The Annihilation Score

by Charles Stross

  “We could do it again some other weekend,” I say. “Some operas are stuffy and boring”—Bob would say, up their own arse—“but I know which to avoid.”

  Sally fixes me with a Look that stacks at least three years on top of her notional age and asks, “What’s in it for you?”

  Jim looks at her sharply but I shake my head and smile at her. “I need to get out more. Your dad can tell you about what I do, but I’ve been working too hard lately, putting in regular seventy-hour weeks. This is me attempting to redress the balance.”

  “Are you married? I mean, do you have a partner? What do they think?”

  “I don’t know what he thinks,” I say truthfully. “We’re going through a bad patch, and he’s moved out. Like I said, too much work. For both of us, I think.”

  “Hah.” She lowers her eyes back to her soup bowl, worst suspicions evidently confirmed.

  “I’m not dating your father,” I tell her. “We just agreed we both needed to get out of the office some more.”

  When we finish our food, it becomes apparent that Sally has plans for the evening. “Thanks for the show, it was great. I want to go shopping now,” she says. “The shops don’t shut for another hour.”

  “But your mother’s—” Jim is obviously thinking of feeding the parking meter.

  “I can get the tube home,” she says artlessly. “You two need to talk.”

  “Wait—” he begins to say, but she’s already walking away.

  “That one sees more than she lets on,” I warn him as his eyes follow her retreating back. “Don’t worry, she’s got a phone.”

  “I know,” he says, sounding anything but confident. “I mean, I know in theory. But it still feels like she only learned to walk last month.”

  “What were you telling me the other night about not helicoptering?”

  His shoulders slowly relax.

  “Maybe you’re right. Want a lift home? I’m afraid I’d rather stay out of pubs or wine bars—it being Saturday night.”

  “A lift would be good.” I shudder slightly at a passing shadow, reach for a hard case that isn’t slung over the back of my chair, then check myself. “I’m quite tired, to tell the truth. I slept really badly last night.”

  We head back to the urban tank and climb in. “By the way,” he says, “there’s a run of La traviata at the Royal Opera House, ending next week. Can I interest you in it? Just the two of us, perhaps?”

  “I’m—hmm.” Suspicion and skepticism set up a train wreck clangor in my head: Has he been cold-bloodedly stalking me, using his daughter as a human shield? Or am I seeing ulterior motives where none exist? “Why not take Sally?”

  “She’s got exams the week after next. Resits, I’m afraid. Culture’s all very well, but not at the expense of grades.” Both his hands are on the steering wheel as he checks for cross-traffic. I can only see his face in side profile, but he seems more intent on driving safely than on slyly checking me out. As excuses go, it has the ring of truth to it.

  “Okay, then yes”—tentatively, I warn myself—“you may indeed consider me interested. How about, oh, Saturday, if we can score tickets?”

  “You’ll be lucky. Would you like me to try and shake some loose?”

  “That’d be great,” I tell him. Saturday evenings hit me hardest when Bob’s away exorcising sacrifice pits in Yucatán or something. Tonight I’ll be okay—even if I’m stuck at the kitchen table with a mug of Horlicks and a stack of purchase orders to approve—but often those evenings seem to stretch out endlessly.

  “Deal,” he says, looking pleased: his expression makes me feel happy.

  * * *

  Jim takes me home, and I resume my macabre research with a light heart and a mug of the aforementioned Horlicks. My social appetite is sated for the time being, and I’m happy to be back in my comfort zone with the front door locked.

  To tell the truth, I just about managed to forget about Lecter while we were at the opera—but I felt a nagging sense of unease as we braved the crowds on New Oxford Street on our way to the restaurant, and it didn’t go away even when I reminded myself that I was on a date with Officer Friendly and his daughter, that the bracelet on my left wrist was a beefed-up ward strong enough to stop the Mandate dead in his tracks should I run into him again by accident, and that even without the violin I am a certificated combat practitioner with the ability to cause an unholy amount of collateral damage if I cut loose by accident. I’ve become accustomed to relying on my singular instrument to an unhealthy degree. I’ve got to stop using Lecter as a crutch, if only because I can’t start to sort things out with Bob if I don’t.

  I take a break from the purchase orders to go back to my macabre (and ultimately futile) research project. Destroying the bone violin would be quite easy if he was merely made of mundane scrimshaw. Bone is a somewhat more rigid material than the spruce and maple of a conventional instrument, but Lecter’s body is thinner in places, to impart the flexibility required by a resonant instrument. If he was inanimate, a wood axe would suffice to dismember him, and a kitchen waste disposal unit would crunch the debris. You might wreck the kitchen unit, but the violin would come off worse.

  The trouble with trying to do away with him using mechanical tools—the problem that renders this entire project an exercise in futile wish-fulfillment fantasy, if I’m perfectly honest—is that Lecter is an occult instrument. To destroy him, I would first have to reverse and unwind the bindings that anchor his soul, or what passes for one, to his body. They weren’t designed to be unwound, and to make matters worse I could reasonably expect Lecter to put up a fight.

  Your sidekick Mr. Grenade stops being your friend the moment you pull his pin out: just so with the violins Erich Zahn created at the behest of Dr. Mabuse. Lecter has steadily grown more powerful ever since we entered the opening stages of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. He’s now alarmingly strong; if I’d met him for the first time as he is now, he’d have eaten me alive. I expect any attempt at exorcism will result in him making an all-out bid to suck my soul out through my eyeballs, and I suspect the only entity I’ve met who could possibly hold him in check is the Eater of Souls.

  Lecter is bound by geas to serve the Laundry, and my superiors have entrusted him to me because they think I’m a safe pair of hands. I’m responsible unless and until I can find a new bearer to hand him over to, and I can’t in all good conscience condemn someone else to what he’ll inevitably do to their mind. So I’m stuck with him unless I can find a legitimate reason to destroy him. But one does not go cap-in-hand to the Board of Directors to request the destruction of an irreplaceable offensive artifact just because of a spot of relationship trouble. Short of obtaining clear evidence that Lecter has become a danger to the organization, getting the SA to agree to sign off on a formal request for his destruction, and running it up the chain to the board, I don’t see any permanent way out of my present fix.

  On the other hand, a nice relaxing swim in the Channel doesn’t have to be permanent.

  Thinking these thoughts I walk upstairs, unseal the ward on the wardrobe, remove the violin case, and carry it back down to the kitchen table. Then I open the lid and stare at the thing inside.

  “Do you know what I’m thinking?” I ask.

  The violin lies still, quiescent and inert in its coffin lined with ivory silk.

  “I went to the opera today,” I tell him. “I went outside without you. For the second time this week.” It’s true: the meeting at ACPO and my afternoon with Jim and Sally are the only times this year that I’ve allowed myself to get more than a hundred meters away from him. “I’m still mad at you. But now I know something else: I can live without you.” Modulo some withdrawal symptoms, but . . . “What do you think of that?” I’m not sure that I can live without my instrument, but I’m not prepared to live with him if we can’t establish exactly who’s in charge of our relationship. “What do y
ou say?”

  ***Sorry.***

  “I’ve been thinking,” I muse aloud: “Destroying you, unbinding you, would be difficult. Not to mention extremely hard to obtain authorization for. I can send you to sleep with the fishes for a while, but that wouldn’t stop you finding a new host, would it? Maybe the best thing would be if I just admit defeat and surrender you. I can tell Dr. Armstrong I can’t carry you any longer. I can tell him why, and I can tell him, warn him that you’re growing stronger. They’ll need a more powerful player to control you. And those don’t come along very often, do they? So they’ll carry you back to that humidity-controlled safe in the basement of Dansey House and seal you up alone in the dark again, and this time it’ll be for months or years. Maybe decades. All alone in the dark.”

  ***Please don’t do that.***

  “So it’s please now, is it?” I shout, thumping the kitchen table so that the violin case bounces. “Well, tough!” I take a deep breath. “Here’s what’s going to happen. I am going to get a warded gun locker installed here and another at the office. You’re going to live in them when I don’t need you. At night, for example, when I’m sleeping. You’ll come out of your box when I need to practice and when I need to deploy you and for transport. That’s all. If you try to escape or slither into my dreams, that’s it. It’s the safe for you. I’m through with this. You’ve had your chance. You tried to kill Mhari, you tried to kill Bob, you tried to force me to play you. No more. No more chances, no more apologies. That stuff is over for good. Do you understand?”

  ***Yes.***

  “Good.” I close the violin case. “Back in your box.” I carry him back upstairs and stash him in the wardrobe again.

  ***So hungry,*** I hear him whisper in my head as I close the door and then turn the key in the lock. His voice is like contaminated engine oil floating on the surface of a river at night. A sharp stab of anxiety grips me: Is he lying to me? Something about his supine display of remorse rings false. Well, fuck you, I think. “Sleep tight.”

  ***Need food—*** I activate the ward: blissful silence descends.

  The rest of the weekend is uneventful. If only I could relax and enjoy it.

  * * *

  It’s Tuesday, and pigeons released weeks ago are coming home to roost.

  Monday started with an all-hands meeting to introduce our four new hires to the analysts, HR, and support folks. That kind of event is always risky, teetering on the edge of embarrassment. For quiet, gawky Billy, aka The Torch, it’s his first-ever job in a workplace with carpet, much less indoor plumbing and co-workers who wear suits. There’s a 150 percent pay rise hanging over him like the Sword of Damocles: What is he supposed to do to earn it? He’s silently terrified, even though he has enough firepower in his right index finger to take out a main battle tank. For my part I’m just glad that his hoodie, combats, and trainers are clean enough he doesn’t look as if he’s walked in off a construction site. Bee, aka Lucy Teller, is infinitely more mature—if by mature you mean sassy: with her dark hair gathered in pigtails and wearing a ’50s style yellow dress with black horizontal stripes, she could pass for a hipster on speed, if hipsters had a permanent caffeine buzz and metaphorical stingers. She’s excited, energized, eager to make a difference. This poise has Billy, unsurprisingly, caught somewhere between fascination and terror, so he’s pointedly ignoring her. Great way to start building a team, team.

  Our two other new hires aren’t here yet, but I can at least show everyone their mugshots and order that they be made welcome on arrival. Speaking of which:

  “I’d like you all to welcome Billy and Lucy to the Transhuman Police Coordination Force. They’ve got a steep learning curve ahead of them and lots of training courses before they can represent the Force in public—along with our two other front-line superpowers, Lollipop Bill and Captain Mahvelous, who will be arriving next week. Billy and Lucy: Mhari Murphy will start you on your basic orientation today and introduce you to everyone this afternoon so you don’t need to memorize their names right now. I know this is all a lot to take in at once”—I suddenly realize that even though Jim’s elsewhere and Sam is visiting a sick relative, there are nearly a dozen people present—“but don’t worry, you’ll get used to it in no time.”

  The formal introductions done, I beat a hasty retreat into my office. There’s plaster dust on the carpet and an unpleasant oily smell in the air, courtesy of the hulking gun safe in the corner.* I check my chair carefully for plaster dust before I sit down—I’m wearing my smart suit today, in anticipation of spending the afternoon at a Home Office briefing session—and am about to bury myself in prep for the anticipated grilling (on anything we can contribute to the Freudstein problem) when Ramona motors in.

  “Hi, Mo,” she says. “I’ve got a surprise for you!”

  “What kind?” I ask cautiously.

  “Nothing bad.” She smiles gleefully as she whirrs forward, holding up a USB key.

  “What’s that?”

  “First cut at a promo video. Want to watch it together?”

  I suppress my first reflexive response (a groan), force a smile, and say, “Can do.” Then I shove the memory stick into the front of my newly chained-to-the-desk PC. We’ve recently acquired new software that locks everything down, only lets data in (not out) when you plug in a dongle, and refuses to run software that hasn’t been installed and authorized centrally by IT Support. In my opinion (and everyone else’s) it turns our PCs into single-function boat anchors, but two months and ten employees on, our organizational threat surface has expanded until it’s too dangerous for us to risk laptops. Also, we now have to play by civil service regs, not Laundry rules. “Let’s see what they’ve come up with.”

  “Move over.”

  I shove my chair sideways to make room for Ramona. There is indeed a movie file on the stick. I double-click, wait for the obligatory three virus scanners to do their stuff, then sit back while the video player fills the screen with the first thing the organizational PR agency’s collective subconscious has come up with.

  * * *

  START ANIMATION SHOWREEL:

  THE SCENE: A boringly normal-looking suburban street in Anytown, England. Dogs bark, children shout, a delivery van drives slowly past.

  CUT TO: A different street, more densely urban: houses on one side, a big new charter school campus on the other. Uniformed kids hang around outside the gates and in the playground . . .

  VOICE-OVER: Keeping our schools and homes safe.

  PAN RIGHT: A street corner adjacent to the school. Just round the corner, past more buildings, the camera zooms in to frame a man in a lime-green PERVERT SUIT and cloak, crouching in front of a house. He brandishes a teddy bear at the camera.

  PERVERT SUIT: Arr, I am NONCE-BOY! I hang out on street corners near schools and ’ipnotize your kids! ’Oo knows what hideous perversions I fantasize about perpetrating on their smooth underage flesh, what nightmarish pedobear-related fantasies I intend to corrupt their innocent little souls with—

  ZOOM OUT: A posse of SUPERHEROES are racing down the side street towards PERVERT SUIT.

  SUPERHERO 1: It’s NONCE-BOY! Get ’im!

  SUPERHERO 2: On my way!

  SUPERHERO 3 (FEMALE): Flying scissor kick! Oh Piroge jump!

  THEY FIGHT.

  CUT TO: NONCE-BOY lying prone on the pavement with his hands and feet hog-tied in elaborate Japanese rope bondage style. The SUPERHEROES stand over him. He grins horribly at the camera.

  NONCE-BOY: They’re making a big mistake.

  CUT-TO: A Police interview room. TWO INSPECTORS are cross-examining NONCE-BOY.

  INSPECTOR 1: And what exactly did SUPERHERO 1 say?

  NONCE-BOY: I heard him distinctly say, “It’s NONCE-BOY! Get ’im!” Then he attacked me without provocation.

  INSPECTOR 2: Are you denying your previous? You’ve done time for hideous crimes of hideous
ness! He obviously thought you were about to get up to your old tricks again.

  NONCE-BOY: Nevertheless, I has my Human Rights! Including the right not to be beaten up by random vigilantes! (Confidingly): And there’s more.

  INSPECTOR 1: What else?

  NONCE-BOY: SUPERHERO 3 used her Oh Piroge jump on me. That’s sexual assault, that is!

  CUT-TO: A Police briefing room with the TWO INSPECTORS.

  INSPECTOR 2: It’s no good. He’s got us bang to rights.

  INSPECTOR 1: We can’t let him go! He’s a pervert—

  INSPECTOR 2: But he’s right about one thing. The SUPERHEROES who took him down are vigilantes. They didn’t observe due process, they didn’t identify a suspect in the process of committing or preparing a crime, they aren’t sworn officers of the law like you and me, they used dubious or outright illegal methods, and they inadvertently handed his defense a watertight case. In fact, they’ll be lucky if he doesn’t sue them.

  INSPECTOR 1: All we can do is let him go and hope he falls downstairs on his way out of the cell block.

  INSPECTOR 2: And this is a one-story-high police station, so that’s not terribly likely.

  INSPECTOR 1: (Addresses the camera): So NONCE-BOY walks free, all because those SUPERHEROES acted like idiots.

  ZOOM IN: INSPECTOR 1

  INSPECTOR 1: Want to be a SUPERHERO? Don’t be like these numpties! Join up with TPCF. Get wise, get trained, get your villain.

  FADE TO: Home Office Logo, Transhuman Policy Coordination Force contact information.

  * * *

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “Hmm. I think that was pretty good, actually. It compared favorably with Plan 9 from Outer Space. Three rotten tomatoes?”

  “I was thinking Surf Nazis Must Die.”

  “Actually, if they ham it up a bit more, say if they turn the dial from nine to eleven and switch from animation to human actors, it might hit Adam West Batman values of kitsch. Who knows? We might be on course to be the first government agency to win a Golden Oyster award.”