And that business with Emilio and the yacht, I admit that looked bad. But did you know, it originally belonged to Adnan Khashoggi or Fahd ibn Saud or someone? Emilio was acting entirely on his own initiative — a loose cannon — and as soon as I heard about the affair I terminated his employment."
I asked Ernst to tell me about Bond.
"Listen, this Bond chap, I want you to understand this: however he's painted in the mass media, the reality is that he's a communist stooge, an assassin. Look at the evidence. He works for the state — a socialist state at that. He went to university and worked with those traitors Philby and Burgess, that MacLean fellow — communist spies to a man. He didn't resign his commission when the British government went socialist, like a decent fellow; instead he took assignments to go after entrepreneurs who were a threat to the interests of this socialist government, and he rubbed them out like a Mafia button man. There was no due process of law there, no respect for property rights, no courts, no lawyers — just a 'License to Kill' enemies of the state, loosely defined, who mostly happened to be businessmen working on start-up projects that coincidentally threatened state monopolies. He's a damned commissar. Do you know why Moscow hated him?
It's because he'd beaten them at their own racket."
Blofeld was clearly depressed by this recollection, so I tried to change the subject by asking him about his personal management philosophy.
"Well, you know, I tend to use whatever works in day-today situations. I'm a pragmatist, really. But I've got a soft spot for modern philosophers, Leo Strauss and Ayn Rand: the rights of the individual. And I've always wanted to remake the world as a better place, which is probably why the establishment dislikes me: I'm a threat to vested interests. Well, they're all descended from men who were threats to vested interests, too, back in the day, only I threaten them with new technologies, while their ancestors mostly did their threatening with a bloody sword and the gallows. I don't believe in initiating force." He laughed self-deprecatingly. "I suppose you could call me naive."
Trade Goods When I played back my tape of our discussion, it took me some time to notice that Ernst had carefully steered the conversation away from certain key points I had intended to quiz him about.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the Bond milieu is the prevalence of technologies that are strangely out of place.
Belt-buckle grappling hooks with wire spools that can support a man's weight? Laser rifles? These aren't simple extrapolations of existing technology — they go far beyond anything that's achievable with today's engineering tools or materials science. But forget Bond's toys, the products of Q division. From Blofeld's solar-powered orbital laser in Diamonds Are Forever to Carver's stealth cruiser in Tomorrow Never Dies, we are surrounded by signs that the adversary has got tricks up his sleeve that far outweigh anything Bond's backers can provide. These menacing intrusions of alien superscience — where could they possibly have gotten them from?
The answer can be discerned with little difficulty if one cares to scrutinize the writings of the sage of Providence, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. This scholar — whose path, regrettably, never crossed that of the young Ian Fleming — asserted that our tenancy of this planet is but a recent aberration.
Earth has in the past been home for a number of alien species of vast antiquity and incomprehensibly advanced knowledge, and indeed some of them may still linger along-side us — on the high Antarctic plateau, in the frigid oceanic depths, even in strange half-breed colonies off the New England coastline.
If this strikes you as nonsensical, first contemplate your nearest city: How recognizable would it be in a hundred years' time if our entire species silently vanished tomorrow?
How recognizable would it be in a thousand years? Would any relics still bear witness to the once-proud towers of New York or Tokyo, a million years hence? Our future — and the future of any once-proud races that bestrode our planet — is that of an oily stain in the shale deposits of deep history.
Earth's biosphere and the active tectonic system it dances upon cleans house remorselessly, erasing any structure that is not alive or maintained by the living.
Consider also the extent to which we really occupy the planet we live on. We think of ourselves as the dominant species on Earth — but seventy-five percent of the Earth's entire biomass consists of bacteria and algae that we can't even see with the naked eye. (Bacteria from whose ranks fearsome pathogens periodically emerge, burning like wildfire through our ranks.) Nor do we, in any real sense of the word, occupy the oceans. Certainly our trawlers hunt the bounty of the upper waters. But submarines (of which there are only a few hundred on the entire planet) fumble like blind men through the uppermost half-kilometer of a world-ocean that averages three kilometers in depth, unable to dive beneath their pressure limits to explore the abyssal plains that cover nearly two-thirds of the planetary surface. Finally, the surface (both the suboceanic abyss and the thin skin of dry land we cling tenuously to) is but a thousandth of the depth of the planet itself; we can't even drill through the crust, much less contemplate with any certainty the nature of events unfolding within the hot, dense mantle beneath.
We could be sharing the planet with numerous powerful alien civilizations, denizens of the high-energy condensedmatter realm beneath our feet, and we'd never know it — unless they chose to send emissaries into our biosphere, sprinkling death rays and other trade goods like glass beads before the aboriginal inhabitants, extracting a ghastly price in return for their largesse. A Colder War?
James Bond was a creature of the Cold War: a strange period of shadow-boxing that stretched from late 1945 to the winter of 1991, forty-six years of paranoia, fear, and the creepy sensation that our lives were in thrall to forces beyond our comprehension. It's almost impossible to explain the Cold War to anyone who was born after 1980; the sense of looming doom, the long shadows cast by the two eyeball-to-eyeball superpowers, each possessing vast powers of destruction, ready and able to bring about that destruction on a planetary scale in pursuit of their recondite ideologies. It was, to use the appropriate adjective, a truly Lovecraftian age, dominated by the cold reality that our lives could be interrupted by torment and death at virtually any time; normal existence was conducted in a soap-bubble universe sustained only by our determination to shut out awareness of the true horrors lurking in the darkness outside it an abyss presided over by chilly alien warriors devoted to death-cult ideologies and dreams of Mutually Assured Destruction. Decades of distance have bought us some relief, thickening the wall of the bubble — memories misting over with the comforting illusion that the Cold War wasn't really as bad as it seemed at the time — but who do we think we're kidding? The Cold War wasn't about us. It was about the Spies, and the Secret Masters, and the Hidden Knowledge.
It's no coincidence that the Cold War was the golden age of spying — the peak of the second-oldest profession, the diggers in the dark, the seekers after unclean knowledge and secret wisdom. Prior to 1939, spying of the international kind rather than the sordid domestic variety (let us pass swiftly over the tawdry Stasi archives of sealed glass jars full of worn underwear, kept as scent cues for the police dogs) was a small scale, largely amateurish concern. With the outbreak of the Second World War, it mushroomed. Faced with employment vacancies, the first response of a growing organization is to recruit close to home. Just like any 1990s dot-com start-up, growing as the founders haul in all their friends and anyone they know who has the right skill set, the 1940s espionage agencies were a boom town into which a well-connected clubbable London playboy would inevitably be sucked — and, moreover, one where he might try his hand and succeed, to everyone's surprise. (In the 1990s he'd end up in marketing, with stock options up to here. Sic transit gloria techie.) When the Second World War gave way to the Doomwatch days and Strangelove nights of the Cold War, it entered a period in which the same clubbable fellow might find himself working in a mature organization, vastly larger and more professional than the half-ass
ed amateurism of the early days.
The CIA was born in the shadow of the wartime OSS, and grew into the emblematic Company (traders in secrets, overthrowers of governments), locked in titanic struggle with that other superpowered rival, the KGB (and their less wellknown fellows in the GRU).
The age of the traditional sneak-spies with their Minox cameras gave way to the era of the bugging device. With the 1960s came a new emphasis on supplementing human intelligence (HUMINT) with intelligence from electronic sources (ELINT). New agencies — the NSA in the United States, GCHQ in the UK — expanded as the field of "spyless spying"
went mainstream, aided by the explosion in computing power made possible by integrated circuits and, later, the microprocessor. As telephony, television, telex, and other technologies began to come online, a torrent of data poured through the wires, a deluge that threatened to drown the agencies in useless noise. Or was it the whispering on the deep-ocean cables? Maybe the chatter served to conceal and disguise the quiet whispering of the hidden oracles, dribbling out strange new concepts that warped the vulnerable primate minds to serve their inscrutable goals. The source of the incredible new technologies that drove the advances of the mid-twentieth century was, perhaps, the whispering of an alien farmer in the ears of his herd ...
Times change, and the golden age of spying is over. We've delivered the harvest of fear that the secret masters desired, or maybe they've simply lost interest in us for the time being.
Time will tell. For now, be content that it's all over: the Cold War was a time of strangely rapid technological progress, but also of claustrophobic fear of destruction at three minutes' notice, of the thermonuclear stars coming and bringing madness and death in their wake. Retreat into your soap-bubble universe, little primate, and give thanks.
From the perspective of the twenty-first century, Bond was a poor archetype for a hero; certainly he couldn't save us from the gibbering horrors of the Cold War, but only cast a shadow beneath their unblinking ground-zero glare. But we found salvation in the end, in the most unlikely place of all: if you turn on the TV you're likely to see one of old Ernst's proteges being held up for praise as an object of emulation.
President of Italy, captain of industry or chief executive of Enron — SPECTRE won and it's their world that we live in, the world of the lesser evil.
Charles Stross Edinburgh, UK February 2006
GLOSSARY OF ABBREVIATIONS, ACRONYMS,AND ORGANIZATIONS
Abwehr Foreign Bureau/Defense of the Armed Forces High Command: the German intelligence organization founded in 1921; after WWII, in order to appease the Allies, the organization supposedly focused only on defense, i.e. counterespionage [Germany] AIVD General Intelligence and Security Office: the Dutch domestic counterespionage agency [Netherlands]
APT(N) Atlantic Patrol Task (North): standing Royal Navy patrol in the Caribbean and North Atlantic area [UK]
Black (Pertaining to an organization or project) Secret and off the record, except to governmental intelligence oversight bodies [All]
Black Chamber American cryptanalysis agency, officially disbanded in 1929; predecessor to the NSA; nickname for the contemporary superblack agency dealing with occult intelligence [US]
CESG Communications Electronics Security Group: a division within GCHQ [UK]
CIA Central Intelligence Agency; also known as The Company [US]
The Company Nickname: see CIA [US]
COBRA Cabinet Briefing Office Room "A": where the Civil Contingencies Committee meets and is thus often referred to as COBRA; able to invoke Section Two powers under the Civil Contingencies Act (aka Martial Law) [UK]
COTS Commercial, Off The Shelf: computer kit; a procurement term [US/UK]
DERA Defense Evaluation and Research Agency, privatized as QinetiQ [UK]
FSB Federal Security Service, formerly known as KGB [Russia]
Faust Force Nickname: see GSA [Germany]
GCHQ Government Communications htQ (UK equivalent of NSA) [UK]
GMDI Hughes Global Marine Development, Inc.[US]
GRU Russian Military Intelligence; an intense rivalry existed between the GRU and KGB [Russia]
GSA Geheime Sicherheit Abteilung: contemporary German domestic occult intelligence agency [Germany]
HMG Her Majesty's Government [UK]
HUMINT Human Intelligence: intelligence gathered from human (as opposed to electronic) sources [All]
INTERPOL International Criminal Police Organization: created in 1923 to assist international crim-' inal police cooperation [All]
KGB Committee for State Security, principal Soviet intelligence agency; renamed FSB in 1991 after disintegration of the Soviet Union [USSR]
The Laundry Nickname of the former Department Q of the SOE, dealing with occult intelligence; spun off as a separate black organization in 1945, no publicly known name [UK]
MI5 (originally Military Intelligence Section 5) Security Service, also known as SS, responsible for internal security [UK]
MI6 (originally Military Intelligence Section 6) Secret Intelligence Service, also known as SIS, responsible for external security [UK]
MOD Ministry of Defense [UK]
NSA National Security Agency (US equivalent ofGCHQ)[US]
Number Ten 10 Downing Street, London: the historic office and home of the British Prime Minister [UK]
ONI Office of Naval Intelligence [US]
OSS Office of Strategic Services (US equivalent of SOE), disbanded in 1945, remodeled as CIA [US]
Politburo Political Bureau: the executive organization for the Communist Party [USSR]
Q Division Division within The Laundry associated with R&D [UK]
QinetiQ See DERA [UK]
SAS Special Air Service: British Army Special Forces [UK]
SBS SIS SOE Superblack Territorial SAS TLA Two-One SAS Special Boat Service: Royal Marines Special Forces [UK]
See MI6 [UK]
Special Operations Executive (UK equivalent of OSS), officially disbanded in 1945; see also The Laundry [UK]
(Pertaining to a black organization or black project) Secret and off the record to all, including governmental intelligence oversight bodies [All]
Territorial Army, British equivalent of the US National Guard. Territorial SAS, the part-time weekend soldier arm of the SAS, mostly staffed by veterans [UK]
Three Letter Acronym [All]
21 Special Air Service Regiment; also known as Artists' Rifles [UK]
Charles Stross is a full-time writer who was born in Leeds, England in 1964. He studied in London and Bradford, gaining degrees in pharmacy and computer science, and has worked in a variety of jobs, including pharmacist, technical author, software engineer and freelance journalist. Find out more about Charles Stross at: www.antipope.org/charlie/index.html You can read more about Charles and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at: www.orbitbooks.net
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