by Carl Neville
And what’s your position on all this Jack? I don’t move in those circles so much anymore, but you…
We are…
We? The PRB or—
Co-Sphere-wide and beyond, we are anticipating problems. This is their last throw of the dice. This is an existential matter for them. We are being especially vigilant.
An existential matter. I see.
It’s all here, Waterson says, gesturing to a manila envelope on the desk. The file contains an outline of the broad scenario, the threats as we see them, all the information you need, access to the database. We are allocating you a team. This may be nothing, but as I say, we are being especially cautious.
Ahead of the Games?
Ahead of many things.
Barrow stands, tucks the envelope under his arm. Waterson stands too, more shrunken and hunched than Barrow remembers. He imagines the others, the Old Guard, wilting in over-warm rooms down on the south coast, heads drooping with the weight of all that history, all that memory, eyes wet, hands shaky as they raise an afternoon shot of the strong stuff, a toast to the Republic. The Games will bring out what’s left of them, he supposes.
There are new limitations on our powers to investigate. You’ll be aware of the impending bill on SSF’s democratization, I assume.
Not as informed as I could be.
Situation’s complex, pressure from all sides. Your SSF1 liaison will be Squires. He’ll get you up to speed on our own existential threats. Across in the main hall, ten minutes or so.
Barrow nods.
It’s as much for you to assess Squires as he you, Waterston says, almost as an afterthought. But with Waterston nothing was an afterthought.
Barrow logs the observation as he signs off on various protocols, leafing through the papers.
No plans for retirement yourself, Jack?
No immediate plans. A half smile, his eyes distantly lit. I shall die at this desk, I suspect.
ROD Guide TO THE PRB:
INSTITUTE: INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION
CATEGORY: HISTORY
SUBCATEGORY: PROJECTS AND MOVEMENTS
SSC. INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS/SECURITY
History and Development of SSF (Security and Services Facilitation)
The modern-day SSF has its roots in the community-led initiatives that have long characterized para-state mutualist organizations in both urban and rural areas of the former UK. Early regional and local formations of SSF began to integrate at a national level from the 1950s onward, focusing their energies in two directions. First, the provision of services, particularly additional political and general education, localized food and energy production and childcare. Second, an expansion of the information gathering, infiltration and subversion capacity of “the people’s militias” in order to support and defend organized strikers against the police, army and private militia, and to maintain the integrity of occupied factories and production centres until demands for their nationalization or commonization could be met.
As unions began to amalgamate under the rubric of the Universal Union, gaining critical mass through the 1970s and 1980s, SSF joined in a formal alliance and was instrumental in distributing food, re-commoning land for cultivation and dwellings, infrastructure and logistics support, and ensuring, through mass action, that key industries and facilities became publicly owned, most notably the occupation and communalization of North Sea oil platforms in conjunction with Norway’s Landsorganisasjonen i Norge. SSF also played a key role in organising and facilitating mass cooperativization during the capital and investment strike often characterized as the Autarchy.
1980s Onward
As the Great Opening began to bear fruit throughout the Eighties, SSF was instrumental in expanding and defending parallel networks of ports, airports and road haulage systems against sabotage, while its services division began to create the communications technology and infrastructure that forms the basis for the ROD systems, as well as helping to coordinate payment and trade systems between mutualist and nationalised production facilities at the European level. With the slow collapse of the British security services through occupation, infiltration, demoralization and a campaign of intimidation that “through necessity occasionally took on the aspect of terror”, SSF became the main domestic institution coordinating intelligence and security in conjunction with the main Co-Sphere partners.
The security arm of the institution divides into four tiers and is one of the last hierarchical bodies in the PRB. SSF4 is interdepartmental administrative, technical and logistics support, SSF3 intelligence gathering and processing, SSF2 speculative and theoretical mapping, while SSF1 is the highest level of “framing” in which SSF2 hypotheses are tested against classified domestic and international information. SSF deals with both PRB and “international” security matters at the furthest degree of “democratic remove”. SSF remains one of the few institutions where progression is largely based on seniority. The related educational training institution is the International Relations department at the Birmingham Central Academy (BCA).
Additional Documentation
[1] Further information on the Battle of Aberdeen here. For a fictionalized account of the role of the SSF in the Battle of Aberdeen in particular see B. Stirling’s 1979 “There Is a Tide….” Urkived here.
[2] “Massive, Militant, Militarized”, headline and article from the Planet (12/07/74) here
[3] “Please Sack Us So We Can Occupy and Give Our Labour Freely”, open letter from workers in the Nottingham DeJong Assembly plant, 12/04/79
[4] Universal Union Committee, The Universal Union Manifesto: There Are No Trades or Sectors, Only Workers, here
[5] Bewes, A. (1975) “When Property Rights Are Social Wrongs”, Everything in Common Committee, here
[6] West Academy History Dept, 2001, “Bloodless Coup? When Psychic Warfare Got Physical: Participant Testimonials”, here
Rose
She had resisted reading the novel for a while, and when she succumbed she was uncertain about it. Was it really Crane’s work? Where had it come from? When she first heard about it, she had experienced a sudden stab of anxiety, thinking perhaps he had died and that work he had kept hidden or that had been confiscated by the authorities was going to leak back into the public domain. She contacted Gillespie, who had no idea, his response typically terse. Goodridge was more forthcoming but only served to make the mystery deepen further, with his competing theories and claims about files gone missing from SSF archives.
It was all nonsense probably, but still, Crane, in some form or other, was being rediscovered, and that had implications for her too, a way to arrest her own waning influence, perhaps? She was due to speak next week at a conference at the South Academy on those early days, his work, his claims. She played the file again, a collection of old folk songs he had compiled, over there, in the otherland, some she knew, some in versions and by groups she could never exactly locate within the PRB’s rich tradition and which she had always assumed were sophisticated fakes. She had never uploaded it to the Urkive, though they had put it out briefly as a limited-edition cassette on Impossible Worlds. There was a pile of them in a box in the storage room at the back of the house. There was an interview with him in there too, she remembered. What else? The original Field Recordings and the cassettes they had selected from for the first Counterfactual compilation. They would have released it all ultimately, if Crane had let them. But he had instead withdrawn. Although he didn’t demand his work back, he hadn’t given it to them to use — instead he asked them simply to keep it. Could they listen to it privately? I would prefer you not to. She had promised Goodridge she would dig it out all for him, for his book with the South Academy. All this heaped disjecta membra was suddenly becoming a treasure trove. He’s near the end now, she understands, and yes, cruel as it sounds, perhaps Crane’s death will benefit them all. The dead, all their cold unreachable allure.
Urkive/Artist/Vernon Crane/Biography
Vernon Crane (?—)
Place of Birth: “United Kingdom”/ “Great Britain”
Crane is currently a citizen of the PRB, though the date and exact place of his birth remain unknown. No official records exist prior to 1996, when Crane was discovered wandering in the Contested Territories (see here). Crane was carrying a variety of items at the time of his discovery, possibly including the final section of a novel, later published in 2016 as Resolution Way (see here) (see also Controversies here), writings, and cassettes of music which subsequently attracted the attention of the public via their release on a number of independent labels and publishers in the early pre- and post-Breach PRB (see here). Crane claims to have lived in an alternate Britain in which the Breach and Autarchy, along with the Great Opening, among other major twentieth-century events, never occurred. After an initial flurry of attention, he was diagnosed as suffering from advanced hydrocephalus and given a prognosis of a few years to live. Crane withdrew from public life, though he is believed to have been working on fiction exploring an alternate PRB.
Barrow
Barrow was always struck by how little Squires tried to disguise his background; voice still plummy, suits tweedy, posture and gestures urbane, speech alternating between the rapid and nasal and the languorous, ironic. He had public school traitor written all over him.
Barrow orders salmon and asparagus; Squires skips the solids and sips at a half-pint of stout, thick and resinous in a pewter mug, and a brandy he swirls up into thinly interleaved caramel sheets around the snifter, his hands, even in his late sixties and a life dedicated to the drink, rock solid. Words unslurred, mind undulled.
They make small talk for a while, seated at the big windows. Squires praises Barrow’s record, expresses his satisfaction that Barrow has seen fit to come back into the fold, removes a few cardboard folders from his briefcase, fans them out on the table.
You disappeared rather peremptorily after Stockholm, Barrow. It took us a while to track you down and then you failed to come in for debriefing and so on, just a letter of resignation. You have never had a full post-Stockholm evaluation, hence our meeting. It’s very unofficial, but we are a little short on resources and under pressure of time. The Vote.
The public wants control, full access to data as I understand it?
Ultimately the idea is that SSF will wither away. Everything will be dealt with informally. It’s a terrible convergence of demands, unprecedented threat, increased inability to respond.
It’s believed we can be done without, is that it?
Well, that seemed viable a few years ago when it was perceived that we had no enemies, or that we were so insignificant as a country — is it still acceptable to call us that? — and so well intentioned, who could possibly want to attack us, and so on. Well the picture looks a little different today.
If, when, the bill is passed, and we, SSF1 I mean, must ratify it imminently, then effective immediately we must begin turning over all records into the public domain, all security operations must include members of the public as monitors and proceed much more through representative committees and so on. There is even talk that all investigations must be accessible on the RODs with a two-to-twenty-four-hour lag dependent on what level of severity the security threat is agreed, through public consultation, to warrant.
That will make our job impossible. We might as well not exist.
Well, quite. As I said, we’ll wither away. We are the last of the non-democratic institutions.
By necessity.
That necessity is not perceived. Nor can many citizens be convinced of its necessity.
I thought we were the heroes of the revolution.
Squires smiles. The revolution feels a long time ago, and our heroism has been praised enough.
Is that it then? The passage of time?
We are the last elite. They have a point, he says. No, I know we don’t get any special perks, it’s not that they imagine we have some dacha stuffed with caviar and imported booze somewhere. We have something they don’t, some luxury they can’t possess.
What?
My theory? Things we don’t have to share. Private rooms like this where we discuss files that only we read and that are then locked away. Lives we cannot disclose to others outside our circle. And after all we are intimate with darker and more difficult forces than the average citizen of the PRB encounters. They imagine we judge them in some way, sneer at them perhaps, we have experience they don’t and can never get access to. We are granted a certain dispensation, we are allowed to drink more, smoke more, be more withdrawn. Our solitude, apartness is to be respected, oh, they say, in a whisper perhaps when we are difficult, he’s SSF by way of exculpation. He leans forward, searching Barrows face with a half-smile. We have secrets! Well, we will have to talk about Stockholm at some point. Enough shilly-shallying.
Barrow takes a forkful of salmon, chews the pink, glistening flakes slowly, swallows.
Squires inclines his head towards Barrow. Is now the moment? Too informal? Would you prefer an appointment of some kind?
Barrow inhales through his nose, purses his lips, nods. Here is fine.
The sniffer dogs began finding unusual chemical profiles among some of the citizens. They checked against databases of existing, legitimate Co-Sphere compounds. Didn’t match anything on the records — they thought it may be a new PRB compound given our famously relaxed attitude to experimentation and production in these areas. Geographical proximity. Perhaps we hadn’t updated the central database in a timely fashion. Not unknown. Routine administrative issue initially until it appeared that we also didn’t have anything like it in our data sets. It went into circulation and it got picked up by a German department in a semi-official relationship with SSF who monitor non-Co-Sphere producers. Identified it as something produced in Black Labs in the States, strictly illegal in the Co-Sphere therefore, but widely smuggled in. It seemed that a majority of the subjects when questioned were unaware of the drug and how they could have come into contact with it. One, a self-described “nanonaut”, however, had taken it intentionally and could point PCSDF Stockholm to the supplier in Stockholm, who seemed to be a PRB citizen travelling back and forth between Reykjavik, Stockholm and the North, Inverness.
We picked up the PRB citizen identified, along with four other people we believed were responsible for smuggling it in and attempting to reverse engineer it in a makeshift lab up there. Ultimately, we shipped them across to Stockholm for questioning.
It was immediately noticeable that the suspects held a sincere and genuine belief in their own innocence — they showed 100% standard measures of truthfulness in response even when their stories were clearly false. Bioscanning at this point revealed nothing. As greater pressure was exerted on them in the interview process, confronting them with the clear contradiction between what they were telling us and the evidence we had amassed, something triggered a fight-or-flight response. They became instantly hostile and physically aggressive, and if that impulse to escape was blocked, they turned back on themselves and committed suicide. Or killed each other. The one who triggered first seemed to set off a chain response in others we had arrested. Not only there, but in a central square there was a sudden mass outbreak, resulting in a further thirty-two related deaths.
Well, Barrow, the work you did in Stockholm has proven invaluable, but there is that question of the break. Not a major issue necessarily but important for us to understand.
I was the lead interrogator who set off this chain.
You feel guilt.
No, Barrow says. It was partly the way the girl in front of me killed herself. I hadn’t seen such things in a while, not since the Breach.
You needed, simply, perhaps some extended rest. Squires smooths the napkin on his knee. First, let me tell you something about Stockholm, Barrow. I know you haven’t read the reports, though you do have access to them in redacted form. Nonetheless to summarize as it is germane to your particular situation, your interpretation of events. Well…
We analysed the timings of the suicides, the attacks, we know it ran in a wave but not in the direction you assumed on closer analysis. You happened to be questioning the subject when she triggered, but the detonation point, if you will, was elsewhere. We think it was deliberately set off in Myntorgett by an agent or agents we have yet to fully identify.
You weren’t responsible, he says, picks up the knife. Someone should perhaps have told you. The glass is empty, he gestures languidly for another.
What you encountered in Stockholm was the military version of a nanonarcotic known in its commercialized Spoonbill spin-off as, Squires purses his lips in evident distaste, Everlasting Yeah. It’s not available in the Co-Sphere and its use is actively discouraged, but of course we are powerless essentially to control its importation or use.
The drink arrives, placed discreetly at his right elbow.
It’s transmittable you see, once in the bloodstream. A true viral technology. We have no idea of its long-term effects, or even its uses.
You have analysed it?
Of course, it appears benign enough, is used symbiotically with music, induces various hallucinations, states of euphoria and reverie which become transmissible between anyone who has been exposed to it — a communal, lucid dreaming in response to certain triggers. What we suspect of course is that such states and shared hallucinations may become permanent, and the worry of course is that these may be shaped by agencies that are not sympathetic to the overall aims of the PRB. The military version, as you have seen, can be deployed to rather more dangerous effects. We imagine the strategy is double infection, first get in and shape the consensual reality — this is the soft power version of the drug — but retain the hard power option of triggering the population to self-destruct. Stockholm, we think, was a dry run for the latter.
REPORT CLASS SSF3
DEPARTMENT: INTERNATIONAL SECURITY