The Apocalypse Codex

by Charles Stross

  ***Jesus,*** I mutter verbally. ***I get the message. But use the other arm, please.***

  ***Any particular reason?***

  ***No.*** I might just be a bit snippy right now. My eyes are certainly watering. ***Just do it. In case I’m pointing a gun at someone.***

  ***You and guns don’t mix, unless I mistake my man.*** The bastard sounds amused.

  He’s not as right as he thinks he is, but I pass. ***Next. I gather the course is outside the GPM compound, so your boss is looking for a way to get in and plant her bug. Which is fine, if she can do it—but I don’t want her to take any unnecessary risks. Put it this way, I don’t think it’s worth her life. If she can’t get in, we’ll figure out what to do later. But I want you to get that message across, because I’ve got a feeling if I tell her directly she’ll take it as a challenge. Am I right?***

  Silence. Followed by more silence. Finally he says, ***You’re not wrong.*** For a moment my vision fuzzes again, almost as if he’s decided to drop the mental firewall. But no: ***I don’t reckon she’ll take that from me, either. But she’s not stupid, son. Sit back, stay out of our hair, and I’ll feed you updates when it’s safe.***

  ***Okay.***

  ***Okay,*** he says, and there’s an empty moment that feels like I’ve just been punched in the head, minus the pain—then I’m staring at a cracked mirror and clutching my right bicep, which is aching like a pulled molar.

  This management gig isn’t as easy as it looks at first sight, is it?

  I ORDER UP DINNER ON ROOM SERVICE, WATCH A SHITTY COMEDY on the in-room TV channel, then hit up the minibar for a half bottle of wine. Drinking on my own is a bad idea but I manage to keep to just the one serving, and anyway, going out and looking to get drunk in company is an even worse prospect under the circumstances. I am not merely stranded in hotelspace, I am adrift in hoteltime in my very own personal air-conditioned TARDIS. Eventually I drift off to sleep, at first to dream of burning goats checking my time sheet for accounting errors, and then—

  Oh shit, is my first reflexive thought as I wake up inside a dream: I’ve been here before, and I didn’t like it the first time.

  I’m in a dream, and in this dream I am awake, and I am immobilized, and I am very, very thirsty for something other than water.

  Above me the sky is dark from horizon to horizon, dark but not black: a gossamer streamer of varicolored dust clouds splashes across the night like a Thuggee strangler’s silk scarf. The starscape itself is crammed with the red and dying stellar wreckage of a prematurely aged galactic core. Below the horizon I can sense the dying sun, bulbous and red, choking on the corpses of its planetary children. But not this world. The moons—plural—have set, but the dim radiance of the nebula overhead casts long shadows across the parched plateau and the Watchers and the Pyramid.

  The Pyramid.

  I’m one of the Watchers—or rather, I’m a passive, helpless passenger inside the skull of one of the dead, mummified Watchers who the Bloody White Baron impaled in a huge circle on the dying plain nearly a century ago, to form a ring of human sacrificial guards around the Pyramid. The Baron, himself a figure out of nightmares and a necromancer of no small talent, had nightmares of his own about the thing that sleeps in the Pyramid: the Opener of the Ways, some call it. The sleepers are quantum observers, eyeless and dead but still alive, condemned to collapse the wave function of the thing in the mile-high tomb so that it is forever asleep—

  (Because if the Watch on the Pyramid fails the Black Bird of Hangar 12B will fly its one-way mission, the last forlorn hope of the British strategic nuclear deterrent, and then all hell will literally break loose.)

  —Why am I here?

  I am, it occurs to me, having a lucid dream. Which is an utterly horrible experience when you wake up inside an impaled, mummified corpse propped up on a stainless steel spike in front of a geometric shape that makes your imaginary insides curdle with terror. I’d pinch myself if I could move the withered, blackened claws I have instead of hands. The peripheral nerves of this body have shriveled and decayed along with its flesh, but I can still feel the other Watchers to either side of me. Indignant and hungry and incoherent with rage and grief and the shattering of life’s dream, they recognize the presence of a not-dead soul and lust to eat my identity, to pour my waters into the drained pool of their deaths—

  I strain at my imprisoning flesh, but it won’t move. Dead, of course; silly me! I may have learned a thing or two about death when the Cult of the Black Pharaoh were busily trying to feed me to the Eater of Souls, but that doesn’t mean I can reboot the cellular machinery from scratch once the algorithms of life have run their course and halted for good. And while there may be some kind of animation trigger that’ll make the mummy dance, I don’t have it.

  Something brought me to wakefulness here. What? Or who?

  I shiver involuntarily. There’s a low rumble, resonating through the tiny bones of my inner ears. Moments later I feel, as much as see, the corpses on the spikes to either side of me vibrate in sympathy. A dusty ripple spreads out across the plain in front of the Pyramid, rising on a blast of shocked air. The vibration intensifies, the ground rocking, setting my jawbone clattering uselessly against my skull. Somewhere a phone is ringing off the hook.

  Earthquake?

  The phone is ringing as the earthquake intensifies. It’s my phone, I realize, and I reach for it, and the dream disintegrates around me on the darkling plain as I roll sideways and swipe, my arm spasming across the bedside table until I grasp the phone and hug it like a drowning man with a lifebelt.

  It’s still ringing. I clutch it to my ear and hiss, “Yessss… ?”

  An unfamiliar female voice says, “Hello? Can I speak to Mr. Howard, please?”

  “Speaking.” My blurry eyes slowly focus on the bedside alarm clock.

  “I’m conducting a survey on behalf of Scamworth and Robb Double Glazing; would you be interested in doing a short questionnaire? Our salespeople are in your area and I wonder if you’d—”

  “It’s four thirty in the morning.” Everything comes into very sharp focus. “And I very much doubt you’re in my area, unless you are flying a helicopter over downtown Denver. Where did you get this number?”

  “Oh, I’m terribly sorry Mr. Howard—”

  “Where did you get this number?” I repeat, a horrible focal point of hunger crunching itself tighter and tighter inside my head. “Tell me!”

  “You’re…in our database…” Her voice begins to slur.

  “You will remove this number from your database.” My voice is deathly and controlled. “Then you will tell your supervisor that if any of your people ever call this number, men in unfamiliar uniforms will drag them away in manacles and they will never be seen again. Do I make myself understood?”

  “Wha…! There’s no need to be rude!” She sounds indignant. Obviously she doesn’t get the message.

  A silvery spike of pure rage flashes through my head: “Listen! Obey! Submit! I bind you in the name of—”

  I bite the back of my tongue with my molars, hard enough to draw blood. High Enochian is harsh on the vocal chords; more importantly, what the fuck am I thinking? I switched to a metalanguage of compulsion because I was about to tell a double-glazing call center sales drone to go and—oh Jesus, no. That’s the sort of thing the Black Assizes nail you for.

  I hang up, hastily, with a shudder. Then I swallow something warm. Blood. I’ve bitten my tongue and it’s bleeding.

  It’s four thirty in the morning. I roll out of bed, stumble to the bathroom, and welcome in the new day by throwing up in the toilet. After which I can’t get back to sleep.

  I SLEEPWALK THROUGH SATURDAY MORNING IN A STATE OF borderline shock, unable to trust myself. The world outside is still there, just the same as before, but somehow it feels different, more distant. Tenuous and breakable. I go downstairs and hit the hotel swimming pool, but after a couple of dozen lengths I’m gasping for breath. Denver air is thin and unsatis
fying. So I wander out, find a coffee shop to hang out in with a pretzel and a mocha and something that claims to be a newspaper.

  Towards late morning I go back to my room. It’s been made up, as before. Good. I make myself comfortable on the bed then cold-bloodedly drop myself back into Persephone’s head.

  There have been changes.

  Persephone is standing in the open courtyard outside the timber-framed conference hall. Consternation: so are the other students. There’s a trestle outside, and the door handles are taped shut. “I’m sorry,” one of Schiller’s assistants from the night before is saying, “we can’t use the conference hall today, there’s been a leak. We’re waiting for the bus right now, so we can continue off-site in one of the Ministries’ buildings. And the reverend has been delayed—he’s in a meeting this morning, some kind of business that couldn’t wait.”

  “Are we going to run late?” asks one of the men from the previous night—Persephone’s memory prompts, Jason, an accountant from Colorado Springs—thick-set, red-faced, hypertensive. “Because if so, I’ve got a—”

  “It’s coming now,” interrupts the woman. (Christina, according to Persephone. Slightly heavy, ruddy-faced, wears a cross that’s just slightly too large for her neck.) Persephone turns. There is indeed a smallish shuttle bus, outfitted with leather-upholstered seats.

  “He’s worried about being late,” Darryl the real estate agent confides in Persephone’s ear. “You ask me, he should worry more about being late before he’s got himself square with Jesus.”

  “Are you square with Jesus?” Persephone asks with a bright and elegant smile.

  “I surely am.” Darryl is smugly self-satisfied about his salvation status. His eyes wander around Persephone’s person, unconsciously undressing her—she briefly fantasizes about rabbit-punching him—then settle on her wrist. “That’s a pretty bracelet.” He focuses on the engraved silver band as the bus draws up, its doors opening to take the course participants up to the Golden Promise compound. “What’s it say?” She raises it, turns her wrist. “Huh. W. W. L. J. D.—does that mean ‘What Would Lord Jesus Do’?”

  “Something like that.” Her smile widens. Thank you, Johnny, she thinks, and I glimpse in the front of her mind what the bracelet really stands for and choke, which is when she notices me.

  For a moment I’m somewhere very very dark and very very bright, like a bug on a microscope slide the size of a galaxy, pinned down by laser-bright spotlights beneath the inspection of a vast, unfriendly intelligence.

  ***Mr. Howard. Get out of my head and stay out.***

  She is not pleased, but I get to live—this time.

  ***Uh…okay,*** I manage.

  With an effort of will I begin to disentangle myself from her senses. But I’m not fast enough, and she is obviously not happy, because suddenly she shoves, chucking me out of her mind so hard that I lose consciousness.

  WHICH IS WHY I DON’T HAVE A RINGSIDE SEAT IN PERSEPHONE’S and Johnny’s heads when everything goes right to hell.

  9.

  SPEAKING IN TONGUES

  “IT’S IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND GOD’S PLAN,” SCHILLER says, clasping his hands behind his back, chin lowered to his chest, braced against the force of his own wisdom.

  “First, we must follow His instructions. Go forth, be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth with souls obedient to His will. Live good lives, obey His rules, be faithful members of His flock, and when the end comes we’ll be safe forever in heaven. That much is clear. But. But.”

  He’s pacing back and forth across the stage now. “That isn’t enough.” He stops in the middle of the stage, turns and faces his audience. His expressive face, lit from below, is suddenly shadowed and ominous. “There are one and a half billion Muslims on this Earth. A billion and a half Chinese communists, a billion Indian Hindu elephant-worshippers. One point two billion Catholics, misled by the Vatican. And I’m afraid they’re all going to go to hell if we don’t manage to save them in time. This is a tragedy; the great, besetting tragedy of our age is that at least ninety-five percent of currently living humanity is going to burn in hell. To make matters worse, this is the most populous century ever—there are more than seven billion of us! We know the truth, and the necessary steps to salvation are simple: accept Jesus into your hearts—you’re all Saved, there’s room for you in the lifeboat, but why aren’t we saving them?”

  Ray is clearly anguished, Persephone realizes; he believes this stuff with all his soul and all his guts. He believes in the viral metaphor of a bronze-age rabble-rouser from the Levant, as interpreted by his syncretist followers scattered throughout the Roman Empire. He believes in heaven and hell as real, literally existing destinations you can book an airline ticket to. He believes salvation is a deterministic, card-punching exercise in holding faith in the right god; believes that there’s a coming End of Time in which his godhead will return to Earth, reading minds and separating the sheep from the goats. No need to ask why his God might prescribe eternal torture for the unbelievers, no need to engage with the problem of free will—Schiller’s eschatology is either brutally truncated or sublimely simple, depending on viewpoint. One thing it isn’t is nuanced.

  Persephone rubs her bracelet uneasily. (WWLJD indeed.) True believers unnerve her, for she has seen the Red Skull in their observances, witnessed the rites of the Cult of the Black Pharaoh, and she knows the abhorrent truth: the things humanity call gods are either lies or worse, alien and abhuman intelligences that promise something not unlike hell but without any heavenly insurance policy. The pre-existing destination for humanity is death. But Schiller doesn’t see it from that angle; in his own way he is an idealist and an optimist.

  “Everyone who isn’t square with Jesus is destined to go to hell. That means about seven billion souls at this moment. Golden Promise Ministries was established in 1896 by Pastor William Gantz to honor a promise he made when he first realized the magnitude of the crisis, and I am personally sworn to follow him, unto death if necessary. Our mission is simple: We’re not going to let it happen. We’re going to save every human soul it’s possible to save before our Lord returns. And his return is imminent, within our lives: closer, it could be next year, next month, even next week. So we’ve got to work fast.”

  Schiller pauses for a moment to take a sip of water from the glass on his lectern. Persephone glances around the room. Her fellow Omega Course attendees are rapt in the grip of his glamour, mesmerized by his bullshit. She shivers. He’s a powerful speaker. Despite her occult knowledge—for Persephone is fully cognizant of the dismal message of the One True Religion—she’d be in his grip too, were it not for the cross-shaped ward she wears.

  “Our Lord Jesus Christ is going to return sometime within our lifetimes. The signs are there before us, the turmoil and decadence and chaos of these last days. The corruption of Western civilization. We’ve formed a team to pray for guidance—the forward observer study group, we call them—and the signs are clear to read: Jesus is coming. Well, short of actively trying to delay him”—Schiller chuckles drily—“we can’t do anything about the timing; ‘For as the lightning cometh from the east and flashes to the west, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be.’ But we can do our best to sort out the tribes of man first.

  “We need bodies to wage the war for Christ. We can increase our numbers by adoption—you may have noticed the crèches and kindergarten facilities here—and we can raise large families and guide our children to the path of righteousness. If you’re not raising a large family, even if you’re infertile, then you’re not doing all you can for Jesus.

  “And we can work on other strategies. Our missions leverage the latest marketing and narrowband consumer targeting protocols to make best use of the internet to reach—”

  Persephone discreetly stands and sidles towards the doorway.

  She’s taken a seat at one end of the back row, just to make this move possible. And she’s consumed two cups of coffee in the past hour. “I need the
restroom,” she quietly tells Julie, or maybe she’s a Christina or a Roseanne—the mousy-haired young woman in a gray maxi-dress who stands by the door.

  “Sure thing, ma’am.” The handmaiden opens the door and they duck outside. Behind them, Schiller is rattling on about Web 2.0 communications strategies for evangelical outreach. “If you’d like to follow me?”

  Persephone slides into place behind her escort, eyes wide open and scanning the passageways to either side as she is escorted down a corridor and round a bend to a discreetly camouflaged restroom, where her escort leaves her and hurries back to the conference room.

  (Which means the clock is ticking.)

  Persephone waits out her guide and guard’s departure, then steps out into the hall. Her badge is flipped round, the big red V (for visitor, presumably) hidden as she paces rapidly in the opposite direction from the lecture hall. Three minutes, she thinks. She adjusts the bracelet again: What Would Leeroy Jenkins Do? It’s Johnny’s little joke, dating back to an experiment with World of Warcraft as a global conferencing system for the Network. The intel team that raids together stays together.

  This part of the conference center is set up around three lecture theaters and a hall, plus support offices. And it’s a Saturday. It doesn’t take Persephone long to find an unoccupied receptionist’s station, complete with a PC. She does a quick risk assessment. Pros: it gets the job done, and today’s a Saturday, which minimizes the chance of discovery. Cons: her pre-canned excuse won’t work. The pros win. She touches the mouse, thumbs the screen to life, sticks her USB stick in a free socket at the back, then yanks and re-inserts the power cable. The PC’s BIOS isn’t password protected, and it’s the work of a minute to start it rebooting off her memory stick.