Charles Stross - The Fuller Memorandum

After fifteen minutes of chanting I’m cold with sweat and shaking with tension. My audience are displaying no signs of acquiring a taste for pâté de foie programmer, which is good, but if security is paranoid enough they’ll be flagged as overdue any minute now. “End subroutine, amen,” I intone. The zombies stand where they are. Oops, have I crashed them? I pull out my phone and fire up its poxy excuse for a personal ward, then stick it in my jacket’s breast pocket. There’s only one way to find out if this is going to work, isn’t there? I snap my fingers. “What are you waiting for?” I ask, reaching into one of my pockets again. “Let’s go to work.”

The Hand of Glory has seen better days-the thumb is worn right down to the base of the big joint, and only two of the fingers still have unburned knuckles-but it’ll have to do. “Do we have ignition, do we have fucking ignition,” I snarl under my breath, and a faint blue glow like a guttering candle rises from each of the stumps. I climb into one of the document carts, carefully holding on to the waxy abomination, and the residual human resource gives me a tentative shove towards the dark.

There’s a tunnel out of nightmares in the library in the underside of the world. I’m not sure I can quite describe what happens in there: cold air, moist, the dankness and silence of the crypt broken only by the squeaking of the overloaded wheels of my cart. A sense of being watched, of a mindless and terrible focus sweeping across me, averted by the skin of the Hand of Glory’s burning fingertips. A rigor fit to still the heart of heroes, and only the faint pulsing ward-heart of my phone to bring me through it with QRS complex intact. There is a reason they use residual human resources to run the files to and from the MailRail system: you don’t need to be dead to work here, but it really helps.

I’m in the darkness for only ten or fifteen seconds, but when I come out I am in soul-deep pain, my heart pounding and my skin clammy, as if on the edge of a heart attack. Everything is gray and grainy and there is a buzzing in my ears, as of a monstrous swarm of flies. It disperses slowly as the light returns.

I blink, trying to get a grip, and I realize that the handcart has stopped moving. Shivering, I sit up and somehow slither over the edge of the cart without tipping the thing over. There’s carpet on the floor, thin, beige, institutional-I’m back in the land of the living. I look round. There’s a wooden table, three doors, a bunch of battered filing cabinets, and another door through which the mailmen are disappearing-black painted wood, with a motto engraved above the lintel: ABANDON HOPE. Trying to remember what I actually saw in there sends my mind skittering around the inside of my skull like a frightened mouse, so I give up. I’m still clutching the Hand of Glory. I hold it up to look at the flames. They’ve burned down deep, and there’s little left but calcined bones. Regretfully, I blow them out one by one, then dispose of the relic in the recycling bin at one side of the table.

No mailmen, but no librarians either. It’s all very Back Office, just as Angleton described it. I head for the nearest door, just as it opens in front of me.

“Hey-”

I blink. “Hello?” I ask.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he says, annoyed if not outright cross. “Visitors are restricted to levels five and six only. You could do yourself a mischief, wandering around the subbasement!” In his shirt and tie and M &S suit he’s like an intrusion from another, more banal, universe. I could kiss him just for existing, but I’m not out of the woods yet.

“Sorry,” I say contritely. “I was sent to ask for a new document that’s supposed to have come in this morning…?”

“Well, you’d better come with me, then. Let me see your ID, please.”

I show him my warrant card and he nods. “All right. What is it you’re after?”

“A file.” I show him the slip of paper on which I’ve written down Mo’s document reference. “It’s new, it should have come in this morning.”

“Follow me.” He leads me through a door, to a lift, up four levels and along a corridor to a waiting room with a desk and half a dozen cheap powder-blue chairs: I vaguely recognize it from a previous visit. “Give me that and wait here.”

I sit down and wait. Ten minutes later he’s back, frowning. “Are you sure this is right?” he asks.

Annoyed, I think back. “Yes,” I say. I read the number back to Mo, didn’t I? “It’s a new file, deposited last night.”

“Well, it’s not here yet.” He shrugs. “It may still be waiting to be allocated a shelf, you know. That happens sometimes, if adding a new file triggers a shelf overflow.”

“Oh.” Mo won’t be happy, I guess, but it establishes my cover. “Well, can you flag it for me when it comes in?”

“Certainly. If you can show me your card again?” I do so, and he takes a note of my name and departmental assignment. “Okay, Mr. Howard, I’ll send you an email when the file comes into stock. Is that everything?”

“Yes, thanks, you’ve been very helpful.” I smile. He turns to go. “Er, can you remind me the way out…?”

He waves a hand at one of the doors. “Go down there, second door on the left, you can’t miss it.” Then he leaves.

THE SECOND DOOR ON THE LEFT OPENS ONTO A SMOOTH-FLOORED tunnel lined in white glazed tiles and illuminated by overhead fluorescent tubes of a kind that are sufficiently familiar that, when I reach the end of the tunnel and step through the gray metal door (which locks behind me with a muffled click) I am unsurprised to find myself in a passage between two tube platforms.

Half an hour and a change of line later, I swipe my Oyster card and surface, blinking at the afternoon sun. I pat the inside pocket where I secreted the sheaf of papers that Angleton gave me. And then I head back to my office in the New Annexe, where I very pointedly dial open my secure document safe and install those papers, then lock it and go home, secure in the knowledge of the first half of a job well done.

(Like I said: fatal accidents never happen because of just one mistake.)

I DON’T FUNCTION WELL IN THE SMALL HOURS OF THE MORNING. I sleep like a log, and I have difficulty pulling my wits about me if something wakes me in the pre-dawn dark.

So it takes me a few seconds to sit up and grab the bedside phone when it begins to snarl for attention. I fumble the handset close to my face: “Whuuu-” I manage to drone, thinking, If this is a telesales call, I’ll plead justifiable homicide, as Mo spasms violently in a twist of the duvet and rolls over, pulling the bedding off me.

“Bob.” I know that voice. It’s-“Jo here. Code Blue. How soon can you be ready for a pickup?”

I am abruptly awake in an icy-cold drench of sweat. “Five minutes,” I croak. “What’s up?”

“I want you in here stat, and I’m sending a car. Be ready in five minutes.” She sounds uncertain… afraid? “This line isn’t secure, so save your questions.”

“Okay.” The phrase this had better be good doesn’t even reach my larynx: declaring Code Blue is the sort of thing that attracts the Auditors’ attention. “Bye.” I put the phone down.

“What was that?” says Mo.

“That was a Code Blue.” I swing my feet over the edge of the bed and fish for yesterday’s discarded socks. “There’s a car calling for me in five minutes.”

“Shit…” Mo rolls over the other way and buries her face in a pillow. “Am I wanted?” Her voice, muffled, trails away.

“Just me.” I paw through an open drawer for pants. “It’s Jo Sullivan. At four in the morning.”