The Nightmare Stacks

by Charles Stross

  This is The Question, and Alex’s stomach lurches queasily. He’s about to recklessly say I met this girl called Cassie, but then he suddenly realizes that they didn’t meet. He didn’t even get her phone number. His social life is as bereft of feminine company as ever. “I’ll have to see if she’s free,” he says flatly. “Call you back later?”

  “All right! Saturday at seven! Love you, dear!” And Mum ends the call, leaving him twitching on the hook, its viciously barbed point cramping his guts.

  Here’s the thing: Alex’s parents are, well, parents. Subtype: well-meaning, very ordinary folks. They live in a nice semi out towards Adel, in a classic sixties suburban development (subtype: British, which means self-conscious, cramped, and embarrassed by the trappings of prosperity). Mum, Dad, son, daughter. Two cars and a one-car garage. They’re living the dream, for Marks & Spencer values of the dream, working really hard at being sober-sided middle-class professionals. Dad (never Eric to Alex) is a chartered accountant, Mum (never Samantha) is a tax officer, and Sarah is going to follow in Dad’s footsteps because Alex, the eldest son, insisted on taking his uncanny mental acuity with mathematics to a higher level—but their initial misgivings subsided when he completed his doctoral thesis, replaced by genuine pride when he got a real job in the City.

  Alex is the eldest child and only son, and Mum and Dad have certain expectations involving the eventual patter of tiny feet. They waited patiently through his schooling and first degree: he was awfully busy studying, they agreed. And they waited some more during his PhD. But now he has a real job, and a high-status, high-paying one at that, by their lights, so why isn’t he dating an elegantly dressed Jessica from Gilts, and dropping pink-eared hints about engagement rings?

  About eight months ago Mum popped The Question and, in a second of weakness, Alex didn’t so much deny being single, let alone pull an imaginary girlfriend out of his hat, as evade The Question and allow his mother to draw her own conclusions. It wasn’t that he wanted to mislead his parents as that he was deathly tired of the ritualized ordeal. But he now realizes he should have nipped her misconception in the bud immediately. Mum has somehow convinced herself that Alex is hiding a girlfriend from her, which can only mean something unspeakable. Or worse: he’s hiding a boyfriend, which will force her to confront her own easy assumption that she’s not prejudiced.

  In truth, Alex is hiding something, but it’s not what she thinks. Alex doesn’t work for the bank anymore. (He’s on indefinite unpaid leave, which is much the same thing.) Alex’s salary has dropped by over 70 percent and there are no juicy bonuses depending on his year-end review. He’s spent so much time focussing on his studies in applied computational demonology and his new job as a civil servant that he hasn’t had time to think about socializing. And that’s before he takes into account his personal affliction: seropositive for V syndrome, and all it implies. Alex could meet Ms. Right tomorrow and he’d be too paralyzed by anxiety and existential dread to ask her out for dinner. It’s not that he wouldn’t like to meet someone, but he is hemmed in by ominous circumstances and oppressed by uncertainty.

  The problem with The Question is that, short of hiring an actress for the evening, it’s unanswerable. Furthermore, he can’t see any way to defuse the ticking bomb of expectations without causing his mother deep existential pain. (Dad too, he suspects, but Eric has always been so emotionally constipated that it’s impossible to tell what he thinks.)

  Alex doesn’t want to hurt his parents. The easiest option is to avoid seeing them, and for the past few months he’s been very successful. But he’s rapidly running out of time, and what’s a young vampire to do?

  * * *

  Wednesday finds Alex on an early train to London for a training day. A really early train—a six a.m. departure from Leeds, arriving in King’s Cross just in time to dive down into the underground before the morning light blisters the tender skin on his cheeks.

  He arrives at the New Annex and heads straight to the second floor—the half of it that is back in service, that is—and the office he shares with Pete. It’s more like a windowless broom closet, but there’s room for a pair of desks and two chairs in slightly better nick than the rubbish in the Lawnswood bunker. He’s about to log into the secure system and check his email when the door opens. “Alex? Do you have a minute?”

  It’s Jez Wilson. Rangy, short-haired, and in her late thirties, she looks more like a country and western singer than his idea of management. Nevertheless she’s his assigned line manager, she knows more about the taxonomy of tentacled horrors from beyond spacetime* than anyone else he’s met, and if she wants to soak up the half hour he’s allowed himself before the training kickoff he can’t really say no.

  “Yes, I think so,” he says, pantomiming a glance at the wristwatch he isn’t wearing: “I have a course starting at nine . . .”

  “You had a course at nine.” She manages to look faintly apologetic. “I’m afraid there’s been a slight change of plan overnight. Let’s grab some tea and I’ll fill you in on what’s going on.”

  Jez’s office is upstairs, on the fourth floor, formerly the exclusive stomping ground of Mahogany Row except for a handful of uncomfortable meeting rooms. But changes are afoot in the New Annex. Rumor has it that the executives or wizards or whatever they are have already abandoned their top-floor roosts, departing to more secure premises. Some support departments have also moved out, notably Harry the Horse and his basement arsenal—someone decided it was a bad idea to keep it at a site that has been compromised. And the survivors have been making use of the suddenly-less-crowded premises: for the last months before the site shuts down, Ms. Wilson has inherited an office considerably above her station.

  “Grab a seat, any seat,” she says, walking across the thick pile carpet to an oak sideboard that appears to be made of the reclaimed timbers of a Nelsonian ship of the line. “I’m sorry I’m cancelling your training course, but you can probably get most of what you need from the books and this is more important.”

  Alex perches on the chesterfield and leans forward as she fiddles with a copper samovar that has been polished until it glows as if it’s about to catch fire. Atop the sideboard rests a fine china tea set, so delicate that he’s almost afraid to pick up his cup: Jez adds milk, then pours. It is at this point that Alex realizes he’s in trouble. His manager has pre-empted his training course? That’s fine, and in truth he didn’t really need a refresher in eigenvector transformations, even with the footnotes on their utility for banishing higher-dimensional horrors back to flatland. But she’s pouring the tea. Everything he’s learned about the Civil Service tells him that having tea poured for you is one of the ferociously guarded signifiers of rank, like the grade of paintings from the Government Art Collection hung on your office wall, or the quality of your carpet. Never mind the dodgy gender politics of female deference implied by the order in which cups are filled. Given their respective places in the office pecking hierarchy this can only mean that Jez wants something from him. Something she expects him to be reluctant to give her, at that. She knows about his caffeine habit and she wants him off-balance: Is this a subtle softening-up?

  Jez hands him a cup and saucer, then retreats to the wing-backed armchair on the other side of the fireplace. (The fireplace in her temporary office is a minor mystery. The New Annex doesn’t have chimneys, apart from the flue from the central heating system. And there’s the mystery of the perpetually drawn curtains, and the geometry of the floor space—he’s sure it’s impossible to fit a room this large into the building on this side of the fourth-floor corridor—but no matter.) “Tell me about CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN,” she says, then waits.

  Alex shudders so violently he nearly spills his tea. “Wh-what?”

  “Come on.” She smiles, almost pityingly. “World’s worst-kept secret and all that, at least within the agency.” She shelves the smile. “Tell me what you’ve inferred, Alex. I want to get some
idea of how much you’ve gleaned before I fill in the gaps. Your clearance came through this morning.”

  “Clearance? For what?” He’s having trouble keeping up.

  “For CASE NIGHTMARE RAINBOW, of which GREEN is, shall we say, part of the spectrum. C’mon, tell me what you’ve figured out by yourself.”

  “Uh-huh . . .” Alex grabs for the mental gear-stick and tries to jam his aching cortex into action. It’s hard work—he’s on normal office hours today after a week or more of night shifts, and it feels like it’s three in the morning. “Okay, let’s see. The computational density of the noösphere has been rising non-monotonically since about 1800, and on top of the population bubble—now slackening, but still adding about 1020 additional synapses per second to the ensemble—we have the Moore’s Law bubble, with upwards of twenty microprocessors per human being—again, on the order of a billion operations per second, even the embedded controllers in your washing machine—and so, given that magic is a side effect of applied mathematics, we’re approaching the Twinkie singularity.”

  “Twinkie sing . . .”

  “Ghostbusters,” he says, flapping his hands desperately, “too much magic.”

  “Go on.”

  “There’s a, a thixotropic aspect to it. The more you do, the easier it gets. So not only is there more magic out there, it’s getting easier to perform. A year or two ago we passed the threshold at which it went from being something you did using custom summoning grids and microcontrollers, and a very few ritual magicians doing it in their heads until the K-parasites turned up to eat their brains, to the point where unwary mathematicians can accidentally stumble into . . .”

  He flushes. Jez nods. “You can skip OPERA CAPE if you want,” she says, and he draws a shuddering breath. He’s still sensitive about his unwelcome and inadvertent transformation into a blood-sucking fiend.

  “Okay. Then we also have the pervert suit problem. Random members of the public developing superpowers.” He pronounces the word with distaste. “There’s a power law in play, isn’t there? We’re on an up-slope. This is going to get worse, much worse. How bad can it get?”

  Jez thinks for a moment, then puts her cup and saucer down, untouched. “So far so good, Alex, but you missed an angle. We’re not the only sentient tool-using species we know of, not even the only one on this planet. BLUE HADES are worried about it too—the Deep Ones? You must have met Ms. Random at some point? We know of other once-inhabited planets, too. No, we don’t have a magic space telescope, or any other Star Trek shit up our sleeves, but we’ve got the capability to open portals to places compatible with our type of underlying causal logic, where the same laws of mathematics—and physics—hold true. Such gates tend to go preferentially to places that once held intelligent ritual-magic-using life: I say once because when we find them they’re mostly extinct, and when they’re not extinct . . . let’s just say we have a really strong rule against opening portals at random. How to do so, and how to do a risk assessment first so that it doesn’t kill you, was in the next stage of your personal development plan until late last night, by the way.”

  “Whu—” Alex bites his tongue. They’ve gone from Ghostbusters to Stargate SG-1 in five minutes. He has an uneasy feeling that if this keeps up he’d better speed-read his way through the entire TVTropes wiki. “Really?”

  “Yes! Did you ever wonder why successive British governments spent decades killing off anything that looked as if it might develop into a space program? They gave up about a decade ago—but only because the horse was already over the horizon and the stables had burned down behind it. Today we’ve got a shiny new national space agency, but for about four decades Mahogany Row had an unofficial policy of trying to ensure that we didn’t accidentally blunder into a real-life version of Quatermass just because some glory-hound prime minister wanted a photo-op with an astronaut.” Jez picks up her cup and takes a discreet sip. “Go on, Alex. What else do you know?”

  “Um.” He shakes his head. “I think you just blew a few fuses there. You mean we know about other worlds? Other inhabited worlds?”

  “Yes, several of them. And you will be pleased to know that most of them feature alien ruins. The ones we can still get to are all dead, except for the Pyramid of the Sleeper, and nobody’s going there in a hurry. That’s GOD GAME BLACK, by the way, you can look it up later but you might have trouble sleeping afterwards. The thing is—”

  She puts her teacup down, empty.

  “—Those ancient alien civilizations didn’t die of old age, Alex; they were murdered.”

  * * *

  DEAR DIARY:

  I suppose my punishment for being too nosy about CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is entirely appropriate. They let me in on the secret, and I wish they hadn’t.

  Let’s see if I can put all the pieces together coherently, starting with the big picture:

  As we all know, the Earth is not the center of the cosmos. It orbits the Sun at roughly 47 kilometers per second; the Sun in turn is orbiting the center of our galaxy at approximately 220 kilometers per second; and we can infer, from studies of asymmetry in the cosmic microwave background, that the Milky Way galaxy itself is moving in the direction of the constellation Hydra at roughly 550 kilometers per second.

  But on a larger scale, the entire cosmos is far from stationary. Our four-dimensional universe is embedded on the surface of a higher-dimensional membrane, or brane, which is moving through a twelve-dimensional foam of other branes that play host to an infinity of pocket “universes.” Higher-order resonance effects between our brane and some adjacent ones allow information to leak between universes. We, the structures we collectively refer to as “life,” are patterns of information—temporary reversals of the arrow of entropy within our universe—and conscious minds are the most concentrated such patterns we know of. We’re making an increasing amount of information, generating magical noise and simultaneously weakening the structure of spacetime by thinking too loudly. And sometimes other patterns in neighboring universes can sense us, and some of them think we’re edible.

  Back in the 1940s, Enrico Fermi asked a question which has subsequently become more famous than the discovery which won him the Nobel Prize.* During one bull session at Los Alamos, the conversation turned to the prospects for extraterrestrial life. One of the other scientists proposed that there must be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Fermi’s retort was, famously, “Why aren’t they here?” If the conditions in our universe are promising for the formation of stars and planets, and for chemical reactions to proceed with increasing complexity, then—given the age of the universe—we should expect alien intelligences to have evolved long ago and colonized our own solar system. Their absence is a smoking gun, pointing to the existence of a Great Filter: some sort of extinction process that prevents intelligent life from spreading throughout the cosmos.

  If we are lucky, the people who worry about this sort of thing opine, then the Great Filter lies in our past. It’ll turn out to be something that kills off life forms before they get to the banging-rocks-together stage. Candidates include gamma ray bursters or asteroid impacts, or just the rarity of evolving opposable thumbs and fractional reserve banking. In this scenario, we’ve survived it already if we’ve got this far. Which means we’re the first, and we’re going to go into space and become the punch line to everyone else’s version of the Fermi Paradox.

  But if we’re not lucky, they add, then the Great Filter still lies in our future. It’s some sort of extinction-inducing process that has been running for billions of years and which kills off sentient space-going, tool-using species with brutal efficiency. It’s an existential anthropic threat: the mere act of apprehending that it’s possible for such a threat to exist means you’re in the firing line, and if you fail to deal with it correctly your species will die.

  I can now tell you that the Laundry has an answer to the question of whether the Great Filter lies in o
ur past or our future, and the answer is neither—the Great Filter is now.

  Let me tell you about some of the highly disturbing documents I’ve been reading, which synopsize our organization’s response posture to the actually arising class of solutions to the Fermi Paradox.

  CASE NIGHTMARE is the superclass of contingency plans the Laundry maintains for dealing with the end of the world. Jez said they’re all based on studies of specific inhabited exoplanets that underwent extinction events before they were discovered: then she dropped a pile of file references on me for bedtime reading. (I’ve only just started ploughing through them, so this is an aide-memoire for future research.)

  CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is the Twinkie singularity: magic gets so trivially easy that everyone’s doing it, which creates a bit of a problem when looks really can kill, your average Strictly Come Dancing fan can call down a plague of locusts on their least favored competitor, and a sufficiently large congregation of Bible-thumpers can bring about the Apocalypse by summoning up something they’ve mistaken for Jesus. It’s like letting a Primary One class mainline Sunny Delight, then handing out brightly colored semiautomatic grenade launchers. Outcome: we exterminate each other, either retail or wholesale (the latter by inviting in the Elder Gods—I’ll come back to that subject later).

  CASE NIGHTMARE RED is invasion by aliens. The aforementioned excess of magic we’re making creates a signal that’s causally entangled with the human noösphere, the totalization of human experience that we generate and contribute to by thinking. This signal is detectable at a considerable distance by various entities, who interpret it as a flashing neon sign saying all-you-can-eat buffet here. They might be incorporeal parasites like my V-symbionts or the feeders in the night, or they might be physical invaders: but either way, we’re into necromantic War of the Worlds territory, which doesn’t end well.