Dead Lies Dreaming

by Charles Stross

  “Ma’am? What should I do?”

  “Go and close the front door, then stand guard. If anyone you don’t know tries to enter, kill them.”

  “Very good, ma’am.” For such a large man he could move surprisingly quietly.

  Once he was gone, Evelyn closed the office door, then pulled out her phone and dialed. “Julian, this is Eve,” she said without preamble. “I want a cleanup team round at Bernard Harris’s flat. Crash priority, open checkbook. Prime the pig farm to expect a consignment for disposal. I need the contents of the office here bagging and tagging, and a full forensic teardown of Mr. Harris’s PC, although it looks like the hard drive’s been removed. He’s old school, so you’ll need to search for paper records, notebooks, diaries, that sort of thing. Oh, and there’s an old-fashioned printer—not an inkjet or laser, the kind with a ribbon. I want you to look into lifting an impression of the last document he printed on it.”

  Eve hung up. She knew better than to turn on the PC and meddle. Bernard probably didn’t keep anything valuable on it anyway, and if he did there’d be passwords and maybe booby traps for the unwary. Whoever had killed him and taken the hard drive was pursuing a fool’s errand.

  She glanced at the filing cabinet. The top drawer was ajar. Papers had been pulled out, but she saw a scattering of rectangular plastic containers like wombat turds in the bottom. They were diskette boxes: when she’d been growing up, the cash-starved comprehensive school she’d attended had still used PCs with floppy disks, even though they were long-obsolete in business.

  Eve smiled to herself. The killer was not only impulsive and slapdash: they were young or expensively educated or both. And Eve, who was neither of those things, now had the beginnings of a profile of her enemy.

  * * *

  Bernard’s antiquarian PC might have lost its hard drive, but it gave up its secrets with barely a fight.

  Eve’s first stop on her arrival back at Chateau de Montfort Bigge was the IT Department. IT, in keeping with Rupe’s disdain for boffins, were confined to a sad, windowless gerbil hutch under the main staircase that had once served as a cloakroom. There was always at least one semi-interchangeable minion on duty. “You!” she barked at the nearest gerbil—or possibly the least able to scramble for cover when she slammed through the door. “What’s your name?”

  “M-Marcus, Miss?” Marcus was bald, bearded, and gnomishly middle-aged. He wrung his hands as he looked up at her through horn-rimmed glasses with pebble-thick lenses. “Can I help you?”

  “I should think so.” She reached into her Louis Vuitton handbag and produced three boxes of floppies. “These are backup disks from a PC. I want them imaged, cracked, and a copy of the original files restored.”

  Marcus froze, then focussed on the boxes, oddly intent. “May I, Miss?” he asked eagerly. She tipped the boxes into his cupped hands: he stared at them as if they were a particularly delectable treat. “Ooh, I haven’t seen these in a while!” He carefully popped the lid on one box and peered inside. “High density, 1.44 jobs. Definitely an old PC, not a Mac?”

  “A beige boxy thing from the late 1980s. It didn’t have a mouse, if that’s any help. The hard disk is missing, and this is the only material that could be salvaged. I’m relying on you,” she said.

  His eyes glazed as he dreamily stroked the exterior of the box. “I may need to get hold of some specialized kit, I don’t think we’ve got anything that can read floppies any more, but having said that—”

  “Buy anything you need; just keep the receipts. I expect a full work-up within twenty-four hours.”

  “Uh-uh-yes, Miss.” Marcus snapped back to terrified obedience. “Right away, Miss.”

  Eve stalked back to her lair, brooding. Someone had killed Bernard and taken the hard disk. The timing strongly implied that his murder was connected to the auction. So it suggested that the item was worth considerably more on the market than Rupe had indicated. Interesting. The killer was now one jump ahead of her, unless they were incompetent and had killed Bernard by mistake before weaseling the auction details out of him. In which case (an unpalatable thought) they might have irremediably fucked up the entire job for everybody and she’d have to start again from scratch, this time using an unfamiliar book dealer. Either way, Eve was clear on the steps she needed to take.

  It occurred to Eve that she’d need a thief. And for a job like this, there was only one person she could turn to.

  Eve didn’t need much sleep, and the promise of the coming treasure hunt kept her awake as effectively as a pint of espresso. She spent the early evening making use of the gym in the basement, then moved on to the firing range, where she flung ball bearings at pistol targets by force of will alone until her head ached. Returning to the office, she handled issues arising in the American subsidiaries. For dinner she ordered up a cold collation from the kitchen, which she ate at her desk. At eleven, she rose, restless, and returned to the shooting gallery, where she amused herself with a bag of marbles that shattered satisfactorily when they slammed into their targets. By two in the morning she was drained, but she was no closer to sleep than she had been at eight the night before: the febrile anticipation of action had her in its grip.

  Finally she could no longer contain herself. She returned to her lair, restored her appearance—hair secured in a scalp-tugging bun, lips and mascara retouched, suit straightened—then marched on IT. “Well?” she demanded.

  Marcus was still at work, but clearly flagging. He jolted upright at her voice: “Yes Miss!” he blurted. “It’s done and dusted!”

  “What precisely is done and dusted?”

  “You were right about it being an antique, Miss! Norton Backup, vintage 1992, from a 40Mb hard disk on a 286. The disks weren’t corrupt but the backup was encrypted, so I had to copy the images and spin up a few thousand VM instances on EC2—” Eve narrowed her eyes at him and he gulped—“erm, I cracked the password and there’s a VirtualBox with a bootable copy of the hard drive right here.” His hands fluttered above the keyboard of his workstation. “What do you want me to do to it?”

  “Get out and leave me to it,” she told him. Marcus bolted from his chair as if she was a cheetah. Eve took his place at the desk and found herself doing a double-take.

  Bernard’s PC had run MS-DOS—nothing as sophisticated and slickly modern as Windows 3.1—but he’d had an email client, a text-mode monstrosity that collected mail from some weird modem-connected lacuna of the internet that hadn’t yet discovered fire, let alone the World Wide Web. After some swearing she got it working and fumbled her way into his mailbox. (It was refreshingly free of spam, for some reason.) Running on modern hardware, virtually everything happened instantaneously, including text searches. It took her barely ten minutes to find what she was looking for in his inbox. That’s interesting, she thought, then smiled to herself. It was all here: the anonymized email address of the auctioneer, Bernard’s banking details, Rupert’s wish list. It took her another couple of minutes to shut down the VM and upload a copy to her personal area on the office file storage, then delete the original from Marcus’s machine. The disk boxes were sitting beside it, next to a very shiny-looking floppy disk drive, and she took the lot.

  Marcus was waiting outside the office door, knees knocking. “Excellent job,” she reassured him generously: “I’ll be sure to let HR know. I’m taking these,” she added. “You didn’t look at the contents of the disks, did you?”

  “No, no, Miss!” The poor little rodent was eager to return to his cage.

  “Excellent. You won’t speak of this to anyone. You can go home now—wherever you go when you’re not here, that is.”

  Marcus was still babbling his thanks as she stalked back to the elevator. He’s good, but he’s much too talkative for comfort, she realized. I’ll have to reassign him. Once back at her desk with her office door locked, she checked that the disk image was bootable. Then she shredded the floppy disks and drafted a memo to Human Resources, asking them to put him on the next
flight out to the British Antarctic Survey’s Halley Research Station. Let him blab to the penguins: the birds weren’t about to bid on the book.

  Eve smiled again. Then she picked up her phone and called her thief.

  * * *

  Imp and the gang stayed up late into the night, wasted on a never-ending roll-up and a periodically emptying jug of scrumpy (followed by Del’s distressingly crap stockpile of lager when the good stuff ran out). Eventually Game Boy staggered off to the games room, where he could cuddle up close to his PC and obsessively play KOF until he fell asleep. Some time later, Del announced she was going to the bathroom and never came back. That left Imp and Doc passing the guttering embers of a joint with which they exchanged sloppy blowbacks, too wasted to get properly amorous. “I’m drunk and you’re ugly,” Doc slurred, “but in the morning I’ll be hung-over and you’ll still be ugly.” He leaned sideways and kissed Imp deeply, his mouth smoky. But before Imp could get anything more than his hopes up, Doc stumbled to his feet and wandered towards the staircase.

  “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out!” Imp called from his pit on the sofa. He yawned resentfully. “I dunno. Some people. Lightweights.” The room pancaked and wobbled around his head. Doc had a point, he had to admit, and whistled a few out-of-key bars of “Too Drunk to Fuck” by way of self-deprecatory comment. Then he lay on his back alone, his mind empty for once.

  Then, for the first time in over a week, his phone rang.

  “What the—what—fuck—” Imp sat bolt upright and flung out a hand in the direction of the device. It was thundering out the bass line of “Making Plans for Nigel” at audible-over-traffic volume, even though it was three in the bloody morning.

  “He has his future in a British Steel—hello, who the fuck is this do you know what time it oh hello, sis, long time no see, really, you’re calling now? Who died and made you pope?”

  “Are you drunk?” his sister accused.

  He chuckled: “Maybe a little?”

  “Listen carefully,” Imp’s sister said, enunciating each word with obsidian precision, sharp enough to slash his eardrums. “This is very important.”

  Instant sobriety: “It’s not Mum, is it? Has she died?”

  “No, she’s not dead. You’d know if you bothered to visit her.”

  Imp bit back his instinctive response. “What is it, then?”

  “I need a favor.”

  Imp blinked at the ceiling, perplexed, and took stock of his surroundings. Nope, he hadn’t suddenly been transported to Neverland. He was lying on his back, holding his phone in one hand—it was his phone, it hadn’t magically metamorphosed into a rainbow chameleon baby while his attention was elsewhere—and yes, he was still lying in the carnivorous living room sofa, surrounded by discarded beer cans and overflowing ashtrays. He took stock. There was a chill of dampness in the air despite the oil-filled radiator running off the stolen electricity supply. It was December 2015, and he was drunk and stoned, and his sister, of all people, wanted a favor.

  “You’re mad,” he said, and waited for the explosion.

  There was no big sister detonation. Instead, something much more disturbing happened. She chuckled. Imp cringed: he knew that laugh, had known it since before he learned to walk, and it meant nothing good. She didn’t use it very often, but when she did … It was a laugh worthy of a young Shakespearian witch, a laugh destined to grow up to be a cackle of malice. Mischief was afoot. Oh fuck, he thought fuzzily. Stoned and drunk, Imp was no match for his big sister. He’d rather face a police raid or Game Boy’s tiger parents in full hue and corrupting-our-daughter cry. He’d even undergo a Work Capability Assessment, if it meant never again hearing that horrible ululation.

  “Stop,” he implored, “please, just stop. It’s three in the fucking morning!”

  “If I knew all I had to do was laugh at you I’d have phoned years ago.” She tittered briefly, sending chills scurrying up and down his spine. At three in the morning his sister could titter like a ghoul. “But I’m serious, Jeremy. I want you to do me a favor.”

  “What’s in it for me?” he asked automatically, before his tongue caught up: “Don’t call me that!”

  “I think I can make it worth your while.” Pause. “I know where you live.” Another pause. “I know who you live with. And I know it can’t be easy or cheap.”

  “No need to rub it in.” Big sis had always had a knack for getting under his skin.

  “If the shoplifting and petty larceny aren’t cutting it, you could always put your artistic projects on hold. Get a real job. The trustees would even pay for you to go back to university, as long as you study something employable this time.” A bitter tone crept into her voice.

  Skin crawling, Imp had to work hard to resist the urge to tell his sister to fuck off. Like him, she’d chosen her own path and pursued it with terrifying tenacity. He felt it was almost his duty to counterbalance her workaholism by slacking. “Would I have to wear a suit and tie?” he asked idly. “Because that’d be a hard no.”

  “Oh you.” She chuckled again, almost indulgently. “Never change.”

  His vision doubled, blurring as she whipsawed him from love to hate and back again. You could build your own family through choice, but you couldn’t erase the one you were born with, even if you chose to avoid them. With a supreme effort of will he gathered his wits. “Listen, it’s three in the fucking morning and you want a favor and it can’t wait, which means it’s pretty fucking big, so why are we pissing around the bush like this? What do you want?”

  “I’d like to hire you,” she said, “to do a job.”

  “No.” It came out instantly, without having to think. “You can’t make me work for you.” Or see you.

  “You misunderstand: this is a one-off, not a permanent position. And it pays very well…”

  “Doesn’t matter: I’m still not going to work for you.”

  “Not even freelance? On your own terms?”

  “Huh.” Imp stared at his phone for a moment, wondering if he was dreaming, or maybe nightmaring. “Good try, but the answer is still no.”

  “I just want you to get hold of a book for me. There’s eighty large in it for you, no questions asked.”

  “Eighty—” Imp remembered who he was talking to at the last instant and body-swerved—“no.”

  “I can make your dyke biker chick’s Yardie neighbors leave her mom alone. I can get you what you need to make your boyfriend with the attitude problem happy. I can get the Chinese kid’s parents off his back. I can even hook him up with SexChange.”

  “SexChange is a myth,” Imp said automatically. Game Boy had spent ages chasing after the mirage in question, whose power was the ability to put the trans into transhuman.

  “SexChange is real.” Her voice dropped an octave: “And I can get you the use of a RED Dragon and all the lenses you need, and a slot on the number four sound stage at Millennium Studios in Elstree whenever you’re ready for it.”

  “I—” Imp’s larynx froze. This was a nightmare scenario: Big Sis was back in his life, wanted him back in her life, and knew how to pull his strings—“cunt!”

  “I’ll take that as a yes, shall I?” She sounded idly amused, and far too awake for the time of night.

  “Fucknuggets. Yes, all right, but can we talk about it in the morning when I’m sober?”

  “Of course. My office, backside of n—no, ten o’clock, I know what you’re like before breakfast. Yes, come to my office at ten o’clock and I’ll fill you in.” She rattled off an address. It was, Imp realized with dismay, a mere fifteen-minute walk from the squat. “Security will be expecting you. Be there or stay poor, Jeremy! Ciao!”

  Jeremy—Imp—lay back on the sofa and groaned softly, clutching his head. She’s found me, he thought dismally. By the sound of it she’d been watching him from afar for some time. Typical. Five years of avoiding her and suddenly it turned out she’d known where he was all along. Just please god don’t tell me it’s for Mum. The le
ss he had to do with his family, the better for everyone. Jesus fuck.

  But he had to, however unwillingly, face the facts. It was three o’clock in the morning, an hour when nightmares came true; and his sister was willing to pay eighty thousand pounds and a bounty of dreams in return for a rare book. She hadn’t actually threatened Del, Doc, or Game Boy, at least not explicitly. As for why: if anyone knew what Imp was capable of, it’d be his big sister. And it would be her sleazebag boss’s money she was spending. Even so, eighty grand was a lot to pay for a book.

  There was no alternative: tomorrow morning he’d go round to her office and find out what Eve wanted.

  FOUL PAPERS

  The next morning Imp forced himself to shave, brush his teeth, and dress for a business meeting. Which was to say, he wore the morning suit he’d acquired from the back of an Oxfam shop some years ago for Court Appearances and similar occasions. (He’d been caught with an ounce of grass at sixth form college and the barrister had insisted he wear a suit when he came up before the magistrate. Imp had taken to heart the maxim that you can never be underdressed for a formal occasion, and went large, or as large as he could while being broke.) Because it looked dangerously similar to a real suit, he’d accessorized it with a wing-collared shirt and a cravat that was auditioning for a future role as a dishcloth.

  Imp emerged, yawning and blinking at the unaccustomed sight of London before noon, and strolled towards the de Montfort Bigge household. He clasped his hands behind his back and tilted his head forward, like a particularly hungover pigeon. The address his sister had sent him was a few streets over from the squat, in a significantly cheaper part of the borough—one where mere multimillionaires could still afford to live, behind high stone walls surveilled by CCTV cameras.