The Fuller Memorandum l-4

by Charles Stross

  MEANWHILE, OVER ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LOOKING GLASS:

  “Listen, let me give you an update. I’ve been suspended on pay. I need you to pick up a ward for me, as soon as you can. I’m heading home now, but I’m inaudible and they inaudible can you find him and tell him inaudible—”

  Mo sighs, exasperated, as her phone beeps three times and hangs up on Bob. She waits five seconds, then hits redial. It connects immediately.

  “Hello, you have reached the voice mail of—”

  She puts her phone away, leaving it for later. Bob’s obviously in a poor reception zone, but if he’s heading home they can compare notes in a couple of hours. Being suspended is bad news for Bob, but she’s been half-expecting it. They’ve both been under too much pressure lately: the business with the cultists, the suspected leak, all the other minutiae of being part of the operational front end of an organization under increasing strain. Everyone is under strain these days; even the people who aren’t cleared to know about Dr. Mike’s bombshell.

  Mo heads towards an anonymous industrial estate in the suburbs out near Croydon, where some of the more technical departments have relocated while Service House is being rebuilt. She travels by tube and then commuter train, and finally by bus, keeping one hand on her violin case at all times. It takes her an hour and a half to make the journey: strap-hanging in grim silence, alone with her worries about the evidence she removed from Mr. Dower’s workshop. She travels under the gaze of cameras; cameras on the tube platforms, cameras in the railway station concourses, cameras on the buses. Many of them are linked to the SCORPION STARE network, part of the huge surveillance web the government is spinning to keep the nation safe in the final days. But the final days may be about to arrive with a bang, two or three years earlier than anticipated . . .

  She walks the hundred meters to the car park entrance, then enters an anonymous-looking office reception area in an otherwise windowless building. A plain signboard on the high razor-wire-topped fence outside proclaims it the property of Invicta Security Ltd., and the portrait of a slavering German shepherd beneath the sign promises a warm welcome to would-be burglars. Both signs are, of course, lying: the building currently houses most of the Occult Forensics Department, and there’s no easy way to visually depict the protean, gelatinous horrors that ooze around the premises by night.

  “Hello, Invicta—” The blue-suiter behind the counter pauses. “Dr. O’Brien. Can I see your pass, please?”

  Mo presents her warrant card. “Hi, Dave. Is Dr. Williams in?”

  “I think so.” Dave pokes at his computer terminal. “Yes, he’s booked in. Do you need to see him?”

  “I’ve got a job on. Can you page him?”

  “I’ll do that.” Dave points a webcam on a stalk at her, then prints off a temporary badge. “Here, wear this. It’s valid for zones one and two, you know the drill.”

  “Yes.” Mo doesn’t smile. Whereas the New Annexe mostly deals with paper (apart from the armory), the OFD handles physically—and in some cases spiritually—hazardous materials. Access to the inner zones is restricted for good reason.

  While Dave pages Dr. Williams, Mo plants herself on one of the powder-blue waiting area seat-things, and idly pages through some of the magazines on the occasional table: Forensic Sciences Digest, Gunshot Wounds Monthly, Which? PCR. Her attention is a million kilometers away from the articles, but they serve as a distraction for her eyes. She has one of the magazines open at a color spread of spent bullets retrieved from victims of crime when a shadow falls across her. “Mo! What brings you out here?”

  She looks up, forcing a smile. “Nick? Are you busy? Can we discuss this in your office?”

  Five minutes later, another windowless office with overflowing bookshelves and too many filing cabinets. “What have you got for me?” he asks. Balding, in his late forties, Nick is the research lead in this particular lab.

  “A special job.” Mo pauses. “Sub rosa.”

  “Sub—Oh shit. Tell me it isn’t so.”

  She shakes her head. “I think it’s probably a leak rather than an inside job, but even so, this is for you, not the office junior. Eyes only.” She pulls out the tub of paper clips from Mr. Dower’s workroom, and the small stapler from beside his cash register, and places them on the worktable opposite Dr. Williams’s desk. “The owner of these items was murdered about forty-eight hours ago. He’d just prepared a special report for me. I’m pretty certain the killer took the report, and knowing George—the victim—he would have paper-clipped or stapled it. So I want a full read on the top copy—and a locator.”

  Dr. Williams whistles between his front teeth. “You don’t want much, do you?” He pauses. “When do you need it by?”

  “Right now.” Mo positions her violin case on the visitor’s chair, then lets go of it. “It’s very urgent.”

  “Oh. I can have it with you by eight tonight, if I—”

  “No.” She smiles, letting him see her teeth. “When I said now, I meant right now.”

  “What’s so urgent?” Williams, unwilling to be rushed, crosses his arms and stares at her.

  “Are you on the distribution for CLUB ZERO?”

  Williams’s face turns ashen. “That was the business in Amsterdam, wasn’t it?”

  “They’re over here, too. The document in question is a detailed report on that.” She points at the violin case. “Whoever has got the report is almost certainly a live hostile, and may I remind you that the item they’re after is in your office?” Her smile evaporates. “You really want to get me out of here . . .”

  THERE IS A PHILOSOPHY BY WHICH MANY PEOPLE LIVE THEIR lives, and it is this: life is a shit sandwich, but the more bread you’ve got, the less shit you have to eat.

  These people are often selfish brats as kids, and they don’t get better with age: think of the shifty-eyed smarmy asshole from the sixth form who grew up to be a merchant banker, or an estate agent, or one of the Conservative Party funny-handshake mine’s-a-Rolex brigade.

  (This isn’t to say that all estate agents, or merchant bankers, or conservatives, are selfish, but that these are ways of life that provide opportunities for people of a certain disposition to enrich themselves at the expense of others. Bear with me.)

  There is another philosophy by which people live their lives, and it goes thus: you will do as I say or I will hurt you.

  It’s petty authoritarianism, and it frequently runs in families. Dad’s a dictator, Mum’s henpecked, and the kids keep quiet if they know what’s good for them—all the while soaking up the lesson that mindless obedience is the only safe course of action. These kids often rescue themselves, but some of them don’t. They grow up to be thugs, insecure and terrified of uncertainty, intolerant and unable to handle back-chat, willing to use violence to get what they want.

  Let me draw you a Venn diagram with two circles on it, denoting sets of individuals. They overlap: the greedy ones and the authoritarian ones. Let’s shade in the intersecting area in a different color, and label it: dangerous . Greed isn’t automatically dangerous on its own, and petty authoritarians aren’t usually dangerous outside their immediate vicinity—but when you combine the two, you get gangsters and dictators and hate-spewing preachers.

  There is a third philosophy by which—thankfully—only a tiny minority of people live their lives. It’s a bit harder to sum up, but it begins like this: in the beginning was the endless void, and the void spawned the Elder things, and we were created to be their slaves, and they’re going to return to Earth in the near future, and it is only by willingly subordinating ourselves to their merest whim that we can hope to survive—

  Now let me drop another circle on the diagram, and scribble in the tiny patch where it intersects with the other two circles, and label it in deepest fuliginous black: here be monsters.

  Greedy: check. Authoritarian: check. Worshipers of the most bizarre, anti-human monsters you can imagine: check. That’s the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh (and their masks l
ike the Free Church of the Universal Kingdom) and all of their ilk. Hateful, dangerous, unpleasant, greedy, and all-around bad people who you don’t want to have anything to do with if you can help it.

  There’s just one problem with this picture . . .

  That bit about in the beginning was the endless void?

  They’re right.

  (Oops.)

  Here’s the problem:

  We live in a hideously reticulated multiverse, where most of the dimensionality of spacetime is hidden from our view—curved in on themselves in closed loops, tucked away in imaginary spaces—but the stuff we can observe is a tiny fraction of the entirety of what we live in. Magic, the stuff I deal with in the office on a day-to-day basis, involves the indirect manipulation of information flow through these unseen dimensions, and communication with the extra-dimensional entities that live elsewhere. I’m an applied computational demonologist—how can I not believe this stuff?

  Not the bit about original creation, oh no. Beings like N’yar lath-Hotep didn’t mold us out of the black clay of the Nile delta: I’ve got no beef with modern cosmology. But those of them who take an interest in our kind find it useful for humans to believe such myths, and so they encourage the cultist numpties through their pursuit of forbidden lore.

  We aren’t alone in this cosmos; we aren’t even alone on this planet, as anyone who’s met a BLUE HADES can attest (there’s a reason all those domed undersea cities of the future never got built in the 1950s) . . . and don’t get me started on DEEP SEVEN, the lurkers in the red-hot depths. But our neighbors, the Deep Ones and the Chthonians, are adapted for wildly different biospheres. There is no colonial overlap to bring us to the point of conflict—which is a very good thing, because the result would be a very rapid Game Over: Humans Lose.

  The things that keep me awake in the small hours aren’t anything like as approachable as a Deep One. (Hell, I’ve worked with a Deep One. Left a part of my soul behind with her. No matter.) The things that terrify me are blue-green worms, twisting and coiling luminous intrusions glimpsed in the abruptly emptied eyes of a former colleague; minds patient and incomprehensibly old that find amusement in our tortured writhing; Boltzmann Brains from the chaotic, necrotic depths of the distant future, reaching back through the thinning ultrastructure of spacetime to idly toy with our reality. Things that go “bump” in the night eternal. Things that eat us—

  There is a fourth and final philosophy by which some of us live our lives, and it boils down to this: do not go quietly into that dark night. Draw a fourth circle on that now-crowded Venn diagram and you’ll see that while it intersects the greedy and authoritarian circles, and even has a tiny overlap with the greedy authoritarian bit, it doesn’t quite intersect with the third circle, the worshipers. It holds up a mirror to their self-destruction. Call it the circle of the necromantic apostates. That’s where I stand, whether I’m greedy or authoritarian or both. (I don’t think I’m either, but how can I be sure?)

  I may believe in mind-eating horrors from beyond spacetime, but they’ll have to break my neck before I bend it to their yoke.

  Keep telling yourself that, Bob.

  MO CARRIES HER VIOLIN AND FOLLOWS DR. WILLIAMS AS HE picks up a chipped plywood tea tray and backs through a swinging door, carrying the jar of paper clips and the stapler. The glass window in the door is hazed by a fine wire mesh, and the edges of the door are lined with copper fingers that close against a metal strip inside the frame. Williams places the tray on one end of an optical workbench, then bolts the door and flips a switch connected to a red lamp outside his office.

  “You’ve worked with one of these before?” he asks.

  “Of course.” Mo shrugs out of her jacket and hangs it on a hook. “It’s the entanglement-retrieval bit I’m unfamiliar with. That, and I may need a lab report. I know my limits.”

  “Good.” Williams’s smile is humorless. “Then if I tell you to stay in the isolation grid over there you know what the consequences are for getting things wrong.”

  “Indeed.” She opens the violin case and removes her bone-white instrument and its bow. Williams stares at it for a moment.

  “Do you really need that?”

  “When I said they’re targeting me, I wasn’t exaggerating. Besides, the document they stole was a report on this very instrument. If they’re trying to backtrack from it to find the original, then when you bring up the Adams-Todt resonance it might lead them here.”

  Dr. Williams snorts. “I’m sure the front desk will be very happy to see them.” He turns to the bench and unclamps a swinging arm, uses it to position a glass diffraction grating in a path defined by a set of curious pentagonal prisms positioned at the ten vertices of an irregular pentacle. “Would you pass me the data logger? It’s the second one along on the top shelf . . .”

  It takes Dr. Williams a quarter of an hour to set up the forensic magician’s workbench. Apart from the odd geometric layout it doesn’t resemble the popular imagination’s picture of a sorcerer’s laboratory. Colored chalk lines and eye of newt are gone, replaced by solid-state lasers and signal generators: pointy hats and robes have given way to polarized goggles and lab coats. The samples, stripped of their containers, are transferred to windowed containers using perspex tongs. Williams slots them into place in the observation rig. “Okay, stations,” he says conversationally. “I haven’t modified the beam line so there should be no overspill, but I’ll run a low power test first just in case.”

  Mo and the forensic demonologist move to stand inside complex designs inlaid in the floor in pure copper. “How’s your personal ward?” he asks.

  Mo reaches for the fine silver chain around her neck. “Mine’s fine,” she says slowly. “Damn, I should have drawn a spare for Bob. It’s a bit late now, do you have any kicking around?”

  “I’ll see what I can do afterwards. Okay, goggles on, lights going out. Testing in ten, nine, eight . . .” He pushes a switch. The red laser beam is only visible where it passes through the prisms. “You getting any overspill?”

  “None.” The room is dark, the only light source the faint trickle through the thickly frosted glass of the window in the door.

  “Good.” Williams cuts the power, then reaches across the bench by touch and rotates the sample tubes a quarter turn, lining them up with the beam path. Then he adjusts a mirror, flipping it to face a different and bulkier laser. “Okay, I’m switching to the high power source. Going live in ten, nine, eight . . . .”

  An image shimmers faintly in the darkness, stitched out in violet speckles across the translucent face of the screen on the optical bench. A pallid rectangle, violet with black runes.

  “That might be it,” Mo says quietly.

  “I expect so. I’m upping the power.” The rectangle fills in, glowing brighter and brighter. “Okay, I’m exposing the photographic paper now.”

  “What kind of camera . . . ?”

  “Pinhole, with two holes. Yes, it’s a double-split interferometer. Quiet, now . . .” There’s a soft click. Ten seconds later there’s another click. “Okay, I got the exposure done. Shame we can’t use CCDs for this job, but you wouldn’t want to feed some of the things we look at to a computing device . . . Right. You want to look at the bearer?”

  “Yes.” Mo leans forward, careful to stay within her ward (which glows pale blue, the nacreous glimmer washing over her feet). “It might retrieve Mr. Dower; I can identify him. If it’s anyone else, I’d like a portrait, please.”

  “I’ll just reload the interferometer. Wait one . . . Okay, I’m ready. Now comes the fun bit. Do you know Zimbardo’s Second Rite?”

  Mo pauses for a while. “I think so.”

  “Good, because we’re going there. Don’t worry, your part isn’t hard. Let’s get started.”

  After five minutes of minute adjustments, Williams runs a certain specialized script on his workstation, which starts up a sound track of chants in an esoteric language and sends a sequence of commands to the microcontroller
s in the workbench. As the baritone voices intone meaningless syllables with the mindless precision of a speech synthesizer, he whispers to her: “Some visitors say it spoils the fun, but I rather think it’s better than taking the risk of a slip of the tongue . . .”

  A new image begins to fuzz into being in the screen, the drawn face of a male, fifty-something, wearing an expression of intent concentration.“That’s Dower,” Mo confirms. “He wrote the report. Who do you get next?”

  “Let’s see. It’ll cycle through the bearers soon enough . . .”

  Dower’s face is melting, morphing into a likeness. Mo’s breath catches in her throat. “Shit.”

  “You get around, do you?” Williams sounds amused.

  “No, I told you they’re targeting me directly—” She stops, her voice rising. “It would be the best way to get the report out of Dower—send an agent who looks like me—”

  “I believe you.” The amusement drops from his voice. “Thousands wouldn’t.”

  “Let them.” She takes a deep breath. “Is there anyone else?”

  “Wait.” The face is fading, slowly. As it dims, Mo sees a faint shimmer about the eyes: the only sign that it may be a false sending. Whoever is behind the glamour is very good. “Come on, come on . . .” Dr. Williams murmurs under his breath.

  Mo shifts her weight uneasily from one foot to the other, as she does when her feet are complaining about too many hours in smart shoes. She glances sidelong into the darkness, where the shadows are swirling and thickening. A faint spectral scatter of spillage from the violet laser shimmers across the wall. “Any res—”

  She is in the process of turning her head back towards Dr. Williams and the workbench as the imago shudders and distorts, twisting into another’s face.

  Williams is meticulous, and doesn’t cut corners. This is why he and Mo survive.

  There’s a crack like a gunshot, and two near-simultaneous bangs from the power supplies that feed the workbench: high-speed krytron switches short the output to earth. A rattle of broken glass follows, as shards from the diffraction screen and some of the pentaprisms follow. The synthesized voices stop. Seconds later, a thin wisp of smoke begins to curl from the top of the laptop.