The Labyrinth Index

by Charles Stross

Once inside, I open the box. It contains a slim document folder, and when I open it a single sheet of paper falls out and drifts to the floor. I pick it up, put it on the desk, and resist the urge to swear—I recognize most of the names on it. Is He insane? I ask myself. No, don’t answer. I flush: sweat prickles up and down my back under my suit jacket and I glance up to check that the window coating is intact and I’m not feeling the first signs of daylight-induced spontaneous combustion. I’m just—surprised, and not in a good way.

  I sit down and stare at the sheet of paper for about ten minutes, thinking furiously. Then I unlock the top desk drawer, pull out my battered Parliamentary-issued Dell laptop, plug it into the network socket, and fire up the creakingly slow internal email app that Q-Division makes us use instead of something shiny and modern. Then I start typing:

  To whom it may concern:

  You have been seconded to a special assignment with immediate effect by express order of the Cabinet Office.

  We recognize that some of you have ongoing tasks. These orders override all prior duties. If you experience pushback, refer your management to me personally and I will deal with them.

  Your attendance at a mandatory all-hands team briefing is required. Report to Briefing Room C, Cabinet Office, 70 Whitehall, on Monday at 9 a.m.

  In addition to your normal identification documents you should bring your current passport and any travel documents or visas you possess.

  I apologize in advance for any inconvenience,

  Mhari Murphy, Baroness Karnstein.

  * * *

  After I hit “send” I sit for a long while with my chin on my hands, staring pensively at the sheet of paper bearing the list of recipients. What have I done? I wonder. Is this a deliberate provocation, or some kind of loyalty test? Or does He simply not care what we think? Probably a bit of both, I suspect: the PM is slippery even by the standards of other immortal nightmares.

  I’ve got a lot of work to get through—reports to read, minutes to write, witnesses to call, that sort of thing—but after sending that memo to those faces I am feeling the weight of isolation on my shoulders, and it is depressing and upsetting. So I copy some names into slots on the org chart I drew up yesterday, stash my papers and laptop in the office safe, and bunk off work for the weekend. Normally I’d take a bunch of unclassified/low-risk stuff home—I like to feel I’m not idling my life away—but for once I don’t have the energy. I am losing my detachment: I am in danger of actually getting angry with the PM—which is a life-threatening error. So I resolve to get totally blitzed and stay that way until I can no longer avoid dealing with His little joke, which in practice means I next need to be sober again no later than 9 a.m. on Monday, when I have to look everybody in the eye and explain how we’ve been sent on a suicide mission.

  * * *

  Civil service pay scales are traditionally shit, and that’s before you clamp five years of austerity policies down on top. When I worked in banking I was doing a lot better, but thanks to one or two regrettable early errors of judgement I kept putting off the usual first step on the property ladder, namely hooking up with a partner and jointly mortgaging our souls in perpetuity for a leasehold on a single-bedroom rabbit hutch. Story of my life. I wasted nearly a decade before I realized that life is not a game and there are no save points or second chances. That’s when I extricated myself from the Laundry, bought a suit, got a real job, and turned serious about getting ahead. Okay, so maybe I was overreacting, but I signed up for an MBA and grabbed on to the corporate ladder hard. Watch me level grind, making up for lost time! But then I got PHANG syndrome and Oscar got himself killed, so I never made it to VP level after all. And I fell back into the shadows.

  When I was drafted back into Q-Division, Human Resources went to some lengths to find me secure accommodation. They classified PHANG as a disability for residential support purposes, bless them, which got me free housing. But it was still a room in a Laundry shared house, as if I were a twenty-two-year-old graduate-track recruit: not quite as humiliating as ending up in kid sis’s room at Hotel Mum and Dad, but hardly ideal. When you’re in your late thirties, a civil service salary, even a management one, means that the London property market is not for you, sweetie—and you’re too well-off to qualify for social housing.

  But then I got my promotion break via the Transhuman Police Coordination Force, managed to hang onto my seniority when that came to an end, and when the New Management arrived with a bang it was hello ermine-trimmed robe and Junior Ministerial portfolio. Normal members of the House of Lords don’t get a salary, but they do get to claim expenses. As a committee chair, I got both. Nice money, but then the London property bubble ate it all.

  Saturday evening finds me holed up with a bottle of wine on an IKEA futon in my elegantly sparse one-bedroom apartment in Ilford. My home’s under-furnished because, between my mortgage and the requirement to dress like a front-rank politician, I can barely afford to buy a bean bag to sit on. (Apparently if my shoes aren’t genuine Louboutins that cost a week’s salary, nobody in government will take me seriously.) So I’m working my way down my third glass of Minervois when the land line rings. There’s no caller ID on the cheap handset but I answer it anyway, and get Fuckboy.

  “Mhari!” He snorts indignantly, then switches to concern so fast I nearly get whiplash. “Are you all right?”

  “No,” I say, looking at the empty bottle in my hand. “No, I’m really not.”

  “I’m coming round,” he says, and hangs up.

  “Fuck,” I say, then rummage around behind the futon for another bottle of plonk. I’ve got a feeling it’s going to come in handy.

  About half a medium glass later I hear noises from the narrow concrete balcony outside the French window. My flat’s on the third floor, but Fuckboy has gotten it into his head that I don’t want him to be seen visiting me—at least, not via the street entrance. I stumble over to the glass door and slide it open. He catches me and carefully carries me back inside.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” I tell him.

  “You’re drunk,” he replies, as if that’s important.

  I lean against his chest, waiting for the room to decide which way it prefers to spin. “Yes, but I’ll be sober in the morning, and you’ll still be ugly.” I pause. It’s a quote, and it sounded funny in my head, but—“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way. How’s Sally?”

  “Sally’s fine. I got her a new tracking device and she carries it everywhere. She thinks it’s for SnapChat and I think it’s so I can monitor her location. We’re both happy.”

  “Sneaky,” I say admiringly. (Sally is Fuckboy’s teen-aged daughter.)

  “How are your parents? How’s Jenny?” he asks, shutting the balcony door one-handed.

  “Much the same. Jenny’s angsting over the wedding, I’m trying to keep her from doing the bridezilla thing…” Because nothing relaxes you after a lovely day of workplace stress like two-hour-long phone calls from your sister who wants you to sort out her flower arrangements and attend a sizing for a bridesmaid’s gown you can’t wear in daylight. “Let’s talk about something else?”

  “Sure,” he says. He leads me over to the sofa and I sit down more or less under my own power. “I got the memo.” He lances the boil cleanly. “I see you’re upset. Problem at the office?”

  “Yes.” I hold up the bottle. “Grab a glass. We’re going to need this.”

  Fuckboy ambles over to the kitchenette and goes straight to the correct cupboard. I let my gaze linger on him. He’s easy on the eye. He may be closer to fifty than forty, but he keeps himself trim and he has buns that make my fingers clench appreciatively. Clear blue eyes and graying once-black hair, now cropped short. Abs and pecs that betray his fitness thing: weights and judo. He wears jeans and a polo shirt, but also para boots, because he may be off duty but he can never let go of the job entirely. He looks as if he’s in uniform even when he isn’t. Divorced, clean-cut, a senior police officer, and a gentleman when he needs to
be. Oh, and he can fucking fly.

  My Fuckboy is a detective chief superintendent—and an official Home Office superhero. It’d be really cool if it hadn’t stalled his career—and if his powers weren’t going to kill him, horribly and slowly, over the next couple of years.

  “So, are you going to fill me in?” he asks, dropping down beside me and extending a wine glass, stem delicately held between index finger and thumb.

  I fill it. “To us—to something or other—”

  “—to that.” He clinks his glass against mine, and takes a sip. “Smooth,” he observes, and leans against my shoulder, pressing up against my space like a big, self-confident tomcat, even though he knows what I am and that things like me kill people.

  I take a sip and stifle a sob. “I’m so sorry,” I tell him.

  “Sorry about what?”

  “It’s got to be His idea of a joke.”

  “Hush.” He turns and kisses me behind my ear. “I’ve got your back, whatever it is. Tell me about it.”

  So I recount my meeting with His Darkness to Fuckboy. And then I tell him, “He wants me to lead the new agency, and I kind of get why. But it feels like I’m being set up to fail. Leading a team of politically unreliable agents—his term for them, not mine—and the secondary goal, that’s a suicide mission, isn’t it?”

  He sighs heavily. “It’s bloody ambitious, at a minimum.” He falls silent for a few seconds, processing. “And I don’t get why he should want you to go out, on-site. Unless there’s some elaborate double-bluff in train whereby he’s setting you up to be compromised and leak information all over the oppo…” He hugs me, as if he can hold fate at bay. “This is why cops shouldn’t play spy games,” he adds. “I like working within a chain of command that gets held to account if it plays fast and loose with the rules. At least, in theory.” A pause. “Should you be telling me this?”

  There’s no avoiding what comes next. “Yes, because you’re one of the names on the PM’s list.” I pause. “It’s totally not fair—I mean, you’ve got Sally to look after—and I needed you to know, in case I’m sent…” I pull back a little, then turn my face in towards his and lick the side of his neck. “Finger-fuck me?” I ask after a while.

  “No: you’re too drunk.”

  “Never stopped you before,” I complain.

  “That was before…”

  “Before what?”

  “Never mind. I think you should go to bed.”

  “Spoilsport.”

  He kisses me and puts me to bed, then leaves via the balcony door, floating up into the amber overcast of the London night. And I don’t see him again until after the weekend, because tomcat is as tomcat does, and I guess he has other places to be and other girls to visit. But that’s okay, because he may not be mine but he’s not the boss of me either, and I don’t care, or so I keep telling myself.

  TWO

  MORNING IN AMERICA

  Gilbert Tancredy flees through the warren of neon-lit tunnels beneath the Library of Congress, expecting to die at any moment—but for the life of him, he can’t remember why.

  His world has narrowed to a sick sense of dread, the pounding of his heart and the breathless burn of his lungs. Should have spent more time in the gym, notes the one corner of his mind not yet submerged by the tidal wave of panic. He clamps the clothbound book tight under his left arm as he comes to a junction between corridors leading around one of the conservation suites. High overhead, the exposed book conveyors—larger versions of a department store pneumatic tube system—rumble like oversized aircon ducts. He pauses, unable to sense the footsteps of his pursuers. Which way now?

  A distant shout echoes down the passage behind him and Gilbert spooks. The nearest door is only a couple of yards away. The label DIGITIZATION 202 doesn’t give much away, but if he has to guess it’s unlikely to be full of armed security guards. Panting, he tries the door handle. It turns, and he slips inside the darkened room.

  The digitization lab is empty. Gilbert sobs for air, gulping as he recovers from his panicky sprint. A scuffling sound from outside brings him back to himself, and he shifts sideways to lean against the door just as someone tries the handle. “Locked,” he hears a man say, inches from his left ear. “You and Tom take the right fork, me and Vic will keep going this way. Check every door in case he’s hunkered down.”

  “Yessir…” Two pairs of boots pound away, back up the corridor. Gilbert slumps. Should’ve called in sick, he thinks dismally. Stayed home and offered to take Mrs. Parker’s pug for walkies. Washed the car. (Gilbert doesn’t own a car: he commutes by subway, thanks to the DC traffic.)

  After a minute or so, Gil calms enough to take stock. Moving lightly on his feet—he’s not a small man, both in height and (in recent years) girth—he fumbles around the side of the doorframe until he feels a row of light switches. Illumination reveals a low-ceilinged, cluttered workroom. There are storage shelves on two walls, white-topped benches with lights on articulated arms, cameras and scanners and PCs at workstations. He spots a bulky laser printer sitting on a rolling table in the corner and rolls it in front of the door. Once adequately barricaded, he puts his stolen book down and opens it to the flyleaf.

  The book is fussily typeset, with an engraved border of flags and angels framing the title, after the fashion of an earlier century. The words seem to be in English, but some of them shimmer and warp as he tries to read them, making his eyes hurt. No matter: Gilbert pulls out his smartphone and begins to carefully photograph each two-page spread. He doesn’t need to read entire words to focus, and the individual letters in the blurry ones are clear enough until he tries to join them up. Then they start to snake around inside his head.

  A modern smartphone camera can capture a page of text at nearly the same resolution as a desktop scanner. Gilbert’s book is about two hundred pages long, but creeping dread lends his fingertips wings as he flips pages. He doesn’t bother with conservator’s gloves, even though the book is a rarity. His pursuers were ignorant of its presence in the stacks until he issued an unwise pull request, thereby revealing his own presence: if they find him with it he doubts he’ll enjoy the experience.

  This is so not what I joined the Postal Service for, Gilbert thinks as he passes the halfway point. Perspiration glues his shirt to the small of his back and his hands are shaking. He pauses momentarily to look at the page before him. It’s trying to tell him something about a fellow called John Quincy Adams, a former Secretary of State, whose advocacy for a National Observatory met opposition from, from … Gilbert blinks, his eyes watering. Some other politician, perhaps? There’s that troublesome word again, the one that slips past his gaze like a ripple in a glass of water. “A fnord,” he mutters under his breath as he flips pages again, photographing continuously. “It’s a fucking fnord. Huh.” A fnord is a kind of word that kids are trained not to notice in kindergarten and that causes deep unease in anyone who sees it. They’re fictional, of course—invented by jokey conspiracy theorists, popularized by Robert Anton Wilson, and this word doesn’t even begin with an “F”—but they’re a handy signifier for a hidden layer of reality, like the messages in a cult John Carpenter movie. Except, just like the wholly imaginary fnord, this word—the P-word—stubbornly refuses to come into focus in his mind. Presi-something. Something important. Something important that has gone missing from the world, and he’s supposed to know about it, to know why the security guards are hunting him like he’s a spree killer on a rampage, why they shot Marilyn in Conservation as he ran away—

  I should know this shit. Gilbert flips pages, snapping constantly, then realizes the last two pages are blank but for spots of brown oxidation—he’s reached the end. He squeezes his eyelids shut. “What is wrong with me?” he asks, frustrated.

  Book. Scans. He has a special memory stick in his inside pocket, although he can’t remember—now—why he might be carrying it. Or how he’s smuggled it into his workplace. Copyright violation is not something Library of Congress staff gener
ally approve of or participate in. The stick is double-ended, with a micro-USB connector designed to plug into a phone opposite the regular connector. He shoves it hastily into place and copies all the photos across. It’s only a gigabyte but a subjective eternity passes as he waits, sweating, as the progress bar slowly creeps across the screen.

  Finally, it finishes. Gilbert shoves the stick inside a small internal mailer, and dispatches it to the post room via the pneumatic system. Then he carries the book over to a shelf of manuscripts awaiting return to the stacks. As he slides it into the middle of the row, the design embossed on its cover seems to stare at him accusingly: an eye of Horus inside a pyramid framed within a pentagon, sacred geometry flanked by the compass and plumb bob of an architect. Great Presi-blur-s of the United States of America, laurel wreaths surmounted by a bald eagle. Copyright MDCCCLXXXVI. Gilt lettering inlaid on faded green cloth. Not a very impressive book, except that by the itching in his fingertips and the urgent burning heat of the ward he wears on a chain around his neck it means something, something important that has been forgotten …

  He shakes his head and turns his back on the deadly book. Hands clean, he switches off the lights, shoves the printer aside, and steps into the hallway. Even before the door closes, he’s forgotten again. But it’s just as well. To carry any book with the P-word on its cover down here would attract the wrong kind of attention. Without it, Gilbert Tancredy, former USPS Postal Inspector (Occult Texts Division), working undercover as an administrator in the Library of Congress, is just another pasty-faced, middle-aged bureaucrat adrift in a sea of amnesia. If—god willing—the security guards don’t recognize him, he’ll go home this evening with little recollection of what he’s just done, and by tomorrow morning he’ll have forgotten about it completely, memories suppressed by the extra-heavy glamour focussed on the Capitol.

  Sleep can’t come fast enough.

  * * *

  It’s late on a Thursday evening in Crested Butte, Colorado, and Gaby Carson is sitting in Studio 2 at WOCZ-FM, reading down her playlist one last time while across the glass-walled booth Glenn (producer on playlist, admin, and mixing desk) and Danni (intern on phones, and occasional on-air conversational snark) bicker amiably over how to run tonight’s show. It’s a triple-A format—adult album alternative music—with a phone-in element hosted by Gaby, mainly local night owls and the odd trucker trying to keep awake on the long haul up through the mountains. WOCZ’s license requires the station to act as a relay for the national Emergency Alert System. The station also still pushes out two hours of live programming every day, as a condition of an old endowment the current owners can’t break without losing money. For Gaby it’s a step up from her weekly podcast in the direction of actual public talk radio, which is where she’s convinced her future lies.