The Annihilation Score

by Charles Stross

  “Not fisheries: that’s done and dusted as of last Thursday. No, I’m supposed to be back on my regular secondment with ACPO, monitoring developments relating to the steaming pile of crap that got unloaded on you last week. For which, you have my deepest sympathy.”

  “By steaming pile of etcetera am I right in assuming you mean the transhuman problem . . . ?”

  “That’s—” He sits up slightly and looks round. “Ah, looks like we’re nearly ready to start.”

  A procession is winding its way up the middle of the aisle. Jessica Greene is in the lead, murmuring forehead-to-forehead with a distinguished-looking fellow who I take to be the Permanent Secretary to the Home Office. They are followed, in strict pecking order, by three Ministers of State, two Parliamentary Undersecretaries of State, and four more terribly distinguished senior civil servants. They spread out and occupy the front row, and then my meeter-and-greeter walks up to the podium and starts things rolling.

  “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the weekly briefing. First, I note that the committee are present. Secondly, apologies. I’d like to draw your attention to item four on the agenda, reporting on the progress on the antisocial behavior reduction initiative: Mr. McBride sends his apologies, but he has been unavoidably delayed by circumstances beyond his control—there’s been a major RTA on the A40 and he’s stuck in the tailback. Other than that, the agenda as printed at eight thirty this morning is complete. So, moving swiftly on, item three: presentations. I’d like to introduce our first speaker . . .”

  God, I am so glad I’m not the first course on the menu. The Ministerial lions’ ears prick up, they lash their tails angrily. The gazelle at the focus of their amber gaze is here to report on progress in fixing shortcomings in a cluster of private-sector-outsourced immigration-processing facilities, and oh dear it’s definitely going to be Bambi tartare for dinner. He stumbles a couple of times under the weight of the Home Secretary’s unblinking medusoid stare. This is a woman who models herself on Margaret Thatcher, only without the warmth and compassion. The room is silent but for the scritching of pens on paper, writing death sentences for the poor underachiever’s career.

  Moving swiftly on.

  In what seems like no time at all, it’s my turn to take my place in the ring. Luckily for me the lions have already nibbled on their prey and are feeling distinctly post-prandial. I am, it seems, destined merely for after-dinner amusement. Lions are a little too intimidating for comfort, so I mentally replace them with the good old sapient cauliflowers from Arcturus as I rattle through my presentation.

  “Good morning. My unit has been tasked with developing a strategy initiative for reducing and containing the increase in transhuman-related crime. The full proposal is in your red box this morning. To summarize: we propose to pursue four distinct channels: analysis and intelligence, liaison and support for the police and security services, public information campaigns to get the government’s message across, and finally, active co-option and deployment of the more amenable superpowered. Let me tackle these in order . . .”

  I have to scramble to get my last proposal in under the descending curtain, but I make it just in time. I return to my seat with my pulse hammering and my blouse stuck to the small of my back; the trouble with sapient cauliflowers is that it’s impossible to read their expressions. They’re great for distraction-avoidance during a presentation, not so great if you’re looking for clues as to how it’s being received.

  I drop in my seat just as speaker #8 stands up. Jim leans towards me, confidingly: “Great show, excellent proposal,” he says quietly. “Well thought out.”

  “You think so?” I’m stunned.

  “Yes, but it’s anybody’s guess whether their right honorable selves will swallow it. That last one is bound to stretch their credulity, even if you and I know it makes sense.”

  Oh hell. I subside into the puddle of funk in the middle of my chair that I was afraid I’d end up in at the COBRA session. The next three presentations whizz through at high speed. And then . . .

  “Thank you, and that’s all the presentations. We will now break for ten minutes before opening to questions from the front bench,” says the fellow with the agenda. I sigh and try to stand on knees that are abruptly wobbly.

  Jim offers me a hand. “Are you all right?” he asks.

  “A bit stressed,” I admit. I haul out a tissue and dab at my forehead. “I was up until two this morning, working on that.” Sixty hours of sweat distilled down to sixteen minutes of concentrated stage fright.

  “Coffee?” he asks. “If you need to powder your nose, I’ll fetch one for you. How do you take it?”

  “White, no sugar,” I say gratefully, then grab Lecter and flee in search of the bathroom.

  When I get back to my seat—there was a queue for the ladies, would you believe, in a building commissioned in the twenty-first century—I find Jim waiting for me with a cup of coffee. Bless him: a man after my own heart. Not to mention that he’s a restful sight for sore eyes: he’s well built without being muscle-bound, moves lightly despite his height. I smile gratefully, stow Lecter under my seat, and accept the offered beverage: “Thanks.”

  “Happy to be of service. I remember what it was like when I first got on the list for these sessions: two hours of boredom interrupted by fifteen minutes of terror.”

  “That’s about—” I begin to reply, when there’s a ripple of silence and our moderator stands up to open the round of sudden-death questions.

  “Dr. O’Brien, please.” I recognize the Home Secretary’s icily polite diction. “We have some questions for you.”

  I leave my coffee untouched and march, stiff-legged, straight back to the podium. I’m too surprised for fear: I thought they were going to go after the illegal immigrant processing guy first?

  I find myself facing an audience which consists of about a tenth of the Cabinet, fronting a phalanx of about fifty Home Office executives any one of whom is senior—on paper, anyway—to the Senior Auditor. They run an organization with sub-agencies whose combined budget is bigger than Google or Microsoft, if you want to put it in multinational terms (as Mhari did), directing a couple of hundred thousand staff and contractors. And they’re looking at me as if I have a nonstandard number of heads or a violin case strapped to my back.

  “Dr. O’Brien,” the Home Secretary begins, surprisingly tentatively, “I’d like to thank you for giving the most creative proposal we’ve heard in this room in, hmm, two or three years. Very imaginative, forward-looking. Daring, one might even say.” Her tone is light, just this side of mocking. “How did you come to the conclusion that the Home Office needs a superhero team?”

  Oh you bitch. I keep my face carefully composed. “I did not come to that conclusion on my own, or rapidly. As the Secretary of State is aware, my organization has been tracking this phenomenon with increasing concern for a number of years, although it is only in the past three months that it has become apparent that the frequency of outbreaks is increasing exponentially. I’d like to stress that this proposal emerged by consensus after extensive monitoring and analysis. We believe that ninety-five percent of the problems we’ve been having can be addressed by providing a role model for good citizenship: the superpowered are just ordinary people who have, randomly and inexplicably, found themselves enhanced. Most normal people are law-abiding citizens and do not represent a problem. Our headache is the outliers: the criminally insane and the plain criminal. We also have a secondary problem with the vigilante role model provided by the popular entertainment media: some of the more excitable law-abiding citizens think they can help us by taking the law into their own hands. We need to discourage that. So it seems reasonable to co-opt the popular cultural superhero model and use it to keep the good citizens in line, while suppressing the rare outbreaks of superpowered criminality.

  “There are a handful of police officers who have acquir
ed miraculous powers”—I am not going to mention the enigma wrapped in a mystery that is Officer Friendly at a Home Office briefing—“and my department proposes to use them as a cadre to work with suitably vetted individuals with superpowers, training them as Police Auxiliaries or Special Constables and providing suitable oversight and discipline. They will not be vigilantes in capes and tights, they will be entirely under the control of the police services, and their job will be to conduct operations against individuals with superpowers who have been identified as suspects in the course of regular police intelligence operations. And . . .”

  I pause to swallow, then realize it’s so quiet I could hear a pin drop.

  “This also feeds into the question of public education. If we have a fully managed government superhero team, we can give TV and media crews access to them—subject to careful control of their public profiles. The message we will put across is that vigilantism is not the solution to crime, and we will deal even-handedly with all lawbreakers—including misguided volunteers. People with special abilities who wish to combat criminal activity should volunteer to become SPCs, so that they can operate within a clearly established legal framework. Eccentrics who think a Lycra body stocking and the power of flight entitle them to beat up bank chairmen in the street need to realize that their antics are illegal and counterproductive, and that the official government superhero squad will come down on them as hard as on any bank-vault-robbing mole-man. In this way, we propose to take our current problem and extract from it the seeds of its own solution.”

  Applause. Applause. I blink. The Home Secretary is leading the applause: not enthusiastically, but just slightly faster than a slow clap. She’s actually smiling, although I’ve seen a warmer expression on a rattlesnake at the zoo.

  After about thirty seconds the applause dies down. “I’d like to thank Dr. O’Brien for her excellent and creative proposal, which I believe deserves further consideration,” says the Home Secretary. “My right honorable colleagues and I will discuss it and respond within the next week, Dr. O’Brien, thank you very much for your time. Now, moving swiftly on to a much more mundane topic, the question of how to deal with our underperforming immigrant processing centers—seeing it’s impossible to issue our contractors with capes and superpowers, perhaps Mr. Jennings would like to return to the podium . . . ?”

  I make my retreat, carefully keeping my face impassive. I pass the immigration department gazelle on my way to my seat: he looks just as bad going out as I feel coming back.

  * * *

  My neighbor from ACPO intercepts me before I have a chance to sit back down. “Back of the room, now,” he whispers. I shakily grab for my violin case and shuffle towards the back; he follows me as discreetly as a nearly two-meter-tall man of steel in a uniform held together with silver braid and medal ribbons can manage. He cracks the door open and gestures me through it, then follows me out into the atrium.

  “That went surprisingly well,” he says. “You knocked ’em cold.” He looks at me, appraising, thoughtful.

  “I thought it was terrible,” I admit. “She was all but laughing at me at the end.”

  “Really? I don’t think so.”

  “Hmm?” I stare back at him, mildly annoyed that I’m not wearing heels high enough to look him in the eye. I’m quite a bit taller than average, but he’s built like Superman: I’d need six-inch platforms to be level with him, and those aren’t suitable business dress, at least not in my world. “What makes you say that?”

  “You were talking to an audience of senior politicians from the law-and-order side of their party. You don’t get to that position unless you’re an instinctive authoritarian who likes to put everyone in a neat little box. The Home Office top brass have only really become aware of the paranormal in the past few months, and they don’t like to have to think about it because it upsets their stack of Tupperware. Jessica Greene is at least trying to come to terms with the new reality—she may be an authoritarian, but she’s also terribly bright, and ambitious enough to believe six impossible things before breakfast if that’s what it takes to get to the top. However, I think she still finds it threatening to her model of the natural order of things. Laughter is her way of handling cognitive dissonance; the fact that you got a chuckle out of her is very positive. A negative response would be some sort of belittling dismissal or outright denial or even a very public meltdown and tantrum. I’d say you came out ahead by provoking the mildest reaction. Next time the subject comes up, she’ll think of you with amused tolerance rather than denial or fear.”

  “That’s a very interesting analysis,” I slowly say. (Officer Grey has clearly been studying social psychology.) “But what do you want?”

  He begins to walk slowly back towards the central Street that connects the three buildings. After a moment I scurry to catch up. “I think there’s a cafe around here somewhere. Can I buy you a flat white in return for a few minutes of your time? I’ve got an idea I’d like to run past you.”

  I can tell a setup when I smell one. “Who are you, really?”

  “Really?” His smile is crooked. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you—no, not really. All right, I confess: I attended that briefing because when word that you’d be presenting crossed my boss’s desk, she sent me along. I’m only a chief superintendent, far too low down the totem pole to make policy. But then again, you’re far too low down the totem pole to be making policy, under normal circumstances. So it’s a good thing that circumstances aren’t normal, isn’t it?”

  “I couldn’t possibly comment.” If I wasn’t carrying a violin and a handbag, I’d cross my arms defensively. “So how did the agenda of that particular meeting end up on your desk?” And are you a scary stalker with a security clearance or an ally?

  “Well.” We walk past a shuttered shop front in the side of the Street; just past it, there’s an open awning and a Costa’s sign. He swerves towards the entrance. “I’m nominally with the Met, but for the past three years I’ve been on semi-permanent loan to ACPO. And I’ve been liaising with your people.”

  I stop. “Who do you believe my people are?” I demand.

  “Mahogany Row. SOE Q Division.” So he knows about the Laundry. “You take it white, no sugar, yes?” There’s that twinkle in his eye again.

  “Nope: this time mine’s a tall mocha, no cream, one extra shot.”

  “Capital. Find a table and I’ll be right over.”

  I select a table with upright armchairs and pick the one where I can keep my back to the wall and watch the passers-by in the Street. I have a very peculiar feeling about this dashing officer of the law. He’s far too good to be true. A year or two older than me, athletic, handsome, self-assured, friendly, shows signs of having a sense of humor and several decades more insight into human psychology than Bob has ever developed while I’ve known him—Why am I even making that comparison? It’s silly and pointless. I feel obscurely guilty as I watch him return from the counter bearing a tray with two large cups. Then I feel suspicious. Just why is a chief superintendent who works for the Association of Chief Police Officers soft-soaping me? What does he want?

  “I was tipped off about you by Tim Whitehead, Jo Sullivan’s guvnor. Not to mention the rolling coverage you stirred up on News 24. ‘Paranormal Violinist’s Virtuoso Performance Swats Human Fly’ as the tabloids put it.” He pours a thin stream of brown sugar into his coffee and stirs it thoughtfully. “So I asked Gerry Lockhart, and he suggested talking to you directly.”

  I’m all ears, and on edge. “What exactly do you do for ACPO?”

  “This and that—most recently, discuss fisheries patrols with our scaly friends. And other things that I don’t think you need to know about. ACPO has fingers in a lot of pies, and paranormal issues are just one of them. We handle the stuff that would fall through the cracks if we left it to the regional police forces, but which needs horizontal networking rather than top
-down policy directives from the Home Office: inter-force cooperation, professional standards, intelligence gathering, anything that needs tackling on a national level and isn’t so important that the right honorable members will pass enabling legislation and approve a budget for a new national-level special police force.”

  “Special police force?”

  “Civil Nuclear Constabulary, British Transport Police.” He shrugs. “A problem normally has got to be so big that it’s glaringly obvious that the locals can’t handle it, and need at least a thousand full-time bodies, before they’ll approve a new organization. Supervillains aren’t there yet, but they’re a highly specialized problem and they cut across force boundaries so we got asked to carry the can.”

  “So what is it you want?” I ask. “You think ACPO should run the official government superhero team?”

  “God, no!” He looks shocked. “The risk of blowback is enormous. In fact, we’re backing out of direct policing support everywhere we can. The scandal over the NPOIU—the National Public Order Intelligence Unit—a few years ago forced a major rethink. We’d gotten ourselves—ACPO—into a wag-the-dog situation: a subsidiary task came far too close for comfort to taking over the entire organization and turning it into a de facto secret police agency, getting up to all sorts of unsavory activities. Sleeping with suspects, framing people, supplying bombs. It was unethical, illegal, and could have compromised our ability to do our core job, which is to coordinate between police forces.”

  “Really?” I ask brightly. This is fascinating. After the past few days it’s wonderful to meet someone whose problems are even bigger than mine.

  “But,” he continues, as I take a mouthful of mocha, “as you know, at least one of the newly superpowered is, in fact, a police officer. And there may be others. I believe I can use ACPO channels to find them and point them your way. I also know who to go to within the Met to help you set up a special operations unit as a posting for them. You’re going to need to coordinate with us sooner or later. The way I see it working, you—in your guise as, ahem, a department of the Security Service—will be handling the intelligence, policy, liaison, outreach, public relations, and technical operations side of the team you proposed forming. But if you’re serious about them operating lawfully as sworn police officers, you really need to go through a force. The Met is the biggest police force in the UK, and I’m upper middle-management there. Which is the second reason why you want me on board.”