The Annihilation Score (Laundry Files)

by Charles Stross

  The SA stands, and walks to the podium. “Thank you,” he says, his smile slightly strained in the face of the stunned silence that follows Dr. Sanchez’s and Dr. Mike’s presentations. “That was most thought-provoking!” His smile vanishes. “Now, as you can imagine, this presents us with something of a conundrum. So I’d like to devote the rest of this session to discussing ideas for monitoring, tracking, and if possible, remediating the problem of K syndrome parasites afflicting our three-sigma and higher superpowers. Not to mention dealing with public awareness of the risk of K syndrome to the lower-powered. Does anyone want to speak first? Ah, Johnny, I see you already have your hand up…”

  “What about Bee?” Mhari demands. Her voice is shrill and grates on my nerves. “And Torch?”

  We’re walking along the fourth-floor corridor in the direction of the stairwell. I feel numb. I don’t want to be having this conversation: “What about Jim?” I counter.

  “What about” – she stops dead, blank-faced – “what?”

  I keep going for a couple more steps, then turn on my heel to face her. “Officer Friendly,” I say quietly, “is at least a three-sigma power. How much of what he does is down to the fancy armor, and how much is his own mojo?”

  “I assume it’s mostly him, but I really don’t know.” She pauses. “But I know who will.”

  I allow Mhari to lead me down the stairs to the third floor, then along the corridor leading to the HR hive. Strictly speaking the New Annex only houses Field Ops personnel and supporting specialties; there are a lot of outlying groups, including R&D, Training, Admin, Analysis, and HR, all of whom have their own offices elsewhere in the capital (and in some cases outside it). But Field Ops has its own rather specialized HR requirements, and consequently HR has its own outpost within Field Ops’ territory. It’s there to handle things like payroll and pensions for Residual Human Resources,* disciplinary hearings for chaos magicians, and new background identities for operatives who have been declared dead. Mhari is clearly familiar with these offices, for she heads straight towards one corner, knocks on a door, and says, “Alison? It’s me! Do you have a couple of minutes?”

  “Sure! Come in!” Alison is a chirpily cheerful thirty-something in a canary-yellow top and big bold spectacles with shoulder-length brown hair. “You’re looking good, Mhari! Who’s this?”

  “This is Dr. O’Brien, my director,” Mhari says. I smile and do the office-hello waggle-dance, and Alison buzzes right back: pretending we’re all worker bees together, got a hive to run, honey to store, pollen to collect. “We’ve come up with an unusually knotty HR problem, and rather than go through channels I was hoping you could help us sort it out here and now.”

  “A problem?” Alison looks suddenly wary.

  I take a deep breath. “We’ve just been to a briefing that I can’t share with you in detail yet. It has some worrying implications for the risk of medical disability” – I catch Mhari mouthing K syndrome out of the side of my eye and send her a disapproving look – “and in particular some of our staff are potentially at risk. Direct employees I know how to deal with. The trouble is, one of the people in my group is actually a designated liaison officer from another organization: the Metropolitan Police, by way of ACPO. His personnel file here is probably no more than a placeholder – a record of him signing Section Three and being approved for liaison. What I want to know is, what can I legitimately get hold of?”

  Alison looks puzzled. “He’s a policeman? On the cleared list, am I understanding this correctly? With the Met?”

  “The Met have seconded him to the Association of Chief Police Officers, who have assigned him to my unit, which is nominally part of the Security Service but staffed with a mixture of Laundry, SS, and ACPO bodies.” Alison begins to look twitchy as I lay it all out before her. “In addition to this employee being a police officer, he’s a three-sigma superpower. I need to know the precise date on which his powers began to manifest, and their scope, as tested —”

  “Why don’t you ask him?” Alison asks. Clearly she doesn’t lip read.

  I give up. “We think he’s at risk of a neurodegenerative condition,” I tell her. “One associated with his superpower. I will ask him directly if I absolutely have to, but I’d prefer to perform a preliminary risk assessment and identify our options before I talk to him and, if necessary, refer him for counseling. I don’t have his full personnel file, and although he’s working for me he’s outside my reporting chain: I can’t pull his records without cutting across at least two agencies, which will take time. If he’s at risk, this would obviously be bad. If he’s not at risk, I’d prefer to avoid alarming and upsetting him needlessly. So what can we do?”

  “Oh, Mhari.” Alison’s expression is priceless. “You do find them, don’t you?”

  “I do my best.” Mhari looks rueful. She leans forward, making eye contact: I hope she’s not trying to roll someone in HR with her PHANG mind-control power, but no… “What do you think we should do?”

  “I think you’d better give me Problem Child’s full name and identifying details. And an email address” – she sends me a significant look – “where I can reach you. So you want to know about the scope of his superpowers?”

  “Yes,” I say. “And one other thing. In strictest confidence now: when he’s not being a regular officer, he has a secret identity you might have heard of. He’s Officer Friendly. Yes, he’s working for me in both capacities. The thing is, I’m also curious about the capabilities of his special armor. If he’s at risk of K syndrome whenever he exercises his superpowers, it may make a huge difference if he’s relying on the armor for strength, flight, or other capabilities – or if he’s doing it all himself via an unconscious invocation loop. Someone must have arranged for him to get his hands on it – my money is on ACPO – so there will be records in his professional training and development transcript pointing to when and who taught him to operate the thing.”

  Alison smiles. “I like the way you think. That’ll be a big help, if I can find someone with access.”

  I stand. “If you can do this for me, it’d be more than a help: it might save his life.”

  She stands and waves us towards the door. “Message received.” She nods at Mhari. “We must get together some time, eh?”

  Mhari nods. “Been too long,” she agrees. “Must fly! Until next time…”

  I go in to the office early on Wednesday, because I’m meeting up with Jim and we’re going off-site for the day. We have a dog and pony show to deliver, and I’m actually quite nervous because a lot of our future work will hinge on how it’s received. I made sure to leave work early yesterday for a hair salon appointment, and today I’m wearing my sharpest suit so I’m looking my most presentable. It’s not the Home Office: it’s an even more secretive and powerful organization – the Association of Chief Police Officers.

  It was Jim’s idea, actually. He came up with it late last month: “The Manchester business with Alice Christie got me thinking,” he said. “The Home Office has a clear view of what we’re doing here, and the people at Hendon are aware of you – but I haven’t seen much high-level chatter yet. I think it’d be a good idea to prepare a series of in-person briefings about the Transhuman Police Coordination Force and its work, to get the commissioners up to speed – otherwise there are going to be misconceptions, and they’ll fester.”

  “Sounds good. We ought to do that, and sooner rather than later – I’ll get Karim and Gillian, or whoever’s available, to pull together a bunch of slides, then you and I can go over the raw material and see if we can turn it into a lunchtime presentation? Do you want to see if you can organize a session with an audience we can poll for feedback later?” The offer of free food ought to bribe at least a couple to sit still while we PowerPoint at them, then we can use their responses to refine the pitch.

  “I can do better than that,” Jim assures me. “ACPO has semiannual summit meetings attended by Chief Police Officers from just about every force in th
e UK, right here in London, and the next one is in two weeks. There’s a day of briefings and presentations after the general meeting, and I think I can get us a speaking slot. It’s a first-class opportunity for networking, too. I can introduce you to all the main players.”

  So fast-forward to this morning. I go up to my office to deposit Lecter in the safe I’ve had installed there, collect my laptop (with preloaded presentation and a backup memory stick for emergencies), check the morning email for unexploded administrative ordnance, panic when I see the time, and head for the lobby. Where I run into Jim as he comes in. “Good morning, Dr. O’Brien.” He’s all formality today, from his mirror-finished black DMs to the epaulettes and braid on his dress tunic. “Are you ready to go?”

  I shrug, but my jacket shoulder pads are so stiff they barely move. “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. Let’s call a cab.”

  ACPO headquarters occupies part of a gray concrete and glass slab of post-brutalist office space on Victoria Street, sandwiched between Boeing’s London offices, the Department for Business Innovation & Skills, and the back side of New Scotland Yard. It’s so anonymous it could be mistaken for a council office or a firm of accountants, if not for the trickle of extremely senior police men and women in dress uniforms arriving from the Yard. The cab drops us off by the front door, and Jim leads me inside to reception: “Chief Superintendent Grey and Director O’Brien from TPCF. We’re giving an open briefing on the new Force’s area of interest across the road later this morning.”

  “Yes, sir.” The receptionist peers at his terminal: “I have your badges and kits for the breakout sessions here. If you’d like to go through the door to your left, Andrea will sort you out with your speakers’ packs…” A minute later we’re both wearing badges on lanyards and clutching printed schedules and a note telling us where to go and when. I follow Jim’s lead, happy to be socially invisible in unfamiliar surroundings.

  “We don’t get to sit at the high table or attend the big meeting,” Jim murmurs to me. “How about we go up the road and give things a last run-through over coffee?”

  “That’d be great,” I say fervently, and allow him to usher me along the covered walkway leading to the entrance, past the front desk, and up to the canteen. Where we drink enough coffee to wake the dead, go over our presentation one last time, double-check that the laptop’s battery is up to the job, and cool our heels until it’s time to go up to the eighth-floor briefing rooms that ACPO has booked for the breakout sessions after the principals finish with their main meeting.

  The presentation:

  About sixty Very Important Police Officers have converged on ACPO HQ and the Yard for the day. They’re here to discuss important policy matters affecting multiple forces, to chat one-on-one about matters of professional concern with their peers from other forces, and to attend briefings from a variety of agencies and organizations: the Crown Prosecution Service, newly outsourced forensic laboratories, HM Revenue & Customs, the National Crime Agency… and us. Because these are Very Important Police Officers and their time is valuable, they have carefully planned which seminars and presentations to attend: consequently we get the undivided attention of just fourteen of them. The extra seats are filled by the folks from the CPS, outsourced forensic laboratories, HM Revenue & Customs, the NCA, and other agencies who aren’t actually giving presentations of their own at the same time as us. It could be worse: they’re not our core target audience but we’re getting the message out, and that’s what matters.

  I’m not going to bore you with the presentation itself. You’ve probably sat through enough management PowerPoint pitches to write it yourself: open by defining a problem (the power curve showing the increasing frequency of superpowers over time), then introduce an organization to deal with the problem. Add a mission statement and an org chart, rhapsodize about your agency’s values, describe the future rollout of services, outline a protocol whereby your audience may send up the bat-signal to request your assistance, and finally thank them for their attention and reassure them that as valued stakeholders you welcome their feedback. Credits and curtain call.

  The audience, as always at this sort of off-site summit/mini-conference, is far more interesting than the presentation itself. The front row is mostly middle-aged white men in senior police uniforms (one woman, one nonwhite: not even the most optimistic commissioner will deny that the UK’s police forces have some catching up to do on diversity, especially at higher ranks). But appearances are deceptive. You don’t get to Assistant Chief Constable or above without being a habitual overachiever with a razor-sharp mind. Half of them have doctorates; the other half had to work even harder to get there, whether at thief-taking or politics. We allowed five minutes for questions and I’m still answering them when one of the organizers pops in through the door to wave us out to make room for the next speakers.

  “Well, I think that went well,” Jim confides as we emerge into a hallway where our hosts have set up a table with coffee supplies.

  “I hope so.” I pull out my compact to check my hair’s under control and my mascara isn’t running. “They really had me sweating at the end.”

  “What, John’s grilling about training and professional standards?” Jim is busy with the refreshments.

  “Yes, that – no, all of them.” My face having neither melted nor exploded, I put the mirror away and accept the cup of coffee Jim hands me. “John was right: it normally takes three months to train a PCSO, and two years for a probationary constable – and we’re trying to rush through candidates who didn’t originally want a career in policing?”

  “It’s not quite that bad.” I can’t tell whether Jim’s speaking of the coffee or the training program. “We’re running a specialist unit that gets called on as backup in response to specific events. The superpowered don’t need training in everyday policing tasks that don’t fall within their remit: they’ll never be deployed in a situation where they don’t have a responsible officer in charge. They just need to keep their noses clean and follow instructions. And I don’t think anyone is ahead of us on the learning curve in our field, so there’s nobody for us to look bad in comparison to.” I take a cautious sip of coffee as I wince. Jim’s perspective is blunter than usual: perhaps it’s the uniforms on all sides making him open up. “That’s probably what they’re thinking, even if they’re more polite to your face,” he adds. “Join me for lunch after the next talk? I think I can promise you an eye-opener.”

  I sit through the next half-hour slot (a woman from the CPS discussing new procedures for handling cases involving serious financial malfeasance – not my thing at all although I can see it’s useful to the intended audience), using the time to decompress. In due course I tag along with Jim behind a clot* of uniformed senior officers as they make their way towards the canteen at New Scotland Yard – because it’s necessary for them to be seen there, canteen culture being what it is even today.

  There’s a side room waiting for the top brass, although the door’s open so that everyone can see that they’re just regular coppers who eat and drink the same food as everyone else. Even if it’s a buffet and there are starched linen tablecloths waiting for them. Jim walks straight in – as an ACPO staffer it’s his right – and I tag along, hoping nobody calls my bluff.

  My middle-aged invisibility seems to come in handy – at least at first. I find myself sitting opposite Jim, sandwiched between an assistant chief from South Wales, Graham Walton, and his opposite number from Humberside, Chris Norton. They seem to know Jim (he’s probably on their radar as young and ambitious, possible future competition for a top slot), but the conversation is friendly enough: almost collegiate. So I do my best fly on the wall impersonation as they politely grill Jim about my organization.

  “… So we’re particularly worried about the public order angle,” Graham is telling Jim. He has a sausage impaled on the end of his fork and gestures with it while he speaks, knife poised ready to scoop a mashed potato shroud atop it when he finishes
and has time to chew: “Not your outliers, but the low-end troublemakers who come out to play at chucking-out time on a Saturday in Cardiff. Your two-sigma tanked-up chav with a skin full of Bucky can raise Cain on the early watch, but what if we’re not covered? Because you’ve only got the one team —”

  “We’re working on it.” Jim’s gaze flickers my way, then slides away as he looks at Chris Norton to see how his response is going down. “We’re still working up to operational status from zero across the board, Graham” – a sidelong glance at his Welsh interrogator, who is now demolishing his plate – “but we have to get the back-office system in place first. Currently we’re focusing on intelligence-led operations, starting by compiling a register of all known high-end offenders. We’re also working up a team of PCSOs with three-sigma or higher capability who can be brought into play by field commanders who need backup —”

  “But what about the leadership culture?” Chris pushes in. “I know you’re overstretched already with your ACPO brief, but what other officers do you have on-force to provide mentorship in a progressive policing environment?” I clear my throat, but he doesn’t stop: “There’s just one of you, and from that org chart you showed us earlier the TPCF is already up to twenty staff and growing rapidly – too rapidly for organic promotion from within. Do you plan to advertise senior positions for recruitment from other forces?”

  “Excuse me —” I try to cut in.

  “No need for that,” Jim replies, without giving me a chance to answer. It’s really annoying: I expected better of him. “We have a management skeleton already in place: people drawn from the Security Service who are on loan to the Home Office. It turns out the MoD already has a lot of experience handling superpowers. The real issue is building a Police culture within the organization, not finding high-quality administrative support and management personnel.”