Dark State

by Charles Stross

  “You’re her grandfather.”

  “And you’re my FB partner.” Rita smiled and gave Angie’s hand a squeeze. “Didn’t you have a top secret clearance, anyway? When you were in the Army?”

  “Yes, but it expired—”

  “But they had you on file. So letting me go home with you guys wasn’t a big no-no. It’s not like I’m hanging out with illegals from a hostile power or something, is it?”

  Angie rolled her eyes, but Kurt tensed up. “Don’t joke about it.”

  “Joking is the only thing keeping me from losing my shit right now!” Rita shivered. “Can we go inside? I’m going to catch my death if we stay out here much longer.”

  An hour before closing, the mall was almost deserted. Angie led them through a Macy’s, then into a central atrium that smelled of floor polish and sweat, decorated with winter-wilted potted trees that needed natural light to thrive. The food court was still open for business, albeit quiet. Kurt staked out a table in the middle, while Angie and Rita fetched the food: a burger for Angie, pizza for Rita and Kurt. “I think we’re alone now,” Angie said quietly. A solitary restaurant worker was clearing up in the wake of the after-work rush, and Rita had to watch Angie’s lips to hear her over the noise of a floor cleaning machine. “What the fuck happened?”

  “They sent me back to the same time line. The one they call BLACK RAIN. It went completely off the rails and I was captured.” Rita took a bite of pizza, chewed methodically and swallowed, all the while relishing Kurt’s concern and Angie’s wide-eyed attention. Look at me, it’s my best performance ever! Well, not so much with the best. “It started Monday morning.” She launched into an account of her trip, but stopped short of describing her meeting with her birth mother. “Grandpa, before I go on I need you to tell me everything you know about my birth mother’s mom. Because she, uh, died a few years ago, but I met her daughter.” Deep breath. “Was Iris Beckstein part of the Orchestra? Or just a fellow traveler?”

  “Neither: I was certain from the start that she was a ringer.” Kurt’s cheek twitched. “Morris Beckstein was another matter. A lovely man. Hopelessly naive, but idealistic: a useful idiot. He would not have stood a chance back home in Dresden. Iris met him when she was young and alone with the baby—she turned up one day, with a stab wound and a dead companion: we know why, now—and he fell for her. She, she loved him in her own way, I think. But she was a skilled manipulator. I am not sure any of us ever saw her true face. If she was a man I would have said she was FBI, a COINTELPRO provocateur, but the FBI did not employ young women in those days, especially young women with babies. At least, this is my recollection of how Iris met Morris. I myself was not inserted until a few years later.”

  “So she was manipulative?” Angie asked, giving Rita a speculative glance.

  “Oh yes. Iris had no papers, you see? She got Morris to pull some strings, ask friends of friends—people with drug connections. The baby, this Miriam, they made to look like an adoption for some reason or other, perhaps a secondary cover in case the people who had tried to kill Iris came looking. Iris and Morris never had another child—he told me once that he had mumps as a boy. Most convenient for her, but very disorienting for the child. To grow up being told you were adopted, to be made to give up your own child, then to learn that—”

  Kurt stopped. He was talking to an empty seat. Rita was walking, stiff-backed, in the direction of the restrooms.

  “Please tell me that’s a bad joke?” Angie glared at Kurt.

  He looked at her sadly. “No joke. Iris raised Rita’s birth mother telling her she was adopted because Iris had problems she wanted to spare her daughter. But I made Franz and Emily promise never to lie to Rita about that, you know? I told them to bring her up as their adopted daughter and never to lie because that kind of lie always ends in betrayal.”

  “Kurt. I like you, you’re a mensch, but sometimes you’re really slow on the uptake. Probably because you’re a man.” She stood up. “Wait right here. Don’t go away: I may be some time…”

  NEW LONDON, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020

  A dinner at home with old friends should not have felt like an ordeal, but the strain was having a visible impact on all present. Huw, already tired, felt as if he was navigating a minefield blindfolded whenever he opened his mouth. Erasmus, clearly worried, was twitching and alternating between jovial bonhomie and extreme solicitude. Miriam, as Olga had intimated, was withdrawn and pensive. It wasn’t like her. She didn’t raise the subject of the DHS world-walker program and Huw didn’t dare dig. Rather than behaving like a woman who’d just rediscovered her long-lost child, she seemed distant and shocky, as if she had received a terminal diagnosis. Huw tried to imagine what she was going through, but found himself at a loss. Maybe if Brill suddenly served him with divorce papers, taking Nel and Roland …

  The opportunity to discuss it passed with the meal. “I have to go now,” Olga announced, in a matter-of-fact way that suggested she was too exhausted for elaborate rituals of withdrawal. “I’ll send a car for you tomorrow,” she told Huw. “Please take care of him,” she added for the benefit of the Burgesons, as her current bodyguard pulled her wheelchair back from the table.

  “Good night.” Miriam waved tentatively. Then she, too, stood. “I’m retiring early,” she announced, and followed Olga out of the room.

  “But it’s only—” Erasmus gave up. He caught Huw’s eye. “Olga told you the news, I suppose.” Huw nodded. “The personal was always political, in the land your people come from, wasn’t it?”

  “I suppose discovering your long-lost only child is on the other side in a potential war must be very hard.” Huw deliberately kept his tone neutral. “Will she be able to do her job?”

  Erasmus frowned. “Do you really need to ask that question?”

  Huw raised his half-empty wineglass. “Normally I wouldn’t. But she’s been under a lot of stress lately, there is the succession issue to consider, and now this. It’s obvious the adversary had some inkling she might be here, and they picked their tool extremely well.”

  “Indeed.” Erasmus picked up the wine bottle and aimed it across the table like a pistol. Huw extended his glass, to intercept it halfway. “I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Olga wants to see you tomorrow. Listen to her, not me; I’m an outsider to your people’s ways.” He topped up his own glass. “I wish I didn’t feel so helpless around her.”

  Jenny, the housekeeper, saw Huw to a guest room on the third floor of the row house—a former grace-and-favor residence for the King’s household attendants, on a gated crescent inside the palace security cordon.

  Huw fell asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow, awakening only as the cloud-diffused dawn light strengthened across the wall above the bed. While he slept, someone laid out a fresh suit of clothes and removed his travel outfit for cleaning: a sealed toilet bag waited in the bathroom next door.

  An hour later a ministerial car delivered him to the front steps of the MITI headquarters building. The front desk had a badge and an escort waiting for him. Ten minutes later he was ushered into a blandly anonymous corner office on the fourth floor.

  “Cuz.” (It was an acknowledgment of shared origins rather than a close blood relationship.) Olga gestured vaguely at the more comfortable-looking of the visitors’ seats: “Make yourself at home. Did you get anything out of her after I left?”

  “No.” Huw planted himself opposite her. She looked somewhat better this morning. Which was not saying much: the evening before, her illness had left her looking half-dead. “Miriam went to bed immediately after you left. Ras didn’t open up much: he’s clearly very concerned. If I didn’t know better I’d say she was suffering from work-related burnout.”

  “There’s an element of that, yes. But now I want to show you the cause of our family crisis. The long-lost prodigal daughter comes with some worrying complications that I don’t think Miriam has noticed yet, and I want a second opinion before I bring them to
her attention.”

  “Complications?” Huw leaned forward.

  “Move your chair round here so you can see the screen without straining your neck.”

  “Hey, that’s an imported monitor!”

  “Top marks for observation. We get to play with all the best toys in my department. As long as the air gap is measured in parallel universes it can’t snitch on us to the NSA.”

  Huw shuffled his chair round to see the screen. The exploration arm he worked in—or ran, if he abandoned false modesty—didn’t have clearance to use imported equipment. They were required to eat their own dog food, using only domestically-produced electronics to avoid becoming critically dependent on a stream of imported super-science gadgets which could dry up at any moment. Yet here Olga had a monitor a quarter of an inch thick on her desk, displaying millions of pixels in glorious color, rather than one of the clunky vacuum tube displays Huw had to use.

  “We don’t have the CCD fab lines to roll out cheap closed-circuit cameras everywhere—not yet, not for another three or four years—and we don’t have the videotape manufacturing volume to record everything our existing cameras can see. But rail and air terminals are a special case when it comes to monitoring. When we learned we could expect a visitor from the DHS to show up I ordered saturation coverage and 24/7 recording in the Irongate South switchyard that serves the Quakertown Tank Factory, and in Irongate Station itself.” Irongate was the industrial city that had grown up near the location of the United States’ Bethlehem Works. “Here’s a reel my staff put together. First, here’s a streetcar platform at the west end of Irongate Station, about ten minutes before dawn last Monday. Watch this. The action starts twenty seconds or so in.”

  She blew the grainy, monochrome image up to fill the screen, until the raster lines expanded like horizontal prison bars. Huw, squinting, managed to make out the shape of the platform and the track bed beside it. For long seconds nothing happened. Then, from one frame to the next, a woman appeared between the tracks. She stood still for a couple of seconds, then stepped toward the brick wall separating the tracks from the street beyond. Something moved near the edge of the frame, expanding rapidly to become visible as the front of a tram: the figure vanished abruptly.

  “Time from world-walk one to world-walk two was less than twenty seconds, Huw. Now let’s cut to the camera that was monitoring the south wall of the station from the outside, at the same time.”

  The reel switched to displaying a view of a block-long brick wall. Seconds passed: then a figure appeared, halfway along it. They walked rapidly away.

  “The camera feeds were synchronized. Elapsed time from world-walk two to world-walk three: about ten seconds.”

  Huw swore. “How is she doing that?” A Clan world-walker who crossed between worlds so rapidly would be curled up on the sidewalk, vomiting—if they were lucky. Even with the drug cocktails the DPR’s tame medics had developed over the past decade, the migraine-like side effects from jumps minutes apart were crippling. The blood pressure spike could well be fatal.

  “Next clip.” Olga tapped her trackpad. “This is the interview room at the police station.” This time the CCTV footage was in color, and of higher quality. A door opened: two cops frog-marched a smaller figure in. There was a bag over her head, and her arms were cuffed behind her back. “So far so good: they’ve been trained in the care and handling of world-walkers. Now they’re going to sit her down and unhood her, and their inspector is going to tell them to uncuff her. She’s not going to try world-walking, she knows she’s on the eighth floor. Watch her arms.”

  They placed a wooden chair behind the prisoner, and made her sit. The hood came off. One of them stepped behind her. A few seconds later she shrugged, brought her arms out from behind her back and began to massage her wrists. The camera operator—They must have a one-way window, Huw realized—zoomed in.

  “No wristwatch. No tattoo either,” Huw murmured.

  “Right. Jack and I tag-teamed her. Inspector Morgan had already gone through all her personal effects. She had a couple of gadgets with displays—an inertial mapper and a fancy light-field camera—but no lockets, no wristwatch, no hidden knotwork designs. Nothing stitched into the lining of her clothes.”

  Huw swore again. “Does this get any better?”

  “Uh-huh.” Olga gave him the ghost of a smile. “Final piece of the puzzle: I had to go to Miriam to confirm this. Rita’s father was a man called Ben Mittal. He was her college boyfriend and first husband. They divorced about a year after they married, and that was a year after the baby. He’s a medic these days. And of course he isn’t a world-walker: not even outer family. Rita told us under questioning that the DHS sent her to a clinic where they activated her world-walking ability. That was a few months ago. I have to presume she was telling the truth.”

  “Oh hell.” Huw leaned back and crossed his arms. “You’re saying they can turn outer family members, recessive carriers, into world-walkers. That they don’t suffer side-effects when they world-walk—in fact, they can do it repeatedly, seconds apart. And they can do it without a knot-focus?”

  Olga was shaking her head at the last. “Not necessarily. We didn’t find a bug-out knot, but she might have something fancy—an ultraviolet-fluorescent get-me-home tattoo, something like that.”

  “But they probably got ven Hjalmar’s breeding program list. So in addition to their black boxes for aircraft and insulated ground vehicles, we could be facing … what? A battalion of special forces soldiers who can world-walk at will without hangovers? A legion of super-spies?”

  “Don’t know. Insufficient data.” Olga looked as if she’d bitten a lemon. “I think they’ve only just begun to ramp up this capability: Rita is a prototype. And the others won’t be as effective, in some ways. Only about a third of the breeding program kids are likely to be medically fit for military service—that’s the running average—and even fewer are going to be willing to serve, much less willing and able to kill. They’re young, too. So we’re not facing a battalion: maybe a platoon, or at worst a company. That’s still bad enough, of course. I’ve asked our assets to schedule an out-of-season web-stalk for all known breeding program kids who are in the military or of age, and to look for signs of them going zombie on Facebook—that’d be a red flag—but I think even if they’re building a unit of world-walkers they’ll use them as spies, not soldiers.” Olga hunkered down in her chair. “What I desperately want, Huw, is to know how they activated Rita. Because if—”

  “Our oldest are only fifteen, Olga.”

  “Yes, but if we can figure out how it’s done, we’ll have our own force multiplier by and by.”

  “But they’re kids.” Huw frowned. “It was a stupid idea, anyway: look, why don’t we use artificial insemination to breed up a fuckload of spares to replace the bodies we lost, two generations down the line, because that worked out so well last time!”

  “The context was completely different, though—”

  “Easy for you to say. You weren’t required—ordered—to donate.”

  “They might not have used your sample, cuz.”

  “No, really? I think they very probably used everybody’s. To minimize the risk of in-breeding down the line. Not one of the Clan’s finest moments, cuz. Not one of the First Man’s finest moments when he signed the decree, either.”

  “No? I remember things differently: it was a requirement for our confinement in that vile camp being ended—that we were to sow in the Commonwealth seeds that would grow into a mighty forest, bound by loyalty not to the Clan but to the revolution. And I don’t remember you protesting very loudly at the time—”

  “No? Brill was pregnant! And the epidemics running wild on the other side of the fence—”

  “Bygones, Huw.” Olga shook her head slowly. “Water under the bridge. The point … we’ve opened a channel. Rita will be back, sooner rather than later, with a message. Rita is—rightfully—suspicious of me, but if you happen to be around, you can at least
try to befriend her. Brill too, when she’s in town. If we can get Rita to reconcile with Miriam, then there’s another angle we can play, but it’s much riskier. Let me talk to her when she’s slept, and see if she thinks it’s worthwhile. But meanwhile, if Rita visits for a few days, even if she won’t talk to Miriam, I want you to befriend her. Give her the dog and pony show. Requisition a courier plane and fly her down to Maracaibo, show her the beach, take her for an airship ride or something. Show her how we open up new time lines. Nothing secret—just keep her entertained, and see what you can learn from her. Oh, and make sure she sees enough that her bosses will figure out why a decapitation strike won’t work.”

  Huw thought for a minute. “I’ll need guidelines. What you want her to learn about us, and what you want to withhold. Besides the obvious classified stuff. I mean, she’s an agent for a foreign power: obviously she needs to be sandboxed, right?”

  “Right. But she’s also Miriam’s daughter. They sent her to us on a fact-finding mission with a side order of head-fuckery. We shall therefore send her back with a head un-fucked and full of facts. We will just have to be very careful to ensure she is only exposed to the facts we want her—and her controllers—to learn.”

  “And if she’s willing to kiss and make up with Miriam?”

  “Then”—Olga’s face was studiously expressionless—“things will get interesting.”

  Exchange Visit

  PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  Angie caught up with Rita in the bathroom, bent over a sink with the tap running. The sour smell of vomit from one of the stalls told its own story. She didn’t speak, but went to the paper towel dispensers, discovered (to her disgust) that they were empty, then grabbed a double handful of toilet paper and brought it to Rita.

  Rita splashed water on her face, then took the tissues with shame-faced thanks.