The Jennifer Morgue l-3

by Charles Stross

  "You've got grues? Here?" He looks so excited at the prospect that I almost hesitate to tell him the truth.

  "No, I just meant you'd just step in something nasty. This isn't an adventure game." The dust lies in gentle snowdrifts everywhere undisturbed by outsourced cleaning services — contractors generally take one look at the seg block and double their quote, going over the ministerially imposed cap (which gets imposed rigorously on Ops, freeing up funds so Human Resources can employ plant beauticians to lovingly wax the leaves on their office rubber plants). "You called it a segregation block. What, uh, who was segregated"

  I briefly toy with the idea of winding him up, then reject it. Once you're inside the Laundry you're in it for life, and I don't really want to leave a trail of grudge-bearing juniors sharpening their knives behind me. "People we didn't want exposed to the outside world, even by accident," I say finally.

  "If you work here long enough it does strange things to your head. Work here too long, and other people can see the effects, too. You'll notice the windows are all frosted or else they open onto air shafts, where there aren't any windows in the first place," I add, shoving open the door onto a large, executive office marred only by the bricked-up window frame in the wall behind the desk, and a disturbingly wide trail of something shiny — I tell myself it's probably just dry wallpaper paste — leading to the swivel chair. "Great, this is just what I've been looking for."

  "It is"

  "Yep; a big, empty, executive office where the lights and power still work."

  "Whose was it?" Pete looks around curiously. "There aren't many sockets..."

  "Before my time." I pull the chair out and look at the seat doubtfully. It was good leather once, but the seat is hideously stained and cracked. The penny drops. "I've heard of this guy.

  'Slug' Johnson. He used to be high up in Accounts, but he made lots of enemies. In the end someone put salt on his back."

  "You want us to work in here?" Pete asks, in a blinding moment of clarity.

  "For now," I reassure him. "Until we can screw a budget for a real office out of Emma from HR."

  "We'll need more power sockets." Pete's eyes are taking on a distant, glazed look and his fingers twitch mousily: "We'll need casemods, need overclocked CPUs, need fuck-off huge screens, double-headed Radeon X1600 video cards." He begins to shake. "Nerf guns, Twinkies, LAN party — "

  "Pete! Snap out of it!" I grab his shoulders and shake him.

  He blinks and looks at me blearily. "Whuh"

  I physically drag him out of the room. "First, before we do anything else, I'm getting the cleaners in to give it a class four exorcism and to steam clean the carpets. You could catch something nasty in there." You nearly did, I add silently. "Lots of bad psychic backwash."

  "I thought he was an accountant?" says Pete, shaking his head. "No, he was in Accounts. Not the same thing at all. You're confusing them with Financial Control."

  "Huh? What do Accounts do, then"

  "They settle accounts — usually fatally. At least, that's what they used to do back in the '60s; the department was terminated some time ago."

  "Um." Pete swallows. "I thought that was all a joke? This is, like the BBFC? You know"

  I blink. The British Board of Film Classification, the people who certify video games and cut the cocks out of movies? "Did anyone tell you what the Laundry actually does?"

  "Plays lots of deathmatches?" he asks hopefully.

  "That's one way of putting it," I begin, then pause. How to continue? "Magic is applied mathematics. The many-angled ones live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set. Demonology is right after debugging in the dictionary. You heard of Alan Turing? The father of programming"

  "Didn't he work for John Carmack"

  Oh, it's another world out there. "Not exactly, he built the first computers for the government, back in the Second World War. Not just codebreaking computers; he designed containment processors for Q Division, the Counter-Possession Unit of SOE that dealt with demon-ridden Abwehr agents.

  Anyway, after the war, they disbanded SOE — broke up all the government computers, the Colossus machines — except for the CPU, which became the Laundry. The Laundry kept going, defending the realm from the scum of the multiverse.

  There are mathematical transforms that can link entities in different universes — try to solve the wrong theorem and they'll eat your brain, or worse. Anyhow, these days more people do more things with computers than anyone ever dreamed of. Computer games are networked and scriptable, they've got compilers and debuggers built in, you can build cities and film goddamn movies inside them. And every so often someone stumbles across something they're not meant to be playing with and, well, you know the rest."

  His eyes are wide in the shadows. "You mean, this is government work? Like in Deus Ex"

  I nod. "That's it exactly, kid." Actually it's more like Doom 3 but I'm not ready to tell him that; he might start pestering me for a grenade launcher.

  "So we're going to, like, set up a LAN party and log onto lots of persistent realms and search 'n' sweep them fot demons and blow the demons away?" He's almost panting with eagerness. "Wait'll I tell my homies!"

  "Pete, you can't do that."

  "What, isn't it allowed"

  "No, I didn't say that." I lead him back towards the welllit corridors of the Ops wing and the coffee break room beyond. "I said you can't do that. You're under a geas. Section Ill of the Official Secrets Act says you can't tell anyone who hasn't signed the said act that Section III even exists, much less tell them anything about what it covers. The Laundry is one hundred percent under cover, Pete. You can't talk about it to outsiders, you'd choke on your own purple tongue."

  "Eew." He looks disappointed. "You mean, like, this is real secret stuff. Like Mum's work."

  "Yes, Pete. It's all really secret. Now let's go get a coffee and pester somebody in Facilities for a mains extension bar and a computer."

  I spend the rest of the day wandering from desk to desk, filing requisitions and ordering up supplies, with Pete snuffling and shambling after me like a supersized spaniel. The cleaners won't be able to work over Johnson's office until next Tuesday due to an unfortunate planetary conjunction, but I know a temporary fix I can sketch on the floor and plug into a repurposed pocket calculator that should hold "Slug" Johnson at bay until we can get him exorcised. Meanwhile, thanks to a piece of freakish luck, I discover a stash of elderly laptops nobody is using; someone in Catering mistyped their code in their Assets database last year, and thanks to the wonders of our ongoing ISO 9000 certification process, there is no legal procedure for reclassifying them as capital assets without triggering a visit by the Auditors. So I duly issue Pete with a 1.4 gigahertz Toshiba Sandwich Toaster, enlist his help in moving my stuff into the new office, nail a WiFi access point to the door like a tribal fetish or mezuzah ("this office now occupied by geeks who worship the great god GHz"), and park him on the other side of the spacious desk so I can keep an eye on him.

  The next day I've got a staff meeting at 10:00 a.m. I spend the first half hour of my morning drinking coffee, making snide remarks in e-mail, reading Slashdot, and waiting for Pete to show up. He arrives at 9:35. "Here." I chuck a fat wallet full of CD-Rs at him. "Install these on your laptop, get on the intranet, and download all the patches you need.

  Don't, whatever you do, touch my computer or try to log onto my NWN server — it's called Bosch, by the way. I'll catch up with you after the meeting."

  "Why is it called Bosch?" he whines as I stand up and grab my security badge off the filing cabinet. "Washing machines or Hieronymus machines, take your pick." I head off to the conference room for the Ways and Means Committee meeting — to investigate new ways of being mean, as Bridget (may Nyarlathotep rest her soul) once explained it to me.

  At first I'm moderately hopeful I'll be able to stay awake through the meeting. But then Lucy, a bucktoothed goth from Facilities, gets the bit between her incisors. She's going on in a giggly way abou
t the need to outsource our administration of office sundries in order to focus on our core competencies, and I'm trying desperately hard not to fall asleep, when there's an odd thudding sound that echoes through the fabric of the building. Then a pager goes off.

  Andy's at the other end of the table. He looks at me: "Bob, your call, I think."

  I sigh. "You think?" I glance at the pager display. Oops, so it is. '"Scuse me folks, something's come up."

  "Go on." Lucy glares at me halfheartedly from behind her lucky charms. "I'll minute you."

  "Sure." And I'm out, almost an hour before lunch. Wow, so interns are useful for something. Just as long as he hasn't gotten himself killed.

  I trot back to Slug's office. Peter-Fred is sitting in his chair, with his back to the door.

  "Pete?" I ask.

  No reply. But his laptop's open and running, and I can hear its fan chugging away. "Uh-huh." And the disc wallet is lying open on my side of the desk. I edge towards the computer carefully, taking pains to stay out of eyeshot of the screen. When I get a good look at Peter-Fred I see that his mouth's ajar and his eyes are closed; he's drooling slightly. "Pete?" I say, and poke his shoulder. He doesn't move. Probably a good thing, I tell myself. Okay, so he isn't conventionally possessed...

  When I'm close enough, I filch a sheet of paper from the ink-jet printer, turn the lights out, and angle the paper in front of the laptop. Very faintly I can see reflected colors, but nothing particularly scary. "Right," I mutter. I slide my hands in front of the keyboard — still careful not to look directly at the screen — and hit the key combination to bring — up the interactive debugger in the game I'm afraid he's running.

  Trip an object dump, hit the keystrokes for quick save, and quit, and I can breathe a sigh of relief and look at the screen shot. It takes me several seconds to figure out what I'm looking at. "Oh you stupid, stupid arsel" It's Peter-Fred, of course. He installed NWN and the other stuff I threw at him: the Laundry-issue hack pack and DM tools, and the creation toolkit. Then he went and did exactly what I told him not to do: he connected to Bosch. That's him in the screenshot between the two. half-ore mercenaries in the tavern, looking very afraid.

  Two hours later Brains and Pinky are baby-sitting Pete's supine body (we don't dare move it yet), Bosch is locked down and frozen, and I'm sitting on the wrong side of Angleton's desk, sweating bullets. "Summarize, boy," he rumbles, fixing me with one yellowing rheumy eye. "Keep it simple. None of your jargon, life's too short."

  "He's fallen into a game and he can't get out." I cross my i arms. "I told him precisely what not to do, and he went ahead and did it. Not my fault."

  Angleton makes a wheezing noise, like a boiler threatening to explode. After a moment I recognize it as two-thousand-year-old laughter, mummified and out for revenge. Then he stops wheezing. Oops, I think. "I believe you, boy. Thousands wouldn't. But you're going to have to get him out. You're responsible."

  I'm responsible? I'm about to tell the old man what I think when a second thought screeches into the pileup at the back of my tongue and I bite my lip. I suppose I am responsible, technically. I mean, Pete's my intern, isn't he? I'm a management grade, after all, and if he's been assigned to me, that makes me his manager, even if it's a post that comes with loads of responsibility and no actual power to, like, stop him doing something really foolish. I'm in loco parentis, or maybe just plain loco. I whistle quietly. "What would you suggest"

  Angleton wheezes again. "Not my field, boy, I wouldn't know one end of one of those newfangled Babbage machine contraptions from the other." He fixes me with a gimlet stare. "But feel free to draw on HR's budget line. I will make enquiries on the other side to see what's going on. But if you don't bring him back, I'll make you explain what happened to him to his mother."

  "His mother?" I'm puzzled. "You mean she's one of us"

  "Yes. Didn't Andrew tell you? Mrs. Young is the deputy director in charge of Human Resources. So you'd better get him back before she notices her son is missing."

  James Bond has Q Division; I've got Pinky and Brains from Tech Support. Bond gets jet packs, I get whoopee cushions, but I repeat myself. Still, at least P and B know about firstperson shooters.

  "Okay, let's go over this again," says Brains. He sounds unusually chipper for this early in the morning. "You set up Bosch as a server for a persistent Neverwinter Nights world, running the full Project Aurora hack pack. That gives you, oh, lots of extensions for trapping demons that wander into your realm while you trace their owner's PCs and inject a bunch of spyware, then call out to Accounts to send a blackbag team round in the real world. Right"

  "Yes." I nod. "An internet honeypot for supernatural intruders."

  "Wibble!" That's Pinky. "Hey, neat! So what happened to your PFY"

  "Well ... " I take a deep breath. "There's a big castle overlooking the town, with a twentieth-level sorceress running it. Lots of glyphs of summoning in the basement dungeons, some of which actually bind at run-time to a class library that implements the core transformational grammar of the Language of Leng." I hunch over slightly. "It's really neat to be able to do that kind of experiment in a virtual realm — if you accidentally summon something nasty it's trapped inside the server or maybe your local area network, rather than being out in the real world where it can eat your brains."

  Brains stares at me. "You expect me to believe this kid took out a twentieth-level sorceress? Just so he could dick around in your dungeon lab"

  "Uh, no." I pick up a blue-tinted CD-R. Someone — not me — has scribbled a cartoon skull-and-crossbones on it and added a caption: DO'NT R3AD M3. "I've been looking at this — carefully. It's not one of the discs I gave Pete; it's one of his own. He's not totally clueless, for a crack-smoking script kiddie. In fact, it's got a bunch of interesting class libraries on it. He went in with a knapsack full of special toys and just happened to fuck up by trying to rob the wrong tavern. This realm, being hosted on Bosch, is scattered with traps that are superclassed into a bunch of scanner routines from Project Aurora and sniff for any taint of the real supernatural.

  Probably he whiffed of Laundry business — and that set off one of the traps, which yanked him in."

  "How do you get inside a game?" asks Pinky, looking hopeful. "Could you get me into Grand Theft Auto: Castro Club Extreme"

  Brains glances at him in evident disgust. "You can virtualize any universal Turing machine," he sniffs. "Okay, Bob.

  What precisely do you need from us in order to get the kid out of there"

  I point to the laptop: "I need that, running the Dungeon Master client inside the game. Plus a class four summoning grid, and a lot of luck." My guts clench. "Make that a lot more luck than usual."

  "Running the DM client — " Brains goes cross-eyed for a moment " — is it reentrant"

  "It will be." I grin mirthlessly. "And I'll need you on the outside, running the ordinary network client, with a couple of characters I'll preload for you. The sorceress is holding Pete in the third-level dungeon basement of Castle Storm.

  The way the narrative's set up she's probably not going to do anything to him until she's also acquired a whole bunch of plot coupons, like a cockatrice and a mind flayer's gallbladder — then she can sacrifice him and trade up to a fourth-level demon or a new castle or something. Anyway, I've got a plan.

  Ready to kick ass"

  I hate working in dungeons. They're dank, smelly, dark, and things keep jumping out and trying to kill you. That seems to be the defining characteristic of the genre, really. Dead boring hack-and-slash — but the kiddies love 'em. I know I did, back when I was a wee spoddy twelve-year-old. Fine, says I, we're not trying to snare kiddies, we're looking to attract the more cerebral kind of MMORPG player — the sort who're too clever by half. Designers, in other words.

  How do you snare a dungeon designer who's accidentally stumbled on a way to summon up shoggoths? Well, you need a website. The smart geeks are always magpies for ideas — they see something new and it's "Ooh! Shiny!
" and before you can snap your fingers they've done something with it you didn't anticipate. So you set your site up to suck them in and lock them down. You seed it with a bunch of downloadable goodies and some interesting chat boards — not the usual MY MAGIC USR CN TW4T UR CLERIC, DOOD, but actual useful information — useful if you're programming in NWScript, that is (the high-level programming language embedded in the game, which hardcore designers write game extensions in). But the website isn't enough. Ideally you want to run a networked game server — a persistent world that your victims can connect to using their client software to see how your bunch o' tricks looks in the virtual flesh. And finally you seed clues in the server to attract the marks who know too damn much for their own good, like Peter-Fred.

  The problem is, Bosch World isn't ready yet. That's why I told him to stay out. Worse, there's no easy way to dig him out of it yet because I haven't yet written the object retrieval code — and worse: to speed up the development process, I grabbed a whole bunch of published code from one of the bigger online persistent realms, and I haven't weeded out all the spurious quests and curses and shit that make life exciting for adventurers. In fact, now that I think about it, that was going to be Peter-Fred's job for the next month. Oops.

  Unlike Pete, I do not blunder into Bosch unprepared; I know exactly what to expect. I've got a couple of cheats up my nonexistent monk's sleeve, including the fact that I can enter the game with a level eighteen character carrying a laptop with a source-level debugger — all praise the new self-deconstructing reality!

  The stone floor of the monastery is gritty and cold under my bare feet, and there's a chilly morning breeze blowing in through the huge oak doors at the far end of the compound.

  I know it's all in my head — I'm actually sitting in a cramped office chair with Pinky and Brains hammering away on keyboards to either side — but it's still creepy. I turn round and genuflect once in the direction of the huge and extremely scary devil carved into the wall behind me, then head for the exit.