Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

So what made my pager go off? While Mo is drinking a mug full of mocha and contemplating the museum's catalogue of forthcoming attractions, I find myself reading an interesting article from the AP wire service. DOUBLE KILLING IN ROTTERDAM (AP): Two bodies discovered near a burned-out shipping container in the port appear to be victims of a brutal gangland-style slaying. Blood daubed on the container, victims-ah, a correlation with a restricted information source, something sucked out of the Police National Computer and not available in the usual wire service bulletin. One victim is a known neo-Nazi, the other an Iraqi national, both shot with the same gun. Is that all? I wonder, and go clickety-click, sending out a brief email asking where was the shipping container sent from and where was it bound for because you never know…

I shake my head. The article dinged my search filter's "phone home" bell by accumulating little keyword matches until it passed a threshold, not because it's obviously important. But something nags at the back of my mind: there's seawater nearby, graffiti in blood on the wall, an Iraqi connection. Why Rotterdam? Well, it's one of the main container-port gateways into Europe, that's for starters. For seconds, it's less than fifty kilometres away.

There's no other real news. I log out and leave the terminal; time to drink a coffee and get back to work.

I look up from the report I'm reading. "Are you sure?"

"Certain." I stand up and walk over. She's leaning over an open drawer and her arms are tense as wires. I think she'd be shaking if she wasn't holding herself still and stiff. I look over her shoulder. The drawing is a geometry curve all right. Actually, I've seen ones like this before. The aborted summoning Dr. Vohlman demonstrated in front of the class that day-was it only a few weeks ago?-looked quite similar. But that one was designed to open a constrained information channel to one of the infernal realms. I can't quite see where this one is directed, at least not without taking it home and studying it with the aid of a protractor and a calculator, but a quick glance tells me it's more than a simple speakerphone to hell.

Here we see a differential that declares a function of tau, the rate of change of time with distance along one of the Planck dimensions. There we see an admonition that this circuit is not to be completed without a cage around it. (A good thing the notation we use, and that of the Ahnenerbe, is derived from the same source, or I wouldn't be able to figure it out.) This formula looks surprisingly modern, it's some sort of curve through the complex number plane-each point along it is a different Julia set. And that is where the human sacrifice is wired into the diagram by its eyeballs while still alive, for maximum bandwidth-

I blank for a second, flashing on the evil elegance of the design. "Are you sure this is it?" I mumble.

"Of course I'm sure!" Mo snaps at me. "Do you think I'd-" She stops. Takes a deep breath. Mutters something quietly to herself, then: "What is it?"

"I'm not 100 percent certain," I say, carefully placing the notepad I was reading from down on my chair and moving to one side so I can inspect the diagram from a different angle, "but it looks like a resonator map. A circuit designed to tune in on another universe. This one is similar to our own, in fact it's astonishingly close by; the energy barrier you have to tunnel through to reach it is high enough that nothing less than a human sacrifice will do."

"Human sacrifice?"

"It doesn't take much energy to talk to a demon," I explain. "They're pretty much waiting to hear from us, at least the ones people mostly want to talk to. But they come from a long way away-from universes with a very weak affinity to our own. Information leakage doesn't imply an energy change in our own world; it's concealed in the random noise. But if we try to talk to a universe close to home there's a huge potential energy barrier to overcome-this sort of prevents causality violations. The whole thing is mediated by intelligence-observers are required to collapse the wave function-which is where the sacrifice comes in: we're eliminating an observer. Done correctly, this lets us talk to a universe that isn't so much next door as lying adjacent to our own, separated by a gap less than the Planck length."

"Oh." She points at the map. "So this thing… it's a very precise transformation through the Mandelbrot set. Which you guys have used as a map onto a Linde continuum, right? Why don't they just set up an n-dimensional homogeneous matrix transformation? It's so much more intuitively obvious."

"Uh-" She manages to surprise me at the damnedest times. "I don't know. Have to read up on it, I guess."

"Well." She pauses for an instant and looks very slightly disappointed, as if her star pupil has just failed a verbal test. "This is very like what I saw. Got any suggestions for what to do next, wise guy?"

"Yes. There's a photocopier upstairs. Let's call the curator and run off a copy or two. Then we can get someone back home to compare it to the photographs of the shipping container at that murder site in Rotterdam. If they're similar we have a connection."

OUR HOTEL HAS A BIJOU BAR AND A BREAKFAST room, but no restaurant; so it seems natural that after running off our copies we should go home, head for our respective rooms, freshen up, and head out on the town to find somewhere to eat. (And maybe share a drink or two. Those hours in the basement of horrors are going to give me bad dreams tonight, and I'd be surprised if Mo is any better.) I spend half an hour soaking in the bathtub with a copy of Surreal Calculus and the Navigation of Everett-Wheeler Continua -hoping to brush up on my dinner-table patter-then dry myself, pull on a clean pair of chinos and an open-necked shirt, and head upstairs.

Mo is waiting at the bar with a cup of coffee and a copy of the Herald Tribune. She's wearing the same evening-out-on-the-town outfit as last time. She folds the newspaper and nods at me. "Want to try that Indonesian place we passed?" I ask her.

"Why not." She finishes the coffee quickly. "Is it raining outside?"

"Wasn't last time I looked."

She stands up gracefully and pulls her coat on. "Let's go."

The nights are drawing in, and the evening air is cool and damp. I'm still self-conscious about navigating around the roads-not only do they run on the wrong side, but they've got separate bike lanes everywhere, and, to make matters worse, separate tram lanes that sometimes don't go in the same direction as the rest of the traffic. It makes crossing the road an exercise in head-twitching, and I nearly get mown down by a girl on a bicycle riding without lights in the dusk-but we make it to the tram stop more or less intact, and Mo doesn't laugh at me out loud. "Do you always jerk around like that?"

"Only when I'm trying to avoid the feral man-eating mopeds. Is this tram-ah." Two stops later we get off and head for that Indonesian place we passed earlier. They have a vacant table, and we have a meal.

I turn on my new palmtop's antisound and Mo talks to me over her satay: "Was that what you were hoping to find at the museum?"

I dribble peanut sauce over a skewer before replying. "It was what I was hoping not to find, really." She has her back to the plateglass window and I have a decent view of the main road behind her shoulder. Which is important, and I keep glancing that way because I am on edge-our friendly neighbourhood abductors seem to go to work at dusk, and when all's said and done this is a stakeout and Mo is the goat. I look back at her. She's very decorative, for a goat: most goats don't wear ethnic tops, large silver earrings, and friendly expressions. "On the other hand, at least we know we're dealing with something profoundly unpleasant. Which means that Carnate Gecko gets something solid to chew on and we've got a lead to follow up."