This makes no sense!
—Firstly, only an idiot would take that kind of pay cut, wouldn’t they? An idiot or somebody expecting to receive some very special benefits in kind.
Secondly, if the bank had really downsized my department, we’d have been headhunted as a team by Goldman Sachs, HSBC, or Morgan Stanley before the ink was dry on the papers, no-competes or not. No-compete clauses in employment contracts aren’t legally enforceable in the UK, and if your new employer is a blue-chip investment bank and wants you badly enough, they will throw lawyers at the contract until it breaks under the weight of briefs.
But let me go on:
I have apparently been hired by the Ministry of Defense to work on the quality assurance program for flight software procurement in the F-35B fighter program, which is why I supposedly can’t talk about what I’m doing. This is such a transparently stupid lie that a Daily Mail reader could shred it in seconds. Yes, it’s true that automated theorem provers have a role to play in software QA for writing test harnesses designed to deliver proof of formal correctness, so my background isn’t totally implausible . . . but the Pentagon have publicly said that nobody outside the USA is going to get their hands on the source code to the F-35’s avionics. And this was in response to a UK request some years ago, reported in all the papers! It’s as if they want any random person I meet with an IQ above room temperature to see through my cover.
And the best bit? The reason I don’t come out during daylight hours is apparently because my work requires me to be online and available for telephone meetings during daylight hours in Japan—except the JSDF are not buying the F-35 at all!
On the train up from London I came up with three different cover stories, none of which contain holes big enough to sail a container ship through. But I am not allowed to use them until they have been approved by HR, because HR is required to provide a documentary and paper trail to substantiate my lies if anyone asks. Coming up with a new (even if more coherent) bunch of lies requires someone to get off their arse and do some work, so it’s a lower priority than dreaming up a new mess of transparently stupid falsehoods as a cover for the next employee to come on board.
If I go and see my parents for dinner, then they will ask how things are going with my job, and I’ll have to confess that I don’t work at the bank anymore. Then they’ll ask what I’m doing now, and I’ll be required to roll out the red carpet of lies—which they will probably see through before I finish speaking. And then I will have to choose between telling the Plumbers to come and clean up the mess and bind my own parents’ tongues, or let them think they’ve raised a bad liar.
I don’t know what to do.
* * *
“This is a K-22 thaumometric spectrum analyzer. It measures the gradient of the ambient thaum field, and outputs an energy spectrum giving you some idea of the flux in a given area, its rate of change over time and distance, and how penetrating it is based on its excitation level. It’s highly directional, so you need to take three readings at each logging point: X, Y, and Z axes.”
It’s six o’clock on the Monday evening after the Thursday when Alex visited Pinky and Brains’s house. He and Pete are the last guys through the door of the briefing room in the Arndale Centre office. Dave, the technician who’s giving them the orientation, stumbles through his spiel as if he’s sleepwalking: he’s obviously been repeating himself at two-hour intervals and he’s got an advanced case of teaching assistant burnout.
Alex shares a brief glance of mutual frustration with Pete. Pete has agreed to stay late in the office because after work Alex is taking him to see the house in Harehills, and they’ll sign the rental agreement jointly if it looks okay. Starting the training course on the K-22 at four in the afternoon seemed like a good idea—it was supposed to take two hours—but that was before they realized that it was just a version of the lab gear they’ve been using for months, packaged with a battery in a messenger bag. Nevertheless, Trainer Dave is determined to run them through the entire manual and subject them to a quiz at the end, even though he’s clearly suffering from narcolepsy.
“Dave.” Pete interrupts, but keeps his voice calm and slow. “Dave, we’re both familiar with the K-22. We’ve been using them on the proving ground at Dunwich and in lab work for the past six months. Why don’t you just skip the rest and see if we can complete your multiple-choice right now, so we can go home?”
Trainer Dave yawns and wobbles on his feet, then gives Pete a dirty look. “How do I know you’re not secret shoppers auditing me for compliance with training delivery standards?” He puts down the bag containing the K-22—it looks suspiciously like a cheap Android tablet connected to a plastic project box with some LEDs sticking through the front panel—and picks up the training course folder he’s reading from. “This is dangerous stuff! If you get too close to a steep thaum gradient you can accidentally precipitate a cascade—”
Alex has had enough. “Excuse me,” he begins.
“—cascade chain in which any grid patternings you’re carrying become activated, like inducing eddy currents by putting a metal container in a microwave oven. Only they’d be magical eddy currents. In which case you can attract—”
Fuck it. This is Thaumotechnic Safety 101 stuff. Never mind knowing it: Alex is qualified to teach it. He’s only been on the inside for six months but he has a natural aptitude for applied computational thaumaturgy. He soaks it up like a sponge. “Look into my eyes,” he says tiredly.
“—you could be eaten alive from the inside out by K-parasites . . . What?” Trainer Dave stops reciting the canned safety spiel and makes the fundamental error of locking gazes with a PHANG.
Persons afflicted with PHANG syndrome are not, in fact, the living dead. They can’t turn into bats or mist. However, they do have a number of traits associated with the vampire legends of yore. PHANGS can move superhumanly fast and exert great strength . . . and the mythical vampire mind-control trick is entirely true.
Trainer Dave is wearing a standard-issue Laundry field ward on a chain around his neck. It looks like a small silver charm pendant, and it’s designed to protect the wearer from everyday magical threats, or at least provide enough warning that they’re getting in out of their depth to give them time to run away. However it offers about as much protection against the gaze of a pissed-off PHANG as a bicycle helmet offers against an onrushing tank. Dave stands slack-jawed for a couple of seconds as he stares into Alex’s eyes, then he twitches violently and grabs at his shirt collar. A moment later the shorted-out ward is on the floor, emitting a thin trail of bitter-smelling smoke. And Dave is still gazing into Alex’s eyes like a love-struck puppy.
“Dave,” Alex licks his lips. The familiar hunger, ever-present, sharpens abruptly. Damn it, I’m not due for another blood meal until next Tuesday! He feels a momentary urge to go for Dave’s throat but suppresses it ruthlessly: he’ll just have to tough it out until HR delivers the next sample tube. “Dave. You can trust us. We are not auditing you for quality purposes: we are exactly what we seem to be. But we’re all wasting our time here. Let us take the workbooks away and we’ll return the completed questionnaires when we’ve read the books from cover to cover. You can go home and get some sleep. We’re done here, aren’t we?”
Trainer Dave nods jerkily, his head puppet-like; he picks up the K-22 demonstrator and slings it over his shoulder. “Well, if you’re sure, it’s your neck on the line when you’re out in the field. Let’s call it a day: send me your worksheets through the internal post by next Wednesday and I’ll sign you off.” He bends down and picks up the ward. “Huh. What happened? It got really hot . . .”
“I think it might be defective.” Alex catches a sharp glance from Pete and shrugs. Pete’s eyes narrow, but he nods imperceptibly. “You probably want to tell Facilities. Sign out a replacement tomorrow. I gather they’re issuing higher-powered ones to everyone now: the old class two wards just aren�
�t much use.”
“I’ll say.” Dave yawns again. “Well, I’ll be going then. Gosh, is that the time? How did it get to be so late?”
Alex watches their trainer flee, then sits down and massages his forehead. He has a mild headache. Cracking a low-powered ward by sheer willpower isn’t something he does very often. It’s got his V-parasites riled and they’re whooping it up, an insectile chittering of eldritch tinnitus resonating at the back of his head.
When they’re alone in the decrepit conference room Pete takes a deep breath and holds it for a count of ten. “You. Should. Not. Have. Done. That.”
Alex rubs his brow again. Abruptly he realizes he’s shivering and hot, angry and scared with the adrenaline flood of reaction. It’s as if all his frustration and stress came bubbling up in a rebellious outburst. “Nope, I shouldn’t have! And he shouldn’t have been wasting our time. It’s made me hungry!” He glares. Pete blanches, and Alex blinks, cringing inwardly as he realizes how he must look from the outside. He backpedals furiously: “I’m sorry, I’m crabby because I only did breakfast around two o’clock. Let’s go grab a takeaway—no, wait, there’s a pizza place across the road, how about we sit down and eat?”
Salvo’s is brightly lit, brash, and a fine example of what happens when a family of Italian restauranteurs in Yorkshire cross breed a mid-fifties American diner with a Neapolitan pizzeria. While they’re waiting for the food, Pete (who has been wearing a positively constipated expression ever since leaving the office) has another go at getting things off his chest.
“Mind control is . . .” He stumbles to a stop and glares at Alex.
Alex takes a deep breath. “I’m a very bad boy, yes. It’s unethical, naughty, and as my mentor you’re supposed to shout at me, agreed. But the flip side of the coin is that he was wasting our time, we’ve got important stuff we should be doing instead, and hey, pizza. Where exactly is the harm in what I did back there?”
“Saying it’s unethical is beside the point.” Pete picks up his fork and bumps it on the table, using it for percussive punctuation. “You don’t need a lecture on ethics. You’re not really a bad boy, otherwise the organization wouldn’t be going to considerable lengths to keep you alive.” He stares moodily at the wallpaper behind Alex’s head. “What worries me is that it’s a contravention of HR regulations.”
Pete taps the table again. “I know why you did it, and I sympathize, up to a point. We’ve both got better things to be doing—you should be studying, I should be monitoring nominally Nicene Creed–compliant doomsday cults—it’s a make-work job and a distraction. Also, you were telling him the truth—all you did was nudge him to agree you weren’t lying to him. And I think you got away with it, too, unless we’re under active investigation by the Auditors. But if we are, well, from their perspective you broke a really serious regulation for an entirely trivial reason.” Alex blinks: that possibility hadn’t occurred to him. “If they catch you messing with employees’ heads, even if it’s for good reasons, they’ll throw the book at you. Their thinking is, maybe this time he did it to cut short a pointless training course that had already overrun its time slot, but what if next time he does it because he’s bored and wants to cut short an important mission briefing, and people get k—get into trouble as a result? What if he does it for bad reasons, to cover up some impropriety?”
Alex looks into Pete’s eyes and sees something new there: Pete is scared. And not scared of him: he’s scared for him.
“Shit, man, I wouldn’t do—”
“I know that! But the organization doesn’t.” Pete’s voice is pitched low and urgent. “These are desperate times. There have been issues with internal penetration by opposition factions—not just you-know-who.” Alex shudders again. His experience with you-know-who put him in a locked hospital room for a week, and he got off lightly. It could have been ever so much worse. “They have to go by capabilities, not avowed intentions. If you ever, ever mess with the insides of an employee’s head again, you had better have evidence and witnesses to prove that they were a clear and present danger, or it’ll be the Black Assizes for you.”
He stops lecturing abruptly. Alex’s shirt is cold and clings clammily to the small of his back. Oblivious to their conversation, a pretty, dark-haired waitress approaches the table and places two pizzas before them, asking, with a smile, if they need any pepper or condiments. Her accent is Polish. Alex stares at her fixedly for a moment, before he realizes that she asked him a question and is expecting a reply. He shrugs. “Sorry,” he says, embarrassingly unsure what’s expected of him.
“That will be all, thanks.” Pete gives her a sunny smile. As she walks away, hips swaying, he murmurs, “You don’t need to stare.”
“What? Sorry!” Alex twitches violently. “I was away with the fairies. Thinking about what you said,” he explains defensively.
Pete picks up his knife and begins to saw at the thin crust of his del’ padrone. “You’re doing a decent job most of the time,” he says quietly. “But you’ve got to learn to think like a state if you work in the Civil Service. Organizations are not human beings and they don’t obey the same priorities. They’re hives. Like the bank you worked for, I suppose, but you were too specialized, working at too low a level to see the politics going on around you. Hives run on emergent consensus and policy. And there are still people in the Laundry who think that leaving any PHANGs alive—much less hiring them—was a really bad idea. You need to make sure you don’t give them any excuses to challenge the consensus.”
Alex picks at his quattro formaggi despondently as Pete disassembles his own pizza. He’s still hungry, but he’s lost his appetite for food. Across the room he notices the pretty Polish waitress flirting with the maître d’ behind the front desk. He looks down at his plate, focussing on the tines of his fork. They stand out in steely relief against the blurred background of his pizza. I need to eat, he thinks dismally, feeling ashamed of himself. After a minute, he forces his hands to move. I’m not a bad boy, he tells himself, unsure whether it’s a statement of fact or an instruction. But if it’s true, why does he feel this way?
* * *
After pizza, Alex takes Pete over to visit Pinky and Brains’s house. Pete is duly appreciative of the benefits of a nearly unfurnished top-floor bedroom, a lathe in the lounge, and a half-tracked motorcycle in the garage. Pinky and Brains are duly appreciative of the benefits of a second roommate with the right security clearance. A lease is signed, and Alex and Pete hand over deposit and rent cheques. Brains proposes that they celebrate by opening a bottle of his home-brewed tea-wine; Pete leads Alex in gracefully declining (by reason of the need to be sober for the ride home to the hotel), and the evening comes to an end.
The following evening, after dark, Pinky meets Alex with the van and they make the entirely predictable and deterministic trip south to the big IKEA warehouse store just off the M62, where Alex spends the thick end of another five hundred pounds—it feels like a lot more money than it did during his banking days—on a desk, an office chair, a futon, bedding, and some blackout curtains. He’s up most of the night hammering, screwing, and swearing as he tries to interpret furniture plans drawn by M. C. Escher. To his astonishment his new housemates sleep through the racket and do not rise to remonstrate angrily with him. Finally, by about four in the morning he has the beginnings of a vampire lair in place. He might have to sleep in a Lycksele instead of a coffin, and sitting on a Torbjörn in front of a Micke desk and a cheap Dell is a step down from the gothic throne flanked by pulchritudinous undead brides that he feels he truly deserves, but at least he can call it home. And maybe in time it’ll come to feel like home? Who knows: stranger things have already happened in his short adult life.
Alex crawls into bed and lies there with the lights out, staring at the ceiling. The blackout curtains are drawn but the LED on his phone charger floods the room with a ghostly green radiance that, to his PHANG-sharp eyes, is alm
ost bright enough to read by. It’s cold—the central heating timer is off until shortly before dawn—and he doesn’t want to reach an arm out from under the covers and throw a discarded sock across the charger. But it comes to him that he’s neither tired nor contented. So in the end he sits up, shivering, grabs a tee-shirt, checks the time—4:33 a.m.—and phones the only person he can think of who might relate to his predicament.
“Yo, Alex?” John answers on the second ring. Like Alex, he’s one of the survivors of the small band of PHANGs who have ended up in the Laundry, dragged along in Mhari’s undertow.
“Yo. Can you talk?”
“Oh, sure. I was just finishing some paperwork, thinking about fixing myself some lunch, then hitting the gym as soon as it opens: I can be home before sunrise. What’s up?”
Alex can’t honestly call John a friend, but they share a certain number of unique life experiences. Heavy math background, worked for the bank, contracted PHANG syndrome together, survived the massacre at the New Annex. Now they’re both scurrying around auditing courses on advanced computational thaumokinesis between seemingly purposeless training assignments. When they’re in the same city they sometimes go to the pub together after work because bitching about the job is always easier in the presence of someone else who’s been there and done that. They’re foxhole buddies rather than real friends, but that’s okay because it’s exactly what Alex needs right now.
“I was just wondering: Have you guys been tapped for rotation through Leeds yet? I’m trying to get a handle on what’s actually going on. There are rumors about it being a permanent relocation target for the entire organization.”
“Really? You’d do better to ask Janice. If it’s that big, the sysadmins will be up to their ears in plans for the server migration”—unlike a commercial operation, or even a regular civil service department, the Laundry cannot outsource its IT infrastructure to third parties—“won’t they?”
The Nightmare Stacks Page 10