The Jennifer Morgue

by Charles Stross

  Dr. Mabuse is an archetype and a runaway media success in his own right, famous from five novels and twelve movies. The Doctor was created by author Norbert Jacques, and was developed into one of the most chilling creations of the silent era in 1922 by no less a director than Fritz Lang. Mabuse is a name, but one that nobody in their right mind speaks aloud. He’s a master of disguise, naturally, and a rich, well-connected socialite and gambler. (Some social context: gambling at the high-stakes table is not so much an innocuous recreation as an obscenity, in a decade of hyper-inflation and starvation, with crippled war veterans dying of cold on the street corners, as was the case in Weimar Germany.) Mabuse has his fingers in every pie, by way of a syndicate so shadowy and criminal that nobody knows its extent; he’s a spider, but the web he weaves is so broad that it looks like the whole of reality to the flies trapped within. He is (in some of the stories) a psychiatrist, skilled in manipulation, and those who hunt him are doomed to become his victims. If Mabuse has a weakness it is that his schemes are overelaborate and tend to implode messily, usually when his most senior minions rebel, hopelessly late; nevertheless, he is a master of the escape plan, and with his ability to brainwash minions into playing his role, he’s a remarkably hard phantom to slay.

  It is all too easy to make fun of the likes of Fantômas and Dr. Nikola, and even their modern-day cognates such as Dr. Mabuse and Ernst Stavro Blofeld—for do they not represent such an obsessively concentrated pinnacle of entrepreneurial criminality that, if they really existed, they would instantly be hunted down and arrested by INTERPOL?

  Careful consideration will lead one to reconsider this hasty judgment. Criminology, the study of crime and its causes, has a fundamental weak spot: it studies that proportion of the criminal population who are stupid or unlucky enough to get caught. The perfect criminal, should he or she exist, would be the one who is never apprehended—indeed, the one whose crimes may be huge but unnoticed, or indeed miscategorized as not crimes at all because they are so powerful they sway the law in their favor, or so clever they discover an immoral opportunity for criminal enterprise before the legislators notice it. Such forms of criminality may be indistinguishable, at a distance, from lawful business; the criminal a paragon of upper-class virtue, a face-man for Forbes.

  When the real Napoleons of Crime walk among us today, they do so in the outwardly respectable guise of executives in business suits and thousand-dollar haircuts. The executives of WorldCom and Enron were denizens of a corporate culture so rapacious that any activity, however dubious, could be justified in the name of enhancing the bottom line. They have rightfully been charged, tried, and in some cases jailed for fraud, on a scale that would have been the envy of Mabuse, Blofeld, or their modern successor, Dr. Evil. When you need extra digits on your pocket calculator to compute the sums you are stealing, you’re in the big league. Again, when you’re able to evade prosecution by the simple expedient of appointing the state prosecutor and the judges—because you’re the president of a country (and not just any country, but a member of the rich and powerful G8)—you’re certainly not amenable to diagnosis and detection in the same sense as your run-of-the-mill shoplifter or petty delinquent. I’m naming no names (They have intelligence services! Cruise missiles!), but this isn’t a hypothetical scenario.

  Interview with the Entrepreneur

  In an attempt to clarify the mythology surrounding James Bond, I tracked down his old rival to his headquarters in the Ministry of Inward Investment in the breakaway Republic of Transdniestria. Somewhat suspicious at first, Mr. Blofeld relaxed as soon as he realized I was not pursuing him on behalf of the FSB, CIA, or IMF, and kindly agreed to be interviewed for this book. Now at age seventy-two, Blofeld is a cheerful veteran of numerous high-tech start-ups, and not a few multinationals where, as a specialist in international risk management and arbitrage, he applied his unique skills to business expansion. Today he is semiretired, but has agreed to work in a voluntary capacity as director of the state investment agency.

  “It took me a long time to understand the agenda that the British government was pursuing through the covert activities of MI6,” he told me over a glass of sweet tea. “Call me naïve, but I really believed—at least at first—that they were honest capitalists, the scoundrels.”

  Over the course of an hour, Ernst explained to me how he first became aware that the UK was attempting to sabotage his business interests. “It was back in 1960 or thereabouts that they first tried to destroy one of my subsidiaries. Until then I hadn’t really had anything to do with them, but I believe one of my rivals in the phosphate mining business at the time put it about that my man on site was some sort of spy, and they sent this Bond fellow—not just to arrest my man or charge him with some trumped-up nonsense, but to kill him.” His lips paled with indignation as he contemplated the iniquity of the situation: that agents of the British government might go after an honest businessman for no better reason than an unsubstantiated allegation that he was spying on American missile tests. “I warned Julius to be careful and advised him to put a good lawyer on retainer, but what good are lawyers when the people you’re up against send hired killers? Julius brought in security contractors, but this Bond fellow still murdered him in the end. And the British government denies everything, to this day!”

  Ernst obviously believes in his own moral rectitude, but I had to ask the obvious questions, just for the record.

  “Yes, I was chief executive of SPECTRE for twelve years. But you know, SPECTRE was entirely honest about its activities! We had nothing to hide because what we were doing was actually legal. We’ve been mercilessly slandered by those rogues from MI6 and their friends in the newspapers, but the fact is, we’re no more guilty of criminal activity than any other multinational today: we simply had the misfortune to be foreign and entrepreneurial at a point in time when Whitehall was in the grasp of the communist conspirators Wilson and Callaghan, and their running-dog, so-called ‘Conservative’ fellow Heath. And we were pilloried because what we were doing was in direct competition with the inefficient state-run enterprises that my good friend Lady Thatcher recognized as mosquitoes battening on the life-blood of capitalism. That cad Fleming put it about that SPECTRE stands for ‘Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion’—absolute tosh and nonsense! Would a group of criminals really call themselves something that blatant? I’ll remind you that SPECTRE is actually a French acronym, as befits a nonprofit charity incorporated in Paris. The name stands for ‘Société professionelle et éthique du capital technologique réinvesti par les experts.16 Venture capitalists specializing in disruptive new technologies, in other words—commercial space travel, nuclear power, antibiotics. Not some kind of half-baked terrorist organization! But you can imagine the threat we posed to the inefficient state monopolies like the British Aircraft Corporation, the coal mining industry, and Imperial Chemical Industries.”

  Blofeld paused to sip his tea thoughtfully.

  “We were ahead of our time in many ways. We pioneered business methods that later became mainstream—Sir James Goldsmith, Ronald Perelman, Carl Icahn, they all watched us and learned—but by then, the commies were out of power in the West thanks to our friends in the establishment, so they had an easier time of it. No need to hire lots of expensive security and build concrete bunkers on desert islands! And yes, that made us look bad, don’t think I’m unaware of it—but you know, you want bunkers and isolated jungle rocket-launch bases? All you have to do is look at Arianespace! It’s fine when the government bureaucracies do it, but if an honest businessman tries to build a space launch site, and hires security to keep the press and saboteurs from foreign governments out, it’s suddenly a threat to world security!”

  He paused for a while. “They put the worst complexion on everything we did. The plastic surgery? Well, we had the clinic, why not let our staff use it, so the surgeons could sharpen their skills between paying customers? It was a perk, nothing more. We did—I admit it—
acquire a few companies trading in exotic weapons, nonlethal technologies mostly. And that business with Emilio and the yacht, I admit that looked bad. But did you know, it originally belonged to Adnan Khashoggi or Fahd ibn Saud or someone? Emilio was acting entirely on his own initiative—a loose cannon—and as soon as I heard about the affair I terminated his employment.”

  I asked Ernst to tell me about Bond.

  “Listen, this Bond chap, I want you to understand this: however he’s painted in the mass media, the reality is that he’s a communist stooge, an assassin. Look at the evidence. He works for the state—a socialist state at that. He went to university and worked with those traitors Philby and Burgess, that MacLean fellow—communist spies to a man. He didn’t resign his commission when the British government went socialist, like a decent fellow; instead he took assignments to go after entrepreneurs who were a threat to the interests of this socialist government, and he rubbed them out like a Mafia button man. There was no due process of law there, no respect for property rights, no courts, no lawyers—just a ‘License to Kill’ enemies of the state, loosely defined, who mostly happened to be businessmen working on start-up projects that coincidentally threatened state monopolies. He’s a damned commissar. Do you know why Moscow hated him? It’s because he’d beaten them at their own racket.”

  Blofeld was clearly depressed by this recollection, so I tried to change the subject by asking him about his personal management philosophy.

  “Well, you know, I tend to use whatever works in day-today situations. I’m a pragmatist, really. But I’ve got a soft spot for modern philosophers, Leo Strauss and Ayn Rand: the rights of the individual. And I’ve always wanted to remake the world as a better place, which is probably why the establishment dislikes me: I’m a threat to vested interests. Well, they’re all descended from men who were threats to vested interests, too, back in the day, only I threaten them with new technologies, while their ancestors mostly did their threatening with a bloody sword and the gallows. I don’t believe in initiating force.” He laughed self-deprecatingly. “I suppose you could call me naïve.”

  Trade Goods

  When I played back my tape of our discussion, it took me some time to notice that Ernst had carefully steered the conversation away from certain key points I had intended to quiz him about.

  One of the most disturbing aspects of the Bond milieu is the prevalence of technologies that are strangely out of place. Belt-buckle grappling hooks with wire spools that can support a man’s weight? Laser rifles? These aren’t simple extrapolations of existing technology—they go far beyond anything that’s achievable with today’s engineering tools or materials science. But forget Bond’s toys, the products of Q division. From Blofeld’s solar-powered orbital laser in Diamonds Are Forever to Carver’s stealth cruiser in Tomorrow Never Dies, we are surrounded by signs that the adversary has got tricks up his sleeve that far outweigh anything Bond’s backers can provide. These menacing intrusions of alien superscience—where could they possibly have gotten them from?

  The answer can be discerned with little difficulty if one cares to scrutinize the writings of the sage of Providence, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. This scholar—whose path, regrettably, never crossed that of the young Ian Fleming—asserted that our tenancy of this planet is but a recent aberration. Earth has in the past been home for a number of alien species of vast antiquity and incomprehensibly advanced knowledge, and indeed some of them may still linger alongside us—on the high Antarctic plateau, in the frigid oceanic depths, even in strange half-breed colonies off the New England coastline.

  If this strikes you as nonsensical, first contemplate your nearest city: How recognizable would it be in a hundred years’ time if our entire species silently vanished tomorrow? How recognizable would it be in a thousand years? Would any relics still bear witness to the once-proud towers of New York or Tokyo, a million years hence? Our future—and the future of any once-proud races that bestrode our planet—is that of an oily stain in the shale deposits of deep history. Earth’s biosphere and the active tectonic system it dances upon cleans house remorselessly, erasing any structure that is not alive or maintained by the living.

  Consider also the extent to which we really occupy the planet we live on. We think of ourselves as the dominant species on Earth—but 75 percent of the Earth’s entire biomass consists of bacteria and algae that we can’t even see with the naked eye. (Bacteria from whose ranks fearsome pathogens periodically emerge, burning like wildfire through our ranks.) Nor do we, in any real sense of the word, occupy the oceans. Certainly our trawlers hunt the bounty of the upper waters. But submarines (of which there are only a few hundred on the entire planet) fumble like blind men through the uppermost half-kilometer of a world-ocean that averages three kilometers in depth, unable to dive beneath their pressure limits to explore the abyssal plains that cover nearly two-thirds of the planetary surface. Finally, the surface (both the suboceanic abyss and the thin skin of dry land we cling tenuously to) is but a thousandth of the depth of the planet itself; we can’t even drill through the crust, much less contemplate with any certainty the nature of events unfolding within the hot, dense mantle beneath.

  We could be sharing the planet with numerous powerful alien civilizations, denizens of the high-energy condensed-matter realm beneath our feet, and we’d never know it—unless they chose to send emissaries into our biosphere, sprinkling death rays and other trade goods like glass beads before the aboriginal inhabitants, extracting a ghastly price in return for their largesse . . .

  A Colder War?

  James Bond was a creature of the Cold War: a strange period of shadow-boxing that stretched from late 1945 to the winter of 1991, forty-six years of paranoia, fear, and the creepy sensation that our lives were in thrall to forces beyond our comprehension. It’s almost impossible to explain the Cold War to anyone who was born after 1980; the sense of looming doom, the long shadows cast by the two eyeball-to-eyeball superpowers, each possessing vast powers of destruction, ready and able to bring about that destruction on a planetary scale in pursuit of their recondite ideologies. It was, to use the appropriate adjective, a truly Lovecraftian age, dominated by the cold reality that our lives could be interrupted by torment and death at virtually any time; normal existence was conducted in a soap-bubble universe sustained only by our determination to shut out awareness of the true horrors lurking in the darkness outside it, an abyss presided over by chilly alien warriors devoted to death-cult ideologies and dreams of Mutually Assured Destruction. Decades of distance have bought us some relief, thickening the wall of the bubble—memories misting over with the comforting illusion that the Cold War wasn’t really as bad as it seemed at the time—but who do we think we’re kidding? The Cold War wasn’t about us. It was about the Spies, and the Secret Masters, and the Hidden Knowledge.

  It’s no coincidence that the Cold War was the golden age of spying—the peak of the second-oldest profession, the diggers in the dark, the seekers after unclean knowledge and secret wisdom. Prior to 1939, spying of the international kind rather than the sordid domestic variety (let us pass swiftly over the tawdry Stasi archives of sealed glass jars full of worn underwear, kept as scent cues for the police dogs) was a small scale, largely amateurish concern. With the outbreak of the Second World War, it mushroomed. Faced with employment vacancies, the first response of a growing organization is to recruit close to home. Just like any 1990s dot-com start-up, growing as the founders haul in all their friends and anyone they know who has the right skill set, the 1940s espionage agencies were a boom town into which a well-connected clubbable London playboy would inevitably be sucked—and, moreover, one where he might try his hand and succeed, to everyone’s surprise. (In the 1990s he’d end up in marketing, with stock options up to here. Sic transit gloria techie.)

  When the Second World War gave way to the Doomwatch days and Strangelove nights of the Cold War, it entered a period in which the same clubbable fellow might find himself working in a matur
e organization, vastly larger and more professional than the half-assed amateurism of the early days. The CIA was born in the shadow of the wartime OSS, and grew into the emblematic Company (traders in secrets, overthrowers of governments), locked in titanic struggle with that other superpowered rival, the KGB (and their less well-known fellows in the GRU).

  The age of the traditional sneak-spies with their Minox cameras gave way to the era of the bugging device. With the 1960s came a new emphasis on supplementing human intelligence (HUMINT) with intelligence from electronic sources (ELINT). New agencies—the NSA in the United States, GCHQ in the UK—expanded as the field of “spyless spying” went mainstream, aided by the explosion in computing power made possible by integrated circuits and, later, the microprocessor. As telephony, television, telex, and other technologies began to come online, a torrent of data poured through the wires, a deluge that threatened to drown the agencies in useless noise. Or was it the whispering on the deep-ocean cables? Maybe the chatter served to conceal and disguise the quiet whispering of the hidden oracles, dribbling out strange new concepts that warped the vulnerable primate minds to serve their inscrutable goals. The source of the incredible new technologies that drove the advances of the mid-twentieth century was, perhaps, the whispering of an alien farmer in the ears of his herd . . .

  Times change, and the golden age of spying is over. We’ve delivered the harvest of fear that the Secret Masters desired; or maybe they’ve simply lost interest in us for the time being. Time will tell. For now, be content that it’s all over: the Cold War was a time of strangely rapid technological progress, but also of claustrophobic fear of destruction at three minutes’ notice, of the thermonuclear stars coming and bringing madness and death in their wake. Retreat into your soap-bubble universe, little primate, and give thanks.