The Apocalypse Codex

by Charles Stross

  The woman is clearly aware that she’s being pursued. Equally clearly, she isn’t prepared for this. She’s dressed for the office, not for a hike in the wild woods, and it’s a hot day. She’s slung her black suit jacket through her handbag’s straps and is walking barefoot through the undergrowth, smart shoes clutched in one hand. Breathing deeply, she backs up close to a three-hundred-year-old oak encrusted with ivy and lichen. Her eyes flicker from side to side, mistrusting. They searched her bag and took her phone—otherwise she could get a GPS fix and call for help. She’s unarmed; she has no idea how many men are pursuing her, but doubts there are fewer than two. And they will be armed. On the other hand, she knows there’s a perimeter wall. On the other side of it, there’s a main road—if she can get over it, she can flag down a ride. Or she can backtrack along it to the gatehouse, assuming her pursuers aren’t waiting for her there. If. If. She glances up at the sky, but the foliage is so thick she can’t spot the sun. She’s running out of options, and as she realizes this her heart beats faster.

  Less than a hundred meters away, her closest pursuer crouches on top of a muddy bluff and inspects the ground at his feet. Unlike his target, he’s dressed for the occasion in woodland camo and para boots. He wears a webbing vest and a helmet with headset, and carries a chunky machine pistol. Right now he’s examining a couple of telltale smears in the mud. Not boots. Not animal paw-prints, either; the only large animals he’s likely to meet in this over-tame forest are deer, and possibly the odd fox or badger. He taps his mike. “Found a trail,” he says. “Recent. Looks to be barefoot.” She came up here for a look-around, slipped and fell, he considers. Or did she? There’s no crushed patch of shrubbery nearby. He peers over the edge of the bluff, looks down three meters. If she’d gone over, I’d have heard. Probably.

  Hunting around, he spots a clump of nettles. The ground around them—someone or something has given them a wide berth and, in doing so, they’ve left traces: bent stems, broken twigs. He grimaces. Clueless. It’s not what he’d expect of a smart fugitive. But nevertheless, it’s a trail. He follows it, scanning for more signs of passage. Careless, he thinks.

  It’s nearly the last thing he thinks. The trail winds close to the edge of the bluff again, then through a disturbed tangle of ferns and nettles between beech trees. As he steps close to it, something catches his eye and he drops into a crouch. It’s almost invisible when he’s standing, but from beneath…“Nasty,” he whispers. Stretching between the trees, about one and a half meters up, is a nearly invisible nylon wire, smeared with mud and vegetable sap. He taps his mike again. “Rabbit showing its teeth.” He tightens his grip on his gun and swings round. Which is why the woman’s field-expedient blackjack—doubled-over nylon hose filled with pebbles from the bed of the stream that feeds the ferns—catches him on the side of the helmet rather than on the back of his neck.

  They close and grapple and two seconds later it’s all over.

  “How do you score that?” Johnny is lying with his back against one of the beech trees, the paintball gun beside him.

  “The usual handicaps apply: I make it one all.” Persephone rolls over on her back. “You shot me, I cracked your skull.”

  “That tripwire was most unpleasant, Duchess.” Johnny sits up and rubs his untouched throat. “Where did you conceal it?”

  “Up top.” She sits up. “Hair extensions are one option; I can loop it through the roots in a continuous run. Takes ages to untangle, though. This time I just tucked it into the lining of my bag—metal detectors don’t see it, and if you do it properly even a trained X-ray tech will assume it’s just a seam.”

  “Right. And the cosh—”

  “Any sufficiently advanced lingerie is indistinguishable from a lethal weapon.” She smiles enigmatically, then holds up one of her shoes. “Heels, too.” Then she sits up. “Okay, back to base then we’ll run it again. This time”—she reaches out and taps him on the shoulder with the shoe—“tag, you’re it. Let Zero know, will you?”

  It’s a game they play about once a month: escape, evasion, and ambush. The object of the exercise is training—not merely for the pursued to avoid capture but to turn the tables on their pursuer, trapping or killing them. Often they run it in the wild, as on this rented paintball range—which they have to themselves for the day—and sometimes they play it on deserted industrial estates, at night. Sometimes they drag in other players to beef up the pursuit side, and sometimes they play it one-on-one. The only constant is that the game only ends when one of them is down.

  They’re standing up and Johnny is calling Zero to tell him round two is on when his phone rings. He answers it. “It’s for you.” He passes it across.

  “Yes?” She listens intently for a minute, nodding silently. “All right, I’ll do it. Thanks.” She hangs up, glances at Johnny. “Playtime is cancelled. Tell Zero to bring the car round; we have a date.”

  “Uh-huh. Where?”

  She starts walking, back the way they’ve come. “That was Lockhart. Schiller’s on his way to the airport and his pilot’s just filed a flight plan for Denver. As his Mission has a compound outside Colorado Springs, that’s probably where he’s going. Also, Lockhart’s got me a gilt-edged ticket. They run a weekend spiritual retreat for interested outsiders from time to time—with a remarkable track record of generating born-again believers. In fact, the conversion ratio is one of the things that got his attention.”

  “So you’re going to go in and sniff around?” Johnny’s expression makes his reservations glaringly obvious.

  “Of course. What could possibly go wrong?” She gives him a sardonic look. “Better hurry; I want to see if we can make the four p.m. shuttle to JFK.”

  I’M AT HOME THAT EVENING, ENJOYING A LONG HOT BATH, WHEN my phone rings.

  It’s been a trying day. From the whole suit-wearing thing to the offsite visit to HMGCC, Pinky and the amazing pyroclastic pigeon-zapper, and then the usual tiresome bullshit in the COBWEB MAZE working group, which is trying to nail down the extent of the damage caused by the BLOODY BARON committee being infiltrated by—no, let’s not dive in the acronym soup just yet. I go home early out of sheer brain-dead exhaustion, hit the Tesco Express for a ciabatta, microwave curry, and a bottle of wine, and just as soon as I get into the steaming hot bath in hope of unwinding, I hear my phone begin to call from the kitchen table downstairs.

  (Do you take your phone to the bathroom? I reckon it’s one of the fundamental dividing lines of modern civilization—like whether you hang the bog roll so that it dangles in or out, or whether you eat your boiled eggs big-endian or little-endian. Anyway, I’m an old fart now—I’m over thirty—and I feel the need to actually put the bloody thing down for a few minutes a day. Even though it is a JesusPhone, and all JesusPhone users eventually wind up crouched in a dank, lightless cave, fondling it and crooning “preciousss…”)

  So there is a loud slosh from behind me, and a baby tsunami rolls across the bathroom floor as I leg it for the stairs, swearing and hoping I left the kitchen window blinds down. Naturally I stumble on the third step and take the rest of the stairs with three bounces of the left buttock, rebound from the passage wall, and topple into the kitchen, reaching the phone on the table just as it goes silent. And then the front door opens.

  “Bob? What are you doing?”

  It’s Mo, back from the office earlier than I’d expected, clutching a couple of shopping bags. Unfortunately she’s not alone: trailing behind her is Sandy—a civilian teacher, friend of hers from way back—also clutching the shopping. I make a dive for the tea towel and manage to slip on a floor tile and go arse over tit—or maybe the tit is busy making an arse of himself: by this point I’m thoroughly confused.

  “I was having a bath,” I explain when I stop swearing and the pain in my head, where I whacked it on a cupboard on the way down, subsides enough to permit business as usual to resume. “Then the phone rang.” The penny drops with a loud clang. “We’re meant to be doing dinner, aren’t we?�
�� With Pete and Sandy, old friends of Mo’s who go way back. Pete’s a witch doctor—sorry, a priest of some sort—and Sandy is a high school religious education teacher with a sideline in pottery. Nice enough folks as long as you keep the conversation away from work.

  “I’ll just be in the living room,” Sandy says helpfully, and disappears, leaving her smile hanging in the air like the Cheshire cat. (I’d say “smirk” but I have it on good authority that women do not “smirk.” At least, that’s Mo’s story, and she’s sticking to it.)

  I manage to catch my balance just in time to help Mo deposit the shopping bags on the table. “Let’s have a look at that,” she says, then inspects the back of my head for a few seconds. “Hmm, everything seems to be intact, but you’re sprouting a lovely egg.” She kisses it, making me wince at the sudden pain. “Why don’t you go upstairs and finish that bath, then join us when you’re human?”

  “My thoughts exactly,” I agree fervently, then retreat towards the stairs, dignity in tatters.

  Half an hour later I make my way downstairs, drier, cleaner, and fully clothed. Mo and Sandy are bickering good-naturedly over the makings of an M&S meal, so I make myself useful and lay the table. Partway through, the doorbell rings; I answer the door, carving knife in hand (you can never be too careful) and find Pete on the doorstep, clutching a couple of bottles of wine. “Come in,” I say, and drag him through to the kitchen. For the next couple of hours Mo and I have the opportunity to lose ourselves in the clichéd middle-class role-play of hosting an informal dinner party—just as long as we remember our employment cover stories: Mo teaches history of music at Birkbeck (about a quarter true) and I’m a civil servant working in IT support (also about a quarter true these days).

  The first course is leek and potato soup a la Marks and Spencer, accompanied by a rather acceptable New Zealand sauvignon blanc while the filet of trout is steaming in its own juices in the oven and Sandy unburdens herself of some workaday frustrations. Teaching is changing again, or something of that ilk—which in turn means more work for teachers, juggling lesson plans and learning new jargon. “Policy-making in RE tends to be very hands-off,” she explains; “it’s political poison, so they usually leave it alone.” Religious education in schools may be the law of the land, but aside from de-programming successive generations through boredom it’s turned into as much of a political third rail as public transport policy: whatever you do will be wrong for someone.

  “Take class Ten B. I’ve got three Hindus, four Muslims, six Catholics, one Jew, two random pagans, and a Jedi. That’s going by what their parents tell us, on top of the default Church of England types who wouldn’t know a chasuble if one bit them on the pulpit. There are another three militant evangelicals and a Seventh Day Adventist who’ve been withdrawn, lest I pollute their precious ears with knowledge of rival faiths, and a couple of out-of-the-closet atheists who sit in the back row and take the piss. Now there’s this”—she’s waving her hands in counter-rotating circles—“spiritual centeredness program coming from the top down, and a whole new four-year curriculum for comparative religious education along with coursework, and my performance is evaluated on the basis of the averaged continuous assessment scores of said Jedi, pagans, and atheists…”

  (Her hair’s turning gray and she’s only in her late-thirties.)

  “Huh. What kind of evangelicals withdraw their kids from RE?” I ask.

  Mo looks at me pityingly, but Sandy is allergic to ignorance, bless her: “Oh, you’d be surprised. Churches often behave more cultishly the smaller they get, trying to hold on to their children by making it hard to leave—and one of the easiest barriers you can put in someone’s way is to convince them that everyone else is some kind of satanic monster, doomed to hell and all too keen to take you with them. Comparative RE is pure poison to that kind of mind.”

  “There are two types of people in this world,” Pete volunteers helpfully, “those who think there are only two types of people in the world, and everybody else.” He sips his wine thoughtfully. “But the first kind don’t put it that way. They usually think in terms of the saved and the damned, with themselves sitting pretty in the lifeboat.” He manages to simultaneously look pained and resigned. “Sometimes they find their way out of the maze. But not very often.”

  “Huh. Speaking of which, I’ve been getting an earful at the office lately,” I say. Mo glances at me sharply as I continue. “One of my colleagues keeps banging on about some televangelist or other who’s been running a mission. You’d think he farts rainbows the way Jim talks about him. The, uh, Golden Promise Ministries? Do you know anything about them?” Mo’s eyes narrow to a flinty stare, but she holds her peace. Pete nods thoughtfully.

  “Golden Promise? The big tent revival meetings in Docklands?” I nod. “Pastor thingummy, um, Schiller—he’s one of the bigger American Midwestern TV Charlies”—he glances at Sandy apologetically—“but there’s something not quite right about him. Did I tell you about Dorothy”—Sandy nods—“one of my parishioners? Special needs, learning disability. And no, we’ve got two or three Dorothys, I’m not telling you which one it is. Anyway, she went along and found it very disturbing. Well, not at first, but he’s actively recruiting. And trying to get people to go along to a series of church meetings his people are running in South London. They’re clearly Presbyterians who are hot on fundamentals theology, but there’s a bit more to it than that. Stuff that smells a bit cultish, frankly. They’ve got the usual unhealthy obsession with homosexuality and so on; but what upset Dorothy was that they were trying to fix her up with a husband. Trying to get her to join a Christian dating ring. Which might be fine if they’d bothered to ask, but Dorothy has—let’s just say she has issues. They were quite pushy, and really freaked the poor girl out.”

  Mo nods slowly. Looking at me, she asks Pete out of one corner of her mouth, “Are they by any chance a quiverfull ministry?”

  Pete’s lips thin. “Yes.”

  The word “quiverfull” sets my alarm bells ringing, and clearly upsets Mo. It goes back to Psalm 127, which refers to having many children as having a full quiver. They’re arrows for the Lord, and a number of evangelical churches have adopted the theory that you can never have too much ammunition. The Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh has a history of using such churches as cover for their cells. They have other uses for children, as recruits and—let’s not go there over dinner.

  “You disapprove?” I ask.

  Pete sniffs. “I’m in the business of providing spiritual and pastoral care for my parishioners,” he points out. “Pressuring a confused and vulnerable young woman into an arranged marriage in order to turn her into a baby factory is not how you look after her spiritual needs—” He stops, revealing a momentary flash of anger. “Sorry. Not your problem.” He pauses. “I probably said too much there,” he adds.

  “It will go no further,” Mo assures him.

  “Absolutely.”

  Sandy, who has been holding her breath without me being consciously aware of it, exhales loudly enough that I nearly jump. I notice that her wineglass is empty. I pick up the bottle. “Can I offer you a refill?” I ask, a little white lie because now I think about it she didn’t ask for one in the first place—

  “No thanks.” Her cheeks dimple. “I’m avoiding alcohol for the next few months.”

  Mo catches the dropped penny first: “Congratulations! How long—”

  “It’s been nearly ten weeks. We’re not out of the first trimester yet, I wasn’t going to announce it for a little longer.”

  Opposite me, Pete’s expression has switched from muted disapproval to the smug anticipation of fatherhood-to-be.

  “Congratulations to the two of you,” I say slowly. “Well, good luck with that.” I lower the wine bottle and pick up my glass. “Here’s to sleepless nights ahead, huh?”

  Mo raises her glass, too, keeping her expression under rigid control. But I can see right through it; right to the core of delight for their joy, and s
uppressed envy for Sandy’s condition, and above all else, horror at the fate they’ve unwittingly condemned themselves to.

  LATE THAT NIGHT, AS WE LIE IN BED, I FEEL MO’S SHOULDERS shake. I slide an arm around her, try to provide comfort. She’s crying, silently and piteously to break a man’s heart; and the worst part is that I can’t do anything about the cause of her grief.

  We’re not going to have children.

  For months now, and for decades to come, we’ve been living on borrowed time. I can feel it in the prickling in my fingers and toes, in the strange shapes and warped dead languages of my dreams. We’re living through the end times, but not in any Biblical sense—the religions of the book have got their eschatology laughably wrong.

  Outside the edge of our conscious perceptions, the walls between the worlds are thinning. Things that listen to thoughts and attend are gathering, shadows and fragments of cognition and computation. The Laundry has a code name for this phenomenon: CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. Magic is a branch of applied mathematics: solve theorems, invoke actions, actions occur. Program computers to do ditto, actions occur faster and more reliably. So far so good, this is what I do for a living. But consciousness is also a computational process. Human minds are conscious, there are too damn many of us in too small a volume of space on this planet right now, and we’re damaging the computational ultrastructure of reality. Too much of our kind of magic going on makes magic easier to perform—for a while, until space itself rips open and the nightmares come out to play.

  But that’s not why we aren’t going to start a family. Abstract principles aren’t sufficient. No, it’s a lot simpler: we know the sort of thing that’s likely to happen during CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, and we’re not selfish enough—or evil enough—to condemn a child of ours to die that way.