid me, or avoid Lecter? That’s the question. “They’ve given me a corner office. Great view, shame about the furniture. Emma said she’d start sending people over this afternoon but unless Facilities get here first I’ve got nowhere to put them.” I realize dismally that we’re talking about work. Retreating into the routine to avoid dealing with the uncanny rift that’s opened up between us. “I need moral support. Can we meet up somewhere?”

  “Yes, but you said you haven’t been home—”

  “Paparazzi, dear.”

  “Did you feed Spooky?”

  Oh snap, I knew I’d forgotten something. Horrid little fleabag. “Yes, but that was yesterday and you were going to clean the litter tray and I can’t go home, I’m horribly busy and the journalists will doorstep me—”

  “Just stop it, Mo.” He sounds weary. “I’ll go round there as soon as I can get away from here, find a cattery or something. Park her in my office if not. It’s not fair to leave her alone in an empty house.”

  “I’ll be—” I take a deep breath. “I can go home on Saturday. The SA reckons the tabloids will lose interest after seventy-two hours.” I realize how stupid this is the moment I say it: I’m going to give a bored cat the free run of the house and bedroom, and ample time to demonstrate its diabolically inventive (not to say fra
grant) displeasure? I may not like cats, but that’s only because I understand the way their twisty little minds work. “If you can find time to pick her up some time today, I’d be ever so.” I dangle a concession in front of him: “You can even bring her home to stay once I’m able to move back in.”

  “Okay, I’ll do that. We still need to talk—”

  My phone vibrates again. “Uh oh, I’ve got an incoming. Looks like it’s Emma. Can we continue this later? Great, bye—smooches,” I add, but he’s already hung up. So by the time I utter the last word I’m speaking to Mrs. MacDougal from Human Resources. “Oops, that was meant for my husband. How are you this morning, Emma?”

  “I’m fine.” There’s a rather odd emphasis in her voice, as if to imply but you aren’t: but maybe that’s just my paranoia speaking. “I was calling to give you your initial personnel assignments; as you probably gathered, things are a little hectic today? But I’ve found four warm bodies for your team and we can fill in from there as the week goes on. I’ve got names for group tech support, two analyst/planners, and of course your deputy director—”

  “That’s great,” I say, and I mean it, “but where am I going to put them? There’s no furniture here, Emma! Not even chairs. Has anyone told Facilities?”

  “Oh hell, Moira was supposed to get onto that first thing. I told her to send six employee kits over—”

  “Would they be flat packs, by any chance?” I stalk towards the lobby area.

  “Yes, six desks, six chairs, six individual bookcases, and a supply cupboard—”

  “Bingo.” The teetering pile of boxes stares me. “Could you maybe send someone round with a screwdriver, no, make that a full toolbox? And half a dozen six-way mains extension bars.” My notebook is weighing my handbag down. “I don’t think we’ve got any network access here, so I’ll email you a bullet list of everything else I can think of that we’re going to need in the next twenty-four hours. We’re going to be running on laptops and external security discipline for a while.”

  “You do that,” Emma says warmly. “Anything else I can do for you?”

  “Yes; just tell anyone who asks that we’re not open for business today. Tomorrow is another matter.”

  “Okay, bye.”

  “Bye.”

  I put my phone away and head back to my enormous, empty office. I park Lecter’s case in the corner between the two windows, sit cross-legged in the middle of the carpet, and start typing furiously on my laptop. Because tomorrow may belong to me, but the day after tomorrow belongs to the Home Secretary: and if I’m not ready to deliver a dog-and-pony show by Monday, the presence or absence of our departmental coffee percolator will be the least of my worries.

  * * *

  The day passes in a blur. If you’ve ever moved house, you’ll have some inkling of what it’s like to bootstrap an empty office suite from scratch. I spend the first hour writing want lists for Emma to throw at her minions. Then the front door buzzer beeps for attention. It’s a bloke from Facilities, with toolbox, as requested. “One employee desk and chair set needs to go in each of those offices”—I point—“starting with the Director’s corner office and the receptionist’s room. Um. If there’s a separate management-grade kit, give it to the Director. And the stores cupboard can go in there.” I wave vaguely at the empty windowless room next to the kitchen.

  “Sure and I can be doing that.” He grins cheerily. “I’ll have you somewhere to sit in a jiffy.”

  “You get started.” I nod. “I’m nipping out. Back in an hour.”

  It turns out that there’s a Café Nero around the corner with free wifi and comfy leather sofas—they’re playing tag with Starbucks for the migratory worker base—so I take self plus violin there, and plant myself behind a laptop screen and a venti mocha with a double shot and a good view of the door and windows. Then I start hammering the keys: it turns out that HR have a canned departmental starter-kit on file, and there are a lot of forms to fill out. (Yes, we’ve all had the security talk about open wireless networks. I’ve also had the weekly special en-clueing from my dear husband. We have a VPN, and firewalls, and you do not want to mess with them because the design spec for the Laundry’s firewall software is not to keep intruders out, but to make them undergo spontaneous combustion when they get in: as Bob puts it, it’s the only way to be sure.)

  After an hour in the cafe I drift furtively back to my office suite. There is now a sign on the glass lobby door: TRANSHUMAN POLICY COORDINATION UNIT. It strikes me as indiscreet at first, but then I think it through: given that I’m running a Potemkin village, indiscretion had better be my middle name from now on. Just as long as it’s planned indiscretion.

  Back in my office, things are looking up: it contains a Desk and a Chair, both so grand that they really demand capitalization. The Desk is a very fine desk indeed—my laptop sits adrift in the middle of its empty bleached woodgrain ocean, looking lost. The Director’s throne is a high-end piece of Herman Miller sculpture: all resin and chrome, it looks as if it was designed by H. R. Giger. I check it carefully for teeth and ovipositors before I dare to sit on it. Once adjusted to my height and seating position, it is, indeed, indecently comfortable: I feel as if I’m levitating. Then I look at my laptop’s battery status and swear.

  Martin from Facilities sticks his head around the door while I’m crawling around on my hands and knees, plugging the computer’s power supply into the socket under the desk. “Miss? There’s someone at the front desk who says he’s been sent over to see you.”

  I scoot backwards and sit up, barely managing not to bang my head on the underside of the desk. “Send him in.” So much for directorial dignity. Bob did this for a living, for years on end, crawling under desks with one end of a cable clutched between his teeth? No wonder he went mad and volunteered for active ops.

  I’m back on my throne by the time the door opens. “Hello?” A hipsterish head—mid-twenties male, owlish black horn-rimmed spectacles and highly ironic beard—oozes round the door frame, followed shortly thereafter by a hipsterish body. “Dr. O’Brien? I’m Samuel Jennings. Emma MacDougal sent me.”

  “She did, did she?” I look at him for a while, until he swallows. There’s probably a personnel file clogging up my inbox, but I like to get an unvarnished look at people before I resort to the funhouse mirror of HR’s misconceptions. (The next personnel file I read that describes its subject accurately will be the first: at best they’re misleadingly out of date, and at worst they’re just plain misleading.) “As you can see, things are a bit sparse around here right now—sorry there’s no visitor’s chair yet! Your file hasn’t caught up with you. So, Samuel—or is it Sam? What do you do?”

  “What—” He shifts gears with an almost audible clunk. “Oh, that. Senior analyst, level two. Background in abstract theoretical xenobiology with application to endogenous evolved neurocomputing architecture.” The beard twitches in a self-deprecatingly ironic smile. “I think I’m here because I got caught moonlighting a year ago and HR carpeted me for it.”

  “Moonlighting?” I do a double take. Is that even possible? This is the Laundry. We have an oath of office that fries us from the inside out if we do anything remotely dodgy! I lean forward: “What were you doing?”

  “I have an, er, hobby. Scriptwriting comics. I’m a so-so illustrator but after doing some indy work I landed a gig writing for a second-tier Titan property.”

  Right. “So. And this qualifies you to work for Transhuman Policy Coordination, how?”

  “Beats me, but HR seem to think that writing about intelligent alien insect invaders from Sirius qualifies me as an expert on the paranormally enhanced.” He shrugs. “My office got trashed the day before yesterday so I’m temporarily homeless, and there’s the xenotech neurocomputing specialty to consider, and I’m an analyst, so I got this call from Moira in HR, and she said, ‘You’re the superhero expert, go analyze!’ So here I am.”
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br />   “Cool. You’ll have to tell me all about the comics business some day.” I stand up. “Let’s go find you an office. Got laptop?”

  “Got laptop.” He pats a carnivorous-looking Crumpler messenger bag.

  “Let’s get you going then. Hmm. As you can see, we’ve barely begun moving in. You can start by drawing up a wish list for equipment and I’ll forward it to Facilities—anything you expect you’ll need to get an analysis and reporting office for four up and running within the next month. You can also answer the door and send anyone new who shows up through to me. That’s just for today, mind. Tomorrow, we’ll hold an all-hands at two o’clock sharp. Clear?”

  “Absolutely.” His head bobs: he looks at me with an expression that makes me feel very strange for a few seconds until I realize what it signifies. I’ve mostly seen it in research students up ’til now. It’s the look you give your new and terrifyingly efficient and impressive boss on your way out their office door the first time you meet them, when you realize that you’ve survived the encounter and you don’t even need a change of underwear.

  Am I that kind of office dragon?

  It’ll be fun finding out.

  * * *

  By six o’clock I’m about ready to call it a wrap for the day. It’s threatening to get dark outside: the shadows are lengthening in the canyon-like street below my window, and the traffic is hitting its rush-hour peak. In addition to Sam, I have acquired another analyst (Nick: mid-thirties, serious male-pattern baldness on top, wiry build that hints at alarmingly athletic exercise preferences, specializes in traffic analysis, owns a huge DVD collection and identifies himself as a sad fan who goes to conventions for fun—almost as if it’s an ethnicity or a calling), and a techie (Sara: I vaguely know her, she used to work for Bob a couple of years ago). Sara gets a phone installed on every desk by five o’clock, promises to plumb us into the intranet tomorrow morning, and even finds me a visitor’s chair from somewhere. She seems a bit shy and diffident, but then again, I’m fifteen years her senior and the sign on my door says DIRECTOR.