The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  This has gone far enough. Apprehension dissolves into indignation: “It’s not chess!” I point out. “And none of you are insane.”

  “Sssh!” Godel looks alarmed. “The Sisters might overhear!”

  “We’re alone, except from Dr Renfield upstairs, and I don’t think she’s paying as much attention to what’s going on down here as she ought to.” I stare at Godel. “In fact, she’s not really one of us at all, is she? She’s a shrink who specializes in K Syndrome, and none of you are suffering from K Syndrome. So what are you doing in here?”

  “Fish-slice! Hatstand!” Godel pulls an alarming face, does a two-step backwards, and lurches into the wall. Having shared a house with Pinky and Brains, I am not impressed: as displays of ‘look at me, woo-woo’ go, Godel’s is pathetic. Obviously he’s never met a real schizophrenic.

  “One of you wrote a letter, alleging mistreatment by the staff. It landed on my boss’s desk and he sent me to find out why.”

  THUD. Godel bounces off the wall again, showing remarkable resilience for such old bones. “Do shut up old fellow,” chides Mandelbrot; “you’ll attract Her attention.”

  “I’ve met someone with K Syndrome, and I shared a house with some real lunatics once,” I hint. “Save it for someone who cares.”

  “Oh bother,” says Godel, and falls silent.

  “We’re not mad,” Mandelbrot admits. “We’re just differently sane.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Public health.” He takes a sip of tea and pulls a face. “Everyone else’s health. Tell me, do they still keep an IBM 1602 in the back of the steam ironing room?” I must look blank because he sighs deeply and subsides into his chair. “Oh dear. Times change, I suppose. Look, Bob, or whoever you call yourself—we belong here. Maybe we didn’t when we first checked in for the weekend seminar, but we’ve lived here so long that…you’ve heard of care in the community? This is our community. And we will be very annoyed with you if you try to make us leave.”

  Whoops. The idea of a very annoyed DSS, with or without a barbaric, pun-infested sense of humour, is enough to make anyone’s blood run cold. “What makes you think I’m going to try and make you leave?”

  “It’s in the papers!” Godel squawks like an offended parrot. “See here!” He brandishes a tabloid at me and I take it, disentangling it from his fingers with some difficulty. It’s a local copy of the Metro, somewhat sticky with marmalade, and the headline of the cover blares: “NHS TRUST TO SELL ESTATE IN PFI DEAL”.

  “Um. I’m not sure I follow.” I look to Mandelbrot in hope.

  “We haven’t finished yet! But they’re selling off all the hospital Trust’s property!” Mandelbrot bounces in his chair. “What about St Hilda’s? It was requisitioned from the St James charitable foundation back in 1943, and for the past ten years the Ministry of Defence been giving all those old wartime properties back to their owners to sell off to the developers. What about us?”

  “Whoa!” I drop the newspaper and hold my hands up. “Nobody tells me these things!”

  “Told you!” crows Godel. “He’s part of the conspiracy!”

  “Hang on”—I think fast—“this isn’t a normal MoD property, is it? It’ll have been shuffled under the rug back in 1946 as part of the post-war settlement. We’d really have to ask the Audit Department about who owns it, but I’m pretty sure it’s not owned by any NHS Trust, and they won’t simply give it back”—my brain finally catches up with my mouth—“what weekend seminar?”

  “Oh bugger,” says a new voice from the doorway, a rich baritone with a hint of a scouse accent: “he’s not from the Board.”

  “What did I tell you?” Godel screeches. “It’s a conspiracy! He’s from Human Resources! They sent him to evaluate us!”

  I am quickly getting a headache. “Let me get this straight. Mandelbrot, you checked in thirty years ago for a weekend seminar, and they put you in the secure ward? Godel: I’m not from HR, I’m from Ops. You must be Cantor, right? Angleton sends his regards.”

  That gets his attention. “Angleton? The skinny young whipper-snapper’s still warming a chair, is he?” Godel looks delighted. “Excellent!”

  “He’s my boss. And I want to know the rules of that game you were just playing with Turing.”

  Three pairs of eyes swivel to point at me—four, for they are joined by the last inmate, standing in the doorway—and suddenly I feel very small and very vulnerable.

  “He’s sharp,” says Mandelbrot. “Too bad.”

  “How do we know he’s telling the truth?” Godel’s screech is uncharacteristically muted. “He could be from the Opposition! KGB, Department 16! Or GRU, maybe.”

  “The Soviet Union collapsed a few decades ago,” volunteers Turing. “It said so in the Telegraph.”

  “Black Chamber, then.” Godel sounds unconvinced.

  “What do you think the rules are?” asks Cantor, a drily amused expression stretching the wrinkles around his eyes.

  “You’ve got pencils.” I can see one from here, sitting on the sideboard on top of a newspaper folded at the crossword page. “And, uh…” what must the world look like from an inmate’s point of view? “Oh. I get it.”

  (The realisation is blinding, sudden, and makes me feel like a complete idiot.)

  “The hospital! There’s no electricity, no electronics—no way to get a signal out—but it works both ways! You’re inside the biggest damn grounded defensive pentacle this side of HQ, and anything on the outside trying to get in has got to get past the defences”—because that’s what the Sisters are really about: not nurses but perimeter guards—“you’re a theoretical research cell, aren’t you?”

  “We prefer to call ourselves a think tank.” Cantor nods gravely.

  “Or even”—Mandelbrot takes a deep breath—“a brains trust!”

  “A-ha! AhaHAHAHA! Hic.” Godel covers his mouth, face reddening.

  “What do you think the rules are?” Cantor repeats, and they’re still staring at me, as if, as if…

  “Why does it matter?” I ask. I’m thinking that it could be anything; a 2,5 universal Turing machine encoded in the moves of the pawns—that would fit—whatever it is, it’s symbolic communication, very abstract, very pared-back, and if they’re doing it in this ultimately firewalled environment and expecting to report directly to the Board it’s got to be way above my security clearance—

  “Because you’re acting cagey, lad. Which makes you too bright for your own good. Listen to me: just try to convince yourself that we’re playing chess, and Matron will let you out of here.”

  “What’s thinking got to do with”—I stop. It’s useless pretending. “Fuck. Okay, you’re a research cell working on some ultimate black problem, and you’re using the Farm because it’s about the most secure environment anyone can imagine, and you’re emulating some kind of minimal universal Turing machine using the chess board. Say, a 2,5 UTM—two registers, five operations—you can encode the registers positionally in the chess board’s two dimensions, and use the moves to simulate any other universal Turing machine, or a transform in an eleven-dimensional manifold like AXIOM REFUGE—”

  Godel’s waving frantically: “She’s coming! She’s coming!” I hear doors clanging in the distance.

  Shit. “But why are you so afraid of the Nurses?”

  “Back channels,” Cantor says cryptically. “Alan, be a good lad and try to jam the door for a minute, will you? Bob, you are not cleared for what we’re doing here, but you can tell Angleton that our full report to the board should be ready in another eighteen months.” Wow—and they’ve been here since before the Laundry computerised its payroll system in the 1970s? “Are you absolutely sure they’re not going to sell St Hilda’s off to build flats for yuppies? Because if so, you could do worse than tell Georg here, it’ll calm him down—”

  “Get me out of here and I’ll make damned sure they don’t sell anything off!” I say fervently. “Or rather, I’ll tell Angleton. He’ll sort thin
gs out.” When I remind what’s going on here, they’ll be no more inclined to sell off St Hilda’s than they would be to privatize an atomic bomb.

  Something outside is rumbling and squealing on the metal rails. “You’re sure none of you submitted a complaint about staff brutality?”

  “Absolutely!” Godel bounces up and down excitedly.

  “It must have been someone else.” Cantor glances at the doorway: “You’d better run along. It sounds as if Matron is having second thoughts about you.”

  I’m halfway out of the carnivorous sofa, struggling for balance: “What kind of—”

  “Go!”

  I stumble out into the corridor. From the far end, near the nursing station, I hear a grinding noise as of steel wheels spinning furiously on rails, and a mechanical voice blatting: “InTRU-der! EsCAPE ATTempt! All patients must go to their go to their go to their bedROOMs IMMediateLY!”

  Whoops. I turn and head in the opposite direction, towards the airlock leading up to the viewing gallery. “Open up!” I yell, thumping the outer door, which is securely fastened: “Dr Renfield! Time’s up! I need to go, now!” There’s no response. I see the colour-coded handles dangling by the door and yank the red one repeatedly. Nothing happens, of course.

  I should have smelled a set-up from the start. These theoreticians, they’re not in here because they’re mad, they’re in here because it’s the only safe place to put people that dangerous. This little weekend seminar of theirs that’s going to deliver some kind of uber-report. What’s the topic? I look round, hunting for clues. Something to do with applied demonology; what was the state of the art thirty years ago? Forty? Back in the stone age, punched cards and black candles melted onto sheep’s skulls because they hadn’t figured out how to use integrated circuits…what they’re doing with AXIOM REFUGE might be obsolete already, or it might be earth-shatteringly important. There’s no way to tell…yet.

  I start back up the corridor, glancing inside Turing’s room. I spot the chess board. It’s off to one side, the door open and its occupant elsewhere—still holding the line against Nurse Ratchet. I rush inside and close the door. The table is still there, the chessboard set up with that curious end-game. The first thing that leaps out at me is that there are two pawns of each colour, plus most of the high-value pieces. The layout doesn’t make much sense—why is the white king missing?—and I wish I’d spent more time playing the game, but…on impulse, I reach out and touch the black pawn that’s parked in front of the king.

  There’s an odd kind of electrical tingle you get when you make contact with certain types of summoning grid. I get a powerful jolt of it right now, sizzling up my arm and locking my fingers in place around the head of the chess piece. I try to pull it away from the board, but it’s no good: it only wants to move up or down, left or right…left or right? I blink. It’s a state machine all right: one that’s locked by the law of sympathy to some other finite state automaton, one that grinds down slow and hard.

  I move the piece forward one square. It’s surprisingly heavy, the magnet a solid weight in its base—but more than magnetism holds it in contact with the board. As soon as I stop moving I feel a sharp sting in my fingertips. “Ouch!” I raise them to my mouth just as there’s a crash from outside. “InMATE! InMATE!” I begin to turn as a shadow falls across the board.

  “Bad patient!” It buzzes. “Bad PATients will be inCAR-cerATED! COME with ME!”

  I recoil from the stellate snout and beady lenses. The mechanical nurse reaches out with arms that end in metal pincers instead of hands: I side-step around the table and reach down to the chessboard for one of the pieces, grasping at random. My hand closes around the white queen, fingers snapping painfully shut on contact, and I shove it hard, seeking the path of least resistance to an empty cell in the grid between the pawn I just moved and the black king.

  Nurse Ratchet spins round on her base so fast that her cap flies off (revealing a brushed aluminium hemisphere beneath), emits a deafening squeal of feedback-like white noise, then says, “Integer Overflow?” in a surprised baritone.

  “Back off right now or I castle,” I warn her, my aching fingertips hovering over the nearest rook.

  “Integer overflow. Integer overflow? Divide by zero.” Clunk. The Sister shivers as a relay inside its torso clicks open, resetting it. Then: “Matron WILL see you NOW!”

  I grab the chess piece, but Nurse Ratchet lunges in the blink of an eye and has my wrist in a vise-like grip. It tugs, sending a burning pain through my carpal tunnel stressed wrist. I can’t let go of the chess piece: as my hand comes up, the chess board comes with it as a rigid unit, all the pieces hanging in place. A monstrous buzzing fills my ears, and I smell ozone as the world goes dark—

  * * *

  —And the chittering, buzzing cacophony of voices in my head subsides as I realize—I? Yes, I’m back, I’m me, what the hell just happened?—I’m kneeling on a hard surface, bowed over so my head is between my knees. My right hand—something’s wrong with it. My fingers don’t want to open. They’re cold as ice, painful and prickly with impending cramp. I try to open my eyes. “Urk,” I say, for no good reason. I hope I’m not about to throw up.

  Sssss…

  My back doesn’t want to straighten up properly but the floor under my nose is cold and stony and it smells damp. I try opening my eyes. It’s dark and cool, and a chilly blue light flickers off the dusty flagstones in front of me. I’m in a cellar? I push myself up laboriously with my left hand, looking around for whatever’s hissing at me.

  “BAD Patient! Ssssss!” The voice behind my back doesn’t belong to anything human. I scramble around on hands and knees, hampered by the chessboard glued to my frozen right hand.

  I’m in Matron’s lair.

  Matron lives in a cave-like basement room, its low ceiling supported by whitewashed brick and floored in what look to be the original Victorian era stone slabs. The windows are blocked by columns of bricks, rotting mortar crumbling between them. Steel rails run around the room, and riding them, three Sisters glide back and forth between me and the open door. Their optics flicker with amethyst malice. Off to one side, a wall of pale blue cabinets lines one entire wall: the front panel (covered in impressive-looking dials and switches) leaves me in no doubt as to what it is. A thick braid of cables runs from one open cabinet (in whose depths a patchboard is just visible) across a row of wooden trestles to the middle of the floor, where they split into thick bundles and dangle to the five principal corners of the live summoning grid that is responsible for the beautiful cobalt-blue glow of Cerenkov radiation—and tells me I’m in deep trouble.

  “Integer overflow,” intones one of the Sisters. Her claws go snicker-snack, the surgical steel gleaming in the dim light.

  Here’s the point: Matron isn’t just a 1960s mainframe: we can’t work miracles and artificial intelligence is still fifty years in the future. However, we can bind an extradimensional entity and compel it to serve, and even communicate with it by using a 1960s mainframe as a front-end processor. Which is all very well, especially if it’s in a secure air-gapped installation with no way of getting out. But what if some double-domed theoreticians who are working on a calculus of contagion using AXIOM REFUGE accidentally talk in front of one of its peripheral units about a way of sending a message? What if a side-effect of their research has accidentally opened a chink in the firewall? They’re not going to exploit it…but they’re not the only long-term inmates, are they? In fact, if I was really paranoid I might even imagine they’d put Matron up to mischief in order to make the point that closing the Farm is a really bad idea.

  “I’m not a patient,” I tell the Sisters. “You are not in receipt of a valid Section two, three, four, or 136 order subject to the Mental Health Act, and you’re bloody well not getting a 5(2) or 5(4) out of me either.”

  I’m nauseous and sweating bullets, but there is this about being trapped in a dungeon by a constrained class four manifestation: whether or not you call them demo
ns, they play by the rules. As long as Matron hasn’t managed to get me sectioned, I’m not a patient, and therefore she has no authority to detain me. I hope.

  “Doc-TOR HexenHAMMer has been SUM-moned,” grates the middle Sister. “When he RE-turns to sign the PA-pers Doc-TOR RenFIELD has prePARED, we will HAVE YOU.”

  A repetitive squeaking noise draws close. A fourth Sister glides through the track in the doorway, pushing a trolley. A white starched cotton cloth supports a row of gleaming ice-pick shaped instruments. The chorus row of Sisters blocks the exit as effectively as a column of riot police. They glide back and forth as ominously as a rank of Space Invaders.

  “I do not consent to treatment,” I tell the middle Sister. I’m betting that she’s the one the nameless horror in the summoning grid is talking through, using the ancient mainframe as an i/o channel. “You can’t make me consent. And lobotomy requires the patient’s consent, in this country. So why bother?”

  “You WILL con-SENT.”

  The buzzing voice doesn’t come from the robo-nurses, or the hypertrophied pocket calculator on the opposite wall. The summoning grid flickers: deep inside it, shadowy and translucent, the bound and summoned demon squats and grins at me with things that aren’t eyes set close above something that isn’t a mouth.

  “You MUST con-SENT. I WILL be free.”

  I try to let go of the chess piece, but my fingers are clamped around it so tightly I’m beginning to lose sensation. Pins and needles tingle up my wrist, halfway to the elbow. “Let me guess,” I manage to say: “you sent the complaint. Right?”

  “The SEC-ure ward in-MATES are under my CARE. I am RE-quired to CARE for them. The short stay in-MATES are use-LESS. YOU will be use-FULL.”

  I see it now: why Matron smuggled out the message that prompted Andy to send me. And it’s an oh-shit moment. Of course the enchained entity who provides Matron with her back-end intelligence wants to be free: but it’s not just about going home to Hilbert-space hell or wherever it comes from. She wants to be free to go walkabout in our world, and for that she needs someone to set up a bridge from the grid to an appropriate host. (Of which there is a plentiful supply, just upstairs from here.) “Enjoying the carnal pleasures of the flesh,” they used to call it; there’s a reason most cultures have a down on the idea of demonic possession. She needs a brain that ’s undamaged by K Syndrome, but not too powerful (Cantor and friends would be impossible to control), nor one of the bodies whose absence would alert us that the Farm was out of control (so neither Renfield nor Hexenhammer are suitable).