The Annihilation Score

by Charles Stross

Cage-fighting mathematicians; violin-playing philosophers. Now that I think about it, there’s probably room in our unit for an epistemologist to work on Theory of Supervillains. I wonder idly if I could convince someone else to take over as director so I can step down and colonize that niche, then shake myself. “We’re not here to discuss ex-scientists, we’re here to figure out how to proactively identify mad ones with four- or five-sigma superpowers,” I remind him. “Although it does seem to be a rather difficult project.”

  Karim speaks up again. “Rather than looking for signs of emergence, maybe we could look at their goals instead?” he asks diffidently. “Has Freudstein said what he wants?”

  “No,” says Jim. He frowns, looking as worried as I feel. “And if he did, could we trust him to tell the truth about his motivations? Mad Scientists aren’t really a problem unless they’re also brilliant. That’s part of the problem space. Dumb Mad Scientists would be a bit pathetic: I think we can ignore them. Ditto the lazy variety. So we’re looking for hyperintelligent, energetic Mad Scientists. And the brilliant ones are going to tell us whatever they think is most likely to cause us to do whatever they want us to do, rather than gloating about their real motivations.”

  “Like what?” I ask. “What would a Mad Scientist conceivably want us to do . . . ?” The question hangs in the air like an unexploded grenade.

  “Um.” Jim, so highly articulate most of the time, is actually unable to frame a reply. After a moment, he explains: “Freudstein has very efficiently raised hell while concealing his motivations. So I’d have to say, insufficient data.”

  “So we need to focus on gathering data.” I smile at him to defuse the implied criticism, and continue: “It seems to me that Mad Science can’t come cheap. They would obviously need a research center or lab of their own, and the money to pay for equipment and materials and electricity. Also, minions to do the legwork—install equipment, run experiments, keep records, do statistical analysis. And we know Freudstein has minions—unless he started by figuring out how to clone himself for the British Library robbery. So we’re not looking for an Igor, we’re hunting an entire team of disillusioned postdoc researchers whose parent institutions didn’t renew their rolling annual employment contract and who think they’re working for a respectable company doing research into whatever the Mad Scientist wants.

  “The flip side . . . the flip side is that scientific research is a bottomless money pit. You can approximate Doing Science to standing on the Crack of Doom throwing banknotes down it by the double-handful, in the hope that if you choke the volcano with enough paper it will cough up the One Ring. Unless you’re doing pure mathematics or philosophy, of course, in which case it’s HB pencils and ruled A4 notepads all the way down. So where there’s a Mad Scientist pursuing their hobby horse, even if it’s something as innocuous as developing a new taxonomy of wood-boring beetles, I think we’re likely to find some kind of low-input, high-output income stream, operating with questionable regard to legality. So we’d be looking for organizations that keep a low public profile, employ a fair number of high-powered staff who go about their tasks in secret, and which are headed by people who picked up a PhD or two by accident before they heard their true calling. Finally, they’d have an incredibly opaque income stream. Identifying such organizations is really a job for the National Crime Agency, who can distinguish a Mad Scientist Menace from a regular organized crime ring by profiling the folks at the top. Of course this breaks down if by a huge coincidence our Mad Scientist is the heir to the Duchy of Cornwall, or the alter-ego of the Duke of Westminster, in which case we’re looking for a demented lord spending money like water. But that’s a low probability, I believe.” I look at Jim. “What do you think?”

  Jim looks slightly taken aback. “Are you sure you’re not a Mad Scientist yourself?” he asks. “You’ve certainly got a grip on the psychological profile, and your ability to monologue—”

  That’s when my phone rings.

  “O’Brien speaking.”

  It’s our new receptionist, Lizzie. “Dr. O’Brien? I’ve got a call for you from the Emergency Control Center at New Scotland Yard. Inspector Cooper on the line . . .”

  “Thanks, put them through. Hello? Inspector? I’m Dr. O’Brien. You asked for me?”

  “Yes, you’re flagged on our alert list to be advised of any developments involving alias Professor Freudstein?”

  “I am. Yes?” I sit up straight. Across the table I see everyone staring at me.

  “We have just received a communication from Freudstein, or someone claiming to be them. The call originated with a previously inactive prepaid phone, bought in cash from a major supermarket chain six months ago, somewhere in Edgeware—we’re trying to locate the phone and its carrier now, but it looks like the call was planned to minimize traceability. The caller said they were speaking on behalf of Professor Freudstein, specified that you, that is, Dr. Dominique O’Brien, Transhuman Police Coordination Force, were to be notified, and he gave a codeword previously associated with the perpetrators of a previously unattributed incident three days ago.”

  “What was the previous?” I ask.

  “I’m sorry, I’m not at liberty to tell you. You need to take it up through channels—Superintendent Drummond at CNC Sellafield can brief you. The codeword Freudstein said to associate with your name is ‘Infinity Concerto,’ whatever that means.”

  I end the call hyperventilating: Freudstein coming to the attention of the Civil Nuclear Constabulary can’t be good.

  Jim gets there first. “I heard Freudstein . . . ?”

  “Sellafield,” I say bleakly. “Freudstein did something there three days ago. He’s just claimed responsibility and given us a codeword—and he’s hanging it on my neck.”

  “Sellafield?” That’s Karim. He sounds shocked.

  I look at Jim. “We need to get in touch with a Superintendent Drummond. Find out what the hell is going on and why Freudstein wants to talk.” Because they never hand you a codeword unless they want to talk, from a position of strength. “Can you follow this up for me?”

  “Yes.” Jim stands up. “I’ll go make some calls. Looks like Freudstein’s decided to give us some actual insights into the Mad Scientist Menace. Let’s just hope they’re not misleading and deadly.”

  * * *

  Six o’clock rolls around and I’m still in the office, one ear tuned to the radio—late summer is the Proms season, the mammoth sequence of standing-room-only concerts that are to classical music in London as Wimbledon is to tennis—so there’s a new concert broadcast from the Albert Hall just about every night. I’m using it to try to distract myself from worrying about that call while I update my weekly situation report to the SA. There’s a knock at my office door: “Come in,” I say without looking up.

  “Hello, Dominique. Do you have a few minutes?”

  It’s Jim. “Sure.” I smile tiredly. “I was just about ready to wrap up. Did you get anywhere?”

  “Yes—” He looks around my office. “Yes, I did.” He sounds frustrated. “It’s Freudstein’s work, although they didn’t know it at the time. Three days ago.” He shakes his head, face unreadable.

  “What did Freudstein do?”

  “Tampered with the national plutonium stockpile.”

  “He— What?”

  “He didn’t steal anything: he just wanted to send us a message. A very scary one, in my opinion, but a nuanced one. Pretty much what you’d expect from a Mad Scientist with a genius-level IQ who wanted to rattle our cage. It might have been better in some ways if he had stolen something, frankly: at least we’d have a clear-cut idea of what was going on. The implications are still sinking in, which is why they’re keeping a tight lid on it—DA-Notices on the news media, massive security panic, circular firing squad, the whole nine yards.”

  “He didn’t steal anything—” I stop. “Oh, you said tampering. What kind of tamperi
ng?”

  “They’re not entirely certain yet: it’s going to take a full audit of the contents of SPRS—the Sellafield Product and Residues Store—to rule out the possibility that the obvious tampering was a decoy to divert attention from some other nefarious activity. I mean, we know he messed up a bunch of archives at the BL to conceal the theft of manuscripts, but this is worse. Someone who is now tentatively identified as Freudstein or his accomplices broke into SPRS, got into part of the secure plutonium store, and left behind additional storage flasks containing approximately twelve kilograms of mixed-isotope metallic instant sunshine. Just in case nobody noticed, they painted them lime green and sprayed CND symbols and smiley faces on top.” He sighs heavily. “Needless to say they had to get past razor-wire fences, cameras, dog patrols, an electric fence, more cameras, and into a heavily reinforced concrete building patrolled by trigger-happy officers of the Civil Nuclear Constabulary armed with fully automatic weapons and an Army surface-to-air missile battery on top—because when they finish building the annex, it’s going to contain nearly a hundred tons of plutonium. Twelve kilos is enough to build two basic atom bombs . . . heads are going to roll.”

  “I’ll say.” I hit “save” and shove my keyboard away: the weekly sitrep suddenly seems trivial. “That’s what he broke into? The secure plutonium store? Just to send us a card saying, Hi, I baked you an atom bomb but I eated it?” Butterflies take flight in my stomach. “Jesus.”

  “The first step is to make sure nothing else is missing. Freudstein could have played a shell-game on us, after all. Swapped storage flasks around . . . the second step is, I’m told you can usually identify the production source for these isotopes by looking at their relative abundance. There are several other nations who might take a keen interest in checking their deposits for unauthorized overdrafts. But to do that means confessing your sins to the IAEA, who leak like a garden sprinkler and who will go totally apeshit if they think someone got at the UK stockpile. I mean, we’ll never hear the end of it. Questions in the UN Security Council, ambassadors being called in, that kind of thing. As soon as it hits the press—and it’s too big to hush up—it’s going to go nuclear, if you’ll pardon the expression. And then there’s the question of how Freudstein did it in the first place. On which subject they’re going to want our input.” Jim sounds gloomy.

  “But we’ve barely got anything on him!” I feel like tearing my hair out.

  “Yes, I told them that. But we’re the Home Office supervillain experts. They’re not happy. I reckon we can expect to be carpeted by Her Upstairs no later than Monday. Sooner, if it goes back to COBRA—they were briefed on the original break-in, but the Freudstein angle is new.”

  “Whoop-de-doo. Do we have a report on how he—no, they—got through the security perimeter?”

  “That’s going to be classified, but we can probably get hold of it if you really need it. But. Hmm. Why did you say ‘they’?”

  “Oh, come on. The profiling exercise we’ve been doing—if there is a real Mad Scientist Menace, then it’s probably more accurate to call it a Mad Science Corporate Menace. You don’t brew up pocket death rays in your basement all on your lonesome—”

  “What about the Laundry’s extradimensional summoning devices?” Jim leans forward. “I heard some of your devices are ultra-portable, compact. Programmable. We’re talking laptop-sized, not particle accelerators.”

  “Maybe, maybe, but that stuff’s dangerous. One misplaced semicolon in your program and an extradimensional amoeba shows up inside your brain and cores you from the inside out. Our researchers practice pair programming for a reason—there’s more chance of one of them spotting a lethal bug before they find it the hard way.” I shudder. Leave that stuff to Bob. “Our own equipment and materials are heavily classified and protected by our usual security geas—oath, that is, or maybe curse of obedience. It provides slightly more security than your regular oath to Queen and Country. Meanwhile, if you try to develop a nondeterministic invocation geometry engine from scratch, you run the risk of getting overconfident and finding out the hard way that there’s a memory leak. That’s why progress in the occult sciences was so slow until we developed digital computers and had a war-footing organization working on it.”

  But the thought has a certain nagging consistency. What if Freudstein is an insider? With some level of access to our standard code libraries and some theoretical background, a lone highly intelligent Mad Scientist could play catch-up surprisingly fast. Build a white-room clone of our core tools, working at home on their own time . . . Worse, what if Freudstein is a front for an entire insider team—a government department that’s gone rogue? I can’t see why such a group would want all the unwelcome publicity Freudstein is drawing down, but just because I can’t see it doesn’t mean there’s no fire concealed behind all the smoke and tabloid headlines. I don’t want to share this last insight with Jim, but it’s definitely something to suggest to Internal Affairs via Dr. Armstrong.

  “It’s getting late,” says Jim. “I was thinking about looking for something to eat. Do you have any plans for dinner?”

  “No, I just need to finish this report and I’m done—”

  “Let me rephrase: Are you hungry? If so, would you like to accompany me to a restaurant?”

  I blink. This is one of my three-nights-off, and I’ve completely forgotten to make any plans. “I can do dinner, but I need to finish this report first. Give me ten minutes?”

  “Happy to. Lobby in fifteen?” He rises smoothly to his feet and looks at me expectantly.

  “That’ll be great,” I tell him, and I mean it. Then I go back into deep focus. I’ve got a weekly situation report to file, after all; and I can slip my theories about Freudstein in with the rest of it.

  * * *

  I make my way down to the lobby around six thirty and find Jim cooling his heels there. His face lights up when he sees me. “Mind if I drive?” he asks. “It’ll save me coming back here afterwards.”

  “Happily.” I follow him down to the basement garage, past Ramona’s lurking vehicle of the uncanny—maintaining its white van disguise for the time being—to a silver BMW Z4 roadster. It’s parked with its soft top folded away. “Nice motor. Yours?”

  “Mine,” he confirms as he zaps it awake with his keyfob. “I have to do a lot of driving.”

  I slide my violin into the narrow gap behind the passenger seat, then climb in. I find it a snug fit; Jim wears his car like a glove. He glances over his shoulder and gooses it to life, backs out of his slot, then screeches up the exit ramp before giving way to pedestrians who are crossing the entrance. Clearly he’s no Steve McQueen. The sky is gray and threatens us with rain, but he drives with the roof down. I hunch behind the windscreen, very glad I tied my hair back. He drives aggressively (everyone in London drives aggressively), but attentively, sticking to speed limits and paying a lot of attention to his mirrors. “Cyclists,” he explains, while stopped at a traffic signal: “They’re the biggest hazard right now, especially at dusk. Most drivers are blind to them, especially if they’re running without lights. But if you don’t spot one coming up in your blind spot . . .”

  “I get it,” I say. Bob and I don’t own a car, although we both have driving licenses. “We didn’t discuss where we were going.”

  He gives me a sidelong grin, then the lights change and his eyes go back to their hazard perception scan as he flings the sports car around a road pillow and a chicane and nails the needle to the speed limit. (Which is only thirty, but it feels a lot faster with wind in your hair and bugs in your teeth.) “Trust me?” he asks.

  “Okay . . .”

  It is an early autumn evening in London and for an instant I’m back in my early twenties again, a time when I was in love with a strong, witty man who had a sports car and wanted to impress me (that was a more innocently dangerous time, two decades ago). It was a time of naive pleasure, when all life’s
possibilities seemed open to me, before we married and subsequently divorced. I’m older now, but Jim is not only strong and witty, but a whole lot wiser than David ever was—and I suspect more dangerous in a fight (for all that David did military service in Israel). So the flash of déjà vu is not unwelcome. But I’m older now, and I recognize certain warning signs, starting with the pocket rocket whose passenger seat I’m now strapped into.

  “So, Jim, I take it you’re not paying your kids’ university fees?” I prod.

  “Nope.” I wonder for a moment if he’s being terse because he’s looking for a narrow turnoff from Victoria Embankment, or because I struck an exposed nerve, but then he explains: “Sally lives with Liz, and Liz out-earns me—she’s a QC. She got the house, I got what she calls the mid-life penis extension.” He pats the steering wheel affectionately. “That was three years ago. Time flies.” Then his head swivels rapidly as he stops and reverses rapidly into a snug parking space. “I’ll worry about the university tuition when Sally gets a place—she’s sixteen.”

  So my guess was right. “Was it the job?” I ask.

  “Which one? We both took our chances in a relationship-eating profession.” He looks morose for a moment, then his expression clears: “Come on, I need to put the hood up before we go eat. It’d be a shame if it rained.”

  The restaurant turns out to be a trattoria near Covent Garden Market, a short walk from our parking space. Jim holds the door open for me, a slightly old-fashioned gesture I wasn’t expecting. “Reservation for two, name of Grey,” he tells the maître d’, and insists I go first as that worthy leads us to a table with a commanding view of the London Transport Museum. We’re not far from the Strand, and the presence of the concrete-blocked Aldwych tube station nags at my attention like a loose tooth. “If you want wine, be my guest,” he offers. “I’m strictly on the wagon when I’m driving.”

  “And I’ve got a meeting tomorrow at nine o’clock,” I say, trying not to wince at the thought. “Maybe some other time.” I pick up the menu. “Do you have any suggestions?” Do you come here often?