Charles Stross - The Fuller Memorandum

Mo heads towards an anonymous industrial estate in the suburbs out near Croydon, where some of the more technical departments have relocated while Service House is being rebuilt. She travels by tube and then commuter train, and finally by bus, keeping one hand on her violin case at all times. It takes her an hour and a half to make the journey: strap-hanging in grim silence, alone with her worries about the evidence she removed from Mr. Dower’s workshop. She travels under the gaze of cameras; cameras on the tube platforms, cameras in the railway station concourses, cameras on the buses. Many of them are linked to the SCORPION STARE network, part of the huge surveillance web the government is spinning to keep the nation safe in the final days. But the final days may be about to arrive with a bang, two or three years earlier than anticipated…

She walks the hundred meters to the car park entrance, then enters an anonymous-looking office reception area in an otherwise windowless building. A plain signboard on the high razor-wire-topped fence outside proclaims it the property of Invicta Security Ltd., and the portrait of a slavering German shepherd beneath the sign promises a warm welcome to would-be burglars. Both signs are, of course, lying: the building currently houses most of the Occult Forensics Department, and there’s no easy way to visually depict the protean, gelatinous horrors that ooze around the premises by night.

“Hello, Invicta-” The blue-suiter behind the counter pauses. “Dr. O’Brien. Can I see your pass, please?”

Mo presents her warrant card. “Hi, Dave. Is Dr. Williams in?”

“I think so.” Dave pokes at his computer terminal. “Yes, he’s booked in. Do you need to see him?”

“I’ve got a job on. Can you page him?”

“I’ll do that.” Dave points a webcam on a stalk at her, then prints off a temporary badge. “Here, wear this. It’s valid for zones one and two, you know the drill.”

“Yes.” Mo doesn’t smile. Whereas the New Annexe mostly deals with paper (apart from the armory), the OFD handles physically-and in some cases spiritually-hazardous materials. Access to the inner zones is restricted for good reason.

While Dave pages Dr. Williams, Mo plants herself on one of the powder-blue waiting area seat-things, and idly pages through some of the magazines on the occasional table: Forensic Sciences Digest, Gunshot Wounds Monthly, Which? PCR. Her attention is a million kilometers away from the articles, but they serve as a distraction for her eyes. She has one of the magazines open at a color spread of spent bullets retrieved from victims of crime when a shadow falls across her. “Mo! What brings you out here?”

She looks up, forcing a smile. “Nick? Are you busy? Can we discuss this in your office?”

Five minutes later, another windowless office with overflowing bookshelves and too many filing cabinets. “What have you got for me?” he asks. Balding, in his late forties, Nick is the research lead in this particular lab.

“A special job.” Mo pauses. “Sub rosa.”

“Sub-Oh shit. Tell me it isn’t so.”

She shakes her head. “I think it’s probably a leak rather than an inside job, but even so, this is for you, not the office junior. Eyes only.” She pulls out the tub of paper clips from Mr. Dower’s workroom, and the small stapler from beside his cash register, and places them on the worktable opposite Dr. Williams’s desk. “The owner of these items was murdered about forty-eight hours ago. He’d just prepared a special report for me. I’m pretty certain the killer took the report, and knowing George-the victim-he would have paper-clipped or stapled it. So I want a full read on the top copy-and a locator.”

Dr. Williams whistles between his front teeth. “You don’t want much, do you?” He pauses. “When do you need it by?”

“Right now.” Mo positions her violin case on the visitor’s chair, then lets go of it. “It’s very urgent.”

“Oh. I can have it with you by eight tonight, if I-”

“No.” She smiles, letting him see her teeth. “When I said now, I meant right now.”

“What’s so urgent?” Williams, unwilling to be rushed, crosses his arms and stares at her.

“Are you on the distribution for CLUB ZERO?”

Williams’s face turns ashen. “That was the business in Amsterdam, wasn’t it?”

“They’re over here, too. The document in question is a detailed report on that.” She points at the violin case. “Whoever has got the report is almost certainly a live hostile, and may I remind you that the item they’re after is in your office?” Her smile evaporates. “You really want to get me out of here…”

THERE IS A PHILOSOPHY BY WHICH MANY PEOPLE LIVE THEIR lives, and it is this: life is a shit sandwich, but the more bread you’ve got, the less shit you have to eat.

These people are often selfish brats as kids, and they don’t get better with age: think of the shifty-eyed smarmy asshole from the sixth form who grew up to be a merchant banker, or an estate agent, or one of the Conservative Party funny-handshake mine’s-a-Rolex brigade.

(This isn’t to say that all estate agents, or merchant bankers, or conservatives, are selfish, but that these are ways of life that provide opportunities for people of a certain disposition to enrich themselves at the expense of others. Bear with me.)

There is another philosophy by which people live their lives, and it goes thus: you will do as I say or I will hurt you.

It’s petty authoritarianism, and it frequently runs in families. Dad’s a dictator, Mum’s henpecked, and the kids keep quiet if they know what’s good for them-all the while soaking up the lesson that mindless obedience is the only safe course of action. These kids often rescue themselves, but some of them don’t. They grow up to be thugs, insecure and terrified of uncertainty, intolerant and unable to handle back-chat, willing to use violence to get what they want.

Let me draw you a Venn diagram with two circles on it, denoting sets of individuals. They overlap: the greedy ones and the authoritarian ones. Let’s shade in the intersecting area in a different color, and label it: dangerous. Greed isn’t automatically dangerous on its own, and petty authoritarians aren’t usually dangerous outside their immediate vicinity-but when you combine the two, you get gangsters and dictators and hate-spewing preachers.

There is a third philosophy by which-thankfully-only a tiny minority of people live their lives. It’s a bit harder to sum up, but it begins like this: in the beginning was the endless void, and the void spawned the Elder things, and we were created to be their slaves, and they’re going to return to Earth in the near future, and it is only by willingly subordinating ourselves to their merest whim that we can hope to survive-

Now let me drop another circle on the diagram, and scribble in the tiny patch where it intersects with the other two circles, and label it in deepest fuliginous black: here be monsters.

Greedy: check. Authoritarian: check. Worshipers of the most bizarre, anti-human monsters you can imagine: check. That’s the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh (and their masks like the Free Church of the Universal Kingdom) and all of their ilk. Hateful, dangerous, unpleasant, greedy, and all-around bad people who you don’t want to have anything to do with if you can help it.

There’s just one problem with this picture…

That bit about in the beginning was the endless void?

They’re right.

(Oops.)

Here’s the problem:

We live in a hideously reticulated multiverse, where most of the dimensionality of spacetime is hidden from our view-curved in on themselves in closed loops, tucked away in imaginary spaces-but the stuff we can observe is a tiny fraction of the entirety of what we live in. Magic, the stuff I deal with in the office on a day-to-day basis, involves the indirect manipulation of information flow through these unseen dimensions, and communication with the extra-dimensional entities that live elsewhere. I’m an applied computational demonologist-how can I not believe this stuff?