Dark State

by Charles Stross

  (The garments will be unfamiliar to you but will render you inconspicuous en route.)

  If you are unable to be extracted at the designated time, you should remove the small ornamental potted plant from the side table in the corridor outside your rooms. Its absence will serve as a signal that you cannot proceed, and we will reschedule subsequently. If it is present, it will signal that we are to proceed.

  You should then wait for me in your study.

  —H.

  With hands that trembled only slightly, Elizabeth put pen to paper and wrote a reply:

  Yes.

  —E.

  She folded it and sealed it in an envelope, then left it on her escritoire. Going through to her bedroom she noted that the servants had laid the fireplace. She crumpled the Major’s letter and shoved it down among the kindling; tucking her skirts out of the way, she struck a match and watched pale flames caress the edge of the communiqué. Once the fire was properly lit she moved the fireguard back into place. Then she returned to her study and prepared a pot of tea (by herself, unaided). That night she slept with the letter opener under her pillow.

  The next morning the envelope had already vanished. It was clear that her unseen correspondent meant her no immediate harm: stone walls and security guards seemed to mean nothing to him. With this confirmation that the offer of extraction was genuine, some of her nastier fears disappeared. Despite her outer confidence Elizabeth had entertained lingering doubts until now.

  But now all she had to do was settle down to wait, and trust the Major from the Commonwealth to do his job.

  PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  Angie hadn’t played the Game of Spies since she was in fifth grade, but the rules were so deeply ingrained that it was a physical reflex, like riding a bicycle or swimming. It was one of those skills that were hard to learn the first time round, when you were trying not to fall over or drown. But once it clicked you could no more forget how to do it than you could forget how to breathe.

  The Game of Spies was a meta-game, like the Game. In the Game, you could only lose: you lost by thinking consciously about playing the Game, and then you had to announce your loss. In the Game of Spies, the first rule was that you lost by disclosing that you were playing the Game of Spies to anyone who was not part of your team—in other words, your controller or your Resident. It need not be a verbal admission: yes, I’m playing the Game of Spies and Kurt is my controller. Any public sign was an admission. And that meant any sign that might be noticed by a hypothetical adversary who could be watching you at any time, for the Game of Spies was played inside the panopticon of a police state.

  In the old days, before Moore’s Law and computers in hotel door handles and CCTV cameras on every block corner … in the old days before everyone carried a fatphone with multiple video cameras and GPS and orientation sensors, before the DEFEND Act required the NSA to log all electronic communications, before high-quality face-recognition and lip-reading software existed … in the old days, it was still possible to talk to the agents under your control in public spaces. It was in private places that you had to worry about bugging devices and eavesdroppers. But sometime in the past decade technology had turned all the old certainties upside down.

  Last year’s tinfoil hat was this year’s sartorial good taste. The act of popping the battery from your phone might activate the tiny microphone and GSM phone stage built into the battery itself, prompting it to phone home to the NSA and relay your private conversation if you were a person of interest. There were chips in credit and debit cards for securing your accounts. Rumor had it that Visa and Mastercard also carried embedded microphones, powered by capacitors energized every time you used an ATM, recording everything and transmitting it back to the government via the banking network. Metal door keys were going out of fashion (a distant camera snapshot and a 3-D printer made it disturbingly easy to fake up a blank). But how could you be sure that the shiny new proximity lock on your front door wasn’t recording your movements and listening in on your conversations?

  Any car manufactured after 2015 was an informer by default unless you took it to an ICE shop and had it lobotomized, invalidating your after-sale warranty and simultaneously guaranteeing that the government took a keen interest in your motivation for damaging your vehicle. The pressure transponders in your tires were radio-frequency snitches, identifying your car even if you swapped out the plates. Any clothing above the level of a $1 T-shirt had smart RFID washing tags to stop your shiny new washer/dryer from wrecking it by running a damaging program. But RFID tags were also low-power chips, and how could you be sure that your bra wasn’t also recording your speech and skin conductivity and pulse—not only a snitch, but a snitch with a built-in polygraph?

  Cosplay and auto firmware hacking were popular hobbies among paranoiacs and dissidents this decade. Angie preferred to rely on Goodwill instead, and relied on other means to keep secrets from her pickup truck and her clothes.

  Her washing machine and tumble dryer were ancient castoffs with bizarrely complex mechanical controls. Half the clothing she bought took a brief trip through the microwave oven: the other half was hung, unworn, in the side of the closet reserved for secret police informers. Her laptop and tablet were bugged, of course, but everybody knew and expected that. Where possible she bought her tools secondhand through eBay, or tormented them with alternating current.

  Her truck was a problem of a different type. She hadn’t taken it to an ICE shop, but she’d lobotomized the tire wiring and painstakingly gone over the body with a hand-made antenna connected to a signal processing board she’d soldered together herself. She was pretty sure that she’d found and suborned all the microphones and brainwashed the in-car Bluetooth. The story they told now was a synthetic-voiced farrago of lies generated on-the-fly by a matchbox-sized computer she’d wired into the glove box. And she’d subverted the truck’s CANbus components with black market firmware.

  The bug detector, lie-bot, and hacked vehicle firmware all ran software she’d found on hacker darknets frequented by everyone from unlicensed Mexican plastic surgeons to fly-by-night family planning clinics working up and down the no-choice state lines. She’d found her way in via pointers from an online community where paranoid schizophrenics gathered. They used it to compare notes on the best way to fool the Illuminati and avoid the orbital mind control lasers operated by the gangster computer god on the dark side of the Moon. She used it because it was a good source of more practical survival tips for the professionally discreet.

  This was a terrible century to be a paranoid schizophrenic. The real world had become a target-rich environment for conspiracy theorists. Meanwhile everyone suffered the consequences of designed-in insecurity. Paradoxically, the very measures that made it easier for the State to monitor the People—the mandatory backdoors that riddled the Internet of things—made it easier for paranoids and cybercriminals to evade surveillance and hack their marks: casual identity theft and credit card fraud were rampant. There was a gigantic herd of graynet subcultures flying under the radar, people of no actual interest to the national security state who feverishly armored themselves against the cybernetic equivalent of the Black Helicopters. And so the real dissidents lurked amidst the vendors of word salad, hiding in plain sight. Angie had learned how to tell them from the unmedicated casualties of the war on consensus reality by examining their punctuation. Real people pretending to be madmen might throw in the odd cut ’n’ paste rant, but in general they wrote in paragraphs and didn’t use ellipses as duct tape between their disconnected ramblings.

  Only the insane could truly appreciate the Kafkaesque nature of the twenty-first century—the insane, and those who stood consciously outside of society, like lone wolves and spies. It was an ironic truth that the last illegals of the East German Stasi could only feel truly at home among crazies and dissidents.

  The families of the Wolf Orchestra, living on as illegals in America, had drilled their children in the Game of Spi
es as a matter of survival. Like conversos, Jews practicing in secret after those of their faith had been forcibly converted or expelled by post-Reconquista Spain, they lived under permanent threat of exposure by the Inquisition. At first the Game of Spies had simply been part of the process of training their children with the survival reflexes they’d need if they were to avoid betraying their parents by accident. They had never intended or expected to need to pass on their other skills, let alone their contact protocols and cell neighbors. They hadn’t realized until after the nuclear attack on 7/16 and the horrifying response that their own upbringing and training, as trusted inmates in the open prison of Actually Existing Socialism, was the best possible way to equip their children for life in Ubiquitously Surveilled America.

  The morning after Rita said farewell and headed back to the other America, Angie set to work with a heavy heart. She plugged away until early evening. Then, leaving the breaker board she was in the process of wiring up to a new-build condo, she headed back to her truck. The evening stretched ahead, empty and surprisingly dull. She pulled out her phone and tapped the thumbprint reader to tell it to switch from its work personality to her home identity. It vibrated, twice. There were messages from Kurt: Angie read swiftly. (1) ANY WORD FROM RITA? And (2) DINNER?

  Angie smiled faintly as she interpreted his coded signal. DINNER SOUNDS GREAT, she texted back. WANT ME TO PICK YOU UP?

  The reply took seconds to arrive: YES. The game was afoot.

  NEW LONDON, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020

  Dinner parties with political movers and shakers were well outside Rita’s comfort zone. In fact, dinner parties in general struck her as a middle-aged thing. They were an implicit confession that the local restaurant scene was expensive or dismally bad, if not both. And formalwear was a stage costume as far as she was concerned. Prom was far in her past, and most of her friends were too beset by student debt and spiraling rents to afford a wedding, or gay and living in back-to-the-closet states. But Brilliana was hard to say no to. She led Rita to a spare bedroom, showed her the bathroom (with recognizable but somewhat odd fixtures and fittings: everything from power outlets to toilet paper rolls was subtly different in size and shape), then insisted on going through a huge wardrobe in search of an outfit for her. “You need something to wear, for tonight and for any other occasions that might require it. We can get you measured tomorrow, but in the meantime—”

  Formalwear fashion in the Commonwealth was currently loose and enveloping rather than figure-hugging and tailored, which was extremely convenient. Rita was a lot less happy about the jewelry Brill insisted she borrow—big enough to be outrageous paste gems in costume settings, heavy enough to feel disturbingly authentic—but she was still punch-drunk from the discovery of her rapidly inflating social identity. Unsure whether to be more scared of meeting Mrs. Burgeson again, or the political implications of failing to make a good impression on everyone else, she was easy meat for a former lady-in-waiting to royalty who had her shit together.

  Two hours later she was clutching a glass of sparkling wine in the front parlor with her hair up, wearing a small fortune in gemstones and a kaftan so fancy it made her feel like an imposter. “Relax,” Brilliana advised her as she made a final pass through the room, “they’ll be here soon.”

  Rita tensed self-consciously. “Who are you”—a doorbell rang—“expecting? Apart from the Burgesons?” But Brill was no longer beside her: she was meeting the new arrivals instead.

  “Hello, my dear.” A man’s voice, slightly hoarse. “So pleased to meet you—”

  “Olga sends her apologies, she’s running late.” A woman’s voice, semi-familiar. Rita tensed up even tighter, as overwound as an abused carriage clock. “God, I’ve had a crap day—”

  It was all piling up too fast: Rita had no time to react as everyone came through the door in a rush, Brilliana leading a man with thinning gray hair and a gaunt face who wore a fancy cut-away jacket with tails over trousers and a frilled shirt, and then a woman whose face dried up the words in her throat.

  “Rita?” said Mrs. Burgeson, stopping dead in the doorway.

  “Um, yeah.” Rita stared right back, frozen in the headlights. You’re not my mom. That’s Emily. She forced a tense smile. “Hello?” She hoped it didn’t look like she was smirking.

  “That’s a gorgeous outfit. Where did you find it?” asked Mrs. Burgeson.

  “It’s borrowed.” Rita managed not to flinch. “Brill insisted.” In the sudden silence she took in her birth mother’s appearance. “Nice earrings.”

  Mrs. Burgeson smiled. “You think so?” Motion resumed around them.

  Rita shrugged uncomfortably. She was agnostic about pearl earrings—they weren’t her style—but suddenly she had a tenuous feeling that if she could keep the conversation on neutral ground it might not end in tears before bedtime.

  “Drinks, everybody?” It was Huw, gawking in through a small side door (servant’s passage, Rita realized). He made a beeline for the sideboard.

  “I’ll have whatever she’s having,” said Mrs. Burgeson, nodding at Rita. “This is my husband, Erasmus. Say hi, Ras. She won’t bite you.”

  “I … won’t…” Rita extended a hand, expecting to shake: it was better than stammering.

  The Minister of Propaganda smiled at her. “Charmed, I’m sure,” he murmured, and actually bowed to kiss the back of her wrist. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  Rita failed her saving throw against cringing. “Shit—I’m sorry!” She took a deep breath. “I’ve been wanting a chance to apologize,” she told Mrs. Burgeson. Breathlessly, her composure leaving her: “There’s a lot I didn’t know.”

  The Minister for Intertemporal Technological Intelligence—the Minister for Spying on America Rita translated silently—accepted a tall glass of wine from Huw, then shrugged gracefully. “Thank you, and I accept your apology. You must have been half out of your mind with fear at the time—”

  “No, it’s not that: my grandfather told me about your, your mother.” Everyone was staring at her, Rita realized. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t know…”

  But Mrs. Burgeson wasn’t interested in further apologetics. She stepped closer, pupils dilating. “Your grandfather knew my mother?” She sounded like a thirsty woman in a desert who had just sighted an oasis.

  “I, uh, yes—”

  Someone chose that moment to hit a small gong with a drumstick. “Dinner is served,” announced a bland-faced man in the knee breeches and white stockings that passed for a butler’s outfit here.

  “After dinner”—Mrs. Burgeson flashed her a smile that was almost feral in its intensity—“I want you to tell me all about your grandfather.”

  Rita took a risk. “If you tell me about your mother?”

  Mrs. Burgeson met her gaze evenly. “Yes, let’s do that. If it’s easier for you, you can call me Miriam,” she said. “To keep things straight in your head, I mean.”

  “Thanks. Miriam.” Rita tried the name. She was right: Mrs. Burgeson was too formal but mother felt like a mistake.

  “I hope you enjoy the food,” Miriam added. “Brill is serious about her entertainment. But I should warn you, her taste runs to the fiery.”

  AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION, UNDISCLOSED TIME LINE, AUGUST 2020

  They took Paulette back to her cell only when she was reeling with exhaustion and hoarse from talking. Some time during the interview her interrogators had swapped over—more than once, she suspected afterward. Thereafter she tried to keep count, because shift changes would give her a handle on how long she’d been there. She half-wondered why they didn’t just dose her up with modafinil to keep her running, but concluded that most likely they wanted her sleep-deprived as part of the process. (One of her DPR contacts had told her sleep deprivation was the most effective tool of torture in the interrogator’s arsenal, insidious and almost irresistible if applied correctly, and far less likely to induce panicky lies than water-boarding or physical pain: it just took patience and t
eamwork.)

  They left her in her cell and she lay down and switched off at once, even though the overhead light was as bright as ever. She slept like a log, undisturbed by sounds from elsewhere in the prison. It was almost as if she was the only inmate. Far too soon, a harsh buzzer brought her back to consciousness. A meal came sliding through the door, and then it was time to go back to the interview room, groggy and stumbling in her leg irons, to be shackled to a chair and asked the same goddamn questions all over again.

  Paulette lost count of the number of interviews some time after the fourth session. It was impossible to tell how long it had been going on for. She suspected no more than a couple of weeks had passed since her arrest, but it felt like months. A thirty-year sentence of white-walled boredom stretched her sense of time to fit. She was too tired to feel any emotion beyond numb despair. Hell, it seemed, was not a fiery pit full of demons but a room with a mirror behind which bored officials repeated inanely misguided questions endlessly. Her only ray of hope was that the lunatics from the first shift didn’t make a reappearance. None of her subsequent interrogators expected her to confess to being a Communist or touched on Scientology beliefs. In the rare free moments she had between waking and interrogation she considered suicide, but her captors had gone out of their way to make it difficult: and in the depths of depression she found it hard to muster up the energy for self-harm.

  They came to take her to the interrogation room once more. Paulie complied wearily, not balking as the guards shackled her to the ring in the floor. It had become routine by now, and she waited patiently for them to unhood her and start the cycle of boredom anew. But this time, when the hood came off she found herself facing a table—and on the other side of the table there was an empty chair.