Dark State--A Novel of the Merchant Princes Multiverse

by Charles Stross

  AGENT GOMEZ: Reds in the bed, more like—

  COL. SMITH: When it might just be a false positive. Sonia, I know what you’re going to say and my answer is that we can’t afford to haul Kurt and Angie into a secure debriefing suite and give them an opportunity to clear themselves of negative engrams on the basis of a suspicion. If we do that, then we’ll turn Rita against us, and we’re going to need every edge we can get if we’re playing footsie with that bitch Miriam Beckstein.

  AGENT GOMEZ: What are you going to do?

  DR. SCRANTON: May I make a suggestion?

  COL. SMITH: Please go ahead, ma’am.

  DR. SCRANTON: Sonia, you should continue monitoring the subject and her associates. Pull in any additional resources you need. The instant you get any positive signals—not just drop-outs and signal degradation, but actual positive evidence of malfeasance—bring it to us. We will then determine whether to file it under leverage and leave Rita running, or to haul in Kurt and Angie for adversarial debriefing, or take more drastic measures. Eric, if you think Rita has been turned and is acting for a hostile agency then you already have termination authority. Or you can take the gloves off and run Rita adversarially, using Ms. Hagen and Mr. Douglas as leverage to keep her on track. It’s your call. But our priority for now—I shouldn’t need to remind you—is to keep the channel open while SecState and POTUS dicker with the other side. Which means Rita stays in a sandbox and doesn’t know we’re on to her—if indeed she’s up to anything at all. When we don’t need the channel anymore, or move to a more conventional system … then I wash my hands of her: she’s all yours, and if she’s been fucking around behind our back I expect you to bury her in a supermax cell for the rest of her life.

  DR. SCRANTON: But until then, I suggest you watch, but don’t touch.

  END TRANSCRIPT

  Diplomats

  PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  After dropping Kurt off back at his motel, Angie drove Rita home. Rita was so drained that she fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. She awakened in mid-morning, to find Angie cooking breakfast in the small apartment’s food preparation area: the smell of eggs, breakfast sausages, biscuits, and gravy finally sufficed to raise her from her bed. “You smell wonderful. I mean, you’re making wonderful smells,” she explained sleepily as Angie embraced her enthusiastically. “Don’t set fire to the kitchen!”

  It was a Saturday, and Angie had the weekend off. “I work emergency cover twice a month, but not this time,” she explained as Rita ate. “Wow, they’ve been starving you.”

  “Not the job,” Rita tried to explain around a mouthful of omelet. “I mean, work haven’t been starving me. It’s the hotel restaurant. There’s no local competition so they serve overpriced junk food. And room service was all I got for two days.”

  “Two days…”

  “There were a lot of meetings and interviews. ’Scuse me. You didn’t hear that,” she acknowledged for the sake of the (hopefully merely hypothetical) microphones. “They grilled me for days, but I got the weekend off. I’m back on the job on Monday: I may be traveling for a while, no idea when I’m going to be home. I mean, it could be three hours, it could be three weeks.”

  “Then we’d better make the best of what time we’ve got, huh?”

  After breakfast Angie dragged Rita out to Target, Walgreens, and a local supermarket for food. That chewed up most of the morning, but it was unavoidable—Rita had been living out of suitcases and hotel rooms for so long that she was short on everything from toothpaste to pillow-cases. In the afternoon they hit Macy’s and a couple of other clothes stores to fill the gaps in Rita’s wardrobe. Then they changed and headed out for dinner and an evening at Angie’s favorite women-only club. Angie seemed to take inordinate joy in introducing Rita to all her friends, and Rita was more than willing to play along with it, despite the sour note of insecurity it hinted at, the faint suspicion of bitch-talk happening behind her back. The comfort of public affirmation, of having a lover whose hand she could openly hold (at least in safe spaces like this), of having someone she could get sweaty on the dance floor with and who would take her home afterward, had gone to her head. Nothing could undermine her happiness.

  But in the small hours of the night Rita awakened and, finding Angie also awake, wept quiet tears on her shoulder. “What am I going to say to her?” she whispered in Angie’s ear.

  Angie rolled over and held her. “Ssh. It’s going to be all right. Don’t overthink it.”

  “But I didn’t know!”

  “So? Just tell her that. I’m sorry, I didn’t know. Can we start over? She’ll say yes.”

  “She must hate me—”

  “I’m sure she doesn’t.”

  Rita sniffed. “Now you’re just trying to be reassuring.”

  “Guess I am. Wanna wipe your nose?”

  “Oh God, I’m a mess.” Rita sniffed, then sat up. “Back in a minute.”

  The flat glare of the bathroom LEDs, tweaked to a moonlight spectrum with added blacklight to aid makeup removal, turned Rita’s mirror image into a skeletally shadowed death’s head. She blew her nose and dabbed at her eyes, then sat down until the sniffles passed. She cradled her left arm in her right hand, playing chords on her pattern generator. Luminous knots swirled and formed on the back of her left wrist, glowing under the UV overspill from the bathroom spots. She took care to stay in the calmly unfocused state of mind where jaunting simply didn’t happen. If she slipped between the worlds in a third-floor bathroom it could be disastrous. I can end it any time I want to, she realized with a frisson of dread. I’m such a fuck-up. They must be certain she wasn’t a suicide risk, otherwise they wouldn’t have given her the device, she thought edgily. Then another insight struck her and she began to scroll back through the stack of saved engrams.

  There was a note-taking facility, so she could add eight character long names to identify where she’d been and where the sequence of knots would take her. Commonwe. CampSing. Station~. Hang on. She squinted at the name. That’s the, the black hole, one jaunt past Camp Singularity, isn’t it? A blue-glowing halo around a blind spot, barely visible without a telescope through the thick glass cupola of the recycled space station module. She backed and then ran forward through her stack. The Station~ engram showed up twice, for some reason, along with a bunch identified by random hexadecimal numbers rather than descriptive names. Did they preload me with a bunch of known time lines? she wondered. Hey, I could go exploring on my own, if I had the stones …

  “You coming back to bed, sleepyhead?”

  “Yeah.” Rita rose and flushed. She walked slowly back to the bedroom and lay down beside Angie, who welcomed her into her open arms. “Feeling better now,” she murmured.

  Angie nibbled the curve of her neck amiably. “Show me,” she said, and so Rita did.

  AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION, UNDISCLOSED TIME LINE, AUGUST 2020

  Already numb and teetering on the edge of despair, Paulette was unable to parse her interrogator’s question. Her ears couldn’t make sense of the words: they were so strange, so unexpected, that she couldn’t extract any kind of coherent meaning from them.

  “What?”

  The first interrogator: “How long have you been spying for the GDR? For East Germany? The, uh, so-called German Democratic Republic?”

  She opened her eyes. The looking-glass wall reflected the chaos in her head. “What are you asking? I don’t understand.”

  The second interrogator spoke tensely, rapidly spraying words Paulie instinctively recognized were not meant for her ears: “This is useless, I told you she doesn’t—”

  The voices shut off abruptly, as if a microphone had been switched off. A few seconds later the background of white noise resumed. It was the first interrogator. “Ms. Milan. How long have you been a Communist spy?”

  She couldn’t help herself. She could feel a deep howl welling up inside her. It was laughter born not of mirth but of despair. If she gave in, part of her
knew, they’d find a way to punish her. But she began to giggle despite herself, frightened and appalled, but completely lost in the holy madness of humor. It started as a giggle, then she throttled it back to a titter—then it broke out again, in full-throated hysterical sobs of mirth and loss.

  “Ms. Milan! Focus! (We’re losing her. I told you—) We know who you’re working for!”

  “Maybe she doesn’t—”

  “(Trust the functional teraherz monitor.) Bullshit. Ms. Milan, Paulette, listen to me. The woman you knew as Iris Beckstein was involved with some very dubious people during the late 1980s and 1990s. You may not have known who they were, but—will you stop laughing? This is serious. Your future depends on it.”

  Paulette hiccuped. She swallowed, trying to suppress the giggles. She was shaking, she realized distantly. Behind the numbing curtain of apprehension, the sum of all fears approached: she was in the hands of maniacs, lunatics with the power of life and death. Of life and a fate worse than death. She hiccuped again, mirth morphing into gut-watering terror. “What.”

  “We know you have been collecting items to order and supplying them to your controller. You may think you are doing so on behalf of the narco-terrorist Gruinmarkt Clan, and you would not necessarily be wrong. However, there is more to the Clan than you are aware of. Their methods betray their motives. Have you ever asked why they attacked the United States, Ms. Milan? Did Miriam Beckstein ever discuss her mother’s politics with you? Or her mother’s fellow travelers from East Germany?”

  Paulette cleared her throat. “I know why they attacked the United States,” she said. It was as good as a confession of guilt, but in her present situation it didn’t seem likely to make matters worse. The espionage charges had ripped away her right to counsel and her harbor from self-incrimination, as far as the courts since Chief Justice Scalia were concerned. “It was an internal power play by the faction with the stolen nukes. I don’t even know where you’re getting this crazy Germany shit from! Anyway, it’s just garbage. They executed the perpetrators afterwards, by the way.”

  “That might be what they want you to believe,” said the first interrogator, “but it’s not true. Did Mrs. Beckstein—Iris Beckstein—discuss politics with you at any point? Specifically, German pre-reunification politics?”

  Oh Jesus. Paulette tried very hard indeed not to roll her eyes. “Mrs. Beckstein, as you call her, was her false identity, in exile in the United States. In the Gruinmarkt she was known as Her Grace the Duchess Patricia Thorold Hjorth, younger sister of one of the most powerful lords in that nation. She was a feudal aristocrat. Communist revolution was not on her bucket list.”

  “And you believe that?” The first interrogator’s voice rose, then the sound cut out again.

  Paulette closed her eyes. They’re not just lunatics: they’re amateurs, she realized despairingly. Not that she, herself, was a trained interrogator, but she’d worked with enough journalists, back before the Internet gutted the profession, to know how you ran an interview. And she’d met enough spooks to know that once you began wandering through the funhouse mirror halls of counter-espionage, coincidences stacked up until even the most bizarre conspiracy theories came to seem credible. A high proportion of working counter-spy officers ended up receiving a medical discharge for acute paranoid psychosis. Feeding the subject your own theories was just plain wrong: it violated the first rule of intelligence, that information goes in, not out. And it told her that the crazies on the other side of the one-way mirror had fallen for some filter-bubble groupthink theory that the Clan was a secret cold war Communist front organization. What happens next, do they start grilling me about the Illuminati?

  She didn’t have long to wait. After about a minute the white noise returned, and with it, the voice of the second interrogator. His voice was clipped and businesslike. “Ms. Milan. It is in your best interests to ignore everything my colleague said. Not all of us are uncleared suppressives. My colleague will not trouble you again. You will now answer my questions truthfully, or not, as you wish: just remember that if you try to mess around I will fuck you up so badly you’ll remember it for all your future incarnations. Do you understand?”

  Paulette licked her suddenly dry lips. Oh God, this one’s differently crazy. “Yes.”

  “All right then. First question. In 2002, from April onwards, you were in receipt of funds totaling approximately $89,560 from an unaudited source. The line of funding increased to $160,422 in fiscal year 2003. You spent the money on, among other things, rental on commercial property in Cambridge, office equipment, and vehicle lease-purchase. Who gave you the money, and what was your understanding of what you were doing with it?”

  At last: a question I can answer! “Uh. That was Miriam Beckstein, you know? We’d both been laid off by The Industry Weatherman in early 2002, and then she discovered her long-lost relatives—it came as a big surprise to her. I didn’t know what was going on until a few months later, when she dragged me out for a coffee and made me a business proposition…”

  PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  Monday morning dawned cold and damp. The leaves of fall, orange and russet and brown, were piling up atop Rita’s car when she said goodbye to Angie and drove to the Unit’s temporary headquarters in an industrial unit in Allentown.

  She parked up beside the trailer the Colonel was currently using as a site office and went inside. Smith was already at his desk and looking grumpy. Monday morning, she guessed. “Reporting for duty, sir,” she said, hoping the formality would help defuse the tension evident in his posture.

  “Sit down.” He pointed: she sat. He glanced at the door as it swung closed, then slumped inside his suit coat as he looked back at her, visibly deflating. “Okay, Rita, here’s the score. This is where we start to play things by ear.”

  “By ear,” she echoed.

  “Yes.” He picked up another of the archaic printed-paper dossiers the operation seemed to run on and pushed it toward her. “Your Phase One jaunts were overplanned and overscrutinized because we had a very specific wish list generated by a whole bunch of stakeholders. We’re now into Phase Two. Phase Two is strictly between you, me, Dr. Scranton, and our security detail. As far as the rubberneckers with clearances are concerned, Phase One is still ongoing. This file—you need to memorize it—is a narrative of your ongoing Phase One explorations. You will repeat it to anyone who asks you what you are doing who has clearance for Phase One but who is not part of Phase Two.”

  Rita blinked. “Just so I’m completely clear on this—you’re ordering me to lie, if necessary, to superiors? To anyone who isn’t in on Phase Two?”

  “Yes.” Colonel Smith blinked at her. His eyes were reddened and the skin under them was baggy, as if he hadn’t slept for days. “And yes, I’m putting a note to that effect in writing in your HR file. Loosely enough worded to cover your ass if it blows up in our face, but not naming the specific project.”

  “Got it.” Rita picked up the file. “What else should I be aware of?”

  “Well.” Smith leaned back in his chair and made a steeple of his fingertips. “In an hour or so I am expecting Dr. Scranton to show up. She’ll have a sealed attaché case for you. You will deliver the case and its contents to your contacts, Ms. Thorold or Mrs. Burgeson, and to nobody else. If someone else tries to gain access the mission’s a bust and you’re to come straight back. Assuming it’s a success, what happens afterwards—” He shrugged. “It’s up to you. If they send you back, fine. But if they ask you to stay around, that would serve our purposes very well indeed. The Clan’s world-walkers can’t jaunt as rapidly as you can. An inherited malfunction in the way their Q-machines are activated causes a norepinephrine cascade which triggers a hypertensive crisis. They get really bad headaches: if they jaunt too often they can stroke out. So it’s totally plausible for you to ask to hang around until there’s a return message, and in the meantime do some sightseeing. And if you do that, they’d be idiots not to use you as a channel to fe
ed us whatever crap they want us to know about them. So I expect them to give you a dog and pony show. And we’d be idiots not to let them, always bearing in mind that they know that we know—” The Colonel cracked a pained smile. “This rabbit hole is lined with funhouse mirrors all the way down.”

  “Do they know I don’t have that problem?”

  “Insufficient data.” Smith paused. “The treatment Dr. Lane gave you fixed it at source, by the way. But you don’t need to tell them that, or anything about the process. Leave them guessing. You should base your threat assessments on the assumption that they know you can jaunt rapidly, but behave in their presence as if you’re sure they don’t know that. Don’t give it away needlessly, in other words, but don’t make plans that assume the adversary is ignorant.”

  “So I just”—Rita glanced around—“go as I am?” She’d dressed that morning in the office attire they’d given her when she got back from her last trip: a pin-striped trouser suit and blouse, very definitely not the height of Commonwealth fashion from what little she’d seen of it.