Charles Stross - The Fuller Memorandum

“You’re sure?”

The rest of my clothes are piling up atop the socks: “Trust me, any burglar who tries their luck tonight is going to get the biggest shock of their life.” Biggest, because afterwards they’re going to run out of life in which to cap it. “Remember you need to deactivate it before you set foot on the stairs. Or open any windows.”

“And if the house burns down…”

“And if the house burns down, yes.” I shove the pillows up against the headboard. “We’re safe here, as safe as can be.” Which isn’t saying much if the bombshell Andy dropped turns out to be true, but I’m not about to remind her of that. I lean back. “A wee dram?”

“Don’t mind if I do. How about death by chocolate?”

“Sounds good to me.”

For a minute we’re silent; me filling two glasses, Mo working her way into the box of cocoa-dusted delights. Presently we exchange gifts. Outside, it’s raining: the rattle and slap of water on glass merges with the distant noise of wheels on wet road surfaces, but inside our insulated, centrally heated bubble of suburbia we’re isolated from the world.

“By the way, I haven’t said thank you, have I?” she asks.

“What for?”

“Picking up the pieces, bollocking Andy for me, being a dear, that sort of thing. Just existing, when you get down to it.”

“Um.” I put my glass down. “Thank you. For saving my life this afternoon-”

“-but if you hadn’t punched his legs out from under him he’d have shot me-”

“-he was going to shoot me first! Did you see where-”

We stop, looking at each other in mutual disbelief and incomprehension.

“How did we get here?” I ask her.

“I don’t know.” She frowns, then offers me the box of chocolates.

“Pick one.”

I pick something that looks like it came out of the wrong end of a hedgehog, except that it smells better. “Why?”

“Let’s see… that one’s unique in this collection, right? Let’s consider life as a box of chocolates. All of them are unique. Let each chocolate be a, a significant event. All we can say of any chocolate before we eat it is that it was selected from the slowly diminishing set of chocolates we have not already encountered. But one thing they’ve all got in common is-”

“Theobroma cacao,” I say, shoving it in my mouth and chewing. “Mmph.”

“Yes. Now, let Theobroma cacao stand for the defining characteristics of our reality. We don’t know precisely what the next chocolate will be, but we expect it to be brown and taste heavenly. But the previous chocolates we’ve eaten have narrowed the field of choice, and if, say, we’ve been picking the crunchy pralines selectively, we may find ourselves experiencing an unexpected run of soft centers-”

“I thought we were taking them at random?”

“No; we’re picking them-without a menu card-but we can choose them on the basis of their appearance, are you with me? We can choose our inputs but not the outputs that result from them. And we have a diminishing array of options-”

“What kind of chocolate did you pick in Amsterdam?” I ask.

She pulls a face. “Wormwood. Or maybe Amanita phalloides.” (The death cap mushroom, so called because the folks who name poisonous toadstools have no sense of humor: it’s shaped like a cap, and you die if you eat it.)

“Are you ready to talk about it?”

She takes a sip of Lagavulin. “Not yet.” Her lips twitch in the faintest ghostly echo of a smile-“But just knowing I can unload when I need to-” She shudders, then abruptly knocks back the contents of her glass in one.

“Do you believe Andy?” she asks, presently.

“I wish I didn’t have to.” I pause. “You mean, about the, the-”

“The acceleration.”

“Yeah, that.” I fall silent for a moment. “I’m not sure. I mean, he says it came out of Dr. Ford’s work in Research and Development, using analytical methods to observe bias in stochastic sequential observations at widely separated sites, and Mike Ford’s not the kind of man to make a mistake.” Sly and subtle, with a warped sense of humor-and a mind sharp enough to cut diamond, that’s our avuncular Dr. Ford. “I’d love to hear what Cantor’s deep-duration research team at St. Hilda’s made of it, but I suspect you’d have to go all the way to Mahogany Row to get permission to talk to them about current work-they’re sandboxed for a reason.” Mostly to protect everybody else’s sanity: it’s a team of no less than four DSS-grade sorcerers working on a single research project for more than thirty years. They’ve grown more than slightly weird along the way. Just talking to them, then thinking too hard about their answers can put you at risk of developing Krantzberg syndrome, the horrible encephalopathy that tends to afflict people who spend too much time thinking about symbolic magic. (The map is one with the territory; think too hard about the wrong theorems and you shouldn’t be surprised if extradimensional entities start chewing microscopic chunks out of your gray matter.)

“I want to see Ford’s raw data,” Mo says thoughtfully. “Someone ought to give it a good working-over, looking for artifacts.”

“Yeah.”

She puts her glass down and plants the box of chocolates on top of it. “If the acceleration is real, we’ve only got a few months left.”

And there’s the rub. What Ford has detected-so Andy told us-is an accelerating rip in the probabilistic ultrastructure of spacetime.

If it exists (if Dr. Ford is right) the first sign is that it will amplify the efficacy of all our thaumaturgic tools. But it’ll gather pace rapidly from there. He’s predicting a phase-change, like a pile of plutonium that’s decided to lurch from ordinary criticality-the state of a controlled nuclear reactor-to prompt criticality-a sudden unwanted outburst of power, halfway between a normal nuclear reaction and a nuclear explosion. Nobody predicted this before: we all expected CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN to switch on with a bang, not a weeks-long transition, an explosion rather than a meltdown. For a few days, we’ll be gods-before it tears the walls of the world apart, and lets the nightmares in.

“Ought to make the best use of what time we’ve got left,” she thinks aloud.

I put my glass down and roll on my side, to face her. “Yes.”

“Come here,” she says, stretching her free arm towards me.

Outside the window, the wild darkness claws at our frail bubble of light and warmth, ignored and temporarily forgotten in our primate frenzy. But its time will come.

THE NEXT MORNING WE OVERSLEEP, BY MUTUAL CONSENT, then slouch about the kitchen for a scandalously prolonged breakfast. Mo looks at me, sleepy-eyed with satisfaction, over a bare plate. “I needed that.” A guilty glance across at the empty egg carton by the frying pan on the hob: “My waistline disagrees, but my stomach says ‘fuck it.’”

“Enjoy it while you can.” I’ve got plans for the weekend that include blowing a week’s salary on stuff we might not need: brown rice, lentils, canned beans, camping gas cylinders. I can make room for it in our abbreviated joke of a cellar if I toss the rusting bicycle and a bunch of other crap that’s taking up space… “I was thinking about going into the office this afternoon.”

“But you’re signed off sick,” Mo points out.

“Yeah, that’s the trouble.” I refill my coffee mug from the cafetière.

“After what Andy said, I figure I ought to at least poke around Angleton’s office. See if I can spot something that everyone else has missed, before the trail goes cold. And there are some files I want to pull so I’ve got something to read over the weekend.”

“You are not bringing work home.” She crosses her arms, abruptly mulish.