Wireless

by Charles Stross

  Pierce approached the table with all the enthusiasm of a condemned man approaching the gallows. “You wanted to see me,” he said. There were two goblets of something foamy and green on the table, and two chairs. “Who else?”

  “The other drink’s for you. Berliner Weiss with Waldmeistersirup. You’ll like it. Guaranteed.” Kaf ka gestured at the empty chair. “Sit down.”

  “How do you know—”

  Silly question. Pierce sat down. “You know this isn’t my time?”

  “Yes.” Kafka picked up a tall, curved glass full of dark brown beer and took a mouthful. “Doesn’t matter.” He peered at Pierce. “You’re a new graduate. Damn, I don’t like this job.” He took another mouthful of beer.

  “What’s happened now?” Pierce asked.

  “I don’t know. That’s why I want you here.”

  “Is this to do with the time someone tried to assassinate me?”

  “No.” Kafka shook his head. “It’s worse, I’m afraid. One of your tutors may have gone off the reservation. Observation indicated. I’m putting you on the case. You may need—you may need to terminate this one.”

  “A tutor.” Despite himself, Pierce was intrigued. Kafka, the man from Internal Affairs (but his role was unclear, for was it not the case that the Stasis police their own past and future selves?) wanted him to investigate a senior agent and tutor? Ordering him to bug his future self would be understandable, but this—

  “Yes.” Kafka put his glass down with a curl of his lower lip that bespoke distaste. “We have reason to believe she may be working for the Opposition.”

  “Opposition.” Pierce raised an eyebrow. “There is no opposition—”

  “Come, now: don’t be naive.

  Every ideology in every recorded history has an opposition. Why should we be any different?”

  “But we’re—” Pierce paused, the phrase bigger than history withering on the tip of his tongue. “Excuse me?”

  “Work it through.” Kafka was atwitch with barely concealed impatience. “You can’t possibly not have thought about setting yourself up as a pervert god, can you? Everybody thinks about it, this we know; seed the universe with life, create your own Science Empires, establish a rival interstellar civilization in the deep Cryptozoic, and use it to invade or secede Earth before the Stasis notices—that sort of thing. It’s not as if thinking about it is a crime: the problems start when an agent far gone in solipsism starts thinking they can do it for real. Or worse, when the Opposition raise their snouts.”

  “But I—” Pierce stopped, collected his thoughts, and continued. “I thought that never happened? That the self-policing thing was a, an adequate safeguard?”

  “Lad.” Kafka shook his head. “You clearly mean well. And self-policing does indeed work adequately most of the time. But don’t let the security theater at your graduation deceive you: there are failure modes. We set you a large number of surveillance assignments to muddy the water—palimpsests all, of course, we overwrite them once they deliver their reports so that future-you retains no memory of them—but you can’t watch yourself all the time. And there are administrative errors. You’re not only the best monitor of your own behavior, but the best-placed individual to know how best to corrupt you. We are human and imperfect, which is why we need an external Internal Affairs department. Someone has to coordinate things, especially when the Opposition are involved.”

  “The Opposition?” Pierce picked up his glass and drank deeply, studying Kafka. “Who are they?”

  Who do you want me to rat out? he wondered. Myself? Surely Kafka couldn’t have overlooked his history with Xiri, now buried beneath the dusty pages of a myriad of rewrites?

  “You’ll know them when you meet them.” Kafka emitted a little mirthless chuckle and stood up. “Come upstairs to my office, and I’ll show you why I requested you for this assignment.”

  Kafka’s office occupied the entire top floor of the building and was reached by means of a creaking mesh-fronted elevator that rose laboriously through the well of a wide staircase. It was warm, but not obnoxiously so, as Pierce followed Kafka out of the elevator cage. “The door is reactive,” Kafka warned, placing a protective hand on the knob. Hidden glands were waiting beneath a patina of simulated brass, ready to envenomate the palm of an unwary intruder. “Door: accept agent Pierce. General defenses: accept Agent Pierce with standard agent privilege set. You may follow me now.”

  Kafka opened the door wide. Beyond it, ranks of angled wooden writing desks spanned the room from wall to wall. A dark-suited iteration of Kafka perched atop a high stool behind each one of them, pens moving incessantly across their ledgers. A primitive visitor (one not slain on the spot by the door handle, or the floor, or the wallpaper) might have gaped at the ever-changing handwriting and spidery diagrams that flickered on the pages, mutating from moment to moment as the history books redrew themselves, and speculated about digital paper. Pierce, no longer a primitive, felt the hair under his collar rise as he polled his phone, pulling up the number of rewrites going on in the room. “You’re really working Control hard,” he said in the direction of Kafka’s receding back.

  “This is the main coordination node for prehistoric Germany.” Kafka tucked his hands behind his back as he walked, stoop-shouldered, between desks. “We’re close enough to the start of Stasis history to make meddling tricky—we have to keep track of continuity, we can’t simply edit at will.” Meddling with prehistory, before the establishment of the ubiquitous monitoring and recording technologies that ultimately fed the Library at the end of time, ought to be risk-free: if a Neolithic barbarian froze to death on a glacier, unrecorded, the implications for deep history were trivial. But the rules were fluid, and interference was risky: if a time traveler were to shoot the Kaiser, for example, or otherwise derail the ur-history line leading up to the Stasis, it could turn the entire future into a palimpsest. “The individual I am investigating is showing an unhealthy interest in the phase boundary between Stasis and prehistory.”

  One of the deskbound Kafkas looked up, his eyebrows furrowing with irritation. “Could you take this somewhere else?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry,” Pierce’s Kafka replied with abrupt humility. “Agent Pierce, this way.”

  As Kafka led Pierce into an office furnished like an actuary’s hermitage, Pierce asked, “Aren’t you at risk of anachronism yourselves? Multitasking like that, so close to the real Kafka’s datum?”

  Kafka smiled sepulchrally as he sat down behind the heavy oak desk. “I take precautions. And the fewer individuals who know what’s in those ledgers, the better.” He gestured at a small, hard seat in front of it. “Be seated, Agent Pierce. Now, in your own words. Tell me about your relationship with Agent-Scholar Yarrow.

  Everything , if you please.” He reached into his desk drawer and withdrew a smart pad. “I have a transcript of your written correspondence here. We’ll go through it line by line next . . .”

  Funeral in Berlin

  The interrogation lasted three days. Kafka didn’t even bother to erase it from Pierce’s time line retroactively: clearly he was making a point about the unwisdom of crossing Internal Affairs.

  Afterward, Pierce left the hotel and wandered the streets of Berlin in a neurasthenic daze.

  Does Kafka trust me? Or not? On balance, probably not: the methodical, calm grilling he’d received, the interrogation about the precise meaning of Yarrow’s love letters (faded memories from decades ago, to Pierce’s mind), had been humiliating, an emotional strip search. Knowing that Kafka understood his dalliance with Yarrow as a youthful indiscretion, knowing that Kafka clearly knew of (and tolerated) his increasingly desperate search for the point at which his history with Xiri had been overwritten, only made it worse. We can erase everything that gives meaning to your life if we feel like it. Feeling powerless was a new and shocking experience for Pierce, who had known the freedom of the ages: a return to his pre-Stasis life, half-starved and skulking frightened in the shadows of
interesting times.

  And then there was the incipient paranoia that any encounter with Internal Affairs engendered.

  Am I being watched right now? he wondered as he walked. A ghost-me surveillance officer working for Internal Affairs, or something else? Kafka would be mad not to assign him a watcher, he decided. If Yarrow was under investigation, then he himself must be under suspicion. Guilt by association was the first rule of counterespionage, after all.

  A soul-blighting sense of depression settled into his bones. He’d had an inkling of it for months, ever since his increasingly frantic search in the Library, but Kafka’s quietly pedantic examination had somehow catalyzed a growing certainty that he would never see Xiri, or Magnus and Liann, ever again—that if he could ever find them, shadows cast from his mind by the merciless inspection-lamp glare of Internal Affairs would banish them farther into unhistory.

  Therefore, he wandered.

  Civilization lay like a heavy blanket upon the land, rucked up in gray-faced five-story apartment blocks and pompous stone-faced business establishments, their pillars and porticoes and cornicework swollen with self-importance like so many amorous street pigeons. The city sweated in the summer heat, the stench and flies of horse manure in the streets contributing a sour pungency to the sharp stink of stove smoke.

  Other people shared the Strasse with him; here a peddler selling apples from a handcart, there a couple taking the air together. Pierce walked slowly along the sidewalk of a broad street, sweating in his suit and taking what shelter he could from the merciless summer sun beneath the awnings of shops, letting his phone’s navigation aid guide his footsteps even as he wondered despondently if he would ever find his way home. He could wander through the shadowy world of historicity forever, never finding his feet—for though the Stasis and their carefully cultivated tools of ubiquitous monitoring had nailed down the sequence of events that comprised history, history was a tangled weave, many threads superimposed and redyed and snipped out of the final pattern . . .

  The scent was his first clue that he was not alone, floral and sweet and tickling the edge of his nostrils with a half-remembered sense of illicit excitement that made his heart hammer. The shifting sands of memory gave way:

  I know that smell—

  His phone vibrated.

  “Show no awareness,” someone whispered inside his skull in Urem. “They are watching you.” The voice was his own.

  The strolling couple taking the air arm in arm were ahead of him. It was her scent, the familiar bouquet, but—“Where are you?” he sent. “Show yourself.”

  The phone buzzed again like an angry wasp trapped inside his ribs.

  “Not with watchers. Go to this location and wait,” said the traitor voice, as a spatial tag nudged the corner of his mind. “We’ ll pick you up.” The rendezvous was a couple of kilometers away, in a public park notorious by night: a French-letter drop for a dead-letter drop.

  He tried not to stare.

  It might be her, he thought, trying to shake thirty-year-old jigsaw memories into something that matched a glimpse of a receding back in late-nineteenth-century dress and broad-brimmed hat. He turned a corner in his head even as they turned aside into a residential street: “Internal Affairs just interrogated me about Yarrow.”

  “ You told us already. Go now. Leave the rest to us.”

  Pierce’s phone fell silent. He glanced sideways out of the corners of his eyes, but the strolling couple were no longer visible. He sniffed, flaring his nostrils in search of an echo of that familiar scent, but it, too, was gone. Doubtless they’d never been here at all; they were Stasis, after all. Weren’t they?

  Guided by his phone’s internal nudging, Pierce ambled slowly toward the park, shoulders relaxed and hands clasped behind his back as if enjoying a quiet afternoon stroll. But his heart was pounding and there was an unquiet sensation in the pit of his stomach, as if he harbored a live grenade in his belly.

  You told us already. Go now. Leave the rest to us. His own traitor voice implying lethally spiraling cyni cism. They are watching you. The words of a self-crowned pervert god, hubris trying to dam the flow of history; or the mysterious Opposition that Kafka had warned him of? It was imponderable, intolerable. I could be walking into a trap, Pierce considered the idea, and immediately began to activate a library of macros in his phone that he’d written for such eventualities. As Superintendent-of-Scholars Manson had ceaselessly reminded him, a healthy paranoia was key to avoiding further encounters with cardiac leeches and less pleasant medical interventions.

  Pierce crossed the street and walked beside a canal for a couple of blocks, then across a bridge and toward the tree-lined gates of a park. Possibilities hummed in the dappled shadows of the grass like a myriad of butterfly wings broken underfoot, whispering on the edge of actuality like distant thunder. This part of history, a century and more before the emergence of the first universal-surveillance society, before the beginning of the history to which the Stasis laid claim, was mutable in small but significant ways. Nobody could say for sure who might pass down any given street in any specified minute, and deem it disruptive: the lack of determinism lent a certain flexibility to his options.

  Triggering one of his macros as he stepped through the gate to the park, between one step and the next Pierce walked through a storeroom in the basement of a Stasis station that had been dust and ruins a billion years before the ice sheets retreated from the North German plains. It had lain disused for a century or so when he entered it, and nobody else would use it for at least a decade thereafter—he’d set monitors, patient trip wires to secure his safe time. He tarried there for almost three hours, picking items from a well-stocked shelf and sending out messages to order them from a factory on a continent that didn’t yet exist, eating a cold meal from a long-storage ration pack, and trying to regain his emotional balance in time for the meeting that lay ahead.

  An observer close on his tail would have seen a flicker; when he completed the stride his suit was heavier, the fabric stiffer to the touch, and his shoulders slightly stooped beneath the weight concealed within. There were other changes, some of them internal. Perhaps the observers would see, but:

  Leave the rest to us. He slipped his hands into his pockets, blinked until the itching subsided and the heads-up display settled into place across the landscape, scanning and amplifying. He had summoned watchers, circling overland: invisible and silent, nerves connected to his center. Fuck Kafka’s little game, he thought furiously. Fuck them all. Three hours in his unrecorded storeroom in the Cryptozoic had given him time for his depression to ferment into anger. I want answers!

  It was a hot day, and the park was far from empty. There were young women, governesses or maids, pushing the prams of their bourgeois employers; clerks or office workers skipping work and some juvenile ne’er-do-wells playing truant from the gymnasium; here a street sweeper and there a dodgy character with a barrel organ and behind him a couple of vagrants sharing a bottle of schnapps. At the center of a well-manicured lawn, an ornate stone pedestal supported a clock with four brass faces. Pierce, letting his phone drive his feet, casually glanced around while his threat detector scanned through the chaff.

  Nobody—His phone buzzed again.

  “What was the tavern where you fell for me called?” An achingly familiar voice whispered in his ear.

  “Something to do with wildfowl, in Carnegra, the Red Goose or Red Duck or something like that—”

  “Hard contact in three seconds,” his own voice interrupted from nowhere. “Button up and hit the ground on my word. Now.”

  Pierce dived toward the grassy strip beside the path as flaring crimson threat markers appeared all around him. As he fell, his suit bloated and darkened: rubbery cones expanded like a frightened hedgehog’s quills as his collar expanded and rotated, hooding him. In the space of a second the park’s population doubled, angular metallic figures flickering into being all around. Time flickered and strobed as timegates snapped open and
shut, expelling sinister cargo. Pierce twitched ghost muscles convulsively, triggering camouflage routines as the incoming drones locked onto each other and spat missiles and laser fire.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Palimpsest ambush! Hard . . .”

  The signal stuttered into silence, hammered flat by jammers and raw, random interference. Pierce began to roll, rising to sit as his suit’s countermeasures flared.

  This is crazy, he thought, shocked by the violence of the attack. They can’t hope to conceal—

  The sky turned violet-white, the color of lightning: the grass around him began to smoke.

  The temperature rose rapidly. His suit was just beginning to char from the prompt radiation pulse as the ground opened under him, toppling him backward into darkness.

  REDUX

  Army of You

  When you see the ground swallow Pierce you will breathe a sigh of relief—you’ll finally have the luxury of knowing that one of your iterations has made it out of death ground. But the situation will be too deadly to give you respite. If Internal Affairs are willing to start with combat drones and orbital X-ray lasers, then escalate from there, where will they stop? How badly do they want you?

  Very badly, it seems.

  There’s going to be hell to pay when it’s time for the cleanup; ur-history doesn’t have room for a nuclear blitzkrieg on the capital of the Second Reich. The calcinated, rapidly skeletonizing remains of the governesses and the organ grinders contort and burst in the searing wind from the Hiroshima miscarriage, and the four faces of the clock glow cherry red and slump to the ground as a dozen more of you flicker into view, anonymous in their heat-flash-silvered battle armor. The echo-armies of your combat drones fan out all around, furiously dumping heat through transient timegates into the cryogenic depths of the far future as they exchange fire with the enemy’s soldiers.