by Anthology
"What you keep forgetting, Dee-Dee, is that according to the well-known laws of quantum mechanics, we create reality. In effect, there is no 'out there' out there."
I'd heard this argument before. It was popular with some hermetic magicians, I knew, though it wasn't at all mainstream. Not yet.
"You're talking about the Awakening, right?" I asked.
He nodded. "And a lot else. But we brought the Awakening on ourselves."
"Nonsense," Cammie said, but she was frowning. "That was just… just magic."
"What do you think magic is, but the use of belief to change reality?"
I glanced at Dee, at her delicately pointed ears, then at Thud, who was sitting there sharpening the tips of his horns, apparently not even listening, massive as a mountain, with fangs protruding two centimeters up from behind his lower lip.
An elf, a troll, and two humans. A hundred years ago, it would have been four humans. So where did the metahumanity come from?
Oh, yeah. We did it to ourselves. At least Scoot and a few like him thought so, and I had to admit the theory made as much sense as anything I'd ever heard. Seems that back at the end of the 20th century, and through the first decade of the 21st, we had all kinds of belief in the Big Changes coming. Cop it. The fundy Christians were so certain that Armageddon was right around the corner, with all the hosts of Satan ready to rise up and follow the Antichrist. And the fundy Muslims, the Shiites, anyway, were invested in the coming of the Mahdi and the creation of Allah's New Order on Earth. Even the New Agers got into the act, focusing on channeled messages of coming Earth Changes, and the ancient Mayan prophecies that the Fifth Sun was coming to an end in 2012.
With that much pure, raw belief gnawing at the foundations of Reality, man, something had to give.
And it did. It's tough to remember sometimes, sixty years later, that the Old World Order was all human. No trolls. No orks. No elves. No dwarves. And no magic. None that worked reliably, at any rate.
We called it the Awakening when the Old Order fell. Hidden away within the human genome were all of the metahuman racial types, it turned out, and suddenly Black and White and Latino and Asian didn't matter anymore. We were all humans, and we were sharing the planet with the stuff of myth and legend. Magic worked and dragons were real and Civilization itself was crumbling around our ears.
So, what the hell? Maybe old H.P. Lovecraft's little nightmares could have something to them after all. The potential of becoming real, if enough people closed their eyes and thought about it real hard.
"What do you think about all of this, Thud?" I asked.
"Don't think," the troll rumbled. He sounded like a good-natured earthquake. "Just do. Long as the nuyen're there."
Thud could be remarkably down-to-earth about things.
"We got our advance," I told them. "Look, at the very least we clear better'n eighteen-K apiece, right? We go in, show 'em it can't be done, and get out. Simple."
"Yeah? What if it can be done?" Scooter asked. The Voice had gone, and the annoying fanboy was back.
I shrugged. "Then we get fifty-freakin'-K apiece. How hard can it be?"
"Don't say that, Fix," Cam told me. "Don't ever say that. Somebody might be listening."
"They will be." I chuckled, and held up the bag of nannies. "Count on it."
"We really need to wear those things?" Dee said. "I don't like it."
"Me neither. But it's just for the op. They won't be watching you shower."
"It's just upgraded RFID," Dee said. "No big deal."
She used the streetslang pronunciation, "ar-fid." Radio frequency identification devices are everywhere-those little tags that control shoplifting and inventory, keep track of the kids, and let you dial in to the local net to get the name and number of the pretty girl you're chatting up on the street. They work by broadcasting a limited chunk of data that you can read on your commlink from like thirty or forty meters away.
Nannies are the same, but with more bandwidth, and with audio and vid channels. You wear the little flesh-colored dot on your forehead. It sees everything you see through an ultra-small nanocamera, and hears what you hear through a microphone the size of a large protein molecule. The range varies, depending on whether it's a government or a corporate model, but it's a lot farther than forty meters… and it can get through almost any of the usual RF barriers. Mr. Johnson's people really would be watching. • • •
It took Dee three days to hack the system, but we got what we needed to make the strike. Mitsubishi-Mellon had all kinds of defenses up, of course, but there are always cracks in the walls. We'd snuck into tougher places.
The biggest problem was that we were operating under deadline. Our Mr. Johnson had provided us with a few details. Seems he had a pipeline into this Zayid character's inner sanctum-a circle of twelve that was doing the heavy lifting for Zayid's major working. A street shaman named Shifter hadn't liked what he'd seen, and he'd made contact with our Mr. Johnson's people, whoever they were.
So, courtesy of Shifter, we knew Zayid was doing a series of incantations every night of the waning Moon, and that it was all coming to a head at midnight on the night of the new Moon-the 5th. And that was three days from my meeting with the Johnson.
But Dee found us a way in that ought to bypass the defenses at the front entrance, at least. We'd need to jimmy a lock to get us into an infrastructure service tunnel two blocks from the M amp;M building, then follow the fiber-optics and water pipes into the tower's basement. At that point, Dee would have to hack the building OS to take down certain surveillance cameras and the pressure sensors in the floor, and there would be guards outside the staff elevator.
From there it was up sixty-eight floors to where Zayid was doing his thing.
Simple. What could possibly go wrong? • • •
What indeed?
How about the extra SWAT-rigged security facing us as soon as we stepped out of the service tunnel?
I still don't know what the hell went wrong. Maybe Dee missed a security line when she hacked in. Maybe the whole op was compromised from the start. Hell, maybe we were set up. But Cammie stepped through that door, muttered a heartfelt oscar-sierra over her comm, and rolled for it as the bullets started slamming into the wall.
Scoot spat something under his breath, and a guard three meters away snapped backward, arms pinwheeling as he slammed into a wall. Thud reached out with two hands the size of large turkeys and grabbed a couple of other guards by the throats, hoisting them off the floor and giving them a hard shake as a pacifier. I stepped out from behind him with my Predator IV in both hands, squeezing off one shot after another into the mob of black-suits in front of us.
I don't know if it was Scoot's stunbolt, the sight of the Predator, or Thud's enthusiasm, but the rent-a-cops still standing bolted for the cover of a bend in the hallway. I pulled out a bouncy-boom, squeezing hard to arm it. I tossed it hard, aiming to bounce off the floor, hit the back corridor wall, and ricochet behind the corner. On the third bounce, it detonated with a serious ear-ringing wham, and corp-cops were spilling back out into the opening, hands clutched to bleeding ears.
"Put 'em to sleep, Thud-boy!" I called. I didn't like killing the local security, even if a second ago they'd been trying to kill me. After all, their only crime was trying to earn an honest credstick… unlike yours truly.
They'd have headaches when they woke up, after Thud finished with them, but probably no broken bones. Probably.
The elevator required an electronic passkey. Dee could have finagled it… but one of the guards was nice enough to furnish us with one. We crowded inside-it's always a crowd with Thud present-and told it we wanted the 68th floor.
Of course, we weren't born yesterday. Thud had the maintenance hatch in the car's ceiling open with one, heavy-fisted bam, and we were already scrambling up through the opening and on top the roof when the car came to an abrupt and unscheduled halt between floors 64 and 65. When the gas came hissing into the car beneath us, we were
already on the maintenance access ladder and climbing.
Cammie paused long enough to drop an RFID gas sensor down the open hatch in the elevator and check the result on her commlink.
"Shit!" she said, pocketing the comm and starting to climb. "Neurotox! One-whiff deadly! Climb!"
Hell, that just sucked big slimy ork toes. The corp-bastards could have used sleepy-gas. These guys were trying to kill us!
At the sixty-sixth level we let ourselves in through a maintenance hatch, and quietly slipped into a nearby stairwell. We were two floors from our goal and well ahead of sched. We didn't have the luxury of much time, though. It would take them maybe ten minutes to ventilate the elevator, and then they'd know we'd stepped out. And up.
Scoot used another of his bolts to slam an armed and armored guard in the stairway senseless, and Dee tripped the maglock on the door to the 68th floor. We were in.
But I scowled at my watch and signaled for the others to wait. The toughest part about this op was the timing. We knew from our informant that Zayid expected to get the "merchandise" at midnight tonight… and we were running about four minutes fast. If we burst in on the chanters now, we might interrupt the circle, keep them from opening the gate… which, of course, meant we couldn't get the merchandise either.
Assuming there was any merchandise to get. I still couldn't make myself believe that we were going to find the storied Necronomicon when we broke up Zayid's little party.
But we waited, waited as sweat prickled at our necks and backs, waited as Scooter psychically scanned for approaching trouble.
The nanny on my forehead itched. The thing drew power for the cam and mike set from my skin. The larger transmitter on my belt had a built-in power unit all its own. I hoped our unseen employers were getting an eyeful; we were counting on them to airlift us off the roof after we'd completed the hit. It was better than trying to fight our way all the way back down the M amp;M Tower to the street.
Time.
I looked back at Thud, who crouched behind me with his usual patient mountain-presence. His forehead sloped back so sharply between his massive horns that we'd placed his nanny on his throat. Otherwise, our peeping Toms would've seen nothing but the ceiling through his minicam. "Get to the roof," I told him. "Clear it and wait for us. Got it?"
"Got it," he rumbled. He unslung the autocannon he'd been wearing over his shoulder and gave it a friendly pat. "I wait for you."
So now it was just the three of us, stepping through the stairwell door and moving along the passageway looking for Conference Room 68-4. That was where our informant had said Zayid was casting his circles. It ought to be just ahead.
And we could hear it now… an eerie, droning harmony of male voices. We couldn't make out the words, but we could hear the tones easily enough, moaning and buzzing and humming from the next doorway down the hall. There was another guard standing there, but Scooter was muttering under his breath again, throwing up a stealth spell around us as we closed in on him. He saw us… but too late. He went down as Dee burst-fired three silenced rounds into him from her Ingram Smartgun.
The door beside the body was locked, and the passkey on the body didn't work.
By now, the building's defenses must be fully alerted to our presence. We had minutes now, at most, before a small corporate army converged on the 68th floor.
Midnight. Now the only question was whether Zayid's people were on time inside that conference room. I considered waiting another minute… but a minute is forever on a run, and I didn't much care to hang around in a corporate hallway waiting for the M amp;M goons to show. I nodded at Dee, and she went to work on the lock with a sequencer.
I could hear the chanting much more clearly now. Funny words… incomprehensible, like people trying to gargle and cough at the same time.
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn…"
The maglock hummed and opened and the door slid aside. A cloud of pungently sour incense wafted out as we plunged into darkness.
The room was huge, and seemed larger with the lights off. An oval pool of light marked the center twenty meters up ahead, where robed figures stood in a circle filled with a shifting, auroral glow.
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn…"
Twelve men with raised hands continued the eerie chant. That could only mean that the thirteenth figure, robed and hooded and standing at the circle's center, hadn't yet managed to establish the astral gate.
I hesitated, unsure, now, as to what to do.
The chant faltered as we stepped into the room. "Keep going!" the central figure shouted. "Keep the chant going!"
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn…"
The guy in the center had to be Zayid, and he seemed flustered. Good, because that gave me my chance to take control of the situation. "Good evening," I said, and I walked forward, keeping my Predator aimed at Zayid. "Hope you'll excuse the interruption. Don't move-and don't try any magic on us-and no one gets hurt."
Sure, it was trite. But I wasn't thinking real clearly at the moment.
"What are you doing here!" Zayid snapped. "You have no business here!"
"On the contrary. I have some very important business here."
Zayid was a big man, hooded and robed like the others, but I saw his eyes glaring at me from beneath the cowl. Behind him was an altar, with a sword, a chalice, a bell, and a clutter of less readily identifiable stuff. A couple of six-foot candle stands to either side cast most of the physical light… but that weird aurora shifted and danced in the air around them.
"You do not understand what you're dealing with here," Zayid said. "You have no possible conception! I recommend that you and your people turn around and quietly leave. Now."
"Thanks, but I think we'll hang for a while. This looks interesting."
I was taking in the chalked-out marks on the floor surrounding the thirteen magicians. They'd drawn your standard nine-foot circle-a double circle, actually, filled with your standard arcane occult sigils, signs, and squiggles. Just outside the circle, touching it at one point, was a chalk triangle three feet across.
"How about it, Scoot?" I asked.
Scooter had his hands up, facing the circle and the chanters in a kind of magical stand-off. They outnumbered us, but they were penned inside their protective circle. I hoped that meant they couldn't flame us from in there, or worse. And Scoot was working some protective spells, just in case.
"Looks like an ordinary Hermetic ritual," Scooter said, his brow furrowed with concentration. He was using The Voice. "Complete with a triangle of evocation. The circle protects the magicians inside. The triangle is where whatever you're summoning is supposed to appear. Now don't break my concentration!"
I stepped closer, keeping my Predator aimed at the black-robed bunch inside the circle. I was pretty sure that whatever protection those chalks marks conferred on the chanters, they were more effective against spirits and beings and forces coming out of the astral than they were against copper-jacketed slugs with a muzzle velocity of 400 meters per second.
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn…"
That droning chant was getting inside my head. I felt a bit dizzy, though I was putting that down to the adrenaline rush of combat.
"Careful!" Scoot warned. "Don't break the triangle!"
"I'm not." I peered inside.
And… Dunkelzahn! There was something in there!
It was tough to see clearly. There was something… wrong about the space above and inside that triangle, something that made my eyes ache as I tried to follow the shifting blur of fog and cold light moving inside. But I could make out one solid shape within the haze-a book. A very large book.
And it was speaking to me.
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn…"
Okay. I'm not a magician, but I'm not stupid. I know a little about the astral.
Part of the Awakening, you see, was the opening of channels between wha
t we were always so smugly pleased to call the "real world," and the astral, a kind of parallel universe "on the other side" whatever the hell that might mean. The astral is the realm of spirits, demons, elementals, and other occult entities, and it may be generated by all life here on Earth. Magicians go up onto the astral all the time to read auras or taste the emotional or magical imprints lingering on material items.
Beyond the astral are the metaplanes, other worlds, other realities accessible only to highly trained initiated magicians… and even the best mages have limits to where they can pass.
This was not the astral I was looking into within the triangle… nor was it one of the more usual or accessible metaplanes. This was something decidedly else…
The Necronomicon.
It was fiction, damn it, a myth, a literary gimmick created by a hack pulp-writer to spice up his story submissions to Weird Tales a century and a half ago.
And yet I had no doubt whatsoever that what I was seeing within that luminous aether was the fabled tome of dark magic itself-bigger and thicker than an encyclopedia, bound with iron hasps, with a binding of some brown, leathery material heavily wrinkled and cracked. As I stared at it, one of the puckers in the leather opened, revealing a still-living eye, an eye staring up at me with what might have been a keen and analyzing intelligence… or stark, shrieking madness.
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn…"
According to the mythos, the thing had started out as the Kitab Al-Azif, written in Arabic by the Mad Arab with the impossible name somewhere around 730 A.D. Two centuries later, a Byzantine scholar, Theodorus Philetas, translated it into Greek, and called it the Necronomicon-the Book of Dead Names…
I holstered my Predator, and took another step toward the triangle. The air was bitingly cold.
"Fixer!" Dee-Dee screamed. "No!" Cammie was lunging at me and Scooter was just starting to turn, trying to block me… but I reached into that ethereal light with both hands, grasped the Book, and pulled it out.
No, I didn't know what I was doing, so don't ask! It felt like a dream, really, distant and insubstantial, like I was watching something happening to someone else. I saw the chanting magicians relax, though, and I saw Zayid throw back his head and give a wild and shocking laugh.