4: BRIEFINGS
It takes a few minutes, but eventually everybody is seated around the table. I’m about to go to the foot of it, but the SA shakes his head and directs me towards a seat immediately to his left – and he’s chairing it. “Mr. Choudhury, if you’d like to start the briefing?”
Vikram clears his throat. He looks worried. “Do we have time?” he asks. “She’s due in front of the CO subcommittee in Conference Room A at five, and they don’t like to be kept waiting —”
“They’ll wait for us.” The SA is imperturbable. “She needs to be fully briefed, Vikram. Fully briefed.”
“Fully —” Vik shakes his head. “We could be here all week. Is she cleared?”
“She is now.” Dr. Armstrong looks at me. So does everyone else: I try not to shrink into a puddle in my seat. We have Jez Wilson and Gerry Lockhart, both with bags under their eyes. Jez manages Support and Liaison Ops, a euphemism that covers our friends from the Artists’ Rifles in Hereford; Gerry is in charge of External Assets, which, if this were a Bond movie, would be the double-0 section. There’s a woman I don’t know by name but associate with Audit Ops, kindly face, twinset and pearls; an elderly fellow with a halo of flyaway hair and a bushy Einsteinian mustache; and Emma MacDougal from HR. The point is, everyone I recognize here deals with Mahogany Row – the organization’s elite tier of semiautonomous practitioners – on a daily basis: some of them even have offices there. Which makes this a worryingly high-powered meeting.
“Dominique, welcome to the INCORRIGIBLE working group, whose deliberations you are now on the approved list for. We’re missing a few faces today – Angleton and Judith are terrible losses – so I’m afraid we’re going to have to improvise a bit. Mr. Choudhury?”
Vikram clears his throat. “You have probably noticed we have a growing problem with paranormal vigilantes,” he begins, then stops and shrugs. “And hooligans, like this morning’s miscreant. I’m sorry. If not for last night’s emergency, you wouldn’t have been in the firing line… but what’s done is done, and the genie is out of the bottle.”
The genie? Paranormal vigilantes? INCORRIGIBLE working group? What is this? I shake my head.
“Allow me to recap.” Vik walks over to a trolley with a laptop and overhead projector mounted on it. There’s a screen situated in front of the wall that I hadn’t paid any attention to before. He fidgets with the laptop for a moment, then brings up a graph. “CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN began, let’s see, nineteen months ago.” A vertical dotted line appears near the left of the time line. “We’re here.” Another dotted line marches up the screen near the right-hand edge of the graph. “Here’s one of the side effects: the frequency curve for paranormal incidents. Defined as ordinary people who wake up one morning and discover they have acquired a talent for summonings and bindings, ritual magic – which they mistake for superpowers.”
Oh dear. It’s your classic growth curve, starting low and staying low until about three months ago. Then it begins to double. And double again, rising fast, until it hits the dateline. Either the first quartile of a sigmoid curve, or – don’t go there – an exponential.
“Until recently we were seeing perhaps two or three incidents per ten million people per month. But we’re now up to one per million and climbing. If we extrapolate forward, we get to here,” says Vik. Another graph, with the first one shrunk down to occupy the left hand side of the screen. “If the growth rate doesn’t show signs of slackening soon, if we’re looking at a genuine exponential, it tends towards infinity in another four months. At which point we hit the, um, superhero singularity.”
I can’t seem to help myself: I know it’s bad form, but I interrupt. “Wait. Can you characterize these incidents? How serious are they?”
“Ah, that.” Vikram smiles ruefully. “It’s a bit difficult. There seems to be a power law function covering the spread of abilities. Next slide…” He brings it on-screen and, yes, it shows a classic bell curve – a Gaussian distribution – with the left side cut off around the eightieth percentile. “Here we are. Really minor anomalies don’t show up at all: I mean, we’ve got no way of identifying a four-year-old whose puppy always comes when she calls it, have we? Or a trawlerman who can call fishes, but is over quota and landing them illegally on the black market in Portugal. Now, a fifteen-year-old with the ability to control animals is a bit more obvious, especially if they attract attention by making a passing police horse tap-dance for their friends. And at the other end of the bell curve they stick out like a sore thumb: there was that business in Walthamstow last week, the, ah, ‘crazy cat lady.’”
I don’t remember hearing about a crazy cat lady in Walthamstow last week, but I’ve been a bit too busy to bother with the newspapers or TV news for the past few months. Judging by the winces around the table I must have missed out on something really extraordinarily noteworthy. I nod politely.
“More disturbingly, there are the negative powers. PHANG syndrome you know about. There are others. Being able to transform bits of your body into other objects might sound like a superpower until you get it wrong – there’s been an uptick in some really bizarre teratomas – cancers that look like fully developed organs in inappropriate places. Human Torches who lose self-control for even a second end up with a coroner delivering a narrative verdict of Spontaneous Human Combustion. And there seems to be an association, as one would expect, between people with abilities to the right of the normal distribution and, um, Krantzberg syndrome. We’re already seeing the first rapid-onset dementia cases, some as young as thirteen.”
Oh good grief, I think again.
K syndrome is an unpleasant side effect of practicing ritual magic. If you solve the right theorems in your head, you can invoke various interesting extradimensional entities and make them do things. But there’s a cost. Microscopic Eaters phase in and out of our universe in response to the thaum fields generated in this way. And sometimes, some of them pause for long enough to take a microscopic bite out of your gray matter until you go “insane on the brane” as Bob puts it. Once they get started they tend to come back to the buffet: K syndrome is progressive, and the only way to stop it progressing is to stop practicing magic.
“We believe the superpowers are a direct side effect of unconstrained background cognitive bandwidth processing. Bluntly, random people are thinking themselves into modes where they attract Actor/Agent entities and acquire various… abilities. It’s not yet obvious whether this is a true exponential, or just a step-function that will stabilize soon, but in the worst case, in another few months, almost everyone will be above the minimum threshold for ritual activation.”
“Oh dear,” Emma MacDougal says faintly, and fans herself with a notepad. “That’s really going to complicate our recruitment process.” I couldn’t put it better myself.
“I do not believe it is going to go that far,” Dr. Armstrong says calmly. “Professor Ford is preparing a report. Although he isn’t willing to release it until he’s triple-checked everything, he says that the step-function model is most likely to hold true, and that the rate of increase will taper off shortly. Something about there being no true singularities in nature, outside of a black hole.”
I take a deep breath and let it go slowly. If Mike Ford says it’s so, then there’s some reason for hope: he’s our resident expert on CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, the conjunction of stellar drift, the dreaming monkey population spike, and the computational singularity that is responsible for the surge in magic. If he’s right, it’s not the end of the world as we know it, just a very annoying new problem to deal with. He’s been known to be wrong from time to time, but if he is, the prospect of everyone on the planet suddenly acquiring superpowers simply doesn’t bear thinking about.
“Yes, well. One may hope he’s right again.” Vikram taps a key on the laptop. “Let me give you some examples. Annie Smith, from Leicester, aged twenty-two, works in a Poundland store. Last Friday robbers broke in through the loading bay as the manager was cashing up.
They knew where the alarm cable run was located – the police are sure there was an inside accomplice – and they were attempting to make off with the previous three days’ takings when Annie knocked them unconscious by bouncing them off the ceiling. Not the false ceiling, mind you, but the concrete ceiling one and a half meters above the suspended tiles. Annie is a hundred and forty-five centimeters tall – four feet and nine inches in old money – and weighs fifty kilos: they outweighed her four to one. Then there’s Geraldine Fawcett, eighty-two, of Oakshott, who has taken to wearing fishnet hose and a merry widow, and fights late night noise nuisances by —”
He goes on for another couple of increasingly surreal, not to say implausible, minutes before the SA clears his throat pointedly.
“Yes?”
“As you have already noted, we have limited time. Can I suggest we proceed to the psychological/media profile problem next?”
“If you insist.” Vikram pauses for long enough to take a mouthful of water from the glass in front of his place setting. “The reason we are seeing such a surge in Lycra futures is that ordinary people who know nothing about our business interpret their new abilities in terms of their pre-existing cognitive biases. A century ago it would have been framed in terms of miracles and angels and devils: witchcraft, in other words. But this is the twenty-first century in Britain, where the most rapidly growing religious demographic is ‘none of the above.’ And for the past few decades we’ve lived in a media environment where a particular fictional genre has been growing in popularity. I refer, of course, to the American superhero movie —”
“What about comics?” asks the fellow with the flyaway hair. He seems enthused. “Surely Marvel and DC are somewhat to blame? I remember when they first arrived on these shores in the 1960s…”
“Yes, comics too, I suppose, but movies reach a bigger audience,” Vikram says wearily. He looks as if he’s been back and forth over this ground until it’s churned into mud. “Superman, Iron Man, Batman” – Flyaway Hair winces visibly – “you name it. Rich, powerful, white alpha males who dress up in gimp suits and beat up ethnically diverse lower-class criminals. Reprehensible lawless vigilantes! It would be so much easier if we had Greek or Roman gods and demigods to deal with instead… ACPO are spitting blood.” (ACPO is the Association of Chief Police Officers, the not-a-trade-union for supercops that handles a lot of outsourced high-level policing policy work on behalf of the Home Office.) “The Home Office hates vigilantes in Lycra fancy-dress outfits almost as much as they hate lawbreakers. You see, superheroes don’t follow the rules of evidence. They take procedural shortcuts, assault criminals, mess up crime scenes, and generally make it almost impossible to secure a conviction. Not to mention committing a basket-load of offenses in their own right: aggravated trespass, assault, violating controlled airspace and flying without a license, breaking and entering, criminal damage…”
Oh. Oh. I finger a simple chord on my blotter, then realize that Gerry Lockhart is staring at my hand with an expression of deep distaste, and force myself to stop fidgeting. John bloody Williams. Why do I have to be earwormed by the first violin’s theme from Superman right now?
“Are any of them attributing it to magic?” I ask.
“Yes, some.” Vikram frowns. “But it’s currently running at less than twenty percent. Superhero is the dominant paradigm, and new fish tend to swim with the school. Why do you ask?”
“Well, let’s see. Am I right in thinking that the nature of the INCORRIGIBLE problem is that we are dealing with a plague of untrained occult practitioners who are interpreting their somewhat random skills as superhero abilities?”
Vikram nods, but the Senior Auditor takes it upon himself to reply. “Essentially yes, you’ve nailed it. But there’s more to it than that. Jez?”
Vikram takes his seat as Jez Wilson nods and picks up the thread. “The real problem isn’t just identification and suppression, Dr. O’Brien. The real problem is that it’s too public. It caught us on the hop, and now the news media are sensitized so they’re picking it up everywhere. The usual press chorus, something must be done, is already tuning up. The business this morning is just the latest and worst case, and your showing up on camera may actually be a blessing in disguise, because we need to find a way to get in front of the situation and take overt action to bring the paranormally enhanced under control – otherwise we’re going to be run ragged dealing with this nonsense rather than focusing on the organization’s core mission.”
There is a chirp from the SA’s suit pocket, then another chirp: the discreet mating call of the mobile phone. That the Senior Auditor carries a mobile phone at all, let alone that he doesn’t silence it in meetings, is so extraordinary a revelation that I stare, but then something even stranger happens: he pulls it out (a rather ancient Blackberry, plastic edges polished to a shine by constant use) and answers it, right in front of our shocked faces. In, as I said, a highly sensitive meeting.
“Hello? I’m in the INCORRIGIBLE session, didn’t I say I wasn’t to be – Oh. I see.” (A pause.) “He insists, does he? Damn. Damn. Yes, I’ll tell them.”
He puts his phone away and frowns.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to cut this short, ladies and gentlemen: they’ve brought the meeting forward an hour. Dr. O’Brien, Agent CANDID.” He nods at me. “As you can see, our organization has been dragged into dangerously close proximity to the public sphere by the INCORRIGIBLE problem. In particular, Mahogany Row are desperately keen to stay out of the limelight. So in order to avoid compromising our core mission, we need to generate a semi-classified proxy to deal with the superhero problem.
“Dominique.” I tense: his use of my first name is unusual enough to put my adrenal glands on fight-or-flee alert. “The narrative we are developing is that there is a secret department within the Security Service” – better known to members of the public as MI5 – “which deals with superpowered threats to the realm. As your cover has been comprehensively blown by this morning’s events, I have decided that it is necessary to place Agent CANDID on indefinite furlough.”
I’m afraid I gasp involuntarily: I manage to suppress the flinch reflex. Agent CANDID is my operational designation. Worse, it has framed my working life for the past several years. Part-time academic by day, part-time Laundry researcher and active service operative by night – and occasional on-call executioner.
The Senior Auditor rolls on, pretending not to notice my lapse: “Meanwhile, we want you – that is, Dr. Dominique O’Brien – to become the semi-public face of OPERATION INCORRIGIBLE. Semi-public in this context means that you will interact directly with other government agencies. Your cover story is that you are a senior member of the aforementioned secret department of MI5, answering to the Home Office, where you will recruit and operate an, ah, ‘Superhero Team’ to, um, ‘fight crime.’ You will appear to report to the regular Security Service authorities, and your department will identify and execute suitable responses to the anomalous power threat.
“Fighting crime is the cover story for the BBC and national news media. The internal narrative within other civil service departments, and for open dissemination within MI5 and the Police, is that your primary objective is to put the frighteners on the pervert suits. Compliant ones will be recruited and corralled in a safe organizational framework that provides them with plenty of opportunities for make-believe superhero work; noncompliant ones can be taken down in public if necessary, without compromising the operational security of designated national security agencies. We anticipate full and enthusiastic support for this goal from the Police and the Security Service, because this strategy feeds into their operational goals and all they’re required to do is to claim credit for your hard work.
“But those are merely your tertiary and secondary tasks. Your primary objective is to insulate the Laundry from public exposure and consequential political meddling by directing media attention away from us and towards the antics of the official government superhero team, work
ing for this fictional department within the Security Service.” His smile is terrifying. “In other words, think of yourself as James Bond’s M – if Bond had a cape.”
“But no such organization exists!” I protest, horrified. I’ve got to battle supervillains in public? Worse: I’m working for the Home Office? The Laundry is part of the security services, answerable to the Ministry of Defense, while the Home Office is all about law enforcement. “Two cultures” doesn’t even begin to describe the scale of the divide.
“The organization you will be in charge of exists as of now, at least on paper.” The SA’s smile is fey. “Mrs. MacDougal, the dossier, if you please…?”
Emma gives me a sympathetic look as she slides a ten-centimeter-thick dossier across the table towards me. “Sorry dear,” she says: “I’m afraid you’re promoted – sideways.”
“Better read quickly,” the Senior Auditor adds. “Because that phone call was the Chief Secretary to the Cabinet Office. They’re expecting you in Cabinet Office Briefing Room A in forty-two minutes precisely. Just in time to update the Deputy Prime Minister on your new assignment.”
I thought I’d hit rock bottom on my way into the Admiralty building: little did I suspect how much further there was to sink!
Emma’s dossier is a doozie. If it’s to be believed, I have been promoted three whole grades in a single bound. I am now attached to the org chart of the sprawling bureaucratic empire popularly misidentified as MI5, about three management tiers down from the top and so far off to one side that I’m teetering on the edge of a virtual cliff, with dotted lines leading off the edge of the paper in the direction of the iceberg labelled Home Office. And what a view this cliff overlooks! I have no less than five subdepartments under me, and something like forty staff. But it’s a skeleton crew for now. Their niches on the org chart are all blank for the time being, a tabula rasa labelled INSERT RECRUIT HERE; half of them are tagged SUPERHERO. I have a budget of three million a year, an open requisition for a Secret Bunker and a Team Headquarters (subject to authorization, approval, and planning permission), and an entire back story to memorize for my decades-old career as some kind of high-level counter-espionage expert.
The Annihilation Score (Laundry Files) Page 7