The Fuller Memorandum l-4

by Charles Stross

  I pick up a Post-it pad and copy the number on the front of the envelope. Then I repeat, eight times, for the remaining envelopes. Then I hunt across my desk until—aha!—I find Angleton’s original spidery scrawl, numbers swimming before my eyes like exotic fish.

  Ten numbers. I go through them checking off the files I’ve got, until I identify the number that’s missing. 10.0.792.560. Right.

  I call up the requisition and look for 10.0.792.560. Sure enough, it’s there. So I ordered it, but it isn’t in my office. Double shit. I dumpster-dive the transaction file, looking for my request: Did they fill it? Oh. Oh my. DOCUMENT NOT FOUND ON DESIGNATED SHELF.

  I just about faint with relief, but manage to force myself to pick up the phone and dial the front desk number. “Hello? Archives?” The voice at the far end is female, distracted, a little squawky, and all human—for which I am grateful: not all the archive staff are warm-blooded.

  “Hi, this is Bob Howard in Ops? Back on Thursday I requested an archival document retrieval, ten dead files. I’m going through them now, and one of them is missing. I’ve got a file number, and an annotation saying DOCUMENT NOT FOUND ON DESIGNATED SHELF. Can you tell me what that means?”

  “It means”—she sounds irritated—“the librarian couldn’t find your file. They looked where it was supposed to be and it wasn’t there.”

  “Oh. Is there a direct mapping between the document reference number and a given shelf?”

  “Yes, there is. You should really use code names and the index in case the file’s been assigned a new number, you know. It happens sometimes. Do you have a codeword for me? I could look it up for you . . .”

  “I’m sorry, my colleague just gave me a list of document reference numbers,” I explain. “And he’s, uh, off sick. So I’m trying to figure out what’s missing. I was worried that the file had been sent over and got misplaced, but if it’s missing in the stacks I suppose that just means it’s been renumbered. Or he wrote down the wrong reference. Or something.” I don’t believe that last one for a split second—no way would Angleton get a file number wrong—but I don’t want some nosy librarian poking her nose into my investigation. “Bye.” I put the phone down and lean back, thinking.

  Let’s see: Angleton was working on BLOODY BARON. When I came back to the office he gave me a list of ten files to read, then he went missing. This coincides with an upswing in Russian activity, including a marked willingness to use extreme measures. Nine files came from the stacks, and they turn out to be tedious backgrounders relating indirectly to the historical investigation side of BLOODY BARON. The tenth file isn’t on its shelf. All I’ve got is a number, not a name.

  I think it’s time to do some unofficial digging . . .

  MEANWHILE, BACK TO THE HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION:

  It is nearly six o’clock when Mr. Dower finishes typing his report.

  He’s lost track of the time, his head locked inside the scope of his postmortem on the instrument. He’s read about its like before. Their design is attributed to a deaf-mute German violinist in Paris in the early 1920s, but nobody actually built one until the ghastly Dr. Mabuse commissioned an entire string section from a certain Berlin instrument maker in 1931. (It should be no surprise that the instrument maker prospered under the subsequent regime, but was executed after a summary trial by SMERSH investigators in 1946.) This particular instrument made its way to the West in the luggage of a returning GI, was retrofitted with electric pickups during the 1950s, and after a spectacular run of accidents was acquired by a reclusive collector in 1962—believed by some to be a front for a British government department who, as a matter of state policy, did not like to see such instruments in the wrong hands.

  He dreads to think what its reappearance portends. On the other hand, the young woman who brought it to him—Mr. Dower thinks of everyone aged under fifty as “young”—seemed to have a sober appreciation of its lethality.

  He shudders fastidiously as the last of five pages of single-spaced description hisses out of the ink-jet printer. It joins the half dozen contact pages of photographs, including his fiber-optic examination of the interior of the instrument, and an invoice for just over two thousand pounds. He shakes the bundle of pages together, and binds them neatly with a paper clip from a desk drawer. Then they go inside the envelope the woman who called herself Cassie May gave him. He licks the flap and seals it, then, in a moment of curiosity, he switches on the anti-counterfeit lamp he keeps by the cash register and examines it under ultraviolet light. Nothing shows up: it bears none of the UV-fluorescent dots the Post Office prints on envelopes to control their routing.

  If “Cassie May” thinks she can retrieve an unmarked envelope from the postal system she’s welcome to it, in Mr. Dower’s books. He turns back to the computer and deletes his work, then sighs and glances at the clock. Five minutes to closing time: no point keeping the shop open any longer. He stands and stretches, switches the computer off, and goes through an abbreviated version of his regular closing routine; no point banking the cash register contents (his takings before the woman’s visit barely amounted to petty cash). He pulls on his coat, turns his coffee mug upside down on the draining board, switches off the lights, and opens the front door.

  The woman is waiting for him. She smiles. “Have you finished your report?” she asks.

  Mr. Dower nods, confused. “I was going to post it, as you requested.” He pats his coat pocket.

  “I’m in a hurry. There’s a rush on. If you don’t mind . . . ?” She looks at him impatiently.

  “Of course.” He pulls out the envelope and hands it to her. “My invoice is enclosed.”

  “You don’t need to worry about that side of things.” She slides the envelope into her black patent leather handbag and smiles.

  “I suppose not. You people always pay your debts eventually.”

  “Yes, you can be absolutely certain of that.”

  He turns back to the door and fumbles with his key ring. Which is why he doesn’t see her withdraw a silenced pistol from her bag, raise it to the back of his head, and discharge a single round into his cerebellum. The gun makes little sound—just the racking click of its action—but as she fires, the suppressor fitted to its muzzle frosts over with clear fluid, air in contact with it liquefying as it chills to just above absolute zero. Mr. Dower slumps forward against the door. The woman’s arm follows him down with absolute precision and discharges a second round into the top of his skull, but it is unnecessary: he is already dead.

  She looks around with green eyes as deep as sacrificial cenotes, eyes in which a sensitive witness might see luminous worms writhing. But there are no sensitive witnesses to see through the glamour: just the ordinary post-work crowd hurrying about their business on the London streets. For a moment her face shimmers, the facade sliding—her attention is strained, flying in too many directions to maintain the illusion effectively—but then she notices and pulls herself together. She returns the chilly pistol to her bag. Then, turning on one spiked heel, she strides away from the corpse: just another professional woman on her way home from the office. Nobody has witnessed the killing, and it will be twenty minutes before a passing policeman realizes that the drunk sleeping in the doorway is never going to rise again.

  7.

  BEER AND TEA

  YOU CAN FOCUS ON THINKING YOURSELF INTO THE OTHER guy’s shoes until the cows come home, but it’s not going to do you a whole lot of good if he’s actually wearing sandals. More to the point, what if he’s got an entire shoe rack to choose from, and the pair you need is the one that’s missing? There is a chicken-and-egg problem here, or more accurately a sole-and-bootstrap one, and I’m not going to solve it by sitting in my office. Nor am I going to fix matters by hollering down the speaking tube at the gnomes buried in the stacks, not with just two delivery runs a day.

  On the other hand, if you go and actually look at the other guy’s footprints you might just find something new. And so, in a spirit of enquiry, I set
out to burgle Angleton’s office.

  Now, it just so happens that Angleton has officially been declared missing. And I am his assistant trainee tea-boy. In a more paranoid working environment I might just be under suspicion of having disappeared him myself: perish the thought and pass the ammunition. But Angleton is reckoned to be sufficiently formidable that . . . well, let’s say it’s unlikely. Besides, we don’t generally play politics with the kid gloves off. (There are exceptions, such as the late and unlamented Bridget; but they’re exactly that: exceptions. The hard fact is that all the real players can turn the game board into a smoking hole in the map. Which generally forces them to tread lightly.)

  Skulking past Iris’s office window, I tiptoe around the coffee station and duck down the back staircase, through the fire doors, round the bend, down the fire escape stairs, and then pause outside the unmarked green metal door. I do not encounter anyone in the process, but you can never be sure—there are cameras, and there is Internal Security, and if you’re really unlucky there are the caretakers from the night shift. This is a security agency after all. However slipshod and dustily eccentric it might appear at times, you should never take things for granted if you are perpetrating monkey business.

  I pull out the NecronomiPod and fire it up. Happy fun icons glow at me: Safari, YouTube, Horned Skull, Settings, Bloody Runes, Messaging, Elder Sign, you know the interface. Bloody Runes gets me into the ward detector, which is showing the usual options. I point the camera at the door and peer into the shiny screen. Sure enough, in addition to Angleton’s trademark Screaming Mind someone has ploddingly inscribed a Langford Death Parrot, with a sympathetic link to a web stats counter so they can monitor how many intruders it’s headcrashed from the comfort of their laptop. Tch, what are standards coming to? I pause as a nasty thought strikes me and I triple-check the door frame, then the ceiling above the entrance, then the other side of the corridor, just in case—but no, nothing. This is strictly amateur hour stuff, so rather than zapping the LDP I pull out my conductive pencil and sketch in a breakpoint and then an exception list with a single item: the signature of my new ward. The Screaming Mind already knows me well. Three minutes later I put the phone away, place my hand on the doorknob, twist and push.

  Angleton’s office: here be monsters. Silent and cold, it is home to the ghosts of a war colder by far than the one the ignorant public thought we won in 1989—a room walled in floor-to-ceiling file drawers, a gunmetal desk with organ-pedals and teletype keyboard, dominated by a hooded microfiche reader—the silent heart of an intelligence stilled, no longer beating out the number station signals across the Iron Curtain. I half-expect to see cobwebs in the corners, to smell the stale cigarette ash of a thousand tense nights beneath the arctic skies, waiting for the bombers.

  I shake myself. History lies thick as winter snow in this room: I could drown beneath its avalanche weight if I don’t pull myself together. And in any case, Angleton was here—in his office I mean, not in this actual spot—before the cold war. I’ve seen a photograph from 1942, the man himself smiling at the camera, visibly no older (or younger) than he is today. It’s an open question, the extent to which he was involved in the occult affairs of government before the Second World War. Just how far back does he go? Human Resources don’t have a home address on file, which is itself suggestive. I wonder . . .

  Before I sit down behind his desk, I scan the walls, floor, and ceiling up and down with the NecronomiPod. Sure enough, certain of the file drawers are booby-trapped with lethal-looking webworks of magic—not drawn in the plodding journeyman hand of the outer door’s vandal, but sketched in Angleton’s spidery scrawl, complex arcs and symbols linking arcane declarations and gruesome probability matrices. I could reverse engineer them in time and maybe worm my way inside, but knowing the boss there’s probably nothing there but nitrogen triiodide on the drawer rails and a jack-in-the-box loaded with tear gas: he was a firm believer in keeping the crown jewels in his head—or its annex, the thing in the green metal desk.

  The Memex . . .

  You’ve got to understand that although I’ve read about the things, I’ve never actually used one. It’s an important piece of the history of computing, leaked to the public as a think-piece commissioned by the Atlantic Weekly in 1945; most of the readers thought it was a gosh-wow-by-damn good idea, but were unlikely to realize that a number of the things had actually been built, using a slush fund earmarked for the Manhattan Project. The product of electromechanical engineering at its finest, not to mention its most horrendously complex, each Memex cost as much as a B-29 bomber—and contained six times as many moving parts, most of them assembled by watchmakers. It wasn’t until HyperCard showed up on the Apple Mac in 1987 that anything like it reached the general public.

  I believe Angleton’s Memex is the only one that is still working, much less in day-to-day use, and to say it takes black magic to keep it running would be no exaggeration. I approach the seat with considerable caution, and not just because I’m absolutely certain he will have taken steps to ensure that anyone who sits in it without his approval and pushes the big red on button will never push another button in their (admittedly short) life; he knows how to use the thing, but if I crash it or break the cylinder head gasket or something and he comes back, the only shoes I’d be safe in would be a pair of NASA-issue moon boots (and maybe not even then).

  I drag the wooden chair back from the Memex—the tiny casters squeak like agonized rodents across the worn linoleum floor—and lower myself gingerly into the cracked leather seat. The oak arms are worn smooth beneath my hands, where his palms have pressed upon them over the decades. I grab the solid sides of the desk and ease myself forward until my feet rest lightly on the pedals. There’s an angled glass strip facing me from the far end of the desk, and a light in the leg-well that comes on as my heels touch the kick-plate: it’s a periscope, giving me a view of my toes and the letters at the back of each pedal. I turn the gunmetal turret of the microfiche reader towards me, place the NecronomiPod on the desktop, and push the power button.

  There’s a clunk of relays closing, and then a thrumming vibration runs through the machine. It’s easy to forget that though it weighs more than a ton, its average component weighs less than two grams: the gears alone took two months’ entire output from the largest watch factory in America. I stare into the hooded circular screen in something like awe. Machined to submicron precision, yet less powerful than the ancient 68EC000 in my washing machine, these devices were the backbone of the Laundry’s Intelligence Analysis section in the late 1940s. It’s like a steam locomotive or a stone axe: just because it’s obsolete doesn’t make it any less of an achievement, or any less fit for purpose.

  The screen lights up—not like an LCD monitor, or even an old cathode ray tube, but more like an antique film projector.

  WRITE USERNAME.

  The moment of truth: I cautiously kick-type BOB, then spend a fruitless minute hunting for the return key before I realize there’s a paddle-shaped lever protruding level with my left knee—like the handle on a manual typewriter. I nudge it.

  There’s a clunk from inside the desk and the injunction vanishes, to be replaced by a picture of the organization coat of arms. Then more words appear, scrolling in from the bottom of the screen, wobbling slightly:

  WRITE CLEARANCE.

  What the hell? I laboriously type BLOODY BARON, and knee the return paddle. (There’s something weird about the foot-keyboard: then I twig to the fact that its abbreviated supply of characters means it’s probably a Baudot Code system. Which figures. Older than ASCII . . .)

  The screen fades to white after a couple of seconds, then a bloody sigil flashes into view. It doesn’t kill me to look at it, but the disquieting sense that the void is inspecting the inside of the back of my skull makes me squirm on my seat. There is an eye-warping loop to one side of it that feels familiar, as if it’s tied to my soul somehow.

  WRITE: STILL ALIVE? Y/N:

  Knees knoc
king, I type Y (RETURN).

  WELCOME BOB, YOU ARE AUTHENTICATED.

  If you are reading this message, I am absent. Welcome to the dead man’s boots: hope you don’t find them too tight. You are one of only four people who have access to this machine (and at least two of them are dead or dying of K Syndrome).

  You may: read all files not flagged with a Z-prefix, search all files not flagged with a Z-prefix, and print any files flagged with a prefix from A to Q.

  You may not: read or search Z-prefix files. Print files flagged with a prefix from S to Z. Dismantle or reverse-engineer this instrument.

  WARNING: LETHAL ENFORCEMENT PROTOCOLS ARE ENFORCED.

  WRITE: GOTO MAIN MENU? Y/N:

  This is Angleton. He doesn’t bluff. I make a note of those clearances on my phone, then, hesitantly, I type Y.

  I have, in fact, seen worse-designed user interfaces. There are abominations out there that claim to be personal media players that—but I digress. The Memex is a miracle of simplicity and good design, as long as you bear in mind that it’s operated by foot pedals (except for the paper tape punch), the display is a microfilm reader, and it can’t display more than ten menu choices on screen at any time. Unlike early digital computers such as the Manchester Mark One, you don’t need to be Alan Turing and debug raw machine code on the fly by flashing a torch at the naked phosphor memory screen; you just need to be able to type on a Baudot keyboard using both feet (with no delete key and lethal retaliation promised if you make certain typos). There’s nothing here that’s remotely as hostile as VM/CMS to a UNIX hacker. I’ve just got an edgy feeling that the Memex is reading me, and sitting in quietly humming judgment. So I spend half an hour reading the quick start guide, and then . . .