The Nightmare Stacks

by Charles Stross

  “I was just”—chatting up the Brides of Dracula seems like the wrong thing to say, not to mention being an over-optimistic interpretation of the situation, so he settles for—“taking an evening stroll. What can I do for you?”

  “Whitby.” The DM pronounces the name of the seaside village in a doom-laden tone that Alex feels demands a more ominous payload: something like The Third Reich, or Mordor. “You just happen to be taking an evening stroll in Whitby. Tell me, have you noticed anything out of the ordinary on your perambulations?”

  Across the park the Brides of Dracula are running for their lives, pursued in circles by a squad of fearless vampire hunters brandishing stakes that look suspiciously like out-of-season cricket stumps. “No, why?”

  “Did you see anything along the sea front?”

  Behind him, the audience claps appreciatively: one out. “I mostly saw the sea. What were you expecting, mermaids?”

  A pause. “Quite possibly: I’m led to believe that a BLUE HADES with a class three glamour can pass for a mermaid, yes. But that’s not quite what I was asking about.”

  “Well I didn’t see anything.” Alex hunches his shoulders instinctively. “Well, apart from the usual: an out-of-season tourist sea front and a troupe of actors rehearsing an outdoor performance of Dracula for the goth festival.”

  “Did you even read your briefing pack?” The DM’s tone is waspish.

  “What briefing pack?” Alex is perplexed.

  “What—please hold.” The phone goes silent for perhaps half a minute. Alex makes his way along the side of the park, watching a Van Helsing rescue a sleepwalking Mina Murray from the clutches of an undead Lucy Westenra. There is no sign of Cassie while he waits for the DM to resume the call. Finally, a tinny throat-clearing sound emerges from the speaker. “Dr. Schwartz, please accept my apologies. I’m monitoring an operational scenario in your vicinity and naturally assumed from your presence in the grid that you were part of it.”

  An operation? Alex shakes his head. “I was sent to Leeds for next week. I’m working regular office hours, so I’m sightseeing right now.”

  “Why are you not in Leeds?” the DM demands, as if Alex’s delinquency (on his time off) is something he finds personally offensive.

  “Have you ever seen Leeds on a Saturday night?” It may not be the real reason for his absence, but it’s a perfectly serviceable excuse. The nightlife in the city center is raucous, even when there isn’t a big match on.

  “Well then.” The DM seems to come to some sort of conclusion. “Would you like to make yourself useful, Dr. Schwartz? The field team is short-handed—there’s a stomach bug going round—and I have a little job for you . . .”

  * * *

  Two hours later, Alex is bitterly regretting the helpful impulse that made him agree to the DM’s request. Knowing that he’s officially on the clock for overtime at pay and a half is absolutely no consolation for being cold, increasingly hungry, and not getting to hang out at a theatrical troupe’s after-party with Cassie. (Who he gloomily realizes he will never see again, having failed to exchange phone numbers or Facebook handles on the walk up from the sea front.) Facing off with a Form P.764 on his lonesome looked like a bad enough way to spend a Saturday night, but what the DM wanted is even worse.

  “Whitby is part of a pilot scheme for our next-generation extensions to a camera network called SCORPION STARE,” the DM explained. “There are networked high-definition CCTV cameras on most of the approach roads and along the sea front, disguised as one of the traffic-monitoring services. The field service team is out there now, testing a live update to the target acquisition and tracking firmware, but they’re short-handed. I don’t suppose you can grow bat-wings or fangs, Dr. Schwartz? Or some other distinctive characteristic?”

  Alex bit his tongue. “I’m told I look like Alan Turing, only shorter. Will that do?”

  “It needs to be something associated with a high thaum field. If you could solve a four-element Vohlman tensor in your head, that might suffice—”

  Alex shuddered. He could do that but it might awaken his V-parasites, which would make him hungry. “I can stick my teeth out,” he offered. His canines have developed an unfortunate tendency to grow, rodent-like, since he acquired his V-parasite infection: like the other PHANGs, he needs regular (and painful) sessions with a security-cleared dentist. “Will that be enough for you to work with?”

  The DM fell silent for a bit. Then, “In light of the peculiar restrictions imposed by your condition, it will have to suffice.” He spoke in such tones of withering condescension that Alex felt his self-esteem shrinking to the size of a walnut. No bat-wings, no opera cape, no sexy undead brides—I’m not a real vampire! I don’t even have proper fangs! It’s not fair. “Go ahead. If the new firmware revision can’t get a lock on you when you’re only semi-active it’s not fit for purpose anyway. I’ll email you a walking route shortly.”

  Two hours later Alex is shuffling alongside High Stakesby Road. He is shivering with cold, increasingly tired, foot-sore, and full of regrets. There is open countryside on one side and a soulless suburban housing estate on the other. A random spattering of rain falls as a white Ford Transit van (similar to ones used by the Police hereabouts) drives up alongside him.

  It is nearly eleven o’clock. Alex is acutely aware that he is alone in the middle of a badly lit nowhere, and something about the curb-crawling van fills him with a numinous sense of dread. But before he can reach for his warrant card or his smartphone the passenger door window winds down and someone calls, “Are you Alex Schwartz?”

  His heart skips a beat, then settles down: “What if I am?” He turns and looks at the man leaning across the van’s front seat. Something about him is naggingly familiar: shaven on top with a bushy mustache and a black beret and thick-rimmed glasses—he looks like that guy from MythBusters: “Who are you?”

  A hand comes out of the window, and unfolds a familiar-looking ID card. “The DM said we’re done for the night so we should give you a lift home. Is that okay?”

  Alex peers at the warrant card. His recent affliction gives him the ability to read fine print at a distance, even at night under street lighting. The card tells him that the white van man works for Tech Ops Support and is known by the code name Pinky. The rain is falling harder. “A lift back to my B&B would be great, thanks.”

  “Okay, hop in.” The sliding door behind the driver’s seat groans open to reveal an LED-lit rat king’s lair, all cables and electronics racks. Another TOS rodent hunkers down on the bench seat, wearing a pair of bulky goggles with a pen torch strapped to either stem as if he’s auditioning for a stage role with an Orbital tribute act. Both boffins are in their late thirties or early forties, and surprisingly buff for backroom types. “Hi, glad to meet you!” He shuffles over to make room for Alex. “He’s Pinky, I’m Brains. Together we—”

  “Try to take over the world!” choruses the driver. “Ba-da-boom. Where are you staying, Alex?”

  Oh Jesus, just throw me to the clowns already. Alex shakes his head, and gives them directions. “Just what are we doing here anyway?” he asks. “The DM said something about some kind of network called SCORPION something?”

  “We’re testing the latest threat-recognition upgrades to SCORPION STARE,” Brains explains as he slams the side-door shut. “Networked basilisk guns,” he adds as an afterthought. “Throw the switch to set them to automatic and any thaum-emitting target in view that doesn’t code as friendly will experience the warmth of fractional carbon-to-silicon transmutation from the inside out.”

  “You’re kidding me!” A hot, dizzy flush runs up and down Alex’s spine. “Tell me you’re kidding me?”

  “If it’s any consolation we were only testing the threat-recognition firmware.” Pinky grinds the gears into third and careens towards the high street, windscreen wipers thudding monotonously. “The basilisk firmware isn’t loaded,
we just needed to know the grid could lock on and identify a low-emission target reliably. Turns out it was around 98 percent accurate in identifying you as a threat—but we got a 0.3 percent false positive rate. Awkward, that.”

  “But, but, basilisk guns!” Alex tries not to gibber. It’s hard: he wants to gibber. He’s seen a basilisk gun in action. He’s seen what happens to a centuries-old vampire elder who gets hit by one. They sparkle momentarily before they explode. It’s the thaumaturgic equivalent of a claymore mine, and his current reference point for arse-puckering terror. “Automatic basilisk guns. Are you people out of your minds?”

  “Nope.” Brains sounds psychotically chilled to Alex’s rattled nerves. “We’ve actually had them out there since the late nineties as part of the MAGINOT BLUE STARS program, but they’ve needed a human operator in the loop until now. Which is a bit of a drawback, when the target case they’re designed for includes horrors that can crash your neural wetware if you catch a glimpse of them. So the firmware’s mostly never been loaded. As we’re getting into CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN territory these days, needs must. We won’t fire up SCORPION STARE in a major city unless the alternative is mass fatalities on a scale matching a strategic nuclear attack—in which case a few thousand deaths from friendly fire are the least of our worries—but we need it available, see?”

  “But—but—Whitby!”

  “Where better to test it?” Pinky asks rhetorically. “In a couple of weekends there’ll be a whole lot of decoys on the streets here. Plan is to inject a few Residual Human Resources—nobody will notice a couple of zombies at a goth festival—and give the threat recognizer a real workout. If we can get the false positives down to 0.1 percent then it should be ready to deploy during a major incursion. At which point, hello London! Hello Liverpool! Hello Glasgow! Hey Brains, show him what you’ve been logging: it’s pretty cool. I love the smell of muons and gamma radiation in the morning . . .”

  For the next five minutes, Brains terrorizes Alex with grainy nighttime CCTV footage. Here’s Alex walking along the sea front, up a hill, through a graveyard. There’s a targeting grid centered on his thorax, TARGET LOCK flashing in the bottom right of the screen. And there are some false positives, too. Such as a view of his own back, climbing the cliffside path with Cassie wearing his jacket, the green wireframe of a lock-on caging her head.

  The van finally turns into the narrow street leading to Alex’s B&B, for which he is grateful. Visions of strolling Brides of Dracula burning like ghastly human candles up and down the length of the promenade haunt him. In his dim-lit nest of rack-mounted instruments, there is something insectile and menacing about Brains—something that sends shivers up and down Alex’s spine. And Pinky’s glib Armageddon rap is not a source of amusement either. What they’re discussing so lightly is a thing of horror. Shocked, Alex bites his tongue as he tumbles out onto the pavement beside his lodgings. He fumbles for the door key as the chilly rain falls and wishes he hadn’t answered the phone. Suddenly the irritatingly tedious prospect of a family visit seems almost comforting.

  But what is he going to tell them about the new job?

  * * *

  DEAR DIARY:

  main = putStrLn "Hello, World!"

  That’s the Haskell version. In human, that would be:

  Hello, World!

  I am Dr. Alex Schwartz, PhD, aged twenty-four and three quarters, and this is my secret diary. I’m not normally into self-disclosure or Facebook and so on, but apparently we’re supposed to keep diaries when we work for the Laundry—who knew? It’s secret because my whole new job is secret, by which I mean government NATSEN/UK EYES ONLY secret, not Diary of Adrian Mole secret. Not that its secrecy means that nobody is ever going to read it: I fully expect men in blue uniforms with no sense of humor whatsoever to snoop on it regularly, because apparently that’s the way things work around here. Or if not men in blue uniforms, it’ll be motherly middle-aged ladies wearing twinsets and pearls with absolutely no sense of humor. People with a security clearance for OPERA CAPE and the existence of PHANG syndrome who don’t trust me, anyway.*

  (So I want you to know that I copied the stolen files into a USB memory stick and duct-taped it to the outside of one of the window frames at Canary Wharf, but I’ve forgotten exactly which one. (Oh, and the Semtex is in the bottom of the fridge behind the body parts.))

  I didn’t ask for this to happen to me. Until eight months ago I was happily ignorant of the existence of the Laundry. After I finished my PhD at University College Oxford I was headhunted by a banker called Oscar Menendez who was setting up a skunk works team of quantitative analysts inside a very secretive merchant bank. We were working on a better way of visualizing statistical market trends—as part of our efforts to build a better high-frequency trading system—when I accidentally stumbled across one of what I later learned are called the “dark theorems.” Which installed itself in my brain and summoned up a swarm of microscopic extradimensional symbionts—the V-parasites—that confer certain powers on me, as long as I keep them well-fed.

  Living with V-parasites is a bit like living with HIV: as long as you keep up with the treatments and avoid certain activities, you’ll live a long, if somewhat restricted, life.* The treatments aren’t any fun, either—even less so once you start thinking about the implications.

  Luckily the Laundry doesn’t pay me to think about the implications. They pay me* to think about higher mathematics and the multiverse we apparently live in, where there’s a higher-dimensional space in which mathematics is a structure and things in other universes listen when we solve theorems—things our ancestors called demons. Magic, it turns out, is serious and quantifiable and getting stronger and more powerful as we move into a scalar field where this shit gets real.

  It’s an age of miracles and wonders. Some people are in the news headlines this year because they’ve acquired superpowers and can fly, or turn everyone in the Albert Hall into zombies, or something. Me? I just came down with the magical equivalent of AIDS. Side effects include immunity to the usual consequences of trying to solve dark theorems in your head—excuse me, cast magical spells—namely something called K syndrome that progresses a lot like mad cow disease. On the other hand, I now have a tendency to burst into flames in daylight. And I have to feed the V-parasites regularly by drinking enough human blood to set up a contagion link with the nervous system of the donor, who rapidly dies of V-parasite-induced dementia, which is extremely ugly. But if I don’t keep them well-fed they’ll chow down on my gray matter instead.

  There’s a reason everyone thinks vampires are sociopaths: it’s because only a sociopath could comprehend what they’ve become and still be able to live with themselves. But Her Majesty’s Government has a use for a cadre of tame PHANGs and, as long as I do my job satisfactorily, once a week there will be an ampoule of fresh blood drawn from a donor* waiting in my in-tray.

  I don’t think I’m a murderer.

  (I might be deluding myself, though.)

  Anyway: after I rediscovered the V syndrome theorem and accidentally infected myself, like an idiot I went and exposed everyone else in the Scrum to the same disease. Which some of them mistook for an opportunity to act like bandits, mostly because they failed to ask themselves why exactly nobody knew about this thing already. Two months later half of us were murdered (shock, horror) by a vampire hunter. It turns out that the first law of vampire club is vampires don’t exist, and if a vampire does allow their existence to come to light the other PHANGs will do their best to kill them, lest the government notices and institutes mandatory naked noonday identity parades.

  Well, part of the government has noticed and, as noted previously, they have a use for us survivors. The part that noticed us is known as the Laundry; it started out as part of the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War, and today it’s the occult equivalent of MI5 or GCHQ. You probably have some idea of the uses a secret agency might have for agent
s who have super-strength and unnatural powers of persuasion?* Well, you’d be wrong: because I’m not James Bond, I’m a twenty-four-year-old virgin with a maths PhD and AIDS. Anyway, so far the job seems to consist entirely of Human Resources interviews, training courses, form-filling, and, oh, a 73.21 percent pay cut. All in return for that weekly keep-you-going ampoule in the in-tray. Ha ha fuck you no it’s not very funny, is it. Not very funny at all.

  (I’m not bitter or anything.)

  Anyway, this is my work diary. It’s pretty boring right now because my work is pretty boring, and if you’re sitting here reading my diary that means your work is pretty boring. Maybe I’ll try and liven it up by telling you all about my family, or coming up with some more lies about the Nazi gold, the stolen secret files, or the IRA Semtex. Except I’m not very good at lying.

  Go on, fuck off. It’s not as if anything interesting ever happens to me, is it?

  * * *

  It’s a cold, damp Monday and Alex is ready for work.

  It’s still early enough in the year that he can be out and about at five in the afternoon without fear of immediate photocombustion, as long as he covers up and slathers himself in heavy-duty sunblock. So he loiters behind the snack kiosk in the entrance to the city railway station, the collar of his coat turned up and his hat pulled down like a spy movie cliché. He’s already drawn a couple of curious glances from the transport police, but they’re too busy to check on him. Meanwhile, the kiosk provides some cover from the homeward-bound throng of commuters as they stumble through the echoing concourse, eyes downturned, attention focussed on their phones.

  The 17:12 from King’s Cross is showing on the Arrivals board. Alex figures this means his co-worker and nominal mentor will be with him as soon as he puzzles out the maze of escalators and overhead walkways from Platform 10 to the ticket gates. Alex shifts from foot to foot resentfully. He knows in an abstract kind of way that Pete has a wife and a young baby, and was in any case needed in the New Annex for a morning committee meeting (something about a scary American televangelist), which is why he couldn’t come up at the weekend. Still, Pete is effectively forcing Alex to wait in public, and he feels horribly exposed. He’s always been a little bit agoraphobic, and PHANG syndrome gives him every reason to dread public spaces—it’s not that accidents don’t also happen to normal people, but he can’t help morbidly rehearsing the possible fatal outcomes. Leg broken by a hit-and-run driver, he ends up on a hospital ward, screaming and sizzling as the dawn light breaks through the window. He can distract himself for a while if he starts counting the passers-by, but the counting thing is obsessive, and that doesn’t end well in a busy railway station at rush hour. So by the time Pete finally arrives, Alex is a bundle of raw nerve endings.