by Zachary Adam
SANITY LINE
ZACHARY J. ADAM Note: If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware this book is stolen property. It was reported to the publisher as “Unsold and Destroyed”, and neither the publisher nor the author has received any payment for this “stripped book”. This is a work of fiction: any persons, locations, or events referenced therein are the creation of the author or used fictitiously.
SANITY LINE – First Edition in Print Copyright 2014 by Zachary J. Adam All Rights Reserved, including the right to reproduce this work in whole or in part in any form. A Zaxton Books Novel Published by Zaxton Books www.PSavLabs.net/fiction Fredericton, New Brunswick First Edition in Print 2017
Printed by CreateSpace To Kat, Who Lifted the Curtain Chris And Dave, Who Kept It Alive
Acknowledgements
This book could be made possible only with the help of numerous supporters, early-adopters, readers, and friends. First and foremost is my darling wife, Kat, who has helped develop both the setting and many of the characters in the overall cannon over the years, in addition to being a wonderful layout designer helping with both web and print design for the entire project.
Next, of course, are the various readers who examined early and recent versions of the text. There were countless early adopters who viewed it as a serial on the Sanity Line website – literally countless, since I took no measure to track visitors to the server. In particular though, there was a small army of early readers – an editor from the Lovecraft eZine, close friends at home and abroad, and fellow authors – who helped catch the contradictions and confusion that otherwise would have (and had) poisoned the story.
Of course, nothing would have looked quite so nice without the hard work of Carter Doody, responsible for the Print Edition cover art as well as other promotional material.
However, the ultimate thanks is to Vidcund, Niles, and all the others. I have always felt, as an author, more like a historian than a spinner of tall tales. Obviously I know the difference between reality and fiction... but much like the line between sanity and insanity, it’s not the clearest line in the universe.
00 - Amnesiac
Ipsa scientia poestas est.
Bacon wasn’t entirely wrong when he purportedly coined the phrase, Donnovan Kline and his fellow Kitabists knew. Well-lettered men such as himself counted themselves among the most powerful in the world, and while such power often brought with it the sort of political or economic clout most men dreamed of when they set their hearts salivating after ‘power’, Kline had long since tired of the pursuit of either.
Kline was a pseudonym of course – men his age could hardly be counted wise if they used their proper Christian names – and in any event, Donnovan Kline had about as much use for the name by which he had been baptized as he did for all the other trappings of his atrophied religion. He was a man of Deep Science, of Logic and Reason, a student of the Enlightenment in almost a perfectly literal sense.
He was possessed of no thirst for Gold, nor hunger for Influence, nor the fever-dreamt lust for transcendental divinity that had consumed the likes of Gloria Creena or her kind. His power was Knowledge.
He was a broker of all that which could be known. In the middle of the previous century the Germans called him Motte and the Americans preferred Gypsy, but here at home Moth would do. Wherever his mark went it seemed his eyes could follow, and he did not want for a wealth of information to barter, trade, and even outright sell further on. Little crossed his mind he couldn’t turn a profit on, and in most cases the profit was an even older or more obscure bit of trivia which could fetch an even richer prize down the road.
He sipped his wine somewhat greedily – a nice dark merlot grown from his own vines – and consulted his commonplace book while he waited for his guest to arrive. Strictly speaking, drinking was entirely out of the question, even in the faculty lounge, but as a visiting Emeritus Professor with a long career in English Letters behind him, the university had always given him certain allowances.
He looked out the window – the entire south wall overlooking the lawn, which would have been an architectural impossibility when he’d first come to the Zaxtonian Union – and reflected on the arrival of yet another spring.
“Ah,” he said, interrupting himself as an unkempt man sat down across from him. “Professor. So good to see you.”
“I hope I didn’t keep you waiting long, Professor Kline.” Kline lowered his hand down into his attaché case, and extracted a cloth-wrapped volume. “Not at all. It was I who kept you waiting for me to re-bind it.”
--The more power you wield, the more you fear to lose it. As Vidcund Därk scanned his eyes around Media Management Centre #11, he began to grasp the full meaning of that phrase. Such a powerful resource – both in terms of literal computing power, and the actual realpolitik power such control over mass media generated
– had come at proportionally great expense to the powers that be.
In spite of a near-lifetime of loyal service to those powers
– those men – Vidcund had a doubt that such a large investment could have been a way to stem the inexorable tide of history’s great cycle. Human Culture had, in the ages it spanned, cycled more than once between being focused on gods or focused on kings, in all the various permutations that oft-disguised the pattern, ever since the first humans realized they could plant their crops and never have to roam again – likely long before that, in fact. That men – if the invisible purses behind the strings even were men – could hold that power indefinitely was, at best, a fuzzy prospect.
“Agent, the broadcast you wanted to monitor will be going live in 45 seconds.” Vidcund accepted the usual paper cup of strongly-brewed mint tea from the aide, following him back over to one of the panoramic, multi-component displays that occupied its own little alcove in the large chamber. The mint, which he consumed greedily, was a scar of the psyche; one addiction, exchanged for another.
Ah, the powers of the powers that be… “I care a little less about the introductory content than I do about the specs.” he said, speaking over the professor's preamble. “Where’s the livestream being recorded?” “Zaxton University, at the Anfangsburg Campus, A.P. Castigaine Lecture Hall. Want the IP Number?” The drones working at MMS were always careful to be extremely helpful to anyone who got to use the title Agent. It was a wise move.
“The physical address is more than enough for me,” the Agent replied, making notes on his phone with his thumb. He didn’t need to look – the text he was editing was displayed as an AR overlay through his glasses. “What’s the broadcast delay?”
“From camera to the distribution feed is about 6 seconds, including the two-second delay they have set manually.” Vidcund removed his sunglasses. The feed had, of course, long since started, and it would not do to ignore it completely. “… One of our planted technicians?” “No.”
A faint nod. Professor Johnson was speaking. “… is, of course, an infinitely-regressive function, fully iterative and for all intents and purposes identical at all scales…” “So’s the number one,” Vidcund dismissed, “What’s the subject of the talk again?”
Another functionary checked her notes. “Proposed Interpretation ofNon-Whole Base Number Structures, with Reference to Ancient Scholarship.”
Right. Vidcund knew his fair share of math – he’d spearheaded a program that did quite a lot of work in taking the chaos out of entropy. Even still, he could barely conceive of the idea of a number system that didn’t have its base as a whole number. It didn’t make sense in any of about fourteen different ways.
Still, having weird ideas wasn’t illegal. Today, an
yway. “… which leads us to the conclusion that the number system in the Pnakotic Manuscripts, at least in the 1877 German Translation, could in fact ONLY have been base5.14.”
Vidcund pursed his lips slightly. Suddenly, this all seemed less routine. “I need a longer delay on Professor Johnson’s feed. Thirty seconds minimum.”
“No problem, we can make that look like buffering.” While the technicians scrambled at their keysets to do what had to be done to buy Vidcund his extra twenty-four seconds, the sharply-dressed agent picked up the handset of the corded phone that was a component of a Supervisor’s standing workstation, dialling in a 16-digit sequence before immediately hanging up again, while he removed his Bluetooth headset out of the pocket of his bespoke, polycomposite-fiber jacket and tucked it into his ear.
Silently, the RFID reader near the door changed its status light from green to red, causing the soundproof, frosted Aluminum Oxynitride fixture it controlled to remain quite firmly shut. “Can anyone get me Professor Johnson’s Agency Record?”
“He doesn’t have one, Agent. We checked when you requested the Special Observance Order.”
“Fraternal Brotherhood links?”
“Nothing confirmed. He’s got a few dozen angles of association with Donnovan Kline, but so does-“ “Almost everyone in the country in a faculty position,” Vidcund finished, bluntly and with that frustrated tone that only someone faced with dwindling information to predict what was about to happen to them could muster. “… What’s he going on about now? What’s that graph?”
“A rendering of a figure from the book he’s referencing, if drawn using his fractional base…”
Vidcund’s voice rose above the chatter of the room, though nobody present could recall it rising in tone above the usual frank-and-flat banality of the loyal Supervisory drone. “Shut down his net connection.”
“There’s still a few hundred students in that lecture hall.” “Shut down our feed, too.” Vidcund ordered, tapping his earpiece a little more tightly into place to help listen to an instruction, while he replaced his sunglasses.
Before his order had been carried out, a gasp went out from a few of the technicians who had nothing better to do than actually watch the feed. The camera man, who had grown increasingly lazy in his attempts to frame the professor properly in the shot, suddenly diverted his lens toward the doorway, where no less a person than Vidcund Därk himself – or, at least, a very near relative - had walked into the hall. In the next instant, the feed was cut, but the apparent illusion was manifest strongly enough that there was a stunned silence in the operating room, and more than a few of the technicians, including his own Aide, were staring at him rather dumbfounded. It was the aide that voiced the obvious question. “Uh… Agent? How did you do that?”
“Do what?” Vidcund said, quite honestly, as he removed his earpiece. His eyes had not been on the news-feed, but focused on the nearer plane of information displayed on the inside edge of his glasses. “Due to the nature of the material viewed, it is directed under Agency Division Standing Order that all personnel present for this Oversight Operation remain present until a Cleaning Crew may arrive and administer Amnesiacs.”
There was a general groan. While of course none of them could ever remember having actually needed to accept such an order, they had frequently been drilled on it, and the frequency of the drills had turned the prospect of losing a day or two of memory as collateral damage for one single piece of information they probably hadn’t understood the significance of anyway into less of a negative than the wait that would follow such drills.
That was why there was a slight undercurrent of surprise when the heavy footfalls of the composite-armoured Cleaning Crew arrived only a few moments later, familiar submachine guns tucked under their arms. The leader, shorter than the rest and without the helmet, saluted Därk, who responded with a tap of his sunglasses, freshly returned to his face.
“Seargent Drache. Identity verified.”
“Agent Därk. You’re relieved.”
There was a moan of protest that Därk himself wouldn’t have to go through the drill, as he slipped out between the barely-opened doors with Drache close in tow, after which the doors snapped audibly shut – far louder than their usual pneumatic hiss.
“You ever wish they’d actually get around to inventing an Amnesiac, Vidcund?” Drache extended a pack of cigarettes toward the other, casually.
Vidcund, for his part, shrugged dismissively. “We’d probably have to cut the Surveillance Budget if they ever did.”
01 – Decadence
The first place to start, when looking into matters of weird lore, had historically always been the dusty and wizened vaults of ancient text collections at university and national libraries. This was the conventional wisdom, and more than once, Agency had broken the back of would-be mental plague-bearers by simply keeping tabs on such Collections and their guest lists.
However, the longer Vidcund thought about the problem, the more he came to realize that at least some of the proscribed knowledge in the universe – at least, that which was recorded materially – had yet to be accounted for. This was almost a given – Saffron Knight Archaeologists and Zaxtonian Institution expeditions frequently uncovered new and terrible lore that required the immediate excise of everyone involved and careful filing away of the atrocities uncovered.
This apparent gap – the idea that a book as rare as the Pnakotic Manuscripts could have a surviving copy that was entirely unaccounted for - perplexed the Agent, and for now, at least, it was a matter of some importance to find it. There was no reason to suspect Agency wasn't supervising every extant copy before now, and such supervision should have prevented copying. Like any law, he supposed, there would always be gaps in enforcement.
Thus, his investigation of the late Professor Johnson’s effects. In spite of tenure and a rather prodigious salary, Johnson had retained a rather slovenly apartment in the relatively lower-class Dunholdt district, an old-town maze of brickwork, once-butchery living spaces, and other signs of the failed gentrification of the late nineties. The one-bedroom flat was half a floor of an old bank that had changed hands at least a dozen times since its
construction a century prior, three stories from the ground and with rooftop access.
That Johnson, with a salary that would have made most educators blush, had retained such a small and cramped apartment, with its perpetual smell of cat urine and food well past the sell-by was an anomaly, and of a sort iconic to the profile of Agency’s usual suspects. Obviously, the good professor was putting his income to something else.
The apartment was a secure building, by most common standards of the meaning, but the keypad-controlled intercom at the front was a ready bypass. Most people knew that property holding companies usually gave their superintendents a bypass for the front door lock. Relatively few knew, at least beyond the paranoid, that the companies that manufactured the devices were well-paid to include a hard-wired bypass on all models.
Vidcund simply had to walk right up, tap the code, and enter. From the corner of his eye he considered a security camera, perched in the lobby. The tiny device was a virtual clone of any of a hundred models of both working and decoy surveillance product. There’d be a cable between the device and the wall that was running to a physical computer somewhere on site. Or it would be wireless. Or a dummy.
In this line of work, that was the sort of consideration you would have to make – not because it was likely that he was about to do anything, today, that would be so compromising he would have to remove all traces of his presence; you just simply never knew – unless you wanted to find yourself an amnesiac.
The psych wards were full of men who had probably tried to dance this particular spiral and lost. Forcible retirement from the Division wasn’t a tempting prospect.
Vidcund slipped the professor’s house key into the deadbolt on the apartment proper’s door and slipped inside. The smell of decay was so strong that the agent coughed a
nd immediately spat his mint into a gloved hand, discarding it in the trash when he found it – in this case, an open and fly-infested delivery bag from the nearest of the Chinese take-outs.
Whatever the Professor was doing with the money he had saved on rent, it wasn’t housekeeping or fine dining. That left only a few options, and since the remarkably clean tox screen on the actual autopsy had ruled out hard drugs and a medical record of remarkably intact health ruled out loose women, that meant hookers and blow were entirely out of the question.
Which was, in many ways, where Vidcund came in. As he quested through the apartment looking for the first thing to tickle his interest, he scooped up composition books here and there, leafing through the pages. Most bore scribbling to do with the Pnakotic Manuscripts – that much he understood from vague references to fractional base systems, and that iconic fourth-dimensional pentagram so evocative of that particular mouldering palimpsest. These he’d eventually tuck into the messenger bag he was carrying – better absent than not, when the police finally arrived to do their own going-over. It would cut down on follow-up.
What was bothering him more than most of the occult references, the ever-present mess, and the hanging threat of being interrupted by Terrerra’s finest was what he wasn’t seeing. A strong ammonia smell coupled with cats was so common he’d naturally expected a few felines in the building, and yet, having toured the late professor’s livingroom, he was now firmly convinced no cat existed.
Of course, ammoniac decay was common for most things, but unless there was raw food sitting around somewhere, it seemed unlikely that was the simple source. The fridge confirmed his suspicion – nothing in there but the mouldering remains of a dozen half-eaten meals.
This left the third more common explanation for the smell – the bathroom. Vidcund plodded toward it across a minefield of forbidden lore and chop suey, finding his pulse involuntarily quickening with every step. Silently, and without really knowing why, he slipped his right hand under his tailored spidersilk jacket and pulled the modified and modernized QSZ-92 semiauto out from the holster below his left arm, the safety automatically bypassed by a modded RFID system in the grip. Both the weapon and the modifications were Chinese