Empire Games Series, Book 1

by Charles Stross

  Rita raised a hand. “Whoa. This is too much.” She smiled defensively. “I look at a knot, and it makes these Q-machines send me to another universe?”

  Dr. Jenn smiled back at her. Patronizingly or sympathetically, it was equally annoying. “That’s the gist of it! My, you’re quick on the uptake this morning. Yes, but not all knots work in this way—only ones that follow certain geometric rules. And of course they don’t take you anywhere yet because your Q-machines are inactive because of the missing link between your own central nervous system and the Q-machines.” Rita’s heart sank as she noticed Dr. Jenn gearing up for more neurobabble: “The world-walkers all carry a gene for a nonstandard postsynaptic glutamate receptor. It binds to the Q-machines and activates them. However, whoever designed the mechanism used a hack to switch production of the modified receptor on, and it turns out to be a recessive trait. You’ve got the gene for the receptor, but it’s not expressed—actually making receptor proteins—unless both your parents were world-walkers, which in your case they were not.”

  Dr. Jenn paused barely long enough to draw breath. “We can fix that now, thanks to a big-budget top-secret research project called JAUNT BLUE. You’ve heard of the Six Million Dollar Man, or the Seven Million Dollar Woman? You’re going to be the Half Billion Dollar World-Walker. That’s inflation for you…”

  “How exactly does this work?” Rita narrowed her eyes, annoyed by Dr. Lane’s attempt at manipulating her through levity. “Genetic engineering? Stem cells?”

  “No. That would be impractical and potentially dangerous. Instead, we do some tests to make sure that your receptor complex is inactive because of the stalled repressor function, then infuse a short interfering RNA sequence into your cerebrospinal fluid that gives it a kick. The only dangerous aspect is that if you start world-walking prematurely—if something triggers you—you can end up lost in para-time. Which is why you’re sleeping in an underground bedroom where the only place you can go is a corresponding underground mirror room on a base in time line four.”

  “What? You mean I can end up buried underground or something?”

  “No.” Dr. Jenn shook her head emphatically. “You can’t world-walk into a solid object. Nor can you move while world-walking. Actually, there’s a lot about it that we don’t understand yet: the Earth is moving through space, for example, so why do you move with it? What about the air in the time line you’re going to, that you displace? We figure there are safety mechanisms we haven’t decoded yet … but that’s not my department: that’s for the physicists to worry about.”

  “Oh.” Rita thought for a bit. “So what happens is entirely controlled by my, my seeing some kind of, what did you call it—a trigger engram? A knot?”

  “Yes. Whoever designed the world-walking Q-machinery was pretty careful about that. They picked a set of topological deformations in the visual field that don’t occur in nature. And, believe me, this mechanism was designed: it certainly didn’t evolve. It’s very unbiologically straightforward. While they recycled the glutamate pathway and the recognizer networks from existing neural wetware, the self-replicating Q-dot machines have all but got patent numbers stenciled on them. They look a bit like mitochondria under an electron microscope, and they’re self-replicating, like mitochondria, but they’re a hundred percent engineered and there are additional mechanisms to ensure they get copied and packed in the acrosome during meiosis. It’s high-grade nanotechnology, miles ahead of anything we can match yet. Anyway, you’re mostly safe from running into a trigger engram by accident. But … you’ve flown recently? You saw the DHS notice when you signed onto the in-flight wi-fi? They only switch on the wi-fi above ten thousand feet, once the plane is airborne, and the animated background to the DHS logo—”

  Rita swallowed. “It’s some kind of knotwork design. Is that a trigger engram?”

  “Yes. The theory is that if the Clan are sending world-walkers here and they try to catch a commercial flight, the plane will land with one fewer passenger than it took off with, which will flag it for us. The flight data recorders log the flight’s GPS coordinates when the wi-fi is switched on, so we know where to look for the world-walker’s body.”

  “But I—”

  “Relax. There are a couple of ways of turning off your sensitivity to triggers. The simplest method is to close your eyes. If you need to switch off for longer, there are drugs that mess with your glutamate pathways and render you unable to world-walk for a period of hours to days. And we think there’s a kind of meditation you can practice that will stop it from working on you, if you have time to put yourself in the right frame of mind.”

  “Where did you get that from?”

  Jenn’s smile slipped. “I can’t tell you that.”

  “DHS has captured world-walkers. Right?”

  Dr. Lane’s smile turned cold. “You are not supposed to ask that kind of question. If DHS has captured world-walkers, it would be a very serious and highly classified project. Even asking about them without prior clearance would be a serious security infraction. Luckily for you I don’t know the answer to your question so I’m going to assume that the answer is no, so your question is not actually a security infraction. But how about we agree that we didn’t have this part of the conversation at all? It’ll make life ever so much easier.”

  “Okay!” Rita surrendered unconditionally. Good cows avoid the electric fence; there’s plenty of juicy grazing in the middle of the meadow without risking any nasty shocks. Not that she was taking the doctor’s denial as anything other than confirmation, but some fictions were best preserved. “What do you want me to do today?”

  “That’s better,” Dr. Lane muttered, apparently unaware of her vocalization as she poked at her tablet. Then, louder, she continued: “We’ve got a bunch more basics to go over this morning, then this afternoon we’ll get you weighed, run a bunch of bloods, take your first baseline MRI, and start you fasting this evening. Tomorrow morning we’ll do the lumbar puncture—then in the afternoon, we’ll start the cognitive tests. And the day after tomorrow is your big day, starting with a visit from the judge who’s going to swear you in and sign your court order, and then the second lumbar puncture…”

  * * *

  Off-white walls, gray plastic floor, recessed overhead lighting, and no windows.

  A hospital bed, with fancy powered adjustable motors. A chirping bedside monitor with a fingertip clip to measure her blood oxygen levels and a display showing her ECG trace, relayed wirelessly from the skin sensors taped to her torso. An IV drip. In a wardrobe in the corner of the windowless room, her suitcase and clothing and personal effects.

  There was, Rita thought, an ancient symbolism embedded in the modern pattern. The liminal soul suspended in the antechamber of death. First-dynasty Egyptian princesses would have recognized her situation, but wondered at the absence of canopic jars. Eighteenth-century plantation heiresses might have questioned the lack of leeches and cupping.

  Not that Rita was doing too much thinking. The first day had tired her out, with a whiplash segue from Dr. Lane’s high-velocity briefing into uncharted medical guinea pig territory. She’d given blood and urine samples, stool samples, weight and height and then 3-D morphological imaging measurements, and finally been subjected to a noisy, borderline-claustrophobic hour in a full-body MRI machine. For dinner, they gave her clear soup and coffee with no milk.

  The second day started with a sedative, and went rapidly downhill from there.

  On the third day, she’d awakened dizzy and lethargic, as if with a Valium hangover. They’d then put her in a wheelchair and brought her into an office. She’d haltingly echoed back an oath, with her hand on a book, to a hawk-faced man in a black gown. He asked her the questions Dr. Lane and Colonel Smith had told her to expect, then announced that he could see no reason not to issue the requested order. Then they stuck a cannula in the back of her left hand and her day dissolved into confused kaleidoscope memories of being swallowed by brain scanners and attacked by
electrodes.

  And on the fourth day she awakened in this white and desolate space, wondering if it had all been a terrible mistake and life was still waiting for her somewhere outside.

  The implant in her left arm itched. Flinching slightly, Rita raised her right hand to scratch, then remembered she didn’t have HaptoTech’s motion capture implants anymore—the base clinic at Camp Graceland had removed them on her first day, packaged them up and returned them to her former employer. She rubbed the inside of her left elbow furiously, and the pain shifted to the back of her forearm. Referred pain. There was something there, embedded under the layer of fat beneath the skin, something the size of a long grain of rice. An emergency beacon? A new implant? she wondered as she lifted her arm. There was a yellow-green bruise below her wrist, and a cotton ball held down with micropore tape across the injection site. The familiar itch had fooled her into thinking it was in the usual location, when it was just interfering with the same nerve. Implant. Fuck.

  She fumbled around until she could bring the bed’s motor controller into her line of sight, then stabbed random buttons until, with a whir, the backrest began to rise. As she sat up, the vertigo began to subside. Now she felt a moment of nausea, but recognized it for what it was: hunger, gnawing at her guts with the insistent ache of two days’ near-starvation. With that realization, a bunch of other irritating imps began jabbing their metaphorical tridents into her: she had a headache, she felt dizzy, and she was hungry. Her muscles felt as if she’d fought a bout with the flu, and the flu won. Last but not least, she needed the toilet badly—and she had no idea where it was.

  There was a call button. Not feeling at all proud, she pushed it.

  A minute later, she heard a door open behind her bed. “Oh, you’re awake!” The nurse who bustled in, in green scrubs and gloves, was the friendly but religious one—Marianne—who ran the library in the rec room. “And how are we feeling this morning?”

  Rita tried to smile. “I need the bathroom, but I’m dizzy, and—”

  “Not to worry, we’ll have you there in a second!” The bathroom turned out to be right behind her. It was a typical hospital unit with grab rails everywhere and a smart toilet primed to snitch on her eating habits every time she pooped. Was everything in this clinic a potential informant? Rita wondered as Marianne helped her out of bed and hovered until she had a solid grip on the rail. Quite possibly: after all, the health industry had been an enthusiastic and early adopter of the Internet of Things that Leak Personal Information, right behind the NSA in the queue.

  Morning ablutions completed, Rita returned to her room, towing her IV stand behind her. Marianne had brought in an armchair and a bedside table while she was in the bathroom. “What am I meant to be doing today?” Rita asked.

  “Nothing.” Marianne smiled. “Well, apart from eating three square meals and taking it easy! We’ve got a couple of tests for you. But you don’t start the post-op workup until seventy-two hours after the activation shots. You may feel a bit feverish or unwell—that’s expected with this treatment—but Dr. Lane will look in on you later this morning, and if you feel particularly bad, you can call at any time and one of us will come.”

  “Oh.” Rita digested this information. “I’ve got a couple of days off?” Marianne nodded. “Can I go and sit outside? Or use the rec room?”

  “Ah, well, there’s a problem, you see.” Marianne smiled, presumably with disarming intent: “You’re not supposed to leave this suite. It’s mirrored in another time line, for safety, in case you jaunt by accident or see a trigger symbol.”

  “Oh. Is there a TV?” The nurse shook her head. “Internet…?”

  “I’m sorry!” Marianne said brightly. “I can bring you some books if you like? But you’re not allowed any visual media at all until Dr. Lane says so. No Internet, no TV, not even magazines or newspapers.”

  “Books.” The prospect of spending the next three days cut off from the world did not fill Rita with unalloyed joy. Camping on a hiking trail in the wilderness was one thing; climbing the walls in a soothingly featureless hospital room was something else again. “Yes, please, if you don’t mind?”

  “Sure!” Marianne chirped. “I’ll just go and let Catering know you’re ready for breakfast…”

  * * *

  Breakfast was predictable: cereal, juice, an anemic boiled egg, low-fiber toast. Rita wolfed it down, then confronted the morning with a cup of weak coffee and growing boredom. Marianne returned, bringing a small pile of books and pamphlets with her: to Rita’s dismay they consisted entirely of testimonials for Scientology.

  Rita had nothing against religion as such. Kurt had grown up Lutheran; Mom and Dad had occasionally taken her to church and sent her off to summer camps run by them, but their approach to such matters was very much that it was a social club. Rita wasn’t sure what she believed, beyond a vague sense that there was something Up There keeping an eye on things. Consequently she found Marianne’s pamphlets disturbing in their zealous insistence that Dianetics, and only Dianetics, held the key to realizing one’s full potential.

  Spending the day reading advertorials for someone else’s scripture lacked appeal. So she unpacked and stowed her clothing in the wardrobe, just for something to do. That was when she discovered the musty, coverless paperback that Grandpa Kurt must have stuffed down a zipped side compartment of her carry-on. Normally she had no time for elderly pulp novels: but at least it wasn’t a religious tract.

  There was nothing lightweight about The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. The combination of the author’s paranoid outlook and his cautionary tale within a tale—set in a metafiction in which the Nazis had won the Second World War—made her head spin as she tried to understand it. But the lack of any alternative kept her chewing doggedly along until evening. Whoever had owned it previously had underlined a couple of passages in every chapter in thick, gray pencil, sometimes phrases or words and sometimes individual letters. Trying to make sense of the annotations gave her a little more to chew on, but ultimately that, too, was unproductive. Unfortunately it wasn’t a particularly fat book, and she reached the end all too soon. The end pages were blank, and she was about to close the book when something caught her eye.

  As she turned past the end matter she found herself confronted by a page covered in tiny, very precise handwriting. Squinting in the illumination of the adjustable bedside lamp, she read the opening:

  Dear Rita, if you need to talk to me in private, write by hand, trusting no keyboard. Use this book as your one-time pad, using the two methods described below—high risk, low content, fast; and low risk, high content, slow. I may not be able to help, but if you don’t ask you don’t get—Kurt.

  Inscribed in the middle of the page, before the code instructions that followed, was a pencil sketch of a knot. As Rita looked at it, it made her feel oddly queasy: guts twisting, vision blurring. She blinked it away hastily, then covered it with her thumb, heart hammering. Oh, Gramps, what have you gotten us into? She began to read the rest of Kurt’s message. Boredom was suddenly very far away.

  BALTIMORE, TIME LINE TWO, JULY 2020

  FEDERAL EMPLOYEE 004910023 CLASSIFIED VOICE TRANSCRIPT

  DR. SCRANTON: Okay, so our pawn has just leveled up to queen. What’s the state of play looking like now that our prototype is nearing deployment readiness?

  COL. SMITH: Well, I think I’ve got a pretty good feel for her character, and she’s not perfect but things could be a lot worse.

  AGENT GOMEZ: Oh? What’s not—

  COL. SMITH: For starters, we are not dealing with a classic authoritarian follower personality: not even your typical Gen Z me-first narcissist with no patriotism and no loyalty. Instead she got your full-on liberal, nurturing, question-authority upbringing, with an added dose of extreme political cynicism from her grandfather. This doesn’t mean she’s useless—you can motivate anyone, given the right lever—but she’s going to take some work. She’s actually a lot better suited to the mission profile we’re looking at
than someone who obeys orders blindly just because they feel good when Daddy tells them what to do. The key issue is that she’s an introvert. Self-contained is a job requirement for spies, especially solitary infiltrators. But it means she doesn’t open up easily and tell us what she’s thinking, and that will make it hard to manipu—motivate her. And it means she doesn’t do well in all facets of training.

  DR. SCRANTON: Are we talking about her National Academy session?

  COL. SMITH: Yes. I had to pull strings just to ensure she scraped a pass. I didn’t—I say I didn’t—rig it; I just made sure she got some TLC. Extra coaching. Let’s be honest: she’s not a cop, much less an officer on the leadership inside track. She didn’t belong on that course; she was a fish out of water. It’s to her credit that she finished it at all, even with a bare pass. Putting a twenty-five-year-old introspective liberal female actor through a graduate-level course in policing and leadership populated by ex-Army county sheriffs and upwardly mobile municipality lieutenants was a big risk. But she, she survived. She nearly wiped out but it didn’t break her. Which makes me think she’s got what it takes to operate in an unsympathetic environment as well as having picked up the insight she needs for Evasion Planning. If we can earn her loyalty, we’re gold.

  AGENT O’NEILL: That’s the hard part.

  COL. SMITH: You know the old saying? “Set a thief to catch a thief?” We were trying a new angle. Train a spy in security policing to avoid getting caught by the adversary’s secret police.

  DR. SCRANTON: Nevertheless, it seems to me that failure would have had a significant impact on her morale, not to mention making it harder to keep this little red wagon rolling along. Oversight wouldn’t like it.

  COL. SMITH: I’d have pretexted her out of there in an hour if I thought she was going to crack.