Charles Stross - The Fuller Memorandum

Not the bit about original creation, oh no. Beings like N’yar lath-Hotep didn’t mold us out of the black clay of the Nile delta: I’ve got no beef with modern cosmology. But those of them who take an interest in our kind find it useful for humans to believe such myths, and so they encourage the cultist numpties through their pursuit of forbidden lore.

We aren’t alone in this cosmos; we aren’t even alone on this planet, as anyone who’s met a BLUE HADES can attest (there’s a reason all those domed undersea cities of the future never got built in the 1950s)… and don’t get me started on DEEP SEVEN, the lurkers in the red-hot depths. But our neighbors, the Deep Ones and the Chthonians, are adapted for wildly different biospheres. There is no colonial overlap to bring us to the point of conflict-which is a very good thing, because the result would be a very rapid Game Over: Humans Lose.

The things that keep me awake in the small hours aren’t anything like as approachable as a Deep One. (Hell, I’ve worked with a Deep One. Left a part of my soul behind with her. No matter.) The things that terrify me are blue-green worms, twisting and coiling luminous intrusions glimpsed in the abruptly emptied eyes of a former colleague; minds patient and incomprehensibly old that find amusement in our tortured writhing; Boltzmann Brains from the chaotic, necrotic depths of the distant future, reaching back through the thinning ultrastructure of spacetime to idly toy with our reality. Things that go “bump” in the night eternal. Things that eat us-

There is a fourth and final philosophy by which some of us live our lives, and it boils down to this: do not go quietly into that dark night. Draw a fourth circle on that now-crowded Venn diagram and you’ll see that while it intersects the greedy and authoritarian circles, and even has a tiny overlap with the greedy authoritarian bit, it doesn’t quite intersect with the third circle, the worshipers. It holds up a mirror to their self-destruction. Call it the circle of the necromantic apostates. That’s where I stand, whether I’m greedy or authoritarian or both. (I don’t think I’m either, but how can I be sure?)

I may believe in mind-eating horrors from beyond spacetime, but they’ll have to break my neck before I bend it to their yoke.

Keep telling yourself that, Bob.

MO CARRIES HER VIOLIN AND FOLLOWS DR. WILLIAMS AS HE picks up a chipped plywood tea tray and backs through a swinging door, carrying the jar of paper clips and the stapler. The glass window in the door is hazed by a fine wire mesh, and the edges of the door are lined with copper fingers that close against a metal strip inside the frame. Williams places the tray on one end of an optical workbench, then bolts the door and flips a switch connected to a red lamp outside his office.

“You’ve worked with one of these before?” he asks.

“Of course.” Mo shrugs out of her jacket and hangs it on a hook. “It’s the entanglement-retrieval bit I’m unfamiliar with. That, and I may need a lab report. I know my limits.”

“Good.” Williams’s smile is humorless. “Then if I tell you to stay in the isolation grid over there you know what the consequences are for getting things wrong.”

“Indeed.” She opens the violin case and removes her bone-white instrument and its bow. Williams stares at it for a moment.

“Do you really need that?”

“When I said they’re targeting me, I wasn’t exaggerating. Besides, the document they stole was a report on this very instrument. If they’re trying to backtrack from it to find the original, then when you bring up the Adams-Todt resonance it might lead them here.”

Dr. Williams snorts. “I’m sure the front desk will be very happy to see them.” He turns to the bench and unclamps a swinging arm, uses it to position a glass diffraction grating in a path defined by a set of curious pentagonal prisms positioned at the ten vertices of an irregular pentacle. “Would you pass me the data logger? It’s the second one along on the top shelf…”

It takes Dr. Williams a quarter of an hour to set up the forensic magician’s workbench. Apart from the odd geometric layout it doesn’t resemble the popular imagination’s picture of a sorcerer’s laboratory. Colored chalk lines and eye of newt are gone, replaced by solid-state lasers and signal generators: pointy hats and robes have given way to polarized goggles and lab coats. The samples, stripped of their containers, are transferred to windowed containers using perspex tongs. Williams slots them into place in the observation rig. “Okay, stations,” he says conversationally. “I haven’t modified the beam line so there should be no overspill, but I’ll run a low power test first just in case.”

Mo and the forensic demonologist move to stand inside complex designs inlaid in the floor in pure copper. “How’s your personal ward?” he asks.

Mo reaches for the fine silver chain around her neck. “Mine’s fine,” she says slowly. “Damn, I should have drawn a spare for Bob. It’s a bit late now, do you have any kicking around?”

“I’ll see what I can do afterwards. Okay, goggles on, lights going out. Testing in ten, nine, eight…” He pushes a switch. The red laser beam is only visible where it passes through the prisms. “You getting any overspill?”

“None.” The room is dark, the only light source the faint trickle through the thickly frosted glass of the window in the door.

“Good.” Williams cuts the power, then reaches across the bench by touch and rotates the sample tubes a quarter turn, lining them up with the beam path. Then he adjusts a mirror, flipping it to face a different and bulkier laser. “Okay, I’m switching to the high power source. Going live in ten, nine, eight…”

An image shimmers faintly in the darkness, stitched out in violet speckles across the translucent face of the screen on the optical bench. A pallid rectangle, violet with black runes.

“That might be it,” Mo says quietly.

“I expect so. I’m upping the power.” The rectangle fills in, glowing brighter and brighter. “Okay, I’m exposing the photographic paper now.”

“What kind of camera…?”

“Pinhole, with two holes. Yes, it’s a double-split interferometer. Quiet, now…” There’s a soft click. Ten seconds later there’s another click. “Okay, I got the exposure done. Shame we can’t use CCDs for this job, but you wouldn’t want to feed some of the things we look at to a computing device… Right. You want to look at the bearer?”

“Yes.” Mo leans forward, careful to stay within her ward (which glows pale blue, the nacreous glimmer washing over her feet). “It might retrieve Mr. Dower; I can identify him. If it’s anyone else, I’d like a portrait, please.”

“I’ll just reload the interferometer. Wait one… Okay, I’m ready. Now comes the fun bit. Do you know Zimbardo’s Second Rite?”

Mo pauses for a while. “I think so.”

“Good, because we’re going there. Don’t worry, your part isn’t hard. Let’s get started.”

After five minutes of minute adjustments, Williams runs a certain specialized script on his workstation, which starts up a sound track of chants in an esoteric language and sends a sequence of commands to the microcontrollers in the workbench. As the baritone voices intone meaningless syllables with the mindless precision of a speech synthesizer, he whispers to her: “Some visitors say it spoils the fun, but I rather think it’s better than taking the risk of a slip of the tongue…”

A new image begins to fuzz into being in the screen, the drawn face of a male, fifty-something, wearing an expression of intent concentration.“That’s Dower,” Mo confirms. “He wrote the report. Who do you get next?”