Charles Stross - The Jennifer Morgue

"Whoa! What has she — " I nod at the far wall, beyond which the sleeping beauty lies " — got to do with this?" I glance at the laptop.

Boris harrumphs. "If had spend your time on briefing, would understand," he grumbles. "Brains, Pinky, stations."

'Yo. Good luck, Bob." Pinky pats me on the shoulder as he scuttles past the end of the beds to a small ward he's already set up on the carpet in front of the TV set. "It'll be all right — you'll see." Brains and Boris are already in their safety cells.

"What if someone's in the hall outside?" I call.

"The door's locked. And I put the DO NOT DISTURB sign out," Brains replies. "Stations, everyone?" He pulls out a black control box and twists a knob set on its face. I force myself to settle back in the chair; and in the other room, beyond the two spy-holes drilled through the back of the wardrobe, a very special light comes on and washes over the trapped entity in the pentacle.

When you go summoning extra-dimensional entities, there are certain precautions you should be sure to take.

For starters, you can forget garlic, bibles, and candles: they don't work. Instead, you need to start with serious electrical insulation to stop them from blowing your brains out through your ears. Once you've got yourself grounded you also need to pay attention to the existence of special optical high-bandwidth channels that demons may attempt to use to download themselves into your nervous system — they're called "eyeballs." Timesharing your hypothalamus with alien brain-eaters is not recommended if you wish to live long enough to claim your index-linked, state-earningsrelated pension; it's about on a par with tap dancing on the London Underground's third rail in terms of health and safety. So you need to ensure you're optically isolated as well.

Do not stare into laser cavity with remaining eye, as the safety notice puts it. Most demons are as dumb as a sack full of hammers. This does not mean they're safe to mess with, any more than a C++ compiler is "safe" in the hands of an enthusiastic computer science undergrad. Some people can mess up anything, and computational demonology adds a new and unwelcome meaning to terms like "memory leak" and "debugger."

Now, I have severe misgivings about what Boris, Pinky, and Brains propose to do to me. (And I am really pissed at Angleton for telling them to do it.) However, they're more than passingly competent and they've certainly not skimped on the safety aspects. The entity that calls itself Ramona Random — hell, that might even be her real name, back when she was human, before the Black Chamber rebuilt her into occult equivalent of a guided missile — is properly secured in the next room. Sitting in the bedroom closet — in front of the two holes Brains has drilled in the wall — is a tripod with a laser, a beam splitter, and a thermostatically controlled box containing a tissue culture grown from something that really ought not to exist, all wired up to a circuit board that looks like M. C. Escher designed it after taking too much LSD.

"Everyone clear?" calls Brains.

"Clear." Boris.

"Clear." Pinky.

"Totally unclear!" Me.

"Thank you, Bob. Pinky, how's our remote terminal"

Pinky looks at a small, cheap television screen hooked up to a short-range receiver. "Drooling slightly. I think she's asleep."

"Okay. Lights." A diode on the back of the circuit board begins to flash, and I notice out of the corner of my eye that Brains is controlling it with a television remote. That's smart of him, I think, right before he punches the next button.

"Blood."

Something begins to drip from the box, sizzling where it touches a wired junction on the circuit, which suddenly flares with silver light. I try to look away but it sucks my eyes in, like a bubble of boiling mercury that expands to fill the entire world. Then it's like my blind spot is expanding, creeping up on the back of my head.

"Symbolic link established."

There's an incredibly strong stink of violets, and a horde of ants crawl the length of my spine before holing up in the pit of my stomach to build a nest.

**Hello, Bob.** The voice caresses my ears like the velvet fuzz on a week-dead aubergine, sultry and somehow rotten to the core. It's Ramona's voice. My stomach heaves. I can't see anything but the swirling pit of light, and the violets are decaying into something unspeakable. **Can you hear me?**

**I hear you.** I bite my tongue, tasting the sound of steel guitars. Synesthesia, I note distantly. I've read about this sort of thing: if the situation wasn't so dangerous it would be fascinating. Meanwhile my right arm is straining against the duct tape without me willing it to move. I try to make it stop and it won't. **Leave my arm alone, damn you!**

**I'm already damned,** she says flippantly, but the muscles in my arm stop twitching and jumping.

Then I realize I haven't been moving my lips, and more importantly, Ramona hasn't been speaking aloud. **How do we control this?** I ask.

**The will becomes the act: if you want me to hear, I hear you.**

**Oh.** The light show is beginning to slow down, with reality bleeding back in through the edges, and my head feels like someone's rammed a railroad spike through my skull right behind my left eye. **I feel sick.**

**Don't do that, Bob!** She sounds — feels? — disturbed.

**Okay.** Try not to think of invisible pink elephants, I think grimly, my skin crawling as the implications set in. I've just been rendered uncontrollably telepathic with a woman — or something woman-shaped — from the Black Chamber, and I'm such a dork my first reaction wasn't to run like fuck.

Why'd Angleton do a thing like that? Hey, isn't this asking for a really gigantic security breach — at least, if both of us survive the experience? How am I going to keep Ramona out of my head — ?

**Hey, stop blaming me!** Somehow I can tell she's irritated by my line of thought. **My head hurts, too.**

**So why didn't you run away?** I let slip before I manage to clamp a lid down on the thought.

**They didn't give me the option.** A metallic, bitter taste fills my mouth. **I'm not entirely human.

Constitutional rights don't apply to non-humans. All I can say is, those bastards better hope I never get loose from this geas ...** I feel like spitting, then I realize the glands full of warmth at the back of her throat aren't salivary ducts.

"Bob."

I blink in confusion. It's Brains. He looms over me, out of his grounded pentacle. "Can you hear me"

"Yuh, yeah." I try to swallow, feeling the sensation of venom sacs throbbing urgently inside my cheeks begin to fade. I shudder. There's a trailing wisp of wistfulness from Ramona, and a malicious giggle: she doesn't have fangs, she just has a really good somatic imagination. **Let me get my head together,** I tell her, and then try to do the invisible v pink elephant thing in her general direction.

"How do you feel?" asks Brains. He sounds curious.

"How the fuck do you think you'd feel?" I snarl. "Jesus fuck, give me ibuprofen or give me a straight razor. My head is killing me." Then I realize something else. "And cut me loose from here. Someone's got to go next door and release Ramona, and I don't think any of you guys want to get within spitting range of her without a chair, a whip, and a can of pepper spray."

I remember the shape of her anger at her employers and shiver again. Working with Ramona is going to be like riding sidesaddle on a black mamba. And that's before I get to tell Mo, "Honey, they partnered me with a demon."

THEY WAIT FOR THE IBUPROFEN TO START WORKING before they untie me from the chair, which is extremely prudent of them.

"Right," I say, leaning against the back of the chair and breathing deeply. "Boris, what the fuck is this about"