Dark State--A Novel of the Merchant Princes Multiverse

by Charles Stross

  COL. SMITH: There won’t be, unless they’re idiots. But if they are idiots …

  DR. SCRANTON: I really hope they’re not. They have lots of nuclear weapons, remember?

  END TRANSCRIPT

  NEW LONDON, TIME LINE 3, AUGUST 2020

  Going shopping for clothes with a girlfriend was one thing. It was entirely another thing to be taken shopping by a middle-ranking cop with orders to buy a wardrobe for a leading politician’s daughter to wear during an election campaign. Doing it in a foreign country with unfamiliar fashions was just the icing on the stress cake.

  Inspector Morgan turned up shortly after breakfast time, with a car, a driver, and a businesslike attitude. “Right,” she said, “there’s a department store uptown, Messrs. Cook and White’s, which should get you started. I have a list and we can bill it to the Minister’s account. Let’s see how fast we can burn through it, shall we?” Rita interpolated the rest of the sentence—so I can get back to my real job instead of babysitting you—and shrugged.

  “Okay—yes,” she said, and surrendered to a very unfun experience.

  From the moment Alice Morgan marched her through a side door and handed her over to a matronly store clerk with a tape measure, along with a shopping list and a stern admonition to let those who knew best sort her out, Rita lost all volition. The store wasn’t laid out like anything she’d encountered before. There were no bar-coded tags here, no racks of cheap manufactured items from sweatshops in Bangladesh and the Congo. They took her to a fitting room, stripped her down to underwear, and took more measurements than she’d imagined possible. They punched holes out of a credit-card-sized piece of cardboard to record her sizes. Then Morgan and her personal shop-jailer escorted her through a variety of claustrophobically small rooms stacked floor to ceiling with drawers full of items, some of them mundane, others unfamiliar. Pants and skirts and blouses were familiar enough, if prone to fastening weirdly, but the shalwar suits and kimonos and some of the undergarments for the formal outfits left her wishing for a user’s manual. More numbers were taken, added to another odd-shaped card. Then they moved her on again to a cobbler’s department, where it seemed she wasn’t expected to try on shoes, but to have her feet measured for bespoke footwear.

  “That’s it,” Alice said half-approvingly just as Rita was getting ready to drop. “I think we’re done. Mrs. Murphy, it’s all to be billed to the Ministry of Propaganda. I have a letter of authorization. When can you deliver it by?”

  Mrs. Murphy—the store clerk who was now more familiar with Rita’s body than anyone but Angie—bobbed something not unlike a curtsey. “Everything but the shoes can be with you this evening, ma’am, if the tabulator says we have them in stock. The shoes will take two days, even if we rush them. You’ll be wanting us to retain the lasts, I’m sure?”

  “Do that,” said Morgan. “All right, let’s talk to the accounts department.”

  Accounts—indeed, all payments—were handled by a hollow-faced fellow sitting in a wooden booth fronted by a transom. While Morgan was waiting for the man to duplicate her invoice (using a photocopier hidden in a back office, via pneumatic tube), Rita tugged her sleeve nervously. “Do we take anything away at all?” she asked. “Or is it always delivered…?”

  “It’s all delivered to order.” Morgan looked at her oddly. “After the alterations. Or do you do your fittings at home, where you come from?”

  Rita shook her head. It took a moment to work it out: So that’s what the measurements were for. “It’s very different. Most stuff is off-the-shelf, ready to wear. No alterations.” Something about this, she realized, was important: something about the way they managed supply chains here that the Colonel would want to know. But it stubbornly refused to come into focus in her mind.

  “I imagine it must seem strange.” The Inspector turned back to the payments clerk, accepting a form to sign in triplicate. “Well, we’ve just spent half a year’s universal basic income on your wardrobe: I hope you get some use from it. Come on, I believe you have an appointment with Mr. Burgeson’s people in under an hour.”

  Rita managed to conceal her disbelief. How had they spent a couple of months’ money? Was clothing really that expensive here? On the other hand: everything was altered to fit. The measurements had been very detailed. If they’d never developed a culture of cheap overseas production and disposable garments, then everything must be made like expensive business suits or couture items back home. And they’d run at least five outfits past her, three suits and two formal gowns. She followed obediently as Morgan led her back to the side entrance and out onto the street, where a car was waiting for them. They’re serious about parading me in public, she realized with a sinking sensation. The idea of being a pawn in a recondite political game didn’t appeal. But unless she was willing to run back home with her tail between her legs, thereby annoying the Colonel (and risking whatever measures he might consider necessary to motivate her to greater effort), there didn’t seem to be any alternative.

  The next stop, back inside the walled complex at the foot of the island, was another bland ministerial building. This one had no windows less than twenty feet up, and appeared to have been designed to be defensible in event of a siege. An overbearingly large statue of Hermes dominated the entrance plaza, bearing a message scroll and a somewhat anachronistic bullhorn. As Inspector Morgan led her past its plinth, Rita couldn’t help noticing a scattering of droppings. It seemed the messenger of the gods got scant respect from the odd red-breasted pigeons that swarmed hereabouts.

  Alice Morgan led her past reception (staffed, like Mrs. Burgeson’s ministerial offices, by men and women in unfamiliarly styled quasi-military uniforms), into an elevator, and up to a level consisting of a warren of open-plan offices. Every desk seemed to have a bulky glass-tubed computer terminal atop it, their screens swimming with fuzzy blue-gray text; dotted around the edge of the hallways were recording studios with sound-deadening double-glazing, bulky open-reel tape recorders, and mixing desks adorned with a fearsome array of sliders and thumbwheels. Rita found it odd how imposing the obsolete technology looked. Back home in the United States this could all be done with a cheap tablet and a couple of microphones, but here it took a wall of flashing lights, needle-twitching dials, and minions to change the spinning tapes. “Let’s see,” Alice muttered. “Room 3041, Donald Truax. That’s 3029, here’s 3033, ah…”

  She opened a thick glass door and gently shoved Rita through it. “Mr. Truax, this is Rita Douglas, as requested. I’ll wait outside.”

  “Call me Don.” The man in front of the microphone, his middle-aged and thinning hair crushed by a bulky headset, managed a brief hand-wave in her direction. A younger guy hunched over the mixing desk with ferocious concentration, unable to spare even the briefest eye contact. “Come in, Rita.”

  “Um, do you know why I’m here?” Rita shuffled closer to the table then perched one hip on the wooden interviewee’s chair.

  “Let’s see.” Don picked up a letter: “Special request from the Director-General, at the advice of the Minister. Please record a human-interest segment with Rita Douglas, diplomatic courier from the government of the United States of America in the next universe over, ready for broadcast on next Saturday’s show. Prior clearance and censorship applies, priority A-star.” He shrugged. “That’s pretty unequivocal, huh?” He smiled at her, only slightly pityingly. “So I guess that costume isn’t a prop from some drama shoot?”

  “I, oh hell, I had no idea!” Flustered, Rita almost stood up: then she had second thoughts and sat down again. “I’m, uh, not supposed to be public. I mean, I was told these were low-key talks about talks, not like…” She trailed off. Anchorman, she realized with dawning horror. Broadcast news and commentary. Holy shit! It was every spy’s nightmare writ large.

  “These talks might be low-key wherever you come from.” Truax looked past her. “If I had to hazard a guess, they might still be. But this came with clearance and censorship confirmation which means
the Minister himself is behind this. So he wants a segment in the can, ready to roll, but I wouldn’t go mouthing off about it in the meantime, huh, Brad?”

  Brad glanced up from his mixer. “What?”

  “Forget it. Miss Douglas, if you’d be so good as to take a headset, let’s start with a sound check? Then Brad will start recording…”

  Action This Day

  CAMP SINGULARITY, TIME LINE FOUR, AUGUST 2020

  There was a valley in a forest on a cold continent on the edge of forever, and in the valley there was a dome that had already been ancient when the pyramids in Egypt were built.

  Men had most recently rediscovered this place a dozen years ago, and around the skirts of the dome they had built a base. It sheltered behind tall steel razor-wire fences, surveilled by cameras and the muzzles of robot guns. The guns pointed inward. Nobody lived on this continent, for human life had never evolved in this time line, and the builders of the dome had been wiped out millennia earlier. Nevertheless, the personnel of Camp Singularity felt safest knowing that the dome was well-guarded.

  People worked inside the dome. Their ranks included soldiers from the Army Corps of Engineers, archaeologists from Homeland Security, and spooks from the Colonel’s Unit, which focused on emergent high-technology threats from other time lines. Latterly, a team of technicians from the National Reconnaissance Office had arrived, escorting a low-leader. This bore a payload shrouded in a white-walled container, antiseptic in its clean-room wrapping. The NRO folks played tourist within the limits of their sky-high security clearances, discreetly gaping at the ruins of the ancient alien para-time fortress when they weren’t attending to their assignments. As employees of the federal agency tasked with launching and operating spy satellites and other military spacecraft, they didn’t get to visit other time lines very often—much less ones hiding technological secrets on a par with anything they dealt with at work. They were here to prep the payload in the big white box for delivery to the other side of the gate inside the dome.

  The gate was an enigma wrapped inside a mystery. Nobody knew for sure who’d built the dome in the first place, although they had been dubbed the Forerunners—a long lost human civilization that had spread through a myriad of parallel universes, of which the agencies of the US government had so far explored less than two hundred. The para-time transport technology controlled by the DHS had been developed from the nanoscale artificial life machinery harvested from the brains of captured Merchant Prince clan couriers. In vitro cultured neurons could be stimulated to in turn activate the self-replicating intracellular Q-machines that caused whatever they were in electrostatic equilibrium with to tunnel into a parallel universe. But the gate was something different: a permanent portal, an open wormhole leading into another realm—one where the Earth itself no longer existed.

  The far end of the gate hung a little less than three and a half thousand nautical miles above a black hole the size of a walnut—a hole with a mass disturbingly similar to that of the Earth itself. The Unit had constructed a pressurized bridge through the gate, and the observatory at the end of the bridge had spotted debris in close orbit, whirling fast around the hole. But the observatory couldn’t deliver a conclusive reading on whether the debris were artificial or merely captured near-Earth asteroidal debris, for they were small and fast-moving and thousands of miles away. After much bureaucratic wrangling, a decision had been taken to request the NRO’s assistance in investigating the suspected Forerunner wreckage. And the payload in the launch shroud was the NRO’s initial response.

  By NRO standards, the satellite on the low-loader was small beer. It weighed less than a ton, cost less than a jet airliner, had taken only two years to design and assemble (largely from spare parts left over from other programs), and lacked most of the bells and whistles of the spysat agency’s normal toys. After all, a real spy satellite was the size of a school bus—far too big to pass through the gate—and cost as much as a Navy cruiser. This payload was simply a proof of concept and an experiment, nothing more. On the other hand, to the Unit it was an exciting experiment. It had the potential to disrupt an entire industry. Various manufacturers of medium-payload boosters, from United Launch Alliance to Raytheon, might be very unhappy if it worked. If they could combine the availability of the gate, a black hole, and para-time transfer machines to launch payloads using gravitational slingshot maneuvers rather than rockets, it stood to disrupt more than an industry. There were diplomatic and arms control implications to be understood, a whole new balance of power angle that the National Security Council would have to grapple with—

  Julie Straker was sitting in on the Bridge Control Room with Jose Mendoza, the watch officer, when the phone from the guard house up at Camp Singularity buzzed.

  “Straker here.” The phone knew who she was, recognizing the pattern of veins in her hand as she answered it, but the speaker at the other end might not: “How can I help?”

  “Gateway? Captain told me to warn you, you’ve got a VIP inbound. She’ll be with you in about twenty minutes. Meant to be an unscheduled inspection, so you didn’t hear from us, m’kay?”

  “Got you.” Julie nodded. Here in Nova America 11, lots of stuff that would have been committed to logfiles if it happened back home never got recorded. Landline calls between remote security offices being one of them. She grinned. “Tell the Captain thanks from everybody down here.” There were few enough people permanently stationed at the bases in Nova America 11 that they took a less rigorous approach to security than some people back home might expect. After all, leaks were impossible—aside from the steady trickle of air past the seals around the bridge, whistling thinly into the big emptiness around the hole in space, of course. She glanced over at Jose. “We’ve got company,” she said.

  “Right.” He put down his tablet then glanced back at the row of CCTV screens showing the clean room and the Bridge Approach Room. The BAR was a white corridor, windowless, rectangular in cross-section and as sterile and functional as the space station module it was derived from. The bridge was supported from one end—the Nova America 11 end—and terminated in hard vacuum, sixty feet beyond the far end of the gate between time lines. From the other end it dangled an airlock and a remote manipulator arm above thousands of miles of radiation-drenched vacuum. The far end of the bridge wasn’t in orbit around the hole: it kept station with the point where the Earth’s surface should have been, if the Earth had still been a feature of the other time line. Consequently it drifted around the hole once every twenty-four hours, instead of orbiting it once every ninety-odd minutes. Right now two of their colleagues and four payload specialists from the NRO were carefully sliding a handcart along the floor of the corridor. The white box strapped on top of it was perhaps five feet long and three feet wide and high. Orientation markings and red badges warned of dire peril should the device be tilted beyond a safe angle, or struck with a sharp implement in the vicinity of its shrouded fuel tanks.

  “Huh. That sucker’s not doing the floor loading any favors.” Jose squinted at a false-color display of the stresses playing across the structure of the bridge module. He reached for the mike in front of his desk: “Control to team. Please check lateral drift on payload, keep to within twenty centimeters of the painted centerline on the deck.” A ton of payload and nearly half a ton of suited-up personnel put a considerable strain on the floor of the one-ended bridge, shortening its life. The indoor astronauts paused to inspect their cart and nudge it back toward the middle of the tunnel, just as Julie’s phone blatted for attention.

  “Straker here—” She sat up unconsciously. “Yes, ma’am. If you come straight to the control room, I’ll log you in. Yes, we’re still”—she glanced at the big clock up front—“fifty minutes until launch.”

  She put the phone down and turned to Jose. “Our visitor—it’s Dr. Scranton.”

  “Doctor—” Jose paused. “Her?”

  “Yup, the grand-boss.” Dr. Eileen Scranton gave the Unit’s chief executive,
Colonel Smith, his marching orders. “Looks like she wants to watch this herself.” Scranton was about as high up the chain of command as it was possible to get without being a purely political functionary who couldn’t sneeze without a retinue of assistants and facilitators running to pass the tissues and take notes. But she tried to kid herself that she was keeping her hand in by directly supervising a project or two. If she wanted the excuse to sneak away from the interminable committee meetings for a few hours every week, who was Julie to criticize?

  Jose frowned, pensive. “She’s going to want to talk to you.” Julie was technically part of the Colonel’s small inner team, rather than one of the bridge controllers, although she was certificated to work here. “Who’s on standby?”

  “Max. I’ll page him.” She pulled up the shared staffing calendar and sent a priority message to his phone. “Wish the doctor’d given us some warning.”

  Half an hour later the technicians on the main screen had maneuvered the payload capsule up against the pressure door at the end of the bridge tunnel. They were locking down the connectors and checking the seals behind the outer door, ready to let the satellite out, when Dr. Scranton stepped inside. Max was logged in, sitting at the workstation beside Jose. “As you were,” she said as Julie began to stand. “I’m just here to watch the launch. Nothing more.”

  Julie smiled at her grand-boss. “Glad you could make it. Unfortunately there won’t be much to see from here…”

  “I am aware of that.” Dr. Scranton’s answering expression was wry. Julie had come to her attention on an external assignment, which marked her as one of the Colonel’s highflying youngsters. “Why don’t you talk me through the mission profile?”

  “Uh, okay…” Nonplussed, Julie took a few seconds to realize what was different about Dr. Scranton today. She was in her late-fifties, unobtrusive and handsome in the mode of so many older female Washington insiders. What was new was a pair of thick-rimmed spectacles. Tiny compound eyes glinted at the corners of bridge and arm—easily mistaken for decorative crystals if you weren’t expecting the sensors of a federal lifelogger. “This is on the record, isn’t it?”