Rhesus Chart (9780698140288)

by Stross, Charles

  • • •

  I WASN’T THE ONLY NIGHT OWL WORKING IN THE DEPARTMENT tonight; the Laundry is eccentric by civil service standards, and although the fax machines and telephone switchboards were all switched off at night to stop employees abusing the facilities (per some ancient directive issued in 1972), the coffee machine and the network remain accessible. Quite a few employees choose to work outside core business hours to minimize the risk of being disturbed.

  Tonight, the red NO ENTRY light above Andy’s office was lit, suggesting that my years-ago former manager was burning the midnight oil; our current departmental admin asset—Trish: twenty-something, plump, amiably inquisitive in an utterly inappropriate way—was nose down in a book at her desk in the middle of the open-plan area.

  “Bob? Oh, hi!” She deftly shuffled the book out of sight beneath a lever arch file full of forms, but not before I spotted the cover of The Hunger Games. “Can I sign you in?” I nodded, as she logged my badge and photographed me (duplicating a process that had certainly already happened before the front door closed behind me). “What brings you back to the office?”

  “Couldn’t sleep,” I lied. “Also, got to finish writing up a report for the Auditors.” The document in question was my report on GOD GAME RAINBOW—the apocalyptic clusterfuck in Colorado Springs a couple of months ago—but Trish didn’t need to know that: mentioning the Auditors would put her off asking any more questions. (Our audits are not strictly confined to the realm of the financial, and the people who administer them are deeply scary.) “Is anyone else around?”

  “Andy’s up to something: he said he wasn’t to be disturbed.” Trish’s expression of mildly affronted disapproval nailed it: she was bored. “But he requested night service because of some regulation or other about not working solo, and I’m top of the on-call rota, so it’s overtime for me . . .” She mimed covering her mouth for a theatrical yawn.

  I got it, although I disapproved: regs meet reality. Andy needed to perform some sort of procedure that the Book said needed two bodies present, but he couldn’t be bothered waiting for a qualified pair of hands. Instead he ticked the checkbox by ordering up a receptionist, then did it solo. Once upon a time that kind of sloppiness had been my forté—I’d gotten over it, but Andy had always been a little too casual to leave in a hands-on role. (That, I theorized, was why he’d ended up dangling from the bottom rung of the management ladder—too high to do any damage, too low to make anyone else do any damage.) “I’ll go see if he needs a hand,” I promised her. “If you’d rather go home I’ll sort it out.” I walked over to Andy’s office door—diagonally across the open plan/cubicle area from my own—and knocked twice.

  There was an unhuman presence on the other side of the door: it made the skin on my wrists tingle and brought an electric taste to my tongue. I listened with my ears and an inner sense I’d been uneasily practicing for the past year. Tuning in on the uncanny channel brought me a faint sizzling, chittering echo of chaotic un-minds jostling for proximity to the warm, pulsing, squishy meatsacks. The lightning-blue taste of a warded summoning grid—not a large one, just an electrified pentacle unrolled on a desk—was like fingernails on a blackboard: Andy was conducting midnight invocations by the light of a backlit monitor. Okay, so he wasn’t being totally stupid about this. But it still set my teeth on edge.

  “Who’s there?”

  “It’s Bob. Am I safe to enter?”

  “I’m running a level one. Make sure you don’t violate the containment and you should be fine.”

  “Not good enough, Andy. Is it safe for me to enter?”

  Andy sighed heavily. “Yes, Mother, I’m deactivating it now.”

  “Good.” A muffled click came from the other side of the door, and I felt the inchoate gibbering subside. I put my hand on the doorknob and pushed.

  “Come on in, Bob.”

  I squeezed inside his office. Andy hovered over a home-brew lab, pale-faced and skinny, staring at me with bleary eyes. He was older than me, a member of a generation that had grown up wearing a shirt and tie to the office and who still tried to keep up appearances; he was the junior ops manager who approved my application and gave me my first ever field test. It was odd to see him in a polo shirt and chinos. “What’s the project? Couldn’t you wait for a health and safety check?”

  He managed a self-deprecating shrug. “You know how it is; it’s my weekly ten-percenter.”

  He’d built the summoning grid on a folding table that occupied about half his floorspace: by the look of it, it had started out as a NAAFI table tennis game sometime in the 1950s, before he repurposed it as an occult research workbench. I spotted peripherals: an Arduino controller, a laptop, a couple of wire-wrap circuit boards, a breakout box, and of course a summoning grid—which most people mistake for a pentacle.

  “They roped you into the Google cargo-cult, too?” I asked.

  “Yes.” He shrugged again. “On the bright side, it gives me an excuse to brush up on my practical skills: I’ve spent so long shuffling reports that I’m in danger of forgetting what it’s all about. If you’re willing to watch my back I’d be very grateful, Bob, but you really don’t need to; it’s perfectly safe.”

  “Yes well, I can’t help thinking that you’ve been here since at least the BLOODY BARON meeting this morning.” He nodded instinctively. “Which means you’ve been in the office for at least twelve hours. If you were a pilot they wouldn’t let you anywhere near the controls of an airliner when you’re that tired: it’s how mistakes happen—”

  “Don’t be silly, Bob! All it is is a ‘hello, spirit world’ demo. There’s nothing to go wrong: all it does is execute a contained summoning of a class one voice-responsive agent”—a demon, to you—“make it do a handstand, then send it away again. With maybe a couple of optimizations to the grid controller, which I’m trying to prove with cheap off-the-shelf components. There’s no agency outside the grid.” He pointed at the Arduino board. “See? It’s perfectly safe. Watch—”

  My hair stood on end, I broke out in a cold sweat, and I was already in motion, halfway across the room towards him, when he began to utter the inevitable, fateful word—“this”—as his finger descended on the button wired to the breadboard beside the microcontroller, and power surged into the grid.

  • • •

  I SHOVED ANDY AWAY FROM THE TABLE, BUT I WAS TOO LATE: the circuit had been completed, and I could hear the chittering in the back of my head much more clearly, over a mumbling chewing sizzle like millions of mandibles on the move—

  “Andy, get out!” I grabbed his arm and swung him towards the door. He resisted instinctively but ineffectually: I shoved him across the threshold. The alien gibbering was rising in pitch, and my skin crawled as we passed the side of the card table, where the grid was glowing with a rapidly brightening violet radiance. I felt a metallic taste on my tongue as we crossed below the lintel—

  “Wait, what, I don’t even—” Finally Andy began to move under his own steam.

  Only a couple of seconds had passed since he began to say “watch this,” but my Spidey sense and the frankly terrifying sense of wrongness in my guts told me that we might be too late: whatever the thing flooding into the powered-up summoning grid was, it certainly wasn’t just a harmless class one emanation. I felt it tracking me as I stepped across the threshold, like a terrier that has spotted and locked onto a juicy mouthful of rodent on the run: cold and dank and terrifyingly alien, like something from the abyssal depths of another world’s oceans. I turned and pulled the door shut, then leaned against it and reached instinctively for the ward I wear in a small leather bag on a thong around my neck. “Andy,” I gasped.

  “What? What?” He blinked, confused as I stared at him. Eyes: clear. No sense of possession—if I was a god-botherer I’d have given thanks right then.

  The door behind me rattled. I shivered: it was becoming cold to the touch. I took a
deep breath. “Andy, I need you to go get—no. First, I want you to send Trish home. Then I want you to go get Angleton.” I took a step away from the door, and turned to face it.

  “I don’t understand! It’s only meant to summon a class one—” I could barely hear his spoken words over the gibbering din in my head emanating from the other side of the warded portal.

  “Andy.” I spoke through gritted teeth. “Get Trish out of the building and to a designated place of safety. Then go and get Angleton right now. We will resume this conversation at a later date.”

  “But—”

  I glanced at him and he shut up. I’d never seen his face turn that color before: he nodded stiffly, then broke into a stumbling trot in the direction of the corridor leading to Angleton’s hole. Finally.

  I drew another deep breath, heart pounding. The tense feeling between my shoulders was getting worse. Andy was old enough to know better.

  A class one manifestation, in our charmingly indirect lexicon, is nothing you want to make physical contact with. Many years ago I’d been on a training course where a guy called Fred from Accounting—who’d been assigned to the course because of a typo on an HR form—ended up extremely dead indeed because he hadn’t understood that a voice responsive agent is a nasty little cognitive loop that can run on (and burn out) a human nervous system just as easily as a computing device.

  Whatever was on the other side of that door was most certainly not a class one manifestation.

  I could feel it from the other side of the door, like the hum of a national grid high-voltage bearer. Our offices are shielded by wards—we frequently handle occult materials—but whatever he’d invoked was flexing its magical muscles and coming dangerously close to overloading not only the summoning grid on that flimsy card table but the more substantial wards on the door frame. Which was very bad news. I pulled out my phone and pointed the camera at the door itself, then called up OFCUT—our occult monitoring app in a smartphone-sized can—to take a look. Sure enough, histograms shading from blue to violet were chewing around the edges of the elder sign in the middle of the elaborate tracery. It confirmed what I could feel in my tingling fingertips and roiling stomach: I wasn’t about to open my inner eye and have an eyeball-to-eyeball look at the void by way of a third opinion, but I was pretty sure that if I did I’d see something so wrong that it wouldn’t even be visible at all, except as a sucking blind-spot distortion in my visual field, dragging everything around it together at the edges like a detached retina.

  The doorknob appeared to be smoking. It was air condensing on the metal surface as vapor, then boiling off again. Elapsed time: thirty seconds. And here I was, with just my regulation-issue class four ward, my OFCUT-equipped phone, and whatever native magical talent I happened to have, facing the oh-shit lurking on the other side of the threshold.

  An equally chilly voice from behind me said, “Speak, boy. What are we facing?”

  I glanced round. It was Angleton, with Andy trailing along wearing a hang-dog expression. If it wasn’t for the deafening hum and gibber I’d have felt Angelton’s presence as soon as he entered the corridor leading to this office space: as chilly and powerful as the thing beyond the door. Not to mention his speech patterns: he spoke to everybody as if they were naughty schoolchildren. Judging by Andy’s expression he was expecting a caning.

  “Andy’s ten-percenter involves a non-standard grid designed to summon and contain a class one. He hooked something else. I reckon it’s class five or higher, minimally sentient or stronger, still inside the grid but working to get free. Leakage through the door wards is over six hundred milli-Parsons per minute right now, and rising; the grid is still powered up so I figure the entity on the other side is still trying to squeeze through the portal—”

  “Understood,” Angleton said crisply. “Mr. Newstrom. How exactly does your grid differ from a standard design?”

  I looked back at the door, but I could see Andy’s expression in my imagination: a naughty boy who has had to get the headmaster out of bed because he’s set fire to the chemistry lab. “It’s not substantially different: I just used an Arduino microcontroller board and a bunch of control code I wrote for it to run a standard ‘hello, spirit world ’ demo—”

  “Did you use an off-the-shelf code library? Or write your own?” Angleton’s interrogation was gentle, precise, and pointed. I could see him in my mind’s eye, too: tall, cadaverously pale, thin as a mummy, with eyes like ice diamonds.

  “I rolled my own code generator in FORTRAN77,” Andy explained. “Atmel AVR machine code, not that high-level Arduino stuff. It seemed more efficient to get down to the bare metal . . .”

  Angleton sighed. And now my blood ran cold. Because if there’s one thing worse than an IT manager who’s feeling the chill wind of obsolescence blowing down his neck and consequently trying to contribute code to the repository like an actual working developer, it’s an IT manager who’s getting creative. And Andy’s project was nothing if not creative, for values of creativity that I don’t want to go anywhere near without body armor and HAZMAT gear. “Mr. Newstrom. We will have words about this later.” Angleton paused: I could feel his eyes on me. “Boy. Tell me what you hear?”

  He always called me boy. From anyone else I’d take it badly; from Angleton it was probably a sign of affection.

  “I hear termites,” I said. “About a trillion sixteen-dimensional, elephant-sized termites chewing on the edges of reality.”

  “Did you wire in a remote kill switch?” Angleton asked Andy.

  There was an eloquent moment of silence, punctuated only by the munching of metaphysical mandibles. Then the sound changed.

  “Oh dear,” I said, as Angleton simultaneously said, “Mr. New-strom, evacuate the building. Mr. Howard and I will remain to deal with this.” Then, on the other side of the door, the over-stressed summoning grid ruptured.

  The immediate consequence of the summoning grid rupture wasn’t that spectacular; the door grew colder and the runes engraved in it flared up, glowing the eerie deep blue of Cerenkov radiation. The office was warded to a high level, and would hold for at least half an hour longer than the grid on the card table. But the thing Andy had inadvertently summoned was now forcing its way into our universe directly, no longer confined by the meter-diameter circle on the table. And if it was powerful enough to overload one grid, it might well be able to overpower another, including the structural wards built into the walls, floor, and ceiling of the New Annex: in which case, we could have a real problem on our hands.

  Angleton closed the gap and stepped past me, extending a hand towards the door. He looked at it quizzically, even hesitantly: an expression I’d never seen on his face before, and most unwelcome. Angleton is a DSS, a Detached Special Secretary: in our unofficial lexicon the acronym really stands for Deeply Scary Sorcerer. This is, if anything, an understatement: he’s known to some as the Eater of Souls. That’s because he’s not actually human—he’s an alien intelligence bound into a human body by a powerful necromantic ritual. Luckily for us, he’s on our side. I’m his assistant, apprentice, whatever you call it. I don’t know the real extent of his power, but I’m a moderately competent necromancer in my own right; anything that gives Angleton cause for concern is, by definition, frightening.

  “Boy,” he said conversationally, “this is going to be messy. Please verify that all the human staff are off the premises, then fetch the night watch.”

  “Fetch the—what, all of them?”

  “Yes, Bob. We’re going to need zombies. Lots of zombies.”

  “Wait, what—” I looked back at the door. Either I had a sudden eyestrain or the wards on it were bulging ominously. I glanced at my smartphone again. The thaum field was strengthening rapidly, and the flux had exceeded a thousand milli-Parsons per minute. “Er, yes. Right away.” I fled in the direction of the front door, leaving Angleton to face the glowing door alone, like an
eldritch remix of the little Dutch boy on the dyke.

  There is a formal procedure for evacuating the New Annex: it involves filling out six forms in quadruplicate to obtain the key to a key cupboard containing the key to a cabinet containing a silver hammer (that bit would normally be done in advance, daily, by the Security Officer on Duty), then using the aforementioned hammer to break the glass cover on a brass box containing a bell inscribed with mystic runes—

  I hit the fire alarm. Then I raised my metaphysical fingers to my astral lips and emitted the most deafening mental whistle I’m capable of. Then I began to chant doggerel in Old Enochian: On Ilka Moor Bah’t ‘At, or maybe, Get your shambling undead asses up here on the double. This saved a breakneck dash down a darkened staircase (not to mention all the SOD form-filling and the hammer stuff), buying me sufficient time to dash across to my own office and rummage around in the assorted crap on top of the filing cabinet for my pigeon’s foot, cigarette lighter, silver paint spray can, packet of sharpies, and pocket camera—all the while carrying on the chant. Thus equipped I dashed back into the open-plan area just in time to see the first of the night watch shamble towards me, arms outstretched in classic Bela Lugosi style.

  “Be so good as to make a new grid, boy,” Angleton murmured, not looking away from the haunted office door. “Make it big; I need an airlock.” I began to spray conductive paint in a big circle behind him, across the beige carpet tiles and continuing on up the walls and as high as I could reach.

  I paused before sketching in the second arc, stopped chanting, and turned to face the night watchmen. “Acknowledge my authority,” I ordered them in my halting Old Enochian. Slowly, with creaking joints, the wizened corpses in their blue uniforms went to their knees. Eight mummified faces turned to blindly inspect me. I could feel their attention, eager for flesh and life but bound to obey. “I am your lawful knight-commander,” I added. “Under oath by way of my liege.” They followed my gaze to Angleton, and cringed, suitably terrified. “A hostile intruder lies past yonder portal. Attend.”