“Was our visitor Russian?” Mo leans forward.
“Don’t know.” Andy looks mulish. “Did you get any indication of what he wanted?”
“He kept asking something,” I volunteer. “In at least two different languages, neither of which I speak.”
“Oh great,” he mutters. Stretching, he shakes his head. “Been a bad day so far, going to be a long one as well. Don’t suppose there’s any chance of a cup of tea?”
“Certainly—for you I can recommend the special herbal teas, monk’s hood and spurge laurel, although if you insist I can make a pot of Tetley’s . . .”
“That’d be fine.” Mo’s sarcasm flies right past him, which is the final warning I need that Andy is about ready to drop. Time to ease up on him a little, maybe, if he grovels for it.
“I’ll get it,” I say, standing up. “So let me see . . . Boris is running some kind of operation code named BLOODY BARON which involves something going down in Amsterdam which required Mo’s offices, and—”
They’re both shaking their heads at me. “No, no,” says Andy, and:
“Amsterdam was CLUB ZERO,” says Mo. “It’s a sideshow, and . . . did you bring that letter?” Andy produces an envelope. She pockets it: “Thanks.”
“Actually, it all boils down to CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN,” Andy says heavily. “The other operations are side projects; CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is where it all starts.”
“Oh yes?” I ask casually, although those words send a chill up my spine.
“Yes.” He laughs halfheartedly. “It appears we may have been working under some false operating assumptions,” he adds. “The situation seems to be deteriorating . . .”
CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN IS THE CODE NAME FOR THE END OF the world.
You might have noticed that Mo and I have no children. We don’t even have a pet cat, the consolation prize of the overworked urban middle classes. There’s a reason for this. Would you want to have children, if you knew for a fact that in a couple of years you might have to cut their throats for their own good?
We human beings live at the bottom of a thin puddle of oxygen-nitrogen vapor adhering to the surface of a medium-sized rocky planet that orbits a not terribly remarkable star in a cosmos which is one of many. We are not alone. There are other beings in other universes, other cosmologies, that think, and travel, and explore. And there are aliens in the abyssal depths of the oceans, and dwellers in the red-hot blackness and pressure of the upper mantle, that are stranger than your most florid hallucinations. They’re terrifyingly powerful, the inheritors of millennia of technological civilization; they were building starships and opening timegates back when your ancestors and mine were clubbing each other over the head with rocks to settle the eternal primate disagreement over who had the bigger dick.
But the Deep Ones and the Chthonians are dust beneath the feet of the elder races, just as much so as are we bumptious bonobo cousins. The elder races are ancient. Supposedly they colonized our planet back in the pre-Cambrian age. Don’t bother looking for their relics, though—continents have risen and sunk since then, the very atmosphere has changed density and composition, the moon orbits three times farther out, and to cut a long story short, they went away.
But the elder races are as dust beneath the many-angled appendages of the dead gods, who—
You stopped reading about a paragraph back, didn’t you? Admit it: you’re bored. So I’ll just skip to the point: we have a major problem. The dimensions of the problem are defined by computational density and geometry. Magic is a branch of applied mathematics, after all, and when you process information, you set up waves in the platonic ultrastructure of reality that can amplify and reinforce—
To put it bluntly, there are too many humans on this planet. Six-billion-plus primates. And we think too loudly. Our brains are neurocomputers, incredibly complex. The more observers there are, the more quantum weirdness is observed, and the more inconsistencies creep into our reality. The weirdness is already going macroscopic—has been, for decades, as any disciple of Forteana could tell you. Sometime really soon, we’re going to cross a critical threshold which, in combination with our solar system’s ongoing drift through a stellar neighborhood where space itself is stretched thin, is going to make it likely that certain sleeping agencies will stir in their aeons-long slumber, and notice us.
No, we can’t make CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN go away by smashing all our computers and going back to pencils and paper—if we did that, our amazingly efficient just-in-time food delivery logistics would go down the pan and we’d all starve. No, we can’t make CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN go away by holding a brisk nuclear war and frying the guys with the biggest dicks—induced megadeaths have consequences that can be exploited for much the same ends, as the Ahnenerbe-SS discovered to their cost.
CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is the demonological equivalent of an atomic chain reaction. Human minds equal plutonium nuclei. Put too many of them together in too small a place, and they begin to get a wee bit hot. Cross the threshold suddenly and emphatically and they get a lot hot. And the elder gods wake up, smell the buffet, and prepare to tuck in.
Our organization was formed as the British Empire’s occult countermeasures organization during the struggle against Nazism, but it has continued to this day, serving a similar purpose: to protect the nation from an entire litany of lethal metanatural threats, culminating in the goal of surviving CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. The UK’s in a good position: a developed country, overwhelmingly urban (meaning its inhabitants are located in compact, defensible cities) with nearly neutral population size (no hot spots), and the world’s most sophisticated surveillance systems. If you think the UK’s been sliding into an Orwellian nightmare for the past decade, policed by cameras on every doorstep, you’re right—but there is a reason for it: the MAGINOT BLUE STARS defense network and its SCORPION STARE basilisk cameras are fully deployed, ready to track and zap the first outbreaks. There are other, less obvious defensive measures. Our budget’s been rising lately; ever wondered why there are so many police vans with cameras on the streets?
CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is coming, and it’s going to be perilous in the extreme. It’s a bigger threat than global warming, peak oil, and the cold war rolled into one. We may not live to see the light at the other end of the tunnel, as we finally drift out from the fatal conjunction and the baleful stars close their eyes and reality returns to normal. Survival is far from assured—it may not even be likely. But one thing’s for sure: we’re going to give it our best shot.
THAT EVENING, AFTER THE PLUMBERS HAVE UPGRADED OUR defenses and Andy has finished picking our brains and left, I order in a curry—paying strict attention to the spy-hole this time when answering the doorbell—then retreat upstairs with Mo, a bottle of single malt, and a box of very expensive chocolates I’ve been hoarding against an evening like this. I’m dead tired, my face throbs around the butterfly sutures, and I feel unspeakably old. Mo . . . is better than she was earlier, for what it’s worth.
“Here.” I pass her the Booja-Booja box as I sit on the edge of the bed and unroll my socks.
“Oh, you shouldn’t—did you set the alarm?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re sure?”
The rest of my clothes are piling up atop the socks: “Trust me, any burglar who tries their luck tonight is going to get the biggest shock of their life.” Biggest, because afterwards they’re going to run out of life in which to cap it. “Remember you need to deactivate it before you set foot on the stairs. Or open any windows.”
“And if the house burns down . . .”
“And if the house burns down, yes.” I shove the pillows up against the headboard. “We’re safe here, as safe as can be.” Which isn’t saying much if the bombshell Andy dropped turns out to be true, but I’m not about to remind her of that. I lean back. “A wee dram?”
“Don’t mind if I do. How about death by chocolate?”
“Sounds good to me.”
For a minute we’re silent;
me filling two glasses, Mo working her way into the box of cocoa-dusted delights. Presently we exchange gifts. Outside, it’s raining: the rattle and slap of water on glass merges with the distant noise of wheels on wet road surfaces, but inside our insulated, centrally heated bubble of suburbia we’re isolated from the world.
“By the way, I haven’t said thank you, have I?” she asks.
“What for?”
“Picking up the pieces, bollocking Andy for me, being a dear, that sort of thing. Just existing, when you get down to it.”
“Um.” I put my glass down. “Thank you. For saving my life this afternoon—”
“—but if you hadn’t punched his legs out from under him he’d have shot me—”
“—he was going to shoot me first! Did you see where—”
We stop, looking at each other in mutual disbelief and incomprehension.
“How did we get here?” I ask her.
“I don’t know.” She frowns, then offers me the box of chocolates.
“Pick one.”
I pick something that looks like it came out of the wrong end of a hedgehog, except that it smells better. “Why?”
“Let’s see . . . that one’s unique in this collection, right? Let’s consider life as a box of chocolates. All of them are unique. Let each chocolate be a, a significant event. All we can say of any chocolate before we eat it is that it was selected from the slowly diminishing set of chocolates we have not already encountered. But one thing they’ve all got in common is—”
“Theobroma cacao,” I say, shoving it in my mouth and chewing. “Mmph.”
“Yes. Now, let Theobroma cacao stand for the defining characteristics of our reality. We don’t know precisely what the next chocolate will be, but we expect it to be brown and taste heavenly. But the previous chocolates we’ve eaten have narrowed the field of choice, and if, say, we’ve been picking the crunchy pralines selectively, we may find ourselves experiencing an unexpected run of soft centers—”
“I thought we were taking them at random?”
“No; we’re picking them—without a menu card—but we can choose them on the basis of their appearance, are you with me? We can choose our inputs but not the outputs that result from them. And we have a diminishing array of options—”
“What kind of chocolate did you pick in Amsterdam?” I ask.
She pulls a face. “Wormwood. Or maybe Amanita phalloides.” (The death cap mushroom, so called because the folks who name poisonous toadstools have no sense of humor: it’s shaped like a cap, and you die if you eat it.)
“Are you ready to talk about it?”
She takes a sip of Lagavulin. “Not yet.” Her lips twitch in the faintest ghostly echo of a smile—“But just knowing I can unload when I need to—” She shudders, then abruptly knocks back the contents of her glass in one.
“Do you believe Andy?” she asks, presently.
“I wish I didn’t have to.” I pause. “You mean, about the, the—”
“The acceleration.”
“Yeah, that.” I fall silent for a moment. “I’m not sure. I mean, he says it came out of Dr. Ford’s work in Research and Development, using analytical methods to observe bias in stochastic sequential observations at widely separated sites, and Mike Ford’s not the kind of man to make a mistake.” Sly and subtle, with a warped sense of humor—and a mind sharp enough to cut diamond, that’s our avuncular Dr. Ford. “I’d love to hear what Cantor’s deep-duration research team at St. Hilda’s made of it, but I suspect you’d have to go all the way to Mahogany Row to get permission to talk to them about current work—they’re sandboxed for a reason.” Mostly to protect everybody else’s sanity: it’s a team of no less than four DSS-grade sorcerers working on a single research project for more than thirty years. They’ve grown more than slightly weird along the way. Just talking to them, then thinking too hard about their answers can put you at risk of developing Krantzberg syndrome, the horrible encephalopathy that tends to afflict people who spend too much time thinking about symbolic magic. (The map is one with the territory; think too hard about the wrong theorems and you shouldn’t be surprised if extradimensional entities start chewing microscopic chunks out of your gray matter.)
“I want to see Ford’s raw data,” Mo says thoughtfully. “Someone ought to give it a good working-over, looking for artifacts.”
“Yeah.”
She puts her glass down and plants the box of chocolates on top of it. “If the acceleration is real, we’ve only got a few months left.”
And there’s the rub. What Ford has detected—so Andy told us—is an accelerating rip in the probabilistic ultrastructure of spacetime.
If it exists (if Dr. Ford is right) the first sign is that it will amplify the efficacy of all our thaumaturgic tools. But it’ll gather pace rapidly from there. He’s predicting a phase-change, like a pile of plutonium that’s decided to lurch from ordinary criticality—the state of a controlled nuclear reactor—to prompt criticality—a sudden unwanted outburst of power, halfway between a normal nuclear reaction and a nuclear explosion. Nobody predicted this before: we all expected CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN to switch on with a bang, not a weeks-long transition, an explosion rather than a meltdown. For a few days, we’ll be gods—before it tears the walls of the world apart, and lets the nightmares in.
“Ought to make the best use of what time we’ve got left,” she thinks aloud.
I put my glass down and roll on my side, to face her. “Yes.”
“Come here,” she says, stretching her free arm towards me.
Outside the window, the wild darkness claws at our frail bubble of light and warmth, ignored and temporarily forgotten in our primate frenzy. But its time will come.
THE NEXT MORNING WE OVERSLEEP, BY MUTUAL CONSENT, then slouch about the kitchen for a scandalously prolonged breakfast. Mo looks at me, sleepy-eyed with satisfaction, over a bare plate. “I needed that.” A guilty glance across at the empty egg carton by the frying pan on the hob: “My waistline disagrees, but my stomach says ‘fuck it.’”
“Enjoy it while you can.” I’ve got plans for the weekend that include blowing a week’s salary on stuff we might not need: brown rice, lentils, canned beans, camping gas cylinders. I can make room for it in our abbreviated joke of a cellar if I toss the rusting bicycle and a bunch of other crap that’s taking up space . . . “I was thinking about going into the office this afternoon.”
“But you’re signed off sick,” Mo points out.
“Yeah, that’s the trouble.” I refill my coffee mug from the cafetière.
“After what Andy said, I figure I ought to at least poke around Angleton’s office. See if I can spot something that everyone else has missed, before the trail goes cold. And there are some files I want to pull so I’ve got something to read over the weekend.”
“You are not bringing work home.” She crosses her arms, abruptly mulish.
“The thought never crossed my mind.” I play the innocent expression card and she raises me one sullen glare. I fold. “I’m sorry, but there’s also some reading matter I want to pick up.”
“You’re not bringing work home! We’re not certified, anyway.”
“Yes we are—as of yesterday, this is a level two secure site,” I point out. “I’m not bringing anything secret home, just archive stuff from the stacks. It’s tagged ‘confidential’ but it’s so old it’s nearly ready to claim its pension. Strictly historical interest only.”
“Um.” She raises an eyebrow. “Why?”
“Angleton”—I swallow—“when he sent me to Cosford he forgot to give me the backgrounder first. But he gave me a reading list.”
“Oh fucking hell.” She looks annoyed, which is a good sign. But then her eyes track sideways and I realize I’m not off the hook yet. “What’s that?”
“That?” I ask brightly, suppressing the impulse to squawk oh shit. “It appears to be a cardboard box.”
“A cardboard box with a picture of an iPhone on it,” she
says slowly.
“It’s empty,” I hurry to reassure her.
“Right.” She picks up her coffee and takes a mouthful. “Would I be right in thinking it’s empty because it used to contain an iPhone? Which is now, oh, I dunno, in your pocket?”
“Um. Yes.”
“Oh, Bob. Don’t you know any better?”
“It was at least a class four glamour,” I say defensively, resisting the urge to hunch my shoulders and hiss preciousss. “And I needed a new phone anyway.”
She sighs. “Why, Bob? Has your old phone started to smell or something?”
“I left my PDA in Hangar Six at Cosford,” I point out. “It’s slightly scorched around the edges and I don’t have room for half my contacts on my mobile.”
“So you bought an iPhone, rather than bugging Iris to sign off on a replacement PDA.”
“If you must put it that way . . . yes.”
Mo rolls her eyes. “Bob loses saving throw vs. shiny with a penalty of −5. Bob takes 2d8 damage to the credit card—just how much did it cost? Will you take it back if I guilt-trip you hard enough? Do pigs fly?”
“I was considering it,” I admit. “But then Brains came round and installed something.”
“Brains installed—”
“He’s working on a port of OFCUT to the iPhone platform at work. I think he thought mine was an official phone . . . I’ve got to take it into the office and get it scrubbed before I even think about trading it in, or the Auditors will string us both up by the giblets.” I shudder faintly, but Mo is visibly distracted.
“Hang on. They’ve ported OFCUT to the iPhone? What does it look like?”
“I’ll show you . . .”
Fifteen minutes later I am on my way to the office, sans shiny. Mo is still sitting at the kitchen table with a cold mug of coffee, in thrall to the JesusPhone’s reality distortion field, prodding at the jelly-bean icons with an expression of hapless fascination on her face. I’ve got a horrible feeling that the only way I’m going to earn forgiveness is to buy her one for her birthday. Such is life, in a geek household.
The Fuller Memorandum l-4 Page 7
