“Janice.” Alex doesn’t need to sigh.
“Okay, so you’re afraid of her. Who else—Dick?”
“I wouldn’t cross the road to piss on Dick if he was on fire. Anyway, he’s about as reliable as the Daily Mail. On a good day.”
John chuckles humorlessly. “Hey, I heard a rumor about Dick. Think you can keep it to yourself?”
“Dick’s an animal! When we were exploring the envelope—”
“Dick is in trouble with HR.”
“What?”
John pauses. “Listen. About our condition—what do you know about it and sex?”
“Know about—” Alex’s train of thought falls apart messily. What Alex knows about sex is entirely theoretical, to such a degree that he gets panicky when another man asks him about it—the long-ingrained fear of being found out by the high school gossip ring still haunts him. Alex doesn’t so much wonder about sex as have a fully developed five-year post-doc research program in mind, assuming he ever finds a willing collaborator. “What about it? Apart from how it got Evan into a shitpile of trouble . . .” Evan was one of the PHANGs who didn’t make it. (A self-identified pickup artist, he thought developing vampire mind-control skills was the best thing ever to happen to him, right up until the night he picked up a vampire hunter by mistake. It had been a closed-coffin funeral.) The penny finally drops: “Wait, is this about Dick and the night club—”
“HR sent a memo, did you get it?”
“A memo? I get a lot of memos from HR. Mostly about the correct use of stepladders and how to fill in time sheets correctly. Which memo?”
“So you didn’t read the memo about sexual contact being a contagion vector for V syndrome?”
“About what?”
“Oh geez. You mean you didn’t—well.” John pauses. “Let me give you the TL;DR version. Your blood meal: you get it in a nice sample tube once a week, like methadone, and you don’t really have to think about where it comes from or what happens to the, the donor, right? But when you drink the blood, what happens is that your V-parasites use it to establish a link to the brain at the other end, and they start eating holes in it. Well, the word from HR is that you don’t need to drink the blood. You just have to mix enough of it with your own circulation for the V-parasites to go to work. Blood-to-blood contact is enough, no drinking necessary. Just like—”
Alex is neither stupid nor slow. “You’re saying it’s actually like HIV.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re saying that PHANG syndrome is sexually transmitted?”
“No. I’m saying that V syndrome, the degenerative side effect we inflict on our hosts, what our victims die of, is contagious via blood-to-blood contact with a PHANG. So if you have sex, the only way to avoid killing your partner is to use condoms religiously. Or to choose someone who’s already infested with something that stops the V-parasites moving in. K syndrome–induced dementia, for example: they’re already loaded with extradimensional parasites. Or maybe another PHANG: it looks like we’re immune to each other. Probably.”
“Oh God, Janice will fucking love that. I can hear Dick’s new chat-up line already.” Janice is a PHANG: she’s also a no-nonsense lesbian. “She’d punch his nuts through the wall.”
“Well, she might if Dick dared to say anything. But he’s in real trouble this time. They caught him shagging a zombie on the night shift.”
“Gross! Where? I mean, wait, what happened?”
The Laundry can find a use for anyone and anybody—often literally: death doesn’t always result in release from service. The dead bodies on the night shift have mostly been soul-killed by exposure to summoned nightmares. Physically intact, they are set in motion by captive Eaters and bound to obedience. In organization parlance these are Residual Human Resources: the grim joke is that HR likes them because they don’t take vacations or ask for pay rises.
“I’m not sure of the exact details,” John continues, “but apparently they caught him down in the archive tunnels under Dansey House one night with a female former employee. I mean, a former female employee. Um, whatever. In flagrante. He went down there and used his warrant card to order the zombie to follow him into a storeroom and, well.”
Alex shuffles uncomfortably. “Right. Forget I asked. But. Um. What happened?”
“Suspension on pay pending an enquiry. The Auditors are looking into it.”
“Oh dear God.”
“They’re talking about bringing him up before the Black Assizes, if they can work out what charges apply. Awkward.”
“Jesus. Fucking a zombie. I feel sick.”
That’s not all Alex feels: despair at the unfairness of the blow that has just been dealt to his hope of ever having a normal sex life is also a factor, not to mention a mortifying, burning curiosity that he dares not admit. But he’s not about to expose his emotional underpants to John, not over the phone and without prior consumption of enough beer to render all statements plausibly deniable. Quick, change the subject. “Um. Moving swiftly on. The real reason I called—the Leeds thing.”
“What, the move? So far I think it’s admin only. They want Quarry House, that’s for sure, but they’re going to need outlying bases all over the country for rapid reaction forces. Is this about your family thing?”
“Yeah, you could say that. I was trying to work out if I could avoid being posted here permanently.”
“Well, my guess is the answer to that is a yes, if you can figure out some way to make yourself indispensable elsewhere.”
“Thanks a million!”
“Tell you what, if I hear anything useful down here I’ll call you? I mean, there might always be an internal opening in Cheltenham that requires an expert in higher-dimensional transformational topology who’s allergic to sunlight, right? You never know.”
“Yeah, you’re right! Thanks.”
But even before they end the call Alex knows it’s not going to happen. He is doomed to be dragged back into the infantilizing maw of his family’s expectations. Nothing he can imagine will ever challenge his parents’ iron-clad expectations, or allow him to break out of the claustrophobic mold they’ve spun for him, without shattering them entirely. Forever the dutiful son, Alex can’t see any way to create a life of his own unless he can first escape from the city of his birth. You can take the boy out of Leeds, but you can’t take Leeds out of the boy: the strongest manacles are born in the blood.
And so he lies awake an hour longer, until the central heating lurches back into life with a distant groan and a throbbing gurgle of pipes. And when he finally dozes off in the predawn gloom, he dreams of a green-haired, mad-eyed girl who can shatter his world with a fingertip touch.
* * *
About a month before Alex visits Whitby, Gerald Lockhart attends another briefing—this time in a windowless basement storeroom in a grungy satellite office in Catford.
“Forget everything you think you know about the pointy-eared fuckers,” Derek the DM says genially, dropping a meaty hand with casual disregard on the grease-stained cover of a first edition Monster Manual that occupies pride of place on his desk. “It’s all moonshine and bullshit.”
The DM has taken a special interest in Professor McPherson’s Specimen B ever since the briefing at Audit House five months ago. He’s been particularly evasive for the past two months, closeting himself with Forecasting Ops’ spookier haruspices, and asking lots of pointed questions about ley lines (such as the geodesic linking The Burren with certain prehistoric sites in Yorkshire). Lockhart, who makes a point of keeping an eye on what his External Assets are doing, is perturbed: not so much by Derek’s more eccentric interests as by his secretiveness. But he’s finally invited Lockhart into his den, and Lockhart is determined to get to the bottom of the matter.
Lockhart winces slightly as the DM pulls a book off the shelf behind him—a late impression Allen and Unwin copy
of The Fellowship of the Ring, its paper jacket slightly foxed—and drops it on the AD&D rule book. “No fucking Legolas here. They’re your classic forties Übermensch: Nazis with pointy ears and death spells.”
“You’re going to give me chapter and verse on what you’re doing,” Gerald says firmly, crossing his arms and leaning back on the swivel chair with the broken gas strut suspension. It creaks ominously. “Or I’m leaving.” Life’s too short for your role-playing melodrama is the subtext, although Lockhart is warily aware that calling the DM’s bluff is generally an unwise strategy. He’s the Laundry’s very own Prisoner of Zenda, except that after his escape and revenge he came back into the fold willingly, in return for a lavish budget and the organization’s tacit cooperation in staging his fantasy scenarios. Which makes him, in Lockhart’s world view, a dangerously loose cannon with the ear of Mahogany Row and the goodwill of both Forecasting Ops and the Auditors (which is bad enough), and a tendency to pull brilliantly polished rabbits out of suspiciously beaten-looking hats (which only makes things worse). “Explain yourself.”
“I began investigating after I got the briefing pack on Specimen B,” the DM says smugly, his voice deep and gravelly as a hundred-and-fifty-kilo toad (to which he bears a passing resemblance). “And it bore some structural . . . similarities . . . which got me digging, as it were.”
He leans forward, confidingly. Lockhart manages not to flinch. “Let me give you a scenario. Imagine you’re, oh, I dunno, Doctor Impossible and you’ve just come out of your time capsule from the year 1940. You’re looking forward to unleashing your Vril-powered clone army and taking over the world, but before you can get your marching mojo on it’s a good idea to do due diligence and figure out who you’re taking over the world from.” Lockhart nods. “Well now, you don’t take long to discover that the USA is top dog, right? And you’re going to go up against them eventually. But first, you want to figure out how they’re going to react. I mean, why start a land war in Asia when you can just pay off a couple of corrupt customs officials?”
Lockhart’s eyes narrow imperceptibly. “Go on.”
“Well, thanks to Specimen B we now have confirmation that they’ve been out there for a very long time indeed, if not so much in the past few hundred years. And what I figure is that everything we know about these pointy-eared fuckers has been filtered through medieval monks from word-of-mouth accounts by terrified peasants. Who escaped, meaning they weren’t valuable enough to the aforementioned PEFs to be worth keeping. It’s like, I dunno? Trying to work out the mechanics of K Street lobbying and beltway politics and the US State Department by listening to an illiterate goatherd from Kandahar who got kidnapped by US Special Forces and was released when they confirmed that, no, he didn’t know where the Taliban received their subscriptions to Penthouse and Guns and Ammo.” The DM pauses for breath. “We’re reading what the monks thought was worth writing down, the edited accounts of goatherds nine hundred years ago who had the great good luck to be seen as too harmless to be worth a bullet the night SEAL Team Six blew through the village.”
“And the body?”
The DM shrugs. “Everyone gets unlucky sooner or later. And we know the pointy-eared fuckers stopped operating on our patch, in our world, not long afterwards. Reports just stop dead. Like they gave up on us as too poor to be worth enslaving. Or maybe the folks back home threw their equivalent of World War Three. Or they decided to regroup . . . or something.”
Lockhart thinks for a minute. “Let us stipulate that those are the facts. What do we know about Specimen B’s people?”
“Let’s see.” The DM leans back in turn and stares at the ceiling tiles. There’s a disgusting brown-edged stain where something has leaked from above. “They got speech later than us, but that doesn’t mean they’re unsophisticated. They had to spend hundreds of thousands of years longer than our ancestors making do with hand signals and guesswork—which means they had theory of mind, working out what everyone else in the tribe was thinking by observing their behavior and ascribing intent to it, long before they got words. Silent killers who worked in packs, because that kind of brain-work requires a high-energy metabolism and unless they were a tropical-only band of peaceful fruit-eating hippy fuckers, they were hunters. They got speech late, maybe less than fifty thousand years ago if Processor McPherson’s cladistic analysis is right. Hell, they might even have developed writing first.”
The DM absent-mindedly picks up a set of translucent dice from a stationery organizer on his desk and begins rolling them on the blotter. The decaying thaum field of a thousand hopeful gamers’ wishes, harnessed by the DM’s occult paraphernalia, slows to local lightspeed when the dice hit the blotter: they glow ghostly blue with Cerenkov radiation.
“Go on,” prompts Lockhart.
“Let’s say they get speech, and they got theory of mind, so they get religion pretty soon, too—an emergent side effect of ascribing intentionality to aspects of their environment. Animism, polytheism, whatever. They probably discover ritual magic pretty fast because their brains are predisposed to modeling complex entities. Abstract thinking.” Lockhart begins to sit up. “But they’re not like us psychologically. They’ve got a much shorter history of selection for social living with non-relatives. What kind of society would a species of smart, fast, predatory ritual magicians come up with?”
The DM smacks his hands down on the dice, locking them to the desktop as he stares into Lockhart’s eyes. “They’re going to grab each other by the mind and squeeze,” he announces, gripping the handful of dice in one meaty palm. “You’re going to get a society based on cognitive binding. Geases all the way down. It’ll make Feudal Japan look like an anarchist utopia. Either you’re a master—a sorcerer—or you’re a slave. Or a less powerful sorcerer: a vassal.” He blinks rapidly. “They’re smart, too, so they’ll make progress. Hierarchy holds them back: a Dark Lord is a single point of failure for the Dark Empire. If you can stick a dagger in his kidneys while he isn’t looking you’ll trigger a feeding frenzy among the First Circle. Possibly they’ll go high feudal, with reciprocal obligations and a great-chain-of-being shtick, so everyone knows how the succession works. Or maybe they’ll go full Aztec, and offload all the magic onto a succession of high priests driven mad by blood. But I see no way these fuckers are going to be perfect floaty Tolkienian peaceniks.”
“I hear you.” Lockhart is laconic. “But if that’s the only reason you’ve been hiding for the past five months . . .”
“Nope.” Derek shakes his head. “Because the question I’ve been asking is, what happens now? We’re hitting peak thaumaturgy. We’re sending up the bat-signal loud and clear: we’ve got magic and we’re using it. Back when the PEFs last poked around this neighborhood we were in the dark ages. There was nothing to steal but our fleas. Only now . . . if they’re still out there, are we suddenly going to get our very own personalized answer to the Fermi Paradox?”
Lockhart’s eyes go wide. “What did Forecasting Ops say?”
“Forecasting Ops read the fucking tea leaves and did a double-take, my son. Forecasting Ops are deeply unhappy. You know how it goes when they try to predict the future and someone else is doing the same thing, how the interference effects mess with them and turn it into a muddy blur? Well that’s happening.”
“Oh dear.”
Lockhart’s mustache twitches unhappily.
“You can say that again.” They sit in silent contemplation for almost a minute.
“You have a plan,” Lockhart nudges.
“I have a plan.”
“But . . .”
The DM sighs lugubriously. “FO’s best projection is that shit’s going to kick off in the next month, somewhere in the north.”
“Yorkshire. Leeds, even. Right.” Lockhart nods. He’s been involved in the Leeds relocation planning for nearly a year.
“It could be.” The DM glances at him slyly.
“So what do you want me to do about it?” Lockhart asks, losing patience.
“Cameras.” Derek smacks his lips. “We need a way to spot them if they show up, don’t we? Cameras. Forecasting Ops were very definite about that: it’s all about the peepers.” He blinks rapidly, then looks at Lockhart again. “They couldn’t be any more direct. The closer they get to telling me what to do—”
“The less reliable the forecast becomes, yes, I understand.” Lockhart dry-swallows. “What exactly do you need?”
“All the street camera time in the world. A technical team. And a bunch of feet on the ground who don’t have enough of a clue what they’re up against to run away. One set of feet in particular: I’ve been reading his file and I think he’ll rise to the occasion nicely once I set him up.” The DM stretches expansively. “Three to two nothing happens. But that remaining forty percent contingency? You’ll thank me later.”
“Write me a memo: I’ll make sure you get everything you ask for.” Lockhart stands to leave. “But you’d better be right,” he adds off-handedly.
“What? If they’re not out there it won’t cost you . . .” He trails off, catching Lockhart’s icy stare. “What?”
Lockhart slides his half-moon glasses off his nose, and very deliberately pulls a lens cloth from his breast pocket. He begins to polish them, considering his response carefully. “This isn’t a game, Derek.”
“I know it’s—” The DM pauses. “What do you mean?” he asks in a thin, worried voice.
“Games iterate. You win, you lose, you get another throw of the dice.” Lockhart examines the surface of his spectacles in minute detail, looking for dust motes. “In real life there are no health potions, no respawns. People play for keeps. You should play this one as if the Auditors are going to drag you away and cut your throat if you lose the round.” His gaze flickers back to the DM, a myopic blue-eyed squint: “Because what you’ve just described to me is not a game, Derek: it sounds more like CASE NIGHTMARE RED.”
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