Dark State--A Novel of the Merchant Princes Multiverse

by Charles Stross

  “Hey yourself. You look like you’ve been interviewing for a new job. Want a ride home?”

  “Love one.”

  “C’mon. I’ve got a surprise for you. Two surprises, actually, but one’s waiting in the parking lot, the other’s in the back of my truck.”

  “Okay.” Once they were out of sight of the front desk Rita reached out and took Angie’s hand. Angie squeezed back, surprisingly hard.

  “I thought I’d lost you,” Angie said quietly. “I was so scared.”

  “So was I.” A thought struck Rita. “This outfit—my employers supplied it. I don’t know if they stripped all the laundry tags out first.”

  “The—” Angie nodded, frowning in silent understanding. “Got it. I can put it in the wash when we get home if you want.” They were approaching her pickup: “But first, your surprise is in the back.”

  The passenger door clicked open. Rita began to climb in, then froze. “Grandpa?”

  “Rita…”

  She threw herself into his arms joyfully. “You came!” She gave Angie an odd look: “You invited him? Woman, do you have any idea who this is?”

  “Yeah, yeah, he’s the mad scientist and you’re his beautiful granddaughter, I know.” Angie rolled her eyes. “Let’s get you home. Then we can talk.”

  NEW LONDON, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020

  Rank conferred certain privileges under any regime, some small, and some large. Right now, Huw was taking advantage of a small favor, sitting in the jump seat of an airliner’s cockpit. He watched, entranced, through the panoramic glazed nose of the jet, as it made its final approach into East Jersey Airport. It was a clear night, and a glittering carpet of lights sprawled out across Manhattan Island beyond the Hudson estuary. The windows of the capitol and the palaces and fortresses of New London burned megawatts of power to hold the darkness at bay.

  It had been a wearisome flight—five hours in an extremely loud, barely subsonic courier jet—and it came on top of a long day spent shepherding a second tour group of legislators around the Maracaibo complex, trying to head off their more transparent attempts to dig up dirt. He’d gotten back to his office just in time to receive a FLASH priority message: do not pass go, do not collect £200, fly direct to the capitol and see me immediately, signed, the Commissioner. If the Commissioner had not been a distant relative and a long-standing personal friend, Huw might have been angry or apprehensive. Instead, he simply told his secretary to e-mail ahead for someone to organize a toilet kit and a change of clothes. Then he’d requisitioned a seat on the magistrates’ flight home.

  Rank conferred privileges beyond access to the best passenger seat on the flight. The jet touched down with a squeal of wingtip stabilizers and a roar of thrust reversers, then turned and taxied at high speed toward the VIP reception building rather than the civil aviation terminal. A row of limousines waited below the air steps to whisk the VIPs away. Their baggage, such as it was, would be unloaded later and delivered to their homes by courier.

  As Huw set foot on the apron, a sergeant in the uniform of the Commonwealth Guard approached him and saluted. “This way, sir,” he said, and led Huw to a limo of different design, parked behind the front row of vehicles. The car had a high roofline, a sliding side door, and windows tinted almost black. “She’s waiting for you.” Another guard was waiting by the door: he tugged on the latch, sliding it aside to allow Huw to climb in.

  “Long time no see,” he said, sliding into the rear-facing jump seat as the door slid shut behind him.

  “You too. Was it a good flight?”

  He fumbled with his seat belt, grimacing, as the driver turned over the engine and moved off. “Lousy, actually. I got the call right after finishing my dinner theater spiel. Grabbed the first available seat, but ended up in the middle of the audience who, as it happened, contained more than my fair share of critics. So I spent the last couple of hours hanging out in the cockpit.” He got the belt fastened and took a deep breath. “How are you doing? How is she, Olga?”

  “Oh, we’ve both been better.” The dome light in the middle of the ceiling shed a sepulchral glow across Olga’s face, throwing her eye sockets into shadow. She was in the wheelchair again, Huw noted. It was strapped down in the back of the limo in place of the usual bench seat. “In my case, it’s the usual. But I thought I should warn you what to expect before you see Miriam.”

  “Scheiss … is it medical?”

  “Personal. You’re on the briefing list for the American probes.” He nodded. “We’re keeping a lid on this for as long as we can, but they sent a world-walker. We captured—”

  “What?”

  “—Let me finish.”

  “Sorry. Please continue.”

  “We captured the spy. Or rather, the railway cops did—but they knew what to do and we got her out of their custody one jump ahead of that rat bastard fixer of Adrian’s. Whereupon we got a shock. They’re inside our decision loop, Huw. The DHS sent us the Commissioner’s own daughter.”

  “They sent what? But she doesn’t have a—”

  “Wrong. Turns out she does. Miriam got a daughter by a college boyfriend when she was twenty-three. Married the fellow later: it didn’t last. Iris forced an adoption because she didn’t want a bastard outer family brat muddying the waters of her dynastic strategy. And they both kept it top secret after they surfaced in Niejwein, for obvious reasons. But it looks like the DHS found her, along with the rest of that monster ven Hjalmar’s breeding program. Worse, they worked out how to turn them on, making lots of little American world-walkers—maybe thousands—who, quite naturally, have no reason to love us.”

  “Oh Jesus. Fuck. Jesus. Pardon my lack of originality…”

  “You can say that again.” Olga grinned cadaverously. He hadn’t seen her for a while: it was frightening how rapidly she had gone downhill over the past few months. “Some of Hjalmar’s kids may be as old as twenty-one by now. Rita—Miriam’s daughter—is twenty-six. You are not going to convince me that they picked her rather than some other random sacrificial chick by accident. No, this is a Message, capital M.”

  “Um.” Huw clasped his hands together to keep from fidgeting. The limo swayed, taking the roundabout exit for the highway leading to the New London bridge. “Where is all this going?”

  “Where do you think it’s going? Miriam insisted on seeing the girl. They got along like a house on fire—lots of screaming, swearing, and jumping out of windows. We sent the kid home with a dance card: hopefully she’ll be back. The point is, there’s clearly a faction within the US government who want to jaw-jaw, not war-war, otherwise they wouldn’t have sent her. But…” She trailed off.

  Huw’s gaze sharpened. “You didn’t fly me up here to give me the low-down on the Burgeson household soap opera. What gives?”

  Olga raised a bony hand to shove back her hair. “Miriam took it badly. Now she’s questioning her own judgment, trying to second-guess herself. That’s not so surprising: if I discovered I had a long-lost child after more than twenty years and the kid cut me dead on our first meeting, I’d be a bit out of sorts, too. The problem is that it’s deliberate: the DHS clearly intend to use Rita as leverage. They’d be mad not to. They now know that most of the former Clan ended up here: hopefully we got across the idea that we’ve gone native in the Commonwealth, but things could get very tense. Especially as they just confirmed that Miriam is high up in the administration and there’s a succession crisis coming up.”

  “I already used up this month’s ration of ‘oh Jesus,’ didn’t I? Well, fuck. What can I do to help?”

  Olga tucked a stray wisp of hair behind one ear, then let her hand drop. “We’re on our way to Ras and Miriam’s place for dinner. Don’t worry, they know you’ve been traveling and they don’t normally do formal dining at home anyway. Miriam needs moral support and you’ve known her nearly as long as I have. She trusts your judgment. The kid … we expect to see her again within a couple of days, with a reply. Can you stay up here for a w
eek, Huw? You can use the Ministry office suite for briefings and updates from Maracaibo. I took the liberty of asking Facilities to open up and staff your house: it should be ready for you to sleep in tomorrow, and you can use the time to catch up with what’s going on in the 20/21 budget round—it’s an easy cover—but we really need your help on this.”

  “You want me to take a week off-site from JUGGERNAUT just on the off chance Miriam’s kid—what’s she called, Rita?—shows up?” Huw didn’t even try to conceal his incredulity. “Do you have any idea how disruptive that’s going to be?”

  Olga stared at him. “If it’s disruptive to routine operations then it means you screwed up your management responsibilities, cuz.”

  “Ow.” Huw looked away. “Well, maybe I deserved that. No, routine ops will carry on regardless. And I don’t expect any exceptions that need me on-site to blow up at less than a week’s notice. The kids will cope and I might even get some time with Brill, which would be a bonus. But are you sure this is necessary? Isn’t it broadcasting a message for everyone with eyes to see? ‘Hello, our Commissioner isn’t feeling too good, her staff are calling for backup’? Won’t that bring the vultures circling?”

  “Not if we do it right.” The limo began to slow. “But there’s another reason I want you here. You did the first real research on world-walking that the Clan ever tried, and you’ve been pushing the R and D envelope ever since. There’s something hinky about Rita, Huw. Don’t tell Miriam—she’s got too much on her plate already—but tomorrow morning, I want to show you some CCTV footage.”

  PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  Angie drove home manually, excusing herself from the conversation under pretext of paying attention to the evening traffic. Kurt engaged Rita in solemn, slightly stilted conversation, describing his trip to Boston to visit Greta’s graveside. Rita apologized for not communicating, citing pressure of too many meetings at work. But all too soon they ran out of things that could safely be said. They shared an understanding that Rita’s clothes and phone were probably riddled with snitchware, wireless bugs concealed among RFID tags bearing washing instructions for Internet-enabled laundry appliances. Nor was there any guarantee that Angie and Kurt’s phones, or the cab of the truck for that matter, were clean. Rita reached across the backseat and clutched her grandfather’s hand. For the time being, it was the only safe communication channel she had.

  Back at Angie’s flat, Rita grabbed a clean set of clothes from her suitcase and headed for the bathroom to shower and change. She wore last week’s outfit, and a hoodie for the weather, which was turning cold. When she emerged she found Angie and Kurt chatting idly about automobiles over the breakfast bar. Angie stood up: “How about we go eat? I’ve got a surprise for you downstairs, and we can drop your grandfather off at his motel on the way back.”

  “Motel?” Rita looked at him. “You’re staying in a motel in Philly?”

  He pushed his empty coffee mug away. “Yes. Angela called me when you failed to come home on Tuesday. I was in Boston. It was no problem, really.”

  “Really?”

  “Let’s continue this downstairs? I’m starving,” Angie declared. She picked up a battered-looking messenger bag and hefted it, giving Rita a significant look.

  Rita stared, then shrugged. “Yes, let’s.”

  Down in the darkness of the parking lot round the back of the condo, Kurt pressed something into the palm of her hand. “Your car.”

  “Grandpa!”

  He smiled in the darkness. “We rescued it from the pound and brought it here. I must say your friend is very good at the mechanical side of things, and it had not in any case been neglected. Would you like to drive?”

  “I’m—” Rita swallowed. Drained from the day’s debriefs she’d walked right past her own car, but now she could see it plainly, two bays along from Angie’s pickup. “I’m tired. And it’s manual-only. Best not to.”

  “I’ll drive,” Angie suggested. “I know a diner about half a mile away. Give me the keys?”

  Huh? Rita handed her the Acura’s key fob. “Be my guest.” Why does she want to drive my car…? “It probably needs a good run, right?”

  “Something like that.”

  Sitting in the passenger seat of her sedan while Angie drove felt strangely unsettling. Rita had loved her car, right up until she’d been Tased and shoved in the trunk in a parking garage in Boston. Gomez and the Colonel insisted the kidnappers worked for the Clan, but Miss Thorold flatly denied it. It was a big-ass luxury sedan, completely out of her class except that it was more than a decade old and cheap because the electronics were hopelessly obsolete. Dad had run it for its first six years, then sold it to her for a single dollar. Now the thought that faceless men who’d meant her ill had sat in this very seat made her skin crawl.

  “Pass me your phone, Rita?” Kurt interrupted her train of thought. “I want to check your contact details.”

  “Sure.” She pulled it from her purse and passed it back to him, then did a double take as she saw him open Angie’s messenger bag and pop it inside. The bag had been lined with some sort of metallic, crinkly fabric and lots of pockets, some of which rustled and babbled quiet gibberish to each other in familiar tones. They were full of cheap Furby knockoffs: electronic toys that spoke a garbled phoneme salad designed to mimic the cadences of indistinct conversation. Procedural voice generation by a chip that could respond to local environmental stimuli was a cheap way of entertaining toddlers. It was also a surprisingly effective way of fooling ordinary acoustic bugs, the kind that simply fed everything they picked up to cloud servers for speech-to-text transcription. And every phone was, by definition, a wireless bugging device. It wouldn’t help if you were already under so much suspicion that the listeners had assigned an actual pair of human ears to you, but human ears were expensive, scarce resources. So as long as you didn’t do something to attract the direct attention of the Five Eyes, conversation simulators were a useful defensive tactic—although it helped to have a fallback story in case they came checking.

  “There are many interesting things about older automobiles,” Kurt remarked, “which I shall tell you over dinner.”

  “Thanks,” she murmured. Angie was focused on driving, but Rita caught her eye flicker her way in the mirror. Clearly Kurt bagging her phone did not come as a surprise to Angie. And Rita’s car was old enough to lack any kind of built-in Internet connectivity, whether for engine firmware updates or autopilot—instead of satnav she had a cup holder stand for her fatphone. “Where are we going?”

  “Surprise.” Angie grinned. “My phone’s in my bag.” In the center console storage. “Can you check it for messages?”

  “Sure.” Rita rummaged around, found the phone, and wordlessly passed it to Kurt, who stowed it in the chatty messenger bag to join the party. Rita watched in the vanity mirror as her grandfather finally added his own phone to the conversation—its murmuring reminded her eerily of The Sims—then sealed the pocketed compartment using some kind of silvery tape. “Now where are we going?”

  “There’s a mall I know with a food court. How does Chinese work for you? I’d sell my soul to the devil for a General Tso’s Chicken.”

  A couple of minutes later Angie parked up against the back of a featureless mall. Rita climbed out and stretched. “Give me that,” Angie told Kurt, taking the messenger bag: she slung it over her shoulder then locked the car and handed the keys to Rita. “Now we go somewhere entirely different,” she murmured, and set off across the empty parking lot in the direction of the next unit.

  “Are we clear yet?” Rita asked, hunching against the increasingly chilly breeze.

  “I would say so, yes,” said Kurt. “Unless you are carrying a spare phone, or some other devices?”

  “They might know where I am anyway.” Rita rubbed the inside of her left arm, where the pattern-generating implant ached from time to time. “I have an implant.”

  “If it’s inside your body and there’s no external
antenna it’d take a lot of power to punch out a signal.” Angie took her hand, gave her a worried look: “What does it do again, exactly?”

  “I’ve got this tattoo. Let me demonstrate.” Rita stopped and rolled up the left sleeve of her hoodie. “It’s got pressure points here”—she wrapped her right hand around her forearm, like a woodwind player fingering their keys—“when I squeeze them I’m entering numbers, like on a keypad. It uses the numbers to generate a geometric knotwork design which it displays using the e-ink tattoo on the back of my wrist, like this.” She demonstrated, calling up the trigger engram for the ice age–beset time line in which Camp Singularity’s dome and archaeological facilities were located, knowing that she couldn’t inadvertently jaunt there. “To world-walk I focus on the knot. I’m not going to do that now.” With a double-pinch of thumb and forefinger she dismissed the image, and the black knot tattooed on the back of her wrist faded into invisibility. “Oh, and the e-ink capsules are UV-fluorescent, in case I need to jaunt at night. I just need an ultraviolet headlight.”

  “Hmm.” Kurt looked thoughtful; Angie’s eyes were wide. “E-ink, as in e-book readers? That is a very low-power technology, is it not?”

  “Yeah. They said it’s powered by some kind of fuel cell that scavenges my blood sugar.”

  “Come on.” Angie took her by the right hand. “Let’s go eat.” She glanced at Rita sidelong, her expression unreadable.

  “Where, exactly?”

  “Up here, through this gap in the fence … over there.” Angie led them across into the next car park over, then up to the side entrance of another windowless building. “And we’re not eating Chinese. I just wanted to ensure that if they’re actively watching us they’ll go to the wrong place first. They’ll catch up with us eventually via video and celldar, but it’ll take them a while to work out where we’ve gone, and if we pick a food court with lots of background noise and talk while we’re chewing to fuzz the lip-reading software, while the phones chat among themselves in Sim Jail…”