The Nightmare Stacks

by Charles Stross

  Agent First follows her target along a well-lit road. The target seems aware of her presence, but unalarmed by another solitary female. Finally an opportunity presents itself. There are no pedestrians nearby as Agent First readies the rings on her left hand and accelerates, overhauling the round-eared girl from behind. Catching up, she reaches out with her gloved hand to tap her target on the shoulder.

  The woman whirls round. Her expression of momentary alarm fades as she peers into Agent First’s face. Agent First stifles her unease, steels her will, and stares right back. The woman is of roughly the right age and build. She wears dark leggings and practical boots, a short kilt around her waist and a short leather coat thrown over baggy layers of knitwear above. “What is it?” the woman says. “Do you need help?” Puzzlement creeps into her expression as she registers Agent First’s lack of comprehension. Now is the moment: Agent First’s oath of allegiance tightens its grip on her will and she obeys instinctively, unleashing the power stored in her rings.

  It takes much power but barely a heartbeat to suck the target’s memories and appearance into the thieves’ stones that hangs from her necklace. It is the work of another heartbeat to touch the woman’s eyes, mouth, and chest—cardinal points all—with her harshly glowing ringed fingers and utter the Keyword to dispatch her back along the shadow road, screaming silently. The binding she has placed on the woman will carry her to a cell beneath the limestone pavement, where Agent Second will supervise her interrogation. Meanwhile Agent First collapses to her knees beneath a torrent of foaming memories, the raw stuff of identity flooding through her mind and energizing the glamour that disguises her features.

  She allows herself a single sob of horror at what she has done. Dread and a sick, nameless emotion fill her for a few seconds, then she forces her treacherous feelings back under control and immerses herself in stolen imagery. Words in an unfamiliar tongue come to her lips unbidden. She lifts her left hand, and turns it in front of her face, struggling to remember her victim’s true name, the stolen key that will give her access to everything. It’s on the tip of her tongue, waiting for her: then everything she stole from the urük girl comes flooding in.

  She turns stiffly, taking a deep breath. The kebab shop she saw when she first arrived is barely half a kilometer away, and business will be slow half an hour before pub closing time. It’s an easy walk, and the guys behind the counter will give her a large döner without questioning if she flashes them her glamour-enhanced smile and tells them what she wants.

  “My name is Cassiopeia Brewer,” she tells herself, the English phonemes rough and misshapen in her mouth, the curiously flattened Yorkshire vowels a vexing puzzle (for in the tongue of the People, regional accents are unthinkable deviations from the will of the All-Highest). “I am twenty-two years old. I am a scholar—no, a student—studying Performance at Leeds Beckett University.” She smiles painfully, forcing her traitor knees to tense, leaning against the wall of the hospital car park as she rises to her feet. “YesYes! And my friends call me Cassie.”

  PART 2

  MEETING DR. RIGHT

  7.

  MEET CUTE

  The next Monday morning, Alex is scheduled to attend an orientation meeting at Quarry House, the proposed new headquarters building in Leeds city center. He isn’t too enthused by the prospect of being out and about in daylight, but he manages to combustion-proof himself against the miserable gray overcast that passes for early spring in West Yorkshire by means of a hoodie, gloves, dark glasses, and a pancake-thick layer of theatrical makeup. (Summer is going to present an entirely new set of obstacles if they insist on him working here, but summer is still months away.) Rather than risking his neck on a moped in rush-hour traffic around the Inner Loop, he walks down the hill and catches a bus to the proposed new office. It’s easy enough to reach, being right opposite the central bus station, just north of the river, in the rotting concrete armpit between York Road and Marsh Lane.

  Quarry House squats menacingly atop the same low hill as West Yorkshire Playhouse and the Leeds College of Music. It was built in the early 1980s as the headquarters of the Department of Health and Social Security, and it’s hardened by design against the twin shibboleths of that period—race riots and a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. It’s nicknamed the Ministry of Truth for good reason: there are no windows on the first or second floors and there’s a bomb shelter in the basement. (The previous building on its site was earmarked by the Gestapo for their Headquarters, Northern England, after the planned Nazi invasion of Great Britain.) Surmounting its central atrium is a peculiar landmark—a tower not unlike a giant stainless steel syringe needle on which is impaled a chromed metal toroid supported by flying buttresses—purpose unknown. Its overall aspect is brutal, a modernist bureaucratic fortress.

  “No, seriously Alex, how could you possibly think there’s anything inappropriate about a classified entity planning to move into the Ministry of Truth?” Pete asks, when Alex expresses this thought to him as they wait for their coffees in the cafeteria queue. “Next you’ll be asking if it’s true about the swimming pool!”

  “Swimming . . . pool?” Alex blinks at Pete. He’s been up all night, grappling fruitlessly with a maze of twisty little expense claim forms (supposedly the organization will be paying his hotel bill—if he can fill out all the paperwork correctly) and he’s slightly frazzled this morning.

  “The health club in the basement has a swimming pool,” Pete explains.

  “The health club.” Two coffees materialize on the counter: a flat white, two shots for Pete, and a gigantic mocha, capped with a swirl of gradually deflating whipped cream, for Alex. (Ordered with decaf: Alex isn’t that tired.) “There’s a health club?”

  “Yup, and quite a nice one. They built in back in the early eighties when they were trying to give London-based DHSS staff an incentive to move up to Leeds. Complete with a pool—it doubles as a water reservoir and radiation shielding for the bunker in time of civil disorder or war. It’s open to the public these days but”—Pete touches the side of his nose—“I gather we’ve got plans for it.”

  “Plans.” Alex blinks. Something tickles his memories. “You don’t mean BLUE HADES?” A few weeks ago he was on his way into the New Annex when he had to step aside to make way for an extremely pretty blonde in a motorized chair. Then he looked at her a second time and realized there was something really odd about her skin. But she was talking animatedly to the terrifying Dr. O’Brien, and if she didn’t know she was chatting with a Deep One in a bath chair, then clearly there was no hope, so . . .

  Pete shrugs. “Health and safety regs. If they send us liaison officers, we’ve got to provide them with suitable office accommodation, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Liaison officers.” Alex tries it on for size. “The Deep Ones are sending us liaison officers.”

  “Ssh, there are civilians about.” Pete takes his flat white and scans the room for a spot as far away from the windows—and neighbors—as possible. They take a spindly designerish table in an unpopular corner close by the kitchen entrance. He sits down. “Doris dropped it on me via email this morning: we got the lease.”

  “We got the—” Alex stops. “Oh right.”

  “Yes. The Department of Health folks are being shipped out to a new purpose-built campus around the back of St. Jimmie’s, with plenty of space for private insurance companies to set up shop.” Pete sips his coffee. “As for the DWP, I’m not sure where they’re going. Probably Manchester. But the point is, both departments should be out the door completely by the end of the year. Meanwhile, we have got office space in here from the beginning of next week—we’re moving out of that fleapit in Headingley.” He means the Arndale office. “So we have to establish an internal security perimeter to SOE-approved standards, set up and deploy perimeter wards for the site, survey the hell out of the entire neighborhood, and really make sure any inactive ley lines in central
Leeds are identified and capped off.”

  “We don’t want to leave any open back doors?”

  “No kidding.” Pete shudders slightly. The last two major headquarter sites had disastrous weaknesses, and people died as a result. People Pete and Alex knew. “We’ve got a briefing in room 424 today. Then we get to walk the grounds with K-22s, looking for anomalies—we’re dogsbodies on this one, but I think the idea is to familiarize us with the floor plan while having us do something boring but useful.”

  “Happy joy.”

  “Don’t you start again.” Alex does a double-take: the normally sunny and open Pete looks quietly frustrated—almost angry. “Sandy is back home looking after a colicky baby by herself, I’m shamefully neglecting my parish, I’ve got a backlog of reports to process, and now this! I should jolly well tell—” Pete stops, but not without a visible effort. “Sorry. Must think happy thoughts.”

  Alex is set back in his seat. He stares at his mentor. Pete doesn’t do angry, as a rule. He’s a vicar: he’s an expert not only on Aramaic apocalyptic scriptures but on helping people deal with life’s major milestones. Grief counseling, marriage guidance, deaths in the family, all the emotionally demanding situations that Alex has never had to face (for which he is extremely grateful, when he gives the matter time for thought). Pete has had to comfort so many people for whom things are going terribly, unbelievably badly that he keeps his own personal life in an emotional containment grid. So to see it bleeding over into his attitude to work shocks Alex rigid. “Are you—” Alex licks his lips. “Are they going to make you move up here?”

  Pete knocks back his coffee, and grimaces. Alex takes a mouthful of his own and his lips curl involuntarily. The coffee is diabolically bad, as if the espresso machine’s nozzles haven’t been cleaned in living memory. Presumably the permanent staff know better than to drink the overpriced swill in the canteen. Hoping to salvage it, he picks up one of the paper tubes of sugar but fumbles as he tears it open, spilling grains of Demerara across the table. “Shit,” he says, trying to tear his eyes away from the mess. He can’t help himself: he begins to count. Quietly, anxiously: “Shit.”

  “What’s—oh, I see.” Pete peers at Alex for a moment as he sits there staring at the spilled granules, trapped by stochasticity. “Let me—”

  19. 20. 21. “Wait,” Alex manages to say. 25. 26. 27. The sugar granules fill his vision, urgently enumerating, hyperreal, pulsing for attention. “I need to figure this out.”

  “Figure out what? If it’s just the arithmomania again, I can tidy—”

  “No.” Cold sweat prickles on Alex’s forehead. “This keeps happening.” 42. 43. 44. 45. “I need a better solution. Not sweeping it under the rug.” 52. 53. 54. “It’s debilitating.”

  “Is it getting worse?” Pete asks gently.

  “I think so.” His forehead turns hot. 66. 67. 68. “I had a mild case of the counting bug before, uh, before I turned. But this is much worse.” 70. 71. 72. 73. “I know it’s part of the folklore about vampires, but it’s a real thing, too. Compulsive counting.” 79. 80. 81. “It’s in my head, damn it, the V-symbiotes want to know how many—”

  “You’re a programmer, aren’t you? Can’t you come up with a way to count it for them?”

  “It’s not that simple, counting isn’t just—” A recursive integer function: Come on, how hard can it be? Alex shakes his head, as if irritated by a passing fly. “Wait a moment.” 95. 96. 97. Alex forces the numbers to stop, pinning the grains of sugar to the melamine table top by sheer force of will. He mumbles to himself under his breath, haltingly, hoping he’s got the syntax right. He’s speaking Old Enochian, the ancient formal language the Laundry’s necromancers use for bossing unruly mindless horrors around. It’s not much of a numerical language but it’s good at semantic interpolation and you can do basic arithmetic with string substitution, it’s just lousy-inefficient—

  “Alex?” Pete asks quietly.

  “Wait. Metaprogramming.” Interrupting his flow takes conscious effort and Alex starts again, but this time it comes easily to mind: a short looping construct wrapped in a conditional proposition that hovers and writhes in his visual field. It’s a trivial piece of ritual magic, a mere cantrip. The trick is the recursive element, because if you can distract a vampire by forcing him to count grains of sugar or salt or rice linearly, you can brute-force his attention by dumping a huge sack of the stuff on him—but not if he uses a chunking algorithm. To a normal human magician this sort of usage would be unacceptably dangerous, attracting the eaters that cause K syndrome, but Alex is already infested with V-symbiotes: things can’t get any worse. And now he has an answer: “Two hundred and thirty-six,” he says contentedly, then sweeps the spilled sugar onto the floor. “Thank you, Pete. That was brilliant.”

  “I didn’t do anything.” Pete looks distant, unhappy. Alex feels a flash of disappointment. Then he remembers his question, right before the spill.

  “Are they going to try to move you up here?” he repeats.

  “I should hope not,” Pete says flatly. “Because if they do, I shall have to ask my bishop for guidance. I can’t continue to neglect my parish duties. It’s actively damaging.”

  Boss fight between the Church of England and the Laundry: Who wins? Alex shakes his head. “Let’s go and get started on this bullshit work assignment,” he suggests. “Then we can get set up in a secure office and you can go yell at HR. Maybe they’ll listen this time?”

  “They’re idiots,” Pete grumps. “Sorry. I mean they’re not idiots: they’re overworked, understaffed, under-budgeted, and their morale is in the pits, just like the rest of us. They’re mostly doing the best they can. But—”

  “Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence or overwork?” Alex asks, rising.

  “Something like that. But there’s a point at which sufficient incompetence is malice.”

  Alex, remembering his sometime co-worker Basil Northcote-Robinson, follows him to the lifts in silence.

  * * *

  And now for a flashback:

  Cassie walks through the sleazy studentland of Leeds late at night, eyes wide with wonder. Around her, everything old is new again, and strangely enchanting besides. It’s familiar from memory but she feels as if she’s seeing it clearly for the first time. This is a dustbin; that is a parked motorbike. She’s simultaneously entranced, contemptuous, and horrified, her hidden second identity lending a strange parallax to her perceptions, crowding and jostling with the fresh insights of an alien abroad in a new world.

  Inside her head two distinct sets of memories mingle uneasily; behind them, other half-remembered ghost identities wail and rattle the bars of their cages. Agent First has stolen identities before, but after the task was accomplished she suppressed them with relief, retaining only faint impressions of their original owners’ lives. But Agent First has drunk deep from the well of Cassiopeia, as this is not a normal mission. Most masks need only be worn for a handful of days, but Agent First has no idea how long she will have to be Cassie. It might be for several moons, or even longer: if the unthinkable happens, it might be for the rest of her life. So she has taken a far deeper imprinting than is customary or even safe, and her sense of her own identity is dangerously fragile.

  Cassie believes that she is Agent First of Spies and Liars, daughter of the former General-Overseer of the 14th Western Host of Air and Darkness, who is now the All-Highest of the Morningstar Empire (or what remains of it, all other claimants to that status having been crushed by the ancient horrors that ate the moon). But at the same time she is also Cassiopeia Brewer, aged 22, a cheerfully extrovert art and drama student. Her work: theatrical management, lighting effects, set design. Her hobbies: costuming, music, and a heavy paranormal romance reading habit. Her personal life: plenty of friends, a handful of BFFs, no sultry smoking vampire boyfriends on the horizon. Her upbringing: from the backstreets o
f Hull to breakout and departure for the bright lights of the nearest metropolis by way of an academy school. Next stop: London or LA.

  This is the cause of no little perplexity to Agent First. Agent First understands work, of course: she is trained and prepared for infiltration, assassination, and skullduggery. But there’s more to Cassie than work alone, and the linked concepts of fun and hobby strike Agent First as perversely indulgent, alarmingly decadent, and dangerously frivolous. Such things are at best a distraction from the urgent demands of survival. (As to friendship, there is no one word in the High Tongue that can express the concept. Her upbringing was a single-minded death march dedicated to training her for this particular type of mission, and her current life a desperate struggle to assert her value in the face of her stepmother’s implacable hostility. Next stop: incredulous envy.)

  Cassie has a loving but work-weary mother and a laid-back, drily amused older brother with no ambitions whatsoever (interests: beer, football, cars). She had a father she secretly worshipped behind her mask of teenage disdain, before a premature heart attack carried him away when she was seventeen. She has student loans which she refuses to worry about, and she supplements her income with casual jobs in pubs and cafes. Latterly she’s acquired an unpaid acting gig—grist for her CV—which will take her to Whitby and (who knows?) perhaps even into the Playhouse for an amateur run. But what she really wants is to get into set and costume design and, eventually, build a career in television production.