The Nightmare Stacks

by Charles Stross

  CASE NIGHTMARE YELLOW is the geek apocalypse. During the Twinkie singularity stuff begins to come alive, and to think: mostly stuff that shouldn’t. Stuff like Facebook, or Vodafone, or your teacup—the Internet of Things That Go Bump in the Night. Invasion by superintelligent hostile cafeteria fixtures, if you like. (At least, I think that’s what Jez was getting at. My brain had halfway shut down by the time she got to YELLOW.) It’s your classic nerd-rapture hard-takeoff singularity, but it’s a lot less fun than the Silicon Valley set seem to think when it sprouts tentacles and sucks your brain out through your ears. This one doesn’t end well either.

  There are a number of other NIGHTMARE cases for which remediation protocols exist. Viral SETI signals. Weaponized memes—Rickrolling didn’t come out of nowhere, you know. Lunatic cultists waking up GOD GAME BLACK, whatever the hell that is. (There’s always some idiot who thinks that after the revolution they’ll be the one sitting on top of the hill of corpses, dining on caviar served out of a bowl made from a chromed baby’s skull.) But the one thing they’ve all got in common is that, left to play out in accordance with their internal logic, none of them end with anyone getting to live happily ever after.

  The big problem with all of this is that the CASE NIGHTMARE remediation protocols haven’t been tested—by definition they can’t be tested ahead of time. The risk of mass civilian casualties is unacceptably high. (They go so far into Thinking the Unthinkable territory that some of the cleanup strategies include—well, if you ever wondered why successive British governments have insisted on retaining the capability to nuke London until it glows in the dark, you’re on the right track.) But on the other hand, the cost of failure is infinite: with an existential anthropic threat you don’t get a second chance. Everybody dies.

  How does this affect me?

  Well, apparently we’re already in the early stages of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. The shit is hitting the fan as previously forecast, as witness all the Marvel Comics wannabes who are showing up in the news. So the organization is hitting the gas pedal, and ramping up in anticipation of wartime-level operations within the next twelve months. Normally they’d have taken two years to train me before letting me anywhere near an active duty assignment (“the organization is very careful about embedding feral sorcerers,” as Jez put it), but it turns out that they simply don’t have time.

  So:

  The Laundry is going to move into Quarry House in Leeds, whatever I may think of the wisdom of the idea. It’s close to the geographical center of the country, it’s defensible, it was designed as a center for continuity of government after World War Three, and we don’t have time to build something better. So fuck me, I’m screwed (family spare bedroom, here I come).

  I’m going to be given an accelerated self-study course in higher-dimensional portal management, ley line construction, and existential anthropic threat analysis and countermeasures. Then they’re going to send me on a firearms safety course so that I qualify for a firearms license, because Health and Safety say they’re mandatory for all personnel who can cause explosions at a distance, and the “countermeasures” bit in my training course is a euphemism for what fantasy writers call “battle magic” or “throwing thunderbolts.” In fact, once I’ve finished the course and have been certificated I’ll be entered in the books as a light tank for purposes of international arms control treaties.

  Then they’re going to assign me a code name and an active duty role . . .

  * * *

  Alex is still new to the Laundry. He hasn’t yet realized that training for the end of the world is an ongoing part of the job. Or that however senior the managers he’s working for, there may be stuff that they haven’t been briefed on either.

  Six months before Alex has cause to moan in his diary about the end of the world, another briefing took place for various initiates of Mahogany Row, up on the third floor of Audit House.

  Audit House, name notwithstanding, is not in fact the name of an office building from which the Laundry’s audit department operates. It was originally a Georgian town house, which served as the home of a particularly stuffy accountancy firm during the late Victorian period. Requisitioned by the Ministry of War in 1915, it has remained a Crown property ever since. Too small to serve as an actual agency headquarters and too architecturally notable to rebuild—it’s a grade one listed building—it serves as a conference retreat within the city. Which is why, on a rainy Thursday afternoon, Jez Wilson, Gerald Lockhart, and several other senior officers are there to attend a lecture on variant hominid cladistics and the implications of early FOXP2 gene expression for ritual magic.

  With tea and biscuits, no less.

  “Tesco’s Value range,” Lockhart remarks disapprovingly. He’s a middle-aged man in a three-piece suit, balding, his posture stiff. “An oldie, and not so much of a goodie.”

  “Don’t even mention the tea,” says Ms. Hazard, who is gracing the event with her presence. She looks as out of place as a peacock among squabbling seagulls: she’s dressed for a diplomatic reception, or possibly a royal garden party. She shudders delicately. “They used bags.”

  “Don’t worry, it’ll all be over in a couple of hours.” Lockhart is the very soul of solicitude. “Then you can go back to . . .” He trails off, as if uncertain. (A very rare situation indeed for Gerry Lockhart.)

  “Wining and dining the younger brother of the Emir of Dubai,” she says with an enigmatic smile. “Doing my bit for the balance of trade deficit and the shareholders.” A momentary flash of steel in the smile: “Got to keep the toy chest overflowing, haven’t we? Shall we take our seats? I’m sure Kylie will be with us shortly—”

  A door leads from the reception area into a Georgian drawing room, done out in tasteful period decor, with a seventeenth-century lacquered harpsichord in one corner facing a half-circle of conference hall chairs, as if waiting for a recital. Beside it, there’s a much more modern table supporting a video projector that looks as out of place as a hovercraft at a tall ships race. The dozen invitees file in and take their seats, in some cases still munching furtively on bourbon creams and Hobnobs. Then a serving door at the far side of the room opens and a staffer walks in, leading a stranger. “Hello,” the gofer says diffidently, as if he’s not used to addressing this many top brass simultaneously. (Maybe he isn’t—he’s young enough that he clearly finds it an exciting challenge to drive a shaver around the volcanic range of zits gracing his right cheek—but if he’s lucky he’ll have time to grow into the job before his internship runs out or a necromancer eats him.) “I’d like to introduce this afternoon’s seminar lead, Professor Kylie McPherson from the Natural History Museum. Professor McPherson is an individual merit researcher in the Department of Paleontology, specializing in the origins of cognitive psychogenetics in genus Homo. She’s here to talk to us about some recent findings in hominid evolutionary biology.”

  Kylie McPherson is in her late forties, wears a no-nonsense tweed suit with her hair tied back, and clearly Mahogany Row is of no more significance to her than a pride of unruly baboons or a class of undergraduates. She walks to the table, taps her laptop trackpad to ensure it’s awake, and starts.

  “Good afternoon!” She hits the spacebar and the projection screen throws up a skull. At least, Lockhart supposes it’s meant to be a skull: it looks more like a child’s clay model of a skull that’s been dropped on the floor, shattered, and inexpertly glued back together again with missing pieces replaced by guesswork. It looks crude, the brow ridges heavy and the jaw powerful enough to crack walnuts. “Meet your great-to-the-nth-grandfather, Jim. Jim is a well-preserved specimen of Homo erectus, a species of hominin—our closest living relatives—that lived from roughly two million years ago until they became extinct around 70,000 BC, at around the same time as the Toba supervolcano erupted. There’s some argument about how closely Jim’s people are related to us; some of the earlier specimens have been categorized as Homo er
gaster or Homo habilis, and it’s not clear whether he’s a direct ancestor of Neanderthal man and Homo sapiens or an extinct offshoot.

  “However, I want you to be very clear that Jim is neither an Australopithecine nor an Ape. He’s an early modern specimen of genus Homo, the family of species of which our kind is the only survivor to this date.”

  Kylie pauses, raises a bottle of water for a sip, and remarks drily: “In this business we get to deal with a lot of ‘begats.’ It can feel a bit Biblical at times—especially the holy wars over cladistics.”

  They’re still chuckling when she lowers her bottle and hits the trackpad again. Another slide, another skull: going by the ruler next to it, this one shrank in the wash. She leaves it on the screen just long enough for the audience to spot it, then brings up another slide: now the infant-sized skull is joined by a full-sized adult one. “These are both grown-ups. The one on the right is a Neanderthal specimen, and the one on the left is LB1, a well-preserved adult specimen of Homo floresiensis, Flores Man. You may have heard them described as hobbits: one thing I’d like to put straight right away is that Professor Tolkien was making things up—the name was applied to them after the fact, and it’s a bit embarrassing to those of us in the field because of the misconceptions it comes with. Names come with baggage. Some of my colleagues thought at first they were dealing with island dwarfism—Flores is an island, and species on islands frequently suffer from deficiency diseases. There’s also evolutionary selection pressure for small size. (Think of Shetland ponies, for example.) But we’ve recently confirmed that LB1 is a distinct subspecies of Homo, one that lived from about 90,000 years ago right up until the end of the last ice age, around 11,000 years ago. Fully grown, she’d have been about one meter ten tall—that’s three foot six in old money—and there’s evidence that the hobbits of Flores used fire and Upper Paleolithic hand tools. Small skulls and small brains don’t automatically imply lack of intelligence: we’ve used X-ray tomography to measure her brain volume, and it turns out that the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, an area associated with higher cognition, is about the same size as that of a modern human.

  “That’s another key point I want you to hang on to: intelligence isn’t purely a function of brain size. Albert Einstein’s brain wasn’t notably huge, and LB1 wasn’t obviously backward compared to her full-sized contemporaries on the continent.

  “Now, let’s move swiftly on. Our friend Homo neanderthalensis appeared about 300,000 years ago and disappeared about 40,000 years ago. He’s your prototype ape man, courtesy of Hollywood, but frankly if you put one in a business suit and met him or her in a meeting like this you probably wouldn’t realize. Neanderthals were heavily built with thick bones and heavier brow ridges than most of us have today—but there’s some debate as to whether they’re even a different species, or just people like us, abapted—that is, selected, rather than adapted—by living in a period of intense glaciation. We recently acquired a complete genome sequence for this guy, and they definitely interbred with our ancestors about forty to sixty thousand years ago. They also buried their dead with grave goods, cooked their food, and we think they made dugout canoes as well. Unfortunately other traces they left behind have had enough time to decay, so we don’t know for sure if they made clothing and had other modern cultural practices—painting and decorating, speaking and singing. The first definite evidence for cultural goods that we’ve got is from early Homo sapiens inhabitations in arid areas, going back 70,000 years. But we can’t rule it out for Neanderthal man.”

  She pauses for another mouthful of water.

  “Our ancestors began to diverge genetically from other members of genus Homo, notably our friend Jim, about half a million years ago. By about 200,000 years ago, recognizably modern humans coexisted with Neanderthals and hobbits. Our ancestors interbred with their contemporaries, but there is no trace of any other hominids in the record of the past 10,000 years. Until recently we thought we were the last Homo standing.

  “Very recently. Then we discovered we were wrong.”

  4.

  INTERLUDE: FORWARD RECON

  Most Honorable Agent Second, Doyenne of Spies and Leader of Liars, prostrates herself in front of All-Highest’s throne and wonders, coldly terrified, if her father intends to kill her. Less than ten days have passed since she was revived from hibernation to join the High Command in horrified contemplation of the wreckage of their world. A lot has changed while she slumbered, including, disastrously, her father and his favorites.

  Before she slept, her father was merely a general: elevated above thousands, privileged to command, but still just a slave beneath the sandals of the Morningstar. But now he has become the All-Highest—or the mantle of All-Highest has descended upon him—and to lie to the All-Highest is to die, horribly and painfully. The geasa by which he compels submission entangles everyone in the empire in a lethal web of power, for the weak are bound by the strong who know their true names, and the strong are bound by the strongest. Each level of geas reinforces the next one down. If there were any weaknesses or inconsistencies in the bindings, All-Highest would already be dead, overthrown by an ambitious subordinate; and so she abases herself before the greatest Power in the empire, and hopes not to die.

  Agent Second has never been high in her father’s esteem, but while she lived her mother was able to provide some shelter from his mercurial temper. His young new consort (who even now stands by his right hand) is another matter, and can be expected to want to secure the succession for her own children. Agent Second’s life is thus in peril from more than one direction.

  “Speak to me, Oh Agent, of our ears and eyes overground, of your readiness to walk among the ape men beyond the ghost roads, learn their weaknesses, and ease our campaign of conquest.”

  Agent Second’s ambitions are limited to not dying on this day. He called me Agent, not Most-Favored Daughter, but he still solicits my opinion. It sets an ominous precedent, to withhold recognition of her privilege and title. But on the other hand, All-Highest still wishes to hear her insights. So there is room for hope. She pushes herself to her knees before the charnel throne, eyes still downcast, and steels herself, preparing to speak.

  “All-Highest, I stand ready to lead your Spies and Liars out to learn their secrets as you command, and to mislead and entrap them should you so desire. Please recollect that our numbers were depleted by the last counterinsurgency sweep—we lost many of our best inquisitors when the Eastern Devils penetrated our web of trust, discrediting the previous Agent First.” Translation: You executed them during the confusion after the meteor strike because you thought that they’d been suborned and were telling you lies.

  Speaking truth to power is mandatory on pain of death among the vassals of the Imperial Autarchate, enforced by the geasa superiors impose on subordinates. Unfortunately, honesty provides no immunity from the consequences of bearing bad tidings. But efficiency in turn requires that vassals of rank must have some discretion in interpreting their orders. Agent Second is not Doyenne of Liars and Leader of Spies for nothing: her tongue is deft with delicate meanings, soft with subtleties of inflection.

  “The subsequent decision to take only warrior caste vassals into the future has further reduced the corps of Spies and Liars available to the Host.” Translation: You left them on the surface to die of old age with the rest—or more likely to be eaten by nightmares from beyond the sky while we retreated into hibernation underground. “And so, our strength is woefully reduced.”

  “What remains, Agent?” All-Highest’s tone is as chilly as the breeze that whispers through the streets of the necropolis, sucking the moisture from the mummified corpses of the unfortunate.

  “I remain, Father.” It is a desperate risk, reminding him of their relationship, but a calculated one: at this point she has nothing to lose. “I hold the fealty of my honor guard, six bodies warm and true that I can vouch for.” Bound by her own personal geas, they
will obey her unto death: this is how authority is exercised among the people of the Morningstar Empire and their fellow not-entirely-human sapients.

  “Knowing I could take only my honor guard to sleep with me,” Agent Second continued, “I hand-picked the most adroit in the skills of my order. I have preserved in this way Agent Third, Agent Fourth, and Agent Sixth, along with three others skilled in the arts of assassination.” Agent Fifth, swollen with a surfeit of personal ambition, had failed to convince Agent Second of her loyalty. After the second poisoning attempt she had left the woman screaming and naked on the surface, her empty eye sockets leaking tears of blood as the barrel-bodied and be-tentacled horrors circled overhead. “I strove to preserve the capabilities of my office to the utmost extent permitted. And so, of the Command of Spies and Liars there remains to you the four most proficient of your agents, and a half-lance of Silent Executioners beside.”

  All-Highest is quiet for a long time—almost fifty beats. Agent Second kneels before him, frozen in tension. The only betraying sign of her anxiety is a twitch of the tip of her left ear, hidden by the folds of her cowl. Her father is thinking, calculating, weighing prospects. Beside him, the dragon bitch who murdered her mother stands tall in burnished armor, the high crimson plumes of her helmet-crest waving in time to her breath. Her father’s new wife’s face is outwardly expressionless, but Agent Second recognizes the searing hatred behind the mask. Agent Second’s continued existence is an affront to the Liege of Airborne Strike Command, a reminder that she is only a replacement in All-Highest’s affections and can be put aside as easily as Agent Second’s mother. If Agent Second survives this audience and is to live on, she will have to settle the affair with her stepmother one way or another: to submit and be bound by her geas, or bury a hatchet in her back.