The Atrocity Archives

by Charles Stross

  "Sure? I'm sure! 'Course I'm sure. But I ain't too happy with the content. For one thing, where's all the stuff about license terms and support? That comes first. I mean, pacts with the devil is all very well, but I need to know who to phone for real technical support. And has CESG certified all this stuff for use on government networks?"

  I sigh. "Go have a word with Dr. Vohlman," I suggest, and–a trifle rudely–turn away. I know there's always one person who's in the wrong course, but we're two days in and he still hasn't figured it out–that's got to be some kind of record, hasn't it?

  Everyone drinks up and the smokers magically reappear from wherever they vanished to and we troop back into the lecture theatre. Teacher–Dr. Vohlman–has rolled an archaic test bench in; it looks like a couple of Tesla coils fucking a Wheatstone bridge next to what I'll swear is a distributor hub nicked from an old Morris Minor. The wiring on the pentacle is solid silver, tarnished black with age.

  "Right, better put your coffee cups down now, because we're going to actually put some of the stuff we were discussing before break into practice."

  Vohlman is all business, attacking his curriculum with the gusto of a born schoolteacher. "We're going to try a lesser summoning, a type three invocation using these coordinates I've sketched on the blackboard. This should raise a primary manifestation of nameless horror, but it'll be a fairly tractable nameless horror as long as we observe sensible precautions. There will be unpleasant visual distortions and some protosapient wittering, but it's no more intelligent than a News of the World reporter–not really smart enough to be dangerous. That's not to say that it's safe, though–you can kill yourself quite easily by treating the equipment with disrespect. Just in case you've forgotten, this current is carrying fifteen amps at six hundred volts, and the baseboard is insulated and oriented correctly along a north-south magnetic axis. The geometry we're using for this run is a modified Minkowski space that we can derive by setting pi to four; there's no fractal dimension involved, but things are complicated slightly because the space to which we're mapping this diagram has a luminiferous aether. Gather round, please, you need to be inside the security cordon when I power up the circuit. Manesh, if you could switch on the ABSOLUTELY NO ENTRY sign . . ."

  We gather round the test bench. I hover near the back. I've seen similar experiments before: in fact, I've done much more exotic ones in the basement back at Chateau Cthulhu. Compared to the insanely complex summonings Brains assembles inside his laser grid this is introductory level stuff, just an official checkpoint on my personnel record. (Did I tell you about the friend of mine who was turned down for a job as a trainee scientific officer because he was unqualified? His Ph.D. was no good–the job description said "three GCSE passes" and he'd long since lost all his high school certificates. That's the way the civil service works.)

  Still, it's interesting to watch the other students in this course. Babs, blonde bubble-and-squeak with big-framed spectacles, is treating the bench like an unexploded bomb; I think she's new to this and still too much under the influence of The Exorcist, probably expects heads to start spinning round and green slime to start spewing at any moment. (Vohlman should have told the students that's what we keep the Ectoplasm Wallahs around for. Impresses the brass no end. But that's another course.) John, Manesh, Dipak, and Mike are behaving just like bored junior technical staff on another week-away-from-the-desk-is-as-good-as-a-holiday training course. Fred from Accounting looks confused, as if he's mislaid his brain, and Callie's found a pressing reason to go powder her nose. Can't say I blame her; this kind of experiment is fun, the same way that demonstrating a thermite reaction in a chemistry lab is fun–it can blow up in your face. I make damn sure that the electrical fire extinguisher is precisely two paces behind me and one pace to my right.

  "Okay, everybody pay attention. Don't, whatever happens, touch the grid. Don't, under any circumstances, say anything once I start. Don't, on pain of your life, step outside the red circle on the floor–we're on top of an earthed cage here, but if we go outside it–"

  Topology is everything. The idea of a summoning is simple: you create an attractor node at point A. You put the corresponding antinode at point B. You stand in one of 'em, energize the circuit, and something appears at the other. The big "gotcha" is that a human observer is required–you can't do it by remote control. (Insert some quantum cat mumbo-jumbo about "collapsing the wave function" and "Wigner's Friend versus the Animal Liberation Front" here.) Better hope you picked the right circle to stand in, otherwise you're going to learn far more than you ever wanted to know about applied topology–like how the universe looks when you're turned inside-out.

  It's not quite as bad as it sounds. For added security, you can superimpose the attractor node and the safety cell, locking in the summoned agency–which means they shouldn't be able to get to us at the antinode. Which is why Herr Doktor Vohlman mit der duelling scars unt ze bad attitude has plonked the test bench right in the middle of the red pentagram painted on the lecture theatre floor and is enjoining us all to stand tight.

  Of course, to get to the fire extinguisher I'd have to step out of the circle . . .

  "Is this practice approved by the Health and Safety officer?" Fred asks.

  "Quiet, please." Vohlman shuts his eyes, obviously psyching himself up for the activation sequence. "Power." He shoves a knife switch over and a light comes on. "Circuit two." A button is depressed. "Is there anybody there?"

  Green vapour seems to swirl at the edges of my vision as I focus on the pentagram of silver wire. Lights glow beneath it, set in a baseboard made of timber harvested from a (used) gallows; setup is everything.

  "Three." Vohlman pushes another button, then pulls a twist of paper out of his pocket. Tearing it, he exposes a sterile lancet which he shoves into the ball of his left thumb without hesitation. The hair on the back of my neck is standing on end as he shakes his hand at the attractor and a bead of blood flicks away from it, bounces off the air above one wire, rolls back toward the centre–and hovers a foot above it, vibrating like a liquid ruby beneath the fluorescent lights.

  "Is anybody there?" mimics Fred. Abruptly his face crinkles in a grin. "Good joke! I almost believed it for a minute!" He reaches out toward the drop of blood and I can feel vast forces gathering in the air around us–and all of a sudden I can feel a headache coming on, like the tension before an electrical storm.

  "No!" squeaks Babs, realising it's too late to stop him even as she speaks.

  I see Vohlman's face. It's a mask of pure terror: he doesn't dare move a muscle to stop Fred because touching Fred will only spread the contagion. Fred is already lost and the last thing you do to someone who's in contact with high tension is grab them to pull them away–that is, if you do it, it's the last thing you'll ever do.

  Fred stands still, and his jacket sleeve twitches as if his muscles are writhing underneath it. His hand is over the attractor, and the drop of blood begins to drift toward his fingertip. He is still smiling, like a man with his foot clamped to the third rail of the underground before the smoke and sparks appear. He opens his mouth. "Yes," he says, in a high, clear voice that is not his own. "We are here."

  There are luminous worms writhing behind his eyes.

  * * * *

  "What did you do next?" asks Boris.

  I lean back and stare up at the slowly roiling smoke-dragons that curl under the fluorescent tubes. It takes me a few seconds to find my voice; my throat is raw, and not from smoke.

  "Analysed the situation very fast, the way they train you to: LEAP methodology. Look, evaluate, assign priorities. Fred had grounded the containment field and the level three agency inside it flood-filled him. Level threes aren't sapient but the universe they come from has a much faster timebase than ours; as soon as he crossed the containment they mapped his nervous system and cracked it like a rotten walnut. Full possession in two to five hundred milliseconds."

  "But what did you do?" Andy pushes at me.

  I swal
low. "Well, I was opposite him, and he'd grounded the containment. At that point neither the attractor or the antinode were up and running, so we were all targets. The obvious priority was to shut down the possession, fast. You do that by physically disabling the possessed before the agency can construct a defence in depth. I'd been worried by the electrics and made sure I knew where the fire extinguisher was, so that was what I grabbed first."

  Boris: "It was the first thing that come to hand?"

  "Yes."

  Andy nods. "There's going to be a Board of Enquiry," he says. "But that's basically what we needed to know. It fits with what we're hearing from the other witnesses."

  "How badly was he hurt?"

  Andy looks away. My hands are shaking so much that my coffee cup rattles against its saucer. "He's dead, Bob. He was dead the moment he crossed the line. You and everybody else there would be dead, too, if you hadn't punched his ticket. You've got one colleague who wasn't there, two who didn't notice what was going on, and five–including the instructor–who swear blind that you saved their lives." He looks back at me: "But we have to put you through the enquiry process all the same because it was a fatal incident. He was married with two kids, and there's a pension and other residuals to sort out."

  "I didn't know." I stop, before I say something silly. Fred was a jerk, but no man is an island. I feel sick, thinking about the consequences of what happened in that room. Maybe if I'd explained things to him during the break, patted him on the back and sent him away to find a course that would use up his departmental training credits harmlessly–

  Andy cuts into my introspection: "Oh, it's a real mess, all right. Always is, when something goes pear-shaped in the line of duty. I'll go so far as to say I expect the enquiry to be a formality in this case–you'll probably come out of it with a commendation. But in the meantime, I'm afraid you're going back to your office where Harriet will formally notify you that you're suspended on full pay pending an enquiry and possible disciplinary action. You're going to go home and cool your heels until next week, then we'll try to get it over with as fast as possible." He leans back from his desk and sighs. "This sucks, really and truly, but there's no getting around it. So I suggest you treat the suspension as time to chill out and get your head together, get over things–because after the enquiry I expect we'll be resurrecting your application for active duty training and field ops, and looking at it favourably."

  "Huh?" I sit up.

  "Ninety percent of active duty consists of desk work. You can do that, even if the hat doesn't fit too well. Another 9 percent is sitting around in bushes while the rain drips down your collar, wondering what the hell you're doing there. I figure you can do that, too. It's the other 1 percent–a few seconds of confused danger–that's hard to get right, and I think you've just demonstrated the capability. To the extent that it's my call, you've got it"–he stands up–"if you want it."

  I stand up too. "I'll think about it," I say, and I walk out the door before I start mouthing obscenities, because I can't get Fred's expression out of my head. I've never seen someone die before. Funny, isn't it? Most of us go through life and never really see someone die, much less die violently. I should be on a high, knowing that I'm going to qualify for field ops, and if this interview had happened yesterday I would be. But now I just want to throw up in a corner.

  * * * *

  Brains is in the kitchen when I get home, attempting to cook an omelette without breaking the eggshell.

  It's raining, and my jacket is drenched from the short run between the tube station and the front door; give thanks once more to the invisible boon of contact lenses, without which I would be staring at the world through streak-befuddled spectacles. "Hi," says Brains. "Can you hold this for me?"

  He hands me an egg. I stare.

  The normally not-so-clean kitchen worktop is gleaming and sterile, as if in preparation for a particularly fussy surgeon. At one side of it sits a syringe and needle preloaded with a grey, opaque liquid–essence of concrete. At the other side of it sits a food processor, its safety shutoff hacked and something that looks worryingly like half an electric motor bolted to the drive shaft that normally turns its blades. I stand there dripping and staring: even for Brains's projects, this is distinctly abnormal.

  I hand the egg back. "I'm not in the mood."

  "C'mon. Just hold it?"

  "I mean it. I've just been suspended, pending an enquiry." I unzip my jacket and let it tumble to the floor. "Game over, priority interrupt, segmentation fault."

  Brains cocks his head toward one side and stares at me with big bright eyes, like a slightly demented owl. "Seriously?"

  "Yeah." I hunt around for the coffee jar and begin ladling scoopfuls into the café tire. "Water in the kettle?"

  "Suspended? On pay? Why?"

  In goes the coffee. "Yes, on pay. I saved six people's lives, plus my own. But I lost the seventh, so there's going to be an enquiry. They say it's a formality, but–" Click, the kettle is now on, heating up to a steam explosion.

  "Something to do with that training course?"

  "Yeah. Fred from Accounting. He grounded a summoning grid–"

  "Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now!"

  "It's not funny."

  He looks at me again and loses his levity. "No, Bob, it's not funny. I'm sorry." He offers me the egg. "Here, hold this, I implore you."

  I take it and nearly drop it; it's hot, and feels slightly greasy. There's also a faint stench of brimstone. "What the hell–"

  "Just for a moment, I promise you." He pulls out a roughly made copper coil, the wire wrapped around a plastic pie cutter and hooked up to some gadget or other, and gingerly threads it over the egg, around my wrist and back again. "There. The egg should now be degaussed." He puts the coil down and takes the egg from my nerveless hand. "Observe! The first prototype of the ultimate integral ovine omelette." He cracks it on the side of the worktop and a yellow, leathery curdled sponge flops out. The smell of brimstone is now pronounced, tickling at my nostrils like the aftereffect of a fireworks show. "It's still at the development stage–I had to use a syringe on it, but next on the checklist is gel-diffusion electrophoresis using flocculated hemoglobin agglutinates pending in-ovo polymerisation of the rotor elements–so how did your pet luser autodarwinate?"

  I pull up a trash can and sit down. Maybe Brains isn't as monumentally self-obsessed as he looks? At least he slipped the question in painlessly enough.

  "You know how there's always someone who ends up in the wrong course? It was that dumb accounts clerk I'm always bitching about. He got in the Intro to Occult Computing course by mistake. I shouldn't have been there, anyway, but Harriet managed to convince Andy I needed it; getting her own back for last month, I think." Harriet has been having problems with her email system and asked my advice; I don't know quite what went wrong, but she ended up blowing five days of the departmental training budget attending a course on sendmail configuration. Took her three weeks to stop twitching every time somebody mentioned rules. "Well and all, I guess what he did qualifies as a massive self-LART, but . . ."

  I realise I'm not talking anymore and shudder convulsively.

  "His eyes were full of worms."

  Brains turns, silently, and rummages in the cupboard above the sink. He pulls down a big bottle labelled DRAIN FLUID, rinses out a couple of chipped cups that are languishing on the draining board, then fills them from the bottle. "Drink this," he says.

  I drink. It isn't bleach: my eyes don't quite bulge out, my throat doesn't quite catch fire, and most of the liquid doesn't evaporate from the surface of my tongue. "What the hell is this stuff?"

  "Sump degreaser." He winks at me. "Stops Pinky dipping his wick in it, right?" I wink back, a bit nonplussed; I do not think that phrase means what Brains thinks that it means, but if I told him I doubt he'd give me any more of this stuff, so I'm not going to enlighten him. Right now I've got a strong urge to get blindingly drunk–which he seems to have sensed. If I'm
blind drunk I won't have to think. And not thinking for a while will be a good thing.

  "Thank you," I say, as gravely as I can–it's Brains's secret, after all, and he's confided it in me. I'm obscurely touched, and if I didn't keep seeing Fred grinning at me whenever I closed my eyes it might actually get to me.

  Brains peers at me closely. "I think I know your problem," he says.

  "What's that?"

  "You need"–he's already topping up my cup–"to get pissed. Now."

  "But what about your–" I wave feebly at the worktop.

  He shrugs. "It's an early success; I'll get it working properly later."

  "But you're busy," I protest, because this whole thing is very un-Brains-like; at his worst he's a borderline autist. To have him paying attention to someone else's emotional upsets is, well, eerie.

  "I was only trying to prove that you can make an omelette without breaking eggs. That's just a dumb metaphor or a silly practical experiment; you're real, and a classic example of what it means, too. You're broken, in the course of scrambling a body-snatcher's zero point outbreak, and I figure we need to see if all the king's men can fix you, or at least make you feel better. Then you can help me with my egg-sacting project."

  I do not throw the glass at him. But I make him refill it.

  An indeterminate but nonzero number of semifull vodka glasses later, Pinky appears, looking tall and gangly and slightly flustered. He demands to know where the nearest bookshop is.

  "Why?"

  "For my nephew." (Pinky has a brother and sister-in-law who live on the other side of London and who have recently spawned.)

  "What are you getting him?"

  "I'm buying an A to Z and a bible."

  "Why?"

  "The A to Z is a christening present and the bible is so I know the way to the church." Brains groans; I scrabble drunkenly behind the sofa for a sponge bullet for the Nerf gun, but they all seem to have fallen through the wormhole that leads to the planet of lost paper clips, pencils, and irreplaceable but detachable components of weird toys. "Say, what's going on here?"