The Labyrinth Index

by Charles Stross

  “What do I do?” asks the President. “I mean, how does this even work?”

  “It works the same way as the kit on Air Force One, sir,” Bradshaw says diffidently. He’s clearly trying not to boggle at the identity of the man in the seat next to him, and finding it difficult. “Once you’re ready to talk, I set you up by broadcasting a Presidential Emergency Action Notification. You then push to talk—that switch there, sir—and everything you say gets encoded on the carrier signal and relayed by the FEMA Emergency Alert System. The nearest Primary Entry Point—a suitably equipped radio station—picks it up and rebroadcasts it to all the neighboring PEPs. It cuts into all FM and AM radio broadcasts and a whole bunch more channels as well: cable television, Sirius XM, digital radio, even cellphones. The EAS isn’t very secure—it’s meant to be easy for the President to interrupt ongoing broadcasts, and it’s been hacked in the past—but just to make sure, we’ve got a hacked repeater in the Midwest that’ll keep rebroadcasting you until someone takes an axe to it.”

  “Right. Right.” OSCAR nods vigorously. “All I have to do is work out what to tell the nation—” He waves his pen at the blank sheet of paper on the fold-down table before him.

  Unnoticed by OSCAR but very visible in the cockpit windscreen, the Earth is tilting gradually to the right as 302 Heavy banks left, turning west. In just twenty minutes they’ve flown halfway to New York, trailing a double whip crack of noise up the eastern seaboard. A pair of F-15s have just scrambled from Bolling AFB, but the F-16s already in the air have given up the pursuit.

  “Not to worry, sir,” Bradshaw reassures him. “The F-15s with orders to shoot us down that took off three minutes ago don’t have enough fuel to get within missile range before their tanks run dry. You’ve got at least half an hour before we come within extreme range of the next airfield that can generate an intercept: plenty of time.”

  OSCAR shakes his head, the corners of his eyes wrinkling with fatigue. Then he starts writing.

  * * *

  Washington traffic is notorious, but we’re south of the Potomac to begin with. As soon as the limousine inches past the parked MRAP we’re enveloped by a cortege of motorcycle outriders and blacked-out SUVs so ostentatious that Her Majesty would die of embarrassment if they tried it on her back home. We’re so visible I have to fight the urge to crouch down in my seat—but then I realize here in DC your importance is telegraphed by the size of the gridlock in your wake. This is just DeeDee’s equivalent of prancing around Westminster in an ermine-lined stole. Anyway, the traffic is getting out of our way and the lights are changing in our favor. As we proceed north towards Pentagon City under the guns of a Marine Corps helicopter, I stiffen my back and try to look unimpressed.

  “Why are you doing this?” I ask myself, staring out the window.

  I don’t mean to speak aloud but the words slip out, and DeeDee assumes they’re directed at her. “What, trying to save the world?”

  “World-saving is not exactly how I would describe raising the Lord of Sleep.”

  “Oh, but it is.” Her voice drips studied irony. “I might equally well ask what the hell your people thought they were doing, surrendering to the Black Pharaoh?”

  Ouch. That’s a low blow. “At least we get to keep our free will,” I shoot back at her. Up to a point. “It seemed like the least-worst option to secure national survival, at least in the short term.” Or so it looked when Mahogany Row had their backs to the wall because the idiots in the Cabinet had utterly and irreversibly fucked up, under the influence of an occult Non-State Actor. Now we’re just playing it by ear.

  “Whereas we are looking for a better outcome,” she replies after a momentary pause. “To save the United States from the Lovecraftian Singularity.”

  I hold my tongue. I want to say that I think she’s going about it the wrong way, but I don’t have all the facts, and besides, people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. However—“Isn’t the Lord of Sleep just about the most mind-mangling and sanity-destroying example of a level-six Anthropic Threat, though? I mean, really, Cthulhu herself? How do you justify that?”

  She snorts softly. After a second or two it turns into a low chuckle: “Oh, you crack me up. You’re not thinking big enough. I guess that’s what comes of living on a small island surrounded by the ruins of a dead empire: it narrows your horizons. Did you really think there was only one planet at stake in this game? Or that the Lord of Sleep was the worst thing we could throw in with? There are things out there in the night where light cannot exist that make Cthulhu look like a Care Bear. Things beyond life, things beyond intellect, beyond mathematically defined reality. Ask yourself what the Black Pharaoh, the Lord of Sleep, and their ilk are fleeing. Ask what gives the Elder Gods their nightmares. Ask yourself what your Prime Minister isn’t telling you. Ask yourself what is worse than your entire species dying and being erased from the history of the cosmos, what could be worse than the worst hell human imagination can conceive of…”

  She trails off reflectively. I suppress a shudder as the car jolts across a sleeping policeman and slows, nosing down into a subterranean parking garage. I look at DeeDee, and see that in the darkened belly of the Beast her eyes glow with an inner luminescence: a pale green light that I recognize after a moment. Like every other PHANG I’m blind to my own reflection, but I know what other powerful blood-mages look like, wrapped in the power and the glory.

  “How did you, personally, get here?” I ask, filling the silence.

  “The usual way.” She shrugs. “Up through the ranks, same as you. They sentenced me to thirty years of boredom, for—”

  “—Trying to change the system from within,” I join her, nodding along, and she flashes me a delighted smile of recognition. For a dizzy moment I feel my perspective pivot. There’s no cunning glamour at work here, just an utterly unexpected instant of bonding over Leonard Cohen. We’ve arrived in the same place from opposite directions, and for a second I find myself wishing we weren’t enemies because I know where she’s coming from, and it’s so rare to find somebody who actually understands me. I glance away just as the car bottoms out and drives through an impressively thick steel blast door. Damn it, I hope I don’t have to kill her, I tell myself, knowing that she’s probably thinking the same about me. The worst curse you can inflict on a monster is an excess of empathy.

  We park. “I’ll have to take your phone,” DeeDee says apologetically as we climb out; “it won’t work down here anyway.”

  “I left it in the cafe’s trash. It didn’t survive the traffic stop earlier in the day.” A thought strikes me. “Do you have the time?”

  DeeDee wears an old-fashioned wind-up watch. “Three forty,” she tells me. “Follow the blood guard.”

  The blood guard in question is our zentai-suited shotgun rider from the front compartment. Something about the hierarchical setup feels familiar: “Yours?” I ask her, surprised.

  “Mine,” she confirms, then cackles delightedly, “they’re all mine, from the top down! I used to be the head vampire wrangler,” she explains. “Our kind make excellent muscle when they’re properly bound.”

  “A hierarchical geas?” I ask.

  “Yes. Of course, not everyone in the org chart was down with that, but after we cleaned house the survivors came around.”

  We pick up five more cut-price PHANGs. They form a phalanx around me and steer me towards a side door. We pass the first of several checkpoints on our way into the huge office complex. The SUVs are parking behind DeeDee’s armored limo, and a couple of flunkies in suits who might as well have “administrative assistant” tattooed on their foreheads fall in alongside her, speaking quietly. Evidently they’re bringing her up to speed on the classified gossip that came in during our ride. I don’t need to see her face to guess that she’s not smiling any more. West, not east. For my part, I’m thinking furiously. This setup reminds me of the alfär: it’s a classic authoritarian dominance hierarchy enforced by magic compulsion, which is pretty much w
hat you’d expect from an inhuman ancient nightmare that hasn’t bothered to develop a theory of mind for humans. It means they have a single point of failure, as my geekier co-workers would describe it. Unfortunately that single point of failure seems to be buried under the Pentagon, and unlike the alfär, the Nazgûl are a bureaucracy, with all that implies—

  We proceed inward and downward through naked basement corridors with pipes and suspended cable runs hanging from the ceiling, past shiny security gates set in concrete. Eventually we come to a short stairwell, then more doors, and a much narrower corridor, the walls of which are covered with fat cable bundles. “Keep going,” says one of my gimp-suited guards, startling me badly—I hadn’t realized they could speak at all. His voice is deep but hoarse from lack of use.

  This is not good. I managed to shrug off the existential dread for a bit when DeeDee and I were talking, but (catacombs, vampires, the temple of an Elder God in the Pentagon subbasement) I’d be lying if I said I was in a happy place. And that’s before I address the cause of my nagging sense of dread. What if Fuckboy’s failed, what if 302 Heavy didn’t make the pickup on time, what if DeeDee’s minions succeeded in getting to the rendezvous? What if …

  When you get down to it, there’s not a lot of difference between a dank, dripping stone-walled dungeon with chains dangling from the walls and a dark, stuffy underground server room with cable runs snaking everywhere, especially if they’re both occupied by a giant over-elaborate ward surrounded by motionless vampires who guard a corpse animated by a dead god’s emissary. It’s a good thing I refreshed myself before I came here, because there’s something joyless and deadening in the air, as if what this room really holds is the decaying miscarried fetus of the human future. Anyone who lingers here will sicken and die, just as if they were stranded in the pyramid on a dead world where once the photo-reconnaissance Concordes flew.

  I follow the clacking of DeeDee’s heels all the way to the start of the labyrinth because I’d rather not be frog-marched. The labyrinth seems to be some sort of soul trap, I realize, designed to confuse the occupant and stop them emerging prematurely, or—no, it’s to contain their energy. Ley lines converge on this room, burning with power. They follow the paths established by the US Defense Department’s communication network, going all the way back to the 1930s. Bureaucracies run on telephone lines, and network cables channel occult energy. Every bitcoin proof-of-work mined is an incremental addition to a vast distributed summoning ritual powering the demon-soul at the heart of the maze, the computational equivalent of a Buddhist prayer wheel spinning in a Himalayan breeze. The power flowing into this room today is implied—the network links and server farms of today’s government agencies are vaster by far than anything that came through this hub when it was built—but it still sets my skin tingling, like the static charge near the base of an energized supergrid pylon.

  DeeDee stalks towards the maze, then pauses on the threshold. “Follow in my footsteps,” she murmurs. “Do not deviate from the path or bad things will happen. To you, I mean.” She starts walking again.

  At the heart of the labyrinth we come before a strange throne. Clamped atop it sits a corpse as pitifully maltreated as any of the Residual Human Resources the Laundry harvests from those who die in the line of duty. As with a zombie, the body is technically dead but animated by a controlling daemon. But the feeders that control RHRs are trivial wisps of mind-eating menace. The thing atop the throne below the Pentagon is anything but trivial.

  As I approach the throne, the body moves slightly, straightening upwards, then slumping around its bloated belly. It buzzes and hums like a swarm of wild bees. Its face is a mass of bruises, expressionless but rippling slightly as something hidden behind its cheekbones curls and moves. A shiny segmented foot peeps from one sleeve of the orange jumpsuit, black with barbed yellow bristles circling it like a lace cuff.

  “Approach,” hums the corpse. My feet bear me forward despite my reluctance. There’s a geas associated with the labyrinth, a huge and powerful compulsion I’m as helpless to disobey as a soap bubble circling a drain.

  DeeDee takes up a position before the throne. Her eyes glow brightly in the darkness. She bows deeply to her Lord’s representative on Earth. “I obey,” she says in strongly accented Old Enochian. I curse myself for not having studied the language more intensively. It’s like being presented to the pope and discovering he intends to interview you in Church Latin.

  The corpse’s head tilts towards me. The eyes are milky and flat with the onset of desiccation. The thing behind the fleshy mask clicks and crackles. “Ambassador,” it says to me. “Thou art—” I think the next word is recognized. “So. Speak.”

  “I—” I clear my throat and extemporize. “I don’t speak this tongue—” then words I don’t understand begin to well up inside my throat. Mhari Murphy takes a back seat inside the head of Baroness Karnstein, Emissary of the Court of the Black Pharaoh. I speak eloquently if painfully (Old Enochian was not designed for human vocal chords), uttering words the Prime Minister embedded in my mind during our last meeting, and as the words come, so does a loose and very approximate translation of their meaning. Something like this:

  “Greetings from the Throne of N’yar Lat-Hotep to the Mouthpiece of the Lord of Sleep and Master of Nightmares, Dread Cthulhu. We take note of thy most excellent amusements and diversions, of the pall of forgetfulness spread by thy followers across this continent, thy plans for the sundering of worlds and the immanent return of thy true personage, the construction of the Dam of Dreams and the War against the Cold Ones. There is much that is debatable here, and some that is admirable. However, we feel that our purposes are best served by slowing thy headlong rush into war until such time as we have held joint counsel with all of our peers who are awakening in this epoch. So consider your chain duly yanked, motherfucker.”

  Without conscious volition, I punch the Mouthpiece in what is left of his face.

  Let me note that at this point I’m a passenger in my own body. It’s a really strange sensation, like watching myself on TV: only this is real life and my arms and legs have taken on an eerie life of their own. They move through preprogrammed motions scripted by His Darkness. I’m not much of a puncher to be honest, although I did a self-defense course once and passed basic police auxiliary training. V syndrome gives me added speed and strength, but against a real opponent I’d be toast. Luckily for me, the Mouthpiece is expecting diplomacy—and its human host is chained down and rotting from the inside out.

  I hit its nose and its face splatters like an overripe plum. Red-tinged liquor squirts out, along with a stomach-curdling stench of decay. An eerie keening sound rises from around us, and it begins to split vertically. I glimpse a chitinous gleam inside. My fists pull back in time to block as an arm swipes at me, flesh sloughing off to expose a barbed claw.

  The Mouthpiece lunges and jolts to a stop as the chains come taut. Flesh compresses and bubbles around its steel collar. It chirrs at me, a grating crackle that has nothing to do with mammalian mouthparts. I expectorate, spitting a gobbet of bloody saliva as the Mandate’s Will allows me a moment to take stock. I can hear Him giggling, audible all the way from London. DeeDee stares at me in outrage: “What,” she demands, “do you think you’re doing?”

  Oh fuck, I think. I swallow, regaining control of larynx and limbs now that His B’stardness is done with me. “I assert diplomatic immunity!” I yell. “I’m a valuable bargaining chip and killing me won’t buy you anything! I had nothing to do with this, it was all the Black Pharaoh’s fault!” A mad god made me do it, then ran away. My fists rise again, without me willing it to happen. “Help!”

  DeeDee’s fingers curve into clawlike mudras, violet light rippling across her skin. “I think you’re beyond help,” she snarls over the moist squishing sounds as the Mouthpiece’s human remains fall apart. A blanket of raw power folds itself around my skin and twists suffocatingly tight. “You stole the Uncrowned King so you’re next in line to host
the Mouthpiece.” Oh, was that what you wanted the President for? Outside the grid, the blood guards are closing in on the entrance to the labyrinth.

  The exposed Mouthpiece buzzes deafeningly as it hurls itself repeatedly against its chains. The ovipositor extending from its segmented and sickly yellow abdomen twitches and pulses. Glistening wings, freed from their envelope of human meat, ripple and spread behind its thorax as it turns a cluster of seven compound eyes towards me. It’s not a true wasp—insect book-lungs just don’t scale up: also, the chitinous exoskeleton is articulated like a suit of armor, plates sliding over each other as if supported by some inner structure—and behind the clashing mandibles lurk nematocysts tipped with barbed stingers. With my body no longer my own to control, a weird calm descends on me. If this is indeed a specialized instar of Cthulhu’s kind, tailored for existence within our biosphere, the original body plan must be like nothing that ever evolved on Earth.

  DeeDee splays her fingers and the world flashes pink. The next thing I know, my ears are ringing. Whatever she zapped me with should have killed me, but instead I find a matching darkness rippling around my hands. The Black Pharaoh’s Will flows through me, searing and chill. “Just die already!” DeeDee snaps, triggering another death macro that sizzles uselessly against the Will that animates my marionette body. While she is busy trying to murder me she’s distracted. Her dolls stumble dizzily in the maze around us, at a loss without her guidance. By rights I should be toast, but the PM is protecting me—at least until she realizes she can draw on the power of the Mouthpiece.

  As I watch, she steps sideways to place herself before the throne, facing me across the dais. She’s going to do it, I realize sickly. I nearly black out at a sudden spike of agony as the damaged fingers of my left hand twist, joints crackling, and sketch a symbol in the air that forms a blind spot in my vision. “Now look what you’ve made me do!” she snaps at me. Then she steps backward into the embrace of the Lord of Sleep’s avatar, arms spread wide to welcome in her god.