The Labyrinth Index

by Charles Stross

  “You have what your colleagues in the trade call a clean face. That will come in handy.” The Prime Minister paused. “Have you been following the news from the United States?”

  “The—” What? I bite my tongue.

  “There are signs and portents.” The PM smirked. “The President has not been seen outside the White House for eleven weeks, he’s not on the news or attending any meetings, he is never available to take my calls—and I’ve tried. He’s not home to the German Chancellor either,” he added. “Or to the Prime Minister of Japan.”

  Oh dear.

  “All our usual sources inside the Beltway are distinctly unforthcoming,” continued the Prime Minister. “Congress continues to sit, the Supreme Court deliberates, CNN talking heads debate, the various candidates are preparing the groundwork for next year’s election campaigns, but it’s as if they’ve all forgotten the Executive Branch exists.”

  “What?” I couldn’t help myself; it just slipped out. You don’t just forget the American President: it’d be like forgetting about the Queen, or absent-mindedly misplacing the Moon. The President is one of—if not the—most potent authority figures in the world. And that’s leaving aside his role as the leader of a team of four or five hundred politicians and high-ranking civil servants who run the most powerful human executive office on the planet. (Ahem: the most powerful human office on the planet.) How do you forget that?

  “It appears that the Vice-President is missing, too,” the Prime Minister continued. “A powerful glamour has engulfed the United States of America. It’s not the first time, of course—that nation is a shining temple to amnesia with its foundations built atop the bones of vanished empires—but I find it disturbing that a third of a billion people have simultaneously forgotten the existence of the Executive Branch of their government at just this moment, with the walls between the worlds rubbing paper-thin and the chittering of unseen things in the darkness growing ever louder, eh, what? I fear a takeover, Mhari. A hostile takeover, possibly something coming through the imperfectly sealed gate in Colorado Springs through which that fellow you dealt with last year obtained access to the Sleeper—” He was referring to the unspeakably vile televangelist Raymond Schiller, whom I drained in a luxury apartment in Docklands, and good riddance—“or at the very least, an internal coup within your former agency’s counterparts, the Operational Phenomenology Agency.” His grin was skeletal. “It would hardly be unprecedented, don’t you think?

  “So here’s your new assignment: you will establish a new agency, recruit agents, and direct them—I have a little list of those who won’t be missed, tum-de-dum, I shall send it to you presently—in order to develop and deliver a HUMINT capability directed against the United States. You are to bring the new organization to operational readiness, then lead them in penetrating the continental land mass, peering behind the blackout curtain that has so abruptly descended, and working out who is currently running the show. Ahem: I meant to say what is running the show: they’re almost certainly not human any more.

  “Your team will consist of agents with clean faces who are politically unreliable but sufficiently competent to have some hope of survival in a very hostile environment. In addition to intelligence gathering, they may be called upon in future to conduct extraction and sabotage operations if the situation calls for it, just like the old wartime SOE, hah hah! And while you’re about it, don’t forget to retrieve the President? He might come in useful.”

  I squeaked. “You want me to rescue”—don’t say kidnap—“the President?”

  “Only if he’s still human enough to be worth collecting.” Darkness smiled at me across the table. “You never know, he might not be! It all depends on what’s running the United States in his absence, and whether the President escaped before they got their tentacles wrapped around his brain-stem. I won’t hold it against you if you can’t manage it because he’s awakened at last and is behind it, you know: Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn—in his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. But come now, why the long face? Isn’t this the promotion you’ve been waiting for, Baroness?”

  * * *

  I drink inadvisably with ’Seph but manage to avoid getting weepy or maudlin. Afterwards I pour myself into a taxi, head for the office, and set to work designing a new government agency.

  Whatever else you may think of the New Management, when the boss commits, He pulls out all the stops. There’s something refreshingly Churchillian about it, just as long as you’re not standing at ground zero of one of His ire bombs. Previous administrations had to worry about expenses scandals and investigative journalists, so penny-pinching and paperwork were the order of the day, but that all changed after His Darkness had a fireside chat with the Dirty Digger, and Mr. Dacre of the Daily Mail. Now the headlines all praise the New Management, and nobody dares look below the surface—especially after what He did to Private Eye.3

  When the PM learned about the decrepit state of the former Laundry’s premises, He had us—the revenant core of Mahogany Row/Continuity Operations—requisition a whole row of think-tank and NGO offices along Great College Street, a stone’s throw from Parliament. Then He had the Exchequer write Facilities a blank check. It came with strings attached, of course. I swear Vikram nearly fainted when he saw the deadline to turn that rat’s nest of listed eighteenth-century buildings into a new HQ for the civil service sorcerers. Then, when we slithered past the guillotine blade a couple of hours ahead of the drop dead date, he burst into tears and shouted, “We’re going to live! We’re going to live!”

  Anyway, as a result of the PM’s double-edged largesse, I have a gigantic office with intricate gilt cornice-work and an original Adam fireplace. It’s about the same size as my apartment, and it comes with a huge sash window overlooking the Westminster School gardens. It’s backed by a sheet of bulletproof glass with some sort of fancy photoreactive coating that totally blocks ultraviolet light, so I’m safe from daylight. I can’t get over it: I can enjoy the view during office hours without catching fire! And the paintings from the Government Art Collection are—don’t get me started. Let’s just say I’ve come up in the world. It’s a nice office, perfectly suited to a baroness who is the head of a new intelligence agency; I hope they let me keep it.

  Mind you, I’m not enjoying it right now. I stand in front of the window in my stockinged feet, glass of brandy in hand, glaring at Westminster Abbey and trying not to lose my shit. ’Seph thinks I’m doomed, and I can’t say she’s wrong with any certainty. I’ve been in bad positions before—unreasonable bosses with unreachable expectations—but senior banking VPs usually can’t do anything worse than fire you. As for Laundry management, they’re mostly amenable to reason, especially if you have friends in HR. But the New Management is another matter entirely. The mere idea of disappointing the PM gives me the cold shudders. Reaping my skull for a Christmas tree ornament is one of the least-bad outcomes if I screw this up.

  (Oh, and where’s the list of candidates he promised me? If He’s serious, their caliber will speak volumes about whether He expects me to succeed.)

  Anyway, I can at least try to use my time to come up with a plan. So I sit down at my two-hundred-year-old Admiralty desk, pull out an A3-sized sheet of drafting paper, and start sketching out a tentative org chart.

  So, let’s see: His Darkness has given me an overall goal with two sub-tasks. No, make that three.

  Firstly, I need to set up a management team for a new agency with a remit to support HUMINT assets—spies—working overseas. (Normally that’d be a job for a department inside SIS, but this is different: at least the New Management will give me whatever legal cover I need to make it fly, because we are in an ongoing state of emergency.) It follows that I have to be able to insert agents into the United States of America without coming to the attention of the Nazgûl. That’s our nickname for the Operational Phenomenology Agency, the Laundry’s bigger and better-funded American counterpart, and should tel
l you everything you need to know about them.

  Secondly, I need to deliver on-the-ground answers to certain key questions: Cthulhu: Has he risen? The President: Is he a lizard-man? And so on.

  And thirdly, I need to set this circus up so it can continue to operate on an ongoing basis as a permanent agency, not just a one-off project, iterating in pursuit of future goals defined by Number 10.

  This is so far above my previous pay grade that just thinking about it gets me chewing my lower lip and looking longingly at the brandy. So I force myself to take five minutes out to de-stress and repair my sun-proof makeup.

  While I’m working on the top coat, I carefully reconsider my assumptions. Assume the worst: nobody outside the UK loves us, and in particular the US intelligence community are totally not our BFFs any more. Rather than just dropping in for a friendly chat, my people will be facing a hostile environment, with border guards looking for intruders. Hence the boss’s point about clean faces. Oh, and if the Nazgûl aren’t already on the alert for reports of vampires entering the country, I’m a chocolate teapot.

  As for why His Darkness picked me for this job, I can think of several explanations, none of them good. Why not Mo, who at least has experience of setting up an agency from scratch? Or ’Seph, ditto, only for undercover penetration ops? Neither of them are clean faces, but it’s terrible tactical doctrine to put your controller anywhere the opposition can see them, much less order them to lead from the front. Maybe He simply doesn’t trust anyone else. Or maybe He really does think He’s giving me a big break. Maybe He wants me there as a high-level negotiator—risky, but if He’s serious about the President, he might—

  Let’s shelve that for a moment and move on to the PM’s specific questions. Schiller, the televangelist in Colorado Springs, worries me. I remember Bob Howard was involved in some classified project to do with him a few years ago—GOD GAME something? I scribble a note to myself to pull the archival report. Maybe it’d be better to get the story from Bob directly, but for personal reasons I’m reluctant to ask him.

  The PM’s specific tasking is infuriatingly vague. I draw an arrow leading to a box labelled “RESEARCH” and another arrow from there to “RECON” before allowing myself to get sidetracked for a few minutes.

  I have a “dirty”—private, unsecured—Samsung phone. I pull it out and google Colorado Springs and then ask the google monster how far it is from London. Nearly five thousand miles! I draw an arrow and a thought bubble captioned “LOGISTICS” and move swiftly on.

  Next there’s the action-movie assignment: rescue the President. Even assuming he hasn’t been eaten by tentacle monsters, or possessed by those nauseating crotch parasites Schiller planted on people, that’s a big ask. If he’s missing, then either he’s in a dungeon somewhere (and maximum security prisons are designed to be hard to break people out of), or our information is wrong and he’s still in office and guarded by the Secret Service—battalions of men in black with automatic weapons. I hang these two options off the diagram as an IF … ELSE fork, flow-chart fashion, and make an executive decision. If the President is still human but a prisoner, we’ll rescue him. If we can’t, well, trying to kidnap an unwilling President seems like a messy form of suicide. Especially if he’s the American counterpart of the PM.

  Rule Number One is don’t die. Corollary Number One is don’t poke things that will certainly kill you, like high-tension cables and hostile level-six Existential Anthropic Threats. If it comes to it, I’ll take responsibility and lay my head on the block. I mean, the PM might not kill me if He’s misjudged the threat, right? Firm but fair: strong and stable; the slogans of the New Management.

  Somewhere in the middle of my elaborate thought-doodle my glass of brandy has emptied itself and, having been refilled, has half-emptied itself again. It’s almost two in the morning. I sigh and contemplate my work. “Pathetic,” I mutter. I quickly sketch in an org chart with three tails—two field teams of four and an executive branch, also of four—then knock back my nightcap.

  The eleven empty slots on the org chart mock me as I turn out the light and head for the door. But they’ll have to wait until I get the PM’s little list.

  * * *

  The ship of state is a supertanker with a turning circle so vast that it takes years to change course—but there is constant, frantic activity on the bridge as it begins to steer. For the past six months, we have been under the command of a new master, and the ship is slowly coming about. If you are on the outside, watching, you have probably noticed a few changes. A new cabinet, a new government, new faces, new names in the papers. A stirring declaration by the Prime Minister that there will be no referendum on leaving the EU, because He is determined to take us out of the union anyway4—He has a mandate to do so, after all, a mandate for strong and stable government.

  There have been other changes that don’t make the front pages of the newspapers. Windfall taxes on multinationals, subsidies for certain types of agriculture, discussions about food and petrol rationing with the chief executives of Tesco and Sainsbury’s—

  —The Mandate is preparing for war.

  CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is the codename the Laundry applied to the most likely human extinction scenario resulting from the wide-scale effects of applied computational demonology. That’s the branch of the occult that our agency—the bastard offspring of the wartime Special Operations Executive and Bletchley Park—was responsible for (and ultimately failed at) suppressing. Magic is a branch of applied mathematics. Computers are machines that can be used to solve theorems and perform mathemagical operations exceedingly fast (as are certain neural networks, so long as you can immunize them against the extradimensional feeders that like to chew up the brains of magicians). Brains can under some circumstances perform magic, and there are too many brains these days. There are also too many computers. Would you believe that iPhones are a major threat to national security? A current generation smartphone is more powerful than a 1991 supercomputer.

  CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN hung fire for a decade, but it finally arrived with a bang last year. That’s when the explosion of microprocessors over the past few decades, and the proliferation of meddling peasants who program them, blew past the agency’s ability to sweep everything neatly under the rug. CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN weakens the fabric of spacetime to such a degree that ordinary people begin to acquire power through thaumic resonance. Botnets spread through unpatched copies of Windows 2003 running on medical diagnostic equipment, spamming arcane prayers on behalf of things better left unworshipped. Supposedly wholesome bitcoin mining apps are actually running demon-summoning algorithms in disguise. And don’t get me started on the prevalence of necromantic malware in the app stores.

  Nine months ago we hit critical mass. It started, ironically, with a scenario the agency considered unlikely: an invasion by an army of magic-wielding hominids from a parallel universe, fleeing extermination by ghastly horrors that had been attracted to their realm by their excessive use of magic. The alfär host caused death and destruction on a scale not seen in the British Isles since the Second World War, triggering a crisis that the enemies of the agency sought to exploit for their own benefit. Ultimately this left our board with no option but to strike a devil’s bargain with an only slightly lesser evil—

  —who is now our Prime Minister.

  If you are to survive under the New Management you need to understand the Black Pharaoh, insofar as it’s humanly possible to do so. The PM is brilliant, incisive, and mercurial, and He is definitely not insane. However, His concerns are so remote from those of regular humanity that most people simply don’t understand what they’re dealing with. So I find it helpful to employ a metaphor in order to explain our predicament, and it goes like this:

  The Denizen of Number 10 is the avatar—the humanoid sock-puppet—of an ancient and undying intelligence who regards mere humanity much as we might regard a hive of bees. Our lives are of no individual concern to Him, but He likes honey. As long as we continue
to give Him what He wants—honey—He is content to keep us around, and even to tend to us to the extent that it does not inconvenience Him. But the moment anyone thinks to sting the keeper’s hand, it will be out with the fly-swatter—or, if we’re unlucky, the insecticide bomb.

  So we’ve got to keep Him happy, whatever the cost.

  The alternative is simply too dreadful to contemplate.

  * * *

  The next day is a Friday, which is generally debate-free at Westminster—lots of MPs have to commute home to their constituencies—and this has knock-on effects in the upper house. Committees tend to shut down at lunchtime. The afternoon is for filing expense claims and reports, and leaving early.

  A red box—a battered briefcase covered in red leather, bearing the royal cypher—is waiting with my receptionist when I arrive. “Lauren.” I nod, and she gives me a timid smile: apparently I scare people. “Any news?”

  “A courier dropped this off for you an hour ago, your ladyship?” (I don’t know why she persists with the whole formal “your ladyship” thing: it’s technically the correct form of address, but we’ve been working together for four months and I’ve even taken her along to a wine bar a couple of times.) She offers me the box.

  “Thanks.” I take it. It’s light, which is a relief. “Is there anything to sign for?”

  “No, your ladyship. I mean, they got me to sign for it, but you’re covered.”

  “Okay, fine. Anything else?” She shakes her head. “I’ll be in my office if anyone calls, then.”