The Jennifer Morgue

by Charles Stross

  At the foot of the wide, glittering staircase in the middle of the fourth floor I temporarily lose Grondor. It might have something to do with the tenth-level mage lurking behind the transom with a magic flamethrower, or the simultaneous arrival of about a ton of steel spikes falling from concealed ceiling panels, but Grondor is reduced to a greasy pile of goo on the floor. I sigh and do something to the mage that would be extremely painful if he were a real person. “Is she upstairs?” I ask the glowing letters.

  SUR3 TH1NG D00D!!!

  “Any more traps?”

  N0!!??!

  “Cool.” I step over the grease spot and pause just in front of the staircase. It never pays to be rash. I pick up a stray steel spike and chuck it on the first step and it goes BANG with extreme prejudice. “Not so cool.” Rinse, cycle, repeat, and four small explosions later I’m standing in front of the doorway facing the top step. No more whoopee cushions, just a twentieth-level sorceress and a minion in chains. Happy joy. “Pinky. Plan B. Get it ready to run, on my word.”

  I break through the door and enter the witch’s lair.

  Once you’ve seen one witch’s den you’ve seen ’em all. This one is a bit glitzier than usual, and some of the furniture is nonstandard even taking into account the Laundry hack packs linked into this realm. Where did she get the mainframe from? I wonder briefly before considering the extremely ominous Dho-Na geometry curve in the middle of the floor (complete with a frantic-looking Pete chained down in the middle of it) and the extremely irate-looking sorceress beyond.

  “Emma MacDougal, I presume?”

  She turns my way, spitting blood. “If it wasn’t for you meddling hackers, I’d have gotten away with it!” Oops, she’s raising her magic wand.

  “Gotten away with what?” I ask politely. “Don’t you want to explain your fiendish plan, as is customary, before totally obliterating your victims? I mean, that’s a Dho-Na curve there, so you’re obviously planning a summoning, and this server is inside Ops block. Were you planning some sort of low-key downsizing?”

  She snorts. “You stupid Ops heads, why do you always assume it’s about you?”

  “Because—” I shrug. “We’re running on a server in Ops. What do you think happens if you open a gateway for an ancient evil to infest our departmental LAN?”

  “Don’t be naïve. All that’s going to happen is Pimple-Features here is going to pick up a good, little, gibbering infestation then go spread it to Mama. Which will open up the promotion ladder once again.” She stares at me, then her eyes narrow thoughtfully. “How did you figure out it was me?”

  “You should have used a smaller mainframe emulator, you know; we’re so starved for resources that Bosch runs on a three-year-old Dell laptop. If you weren’t slurping up all our CPU resources, we probably wouldn’t have noticed anything was wrong until it was too late. It had to be someone in HR, and you’re the only player on the radar. Mind you, putting poor Peter-Fred in a position of irresistible temptation was a good move. How did you open the tunnel into our side of the network?”

  “He took his laptop home at night. Have you swept it for spyware today?” Her grin turns triumphant. “I think it’s time you joined Pete on the summoning-grid sacrifice node.”

  “Plan B!” I announce brightly, then run up the wall and across the ceiling until I’m above Pete.

  P1AN 8 :) :) :)

  The room below my head lurches disturbingly as Pinky rearranges the furniture. It’s just a ninety-degree rotation, and Pete’s still in the summoning grid, but now he’s in the target node instead of the sacrifice zone. Emma is incanting; her wand tracks me, its tip glowing green. “Do it, Pinky!” I shout as I pull out my dagger and slice my virtual finger. Blood runs down the blade and drops into the sacrifice node—

  And Pete stands up. The chains holding him to the floor rip like damp cardboard, his eyes glowing even brighter than Emma’s wand. With no actual summoning vector spliced into the grid it’s wide open, an antenna seeking the nearest manifestation. With my blood to power it, it’s active, and the first thing it resonates with has come through and sideloaded into Pete’s head. His head swivels. “Get her!” I yell, clenching my fist and trying not to wince. “She’s from personnel?”

  “Personnel?” rumbles a voice from Pete’s mouth—deeper, more cultured, and infinitely more terrifying. “Ah, I see. Thank you.” The being wearing Pete’s flesh steps across the grid—which sparks like a high-tension line and begins to smolder. Emma’s wand wavers between me and Pete. I thrust my injured hand into the Bag of Holding and stifle a scream when my fingers stab into the bag of salt within. “It’s been too long.” His face begins to lengthen, his jaw widening and merging at the edges. He sticks his tongue out: it’s grayish-brown and rasplike teeth are sprouting from it.

  Emma screams in rage and discharges her wand at him. A backwash of negative energy makes my teeth clench and turns my vision gray, but it’s not enough to stop the second coming of “Slug” Johnson. He slithers towards her across the floor, and she gears up another spell, but it’s too late. I close my eyes and follow the action by the inarticulate shrieks and the wet sucking, gurgling noises. Finally, they die down.

  I take a deep breath and open my eyes. Below me the room is vacant but for a clean-picked human skeleton and a floor flecked with brown—I peer closer—slugs. Millions of the buggers. “You’d better let him go,” I intone.

  “Why should I?” asks the assembly of molluscs.

  “Because—” I pause. Why should he? It’s a surprisingly sensible question. “If you don’t, HR—Personnel—will just send another. Their minions are infinite. But you can defeat them by escaping from their grip forever—if you let me lay you to rest.”

  “Send me on, then,” say the slugs.

  “Okay.” And I open my salt-filled fist over the molluscs—which burn and writhe beneath the white powderfall until nothing is left but Pete, curled fetally in the middle of the floor. And it’s time to get Pete the hell out of this game and back into his own head before his mother, or some even worse horror, comes looking for him.

  Afterword

  THE GOLDEN AGE OF SPYING

  The Mary-Sue of MI6

  “My Name is Bond—James Bond.”

  These six words, heard by hundreds of millions of people, are almost invariably spoken during the first five minutes of each movie in one of the biggest media success stories of the twentieth century. Unless you’ve lived under a rock for the past forty years, you hear them and you know at once that you’re about to be plunged into a two-hour-long adrenaline14-saturated extravaganza of snobbish fashionable excess, violence, sex, car chases, more violence, and Blowing Shit Up—followed by a postcoital cigarette and a lighthearted quip as the credits roll.

  It wasn’t always so. When Casino Royale was first published in 1953, it got a print run of 4,750 hardcover copies and no advertising budget to speak of; while the initial reviews were favorable, comparing Ian Fleming to Le Queux and Oppenheim (the kings of the prewar British spy-thriller genre), it took a long time for his most famous creation to set the world on fire. Despite his rapidly rising print runs (Casino Royale eventually sold over a million paperbacks in the UK alone), and despite his increasing prominence among the postwar thriller writers, a decade elapsed before any of Fleming’s novels were filmed; indeed, their author barely lived to see the commercial release of Dr. No and the runaway success of the icon he created. (Nor were the films seen as a runaway success before they were made—Dr. No was notoriously made on a tight budget, even though it went on to gross nearly $60 million around the world.)

  Literary immortality—or indeed, mere postmortem survival—is dauntingly hard for a novelist to achieve. The limbo of postmortem obscurity awaits 95 percent of all novelists—almost all novels go out of print for good within five years of the death of their author. But in addition to being a million-selling bestseller, Fleming was a ferociously well-connected newspaper executive with a strong sense of the value of his ideas,
and he pursued television and film adaptation remorselessly. Cinematic success arrived just in time for his creation, and the synergy between bestselling books and massive movie hype has sufficed to keep them in print ever since.

  James Bond is a creature of fantasy, perhaps best described using a literary term looted from that most curious and least respected of fields, fan fiction: the Mary-Sue. A Mary-Sue character is a placeholder in a script, a hollow cardboard cutout into whose outline the author can squeeze their own dreams and fantasies. In the case of Bond, it’s cruelly easy to make a case that the famous spy was his author’s Mary-Sue, for Fleming had a curious and ambiguous relationship with spying.

  A dilettante and dabbler for his first three decades, unsuccessful as a stockbroker, foreign correspondent, and banker, Fleming fortuitously landed his dream job on the eve of the Second World War: Secretary to the Director of Naval Intelligence in the Admiralty. The war was good for Ian Fleming, broadening and deepening him and giving him a job that captured his imagination and drew out his not inconsiderable talents. But Fleming was the man who knew too much: privy to too many secrets, he was wrapped in tissue paper and prevented from pursuing his desire to go into the field. He ended the war with a distinguished record—and absolutely no combat experience (if one excludes being bombed by the Luftwaffe or watching the Dieppe raid from a destroyer safely far off the Normandy coastline). Fleming grew up in the shade of a father who died heroically on the Western Front in 1917, and in adult life, he wrote in the shadow of an elder brother whose reputation as a novelist surpassed his own. It’s easy to imagine these unkind familial comparisons provoking the imaginative but flighty playboy who almost found himself during the war, which goaded him into imagining himself in the shoes of a hero who was not merely larger than life, but larger in every way than his own life.

  And, as it turns out, James Bond was larger than Ian Fleming. Not only do few novels survive their author’s demise, even fewer acquire sequels written by other hands; yet several other authors (including Kingsley Amis and John Gardner) have toiled in Fleming’s vineyard. Few fictional characters acquire biographies written by third parties—but Bond has not only acquired an autobiography (courtesy of biographer John Pearson) but spawned a small cultural industry, including a study of his semiotics by Umberto Eco. Now, that has got to be a sign of something . . .

  As with every true pearl, there was a sand-grain of truth at the heart of Bond. Fleming wrote thrillers informed by his actual experience. Years spent working out of the hothouse environment of Room 39 of the Admiralty building—headquarters of the Naval Intelligence Division of the Royal Navy—gave him a ringside seat on the operations of a major espionage organization. On various trips to Washington, DC, he worked with diplomats and officers of the OSS (predecessor organization to the CIA). There is also some evidence that, as a foreign news manager at the Sunday Times after the war, Fleming made his agency’s facilities available to officers of MI6. His first Bond novels were submitted to that agency for security clearance before they were published. Bond himself may have been larger than life, but the strictures imposed by the organization he worked for were drawn from reality, albeit the reality of an intelligence agency of the early 1940s.

  The world of secret intelligence-gathering during the Second World War was, however, very different from life in the intelligence community today. It was already changing by the late 1950s, as the bleeping, football-shaped Sputniks zipped by overhead and intelligence directors began dreaming of spy satellites. By 2004, when MI5 (the counterintelligence agency) openly placed recruiting advertisements in the press, we can be sure that Bond would have been best advised to seek employment elsewhere. Spies are supposed to be short—less than 180 centimeters (5 feet 11 inches) for men—and nondescript. As a branch of the civil service, MI5’s headquarters are presumably nonsmoking, and drinking on the job is frowned upon. As intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6 staffs aren’t in the business of ruthlessly wiping out enemies of the state: any decision to use lethal force lies with the Foreign Secretary, the COBRA committee, and other elements of the British government’s security oversight bureaucracy. An MI6 agent driving a 1933 Bentley racer with a supercharged engine, frequenting the high-stakes table at a casino as James Bond so memorably did in his first print appearance, is an almost perfect inversion of the real picture.

  Nevertheless, the archetype has legs. James Bond continued to grow and evolve, even after his creator put away his cigarette holder for the last time. To some extent, this was the product of storytelling expediency. The film adaptations started in the middle of a continuing story arc—for Fleming wrote his novels with a modicum of continuity—and while Dr. No was the first to make it to celluloid, the novel was in fact a sequel to From Russia with Love (which was filmed second). Thus, various liberties were taken with the plot of the canonical novels right from the start. You can read the novels at length without finding anything of the banter between Bond and M’s secretary Moneypenny that is a recurrent theme of the films, for example, and that’s before we get into the bizarre deviations of the midperiod Roger Moore movies (notably The Spy Who Loved Me and Moon-raker ).

  The literary James Bond is a creature of prewar London club-land: upper-crust, snobbish, manipulative and cruel in his relationships with women, with a thinly veiled sadomasochistic streak and a coldly ruthless attitude to his opponents that verges on the psychopathic. Over the years, his cinematic alter ego has acquired the stamina of Superman, learned to defy the laws of physics, ventured into space—both outer and inner—and deflowered more maids than Don Juan. He’s also mutated to fit the prejudices and neuroses of the day, dabbling with (gasp!) monogamy, and hanging out with those heroic Afghan mujahedeen in the late-’80s AIDS-and-Soviets-era The Living Daylights. He’s worked under a ball-breaking postfeminist M in GoldenEye15, and even confronted a female arch-villain in The World Is Not Enough (an innovation that would surely have Fleming, who formed his views on appropriate behavior for the fairer sex in the 1920s, rolling in his grave). But other aspects of the Bond archetype remain timeless. Fleming was fascinated by fast cars, exotic locations, and intricate gadgetry, and all of these traits of the original novels have been amplified and extrapolated in the age of modern special effects.

  Just how does James Bond—a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War,” to use the words the scriptwriters on GoldenEye so tellingly put into M’s mouth—survive in the popular imagination more than fifty years after his literary birth? What does it mean when Mary-Sue stalks the landscape of the imagination, blasting holes in the plot with a Walther PPK (or the P99 Bond upgraded to in Tomorrow Never Dies)? If we’re going to understand this, perhaps we ought to start by looking at Bond’s dark shadow, the Villain.

  In Search of Mabuse

  Bond is, if you judge him by his work, a nasty fellow and not one you’d choose to lend your car to. In order to make this rough diamond glitter, it is necessary to display him against a velvet backdrop of darkest villainy. If you strip the Bond archetype of the bacchanalia, glamorous locations, and fashion snobbery, you end up with an unappetizingly shallow, cold-blooded executioner—the likes of Adam Hall’s Quiller or James Mitchell’s Callan, only without the breezy cynicism, or indeed any redeeming features at all. The role of adversary is thus a critical one in sustaining the appeal of the protagonist. Fleming set out to depict a hard-edged contemporary world where the usual black-and-white picture of the prewar thriller had blurred and taken on some of the murky gray-on-gray ambiguity of the Cold War era; Bond was the knight in shining armor, fighting for virtue and the free world against the dragon—be they Mr. Big, Dr. No, Auric Goldfinger, or the looming shadow of Bond’s greatest enemy of all, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Number One of SPECTRE, the Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion.

  It is interesting to note that Blofeld assumed his primacy as Bond’s number-one enemy only in the movie canon; Fleming originally invented him while working on the s
creenplay and novel of Thunderball, and used him subsequently in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and You Only Live Twice. (Prior to these later books, Bond typically tussled with less corporate enemies—Soviet stooges, unregenerate Nazis, and psychotic gangsters.) Blofeld was born out of mere corporate expediency. Rather than demonize the Soviets and reduce their potential audience, the producers of the film From Russia with Love appropriated SPECTRE as the adversarial organization. With the success of Thunderball, the fourth of the films, Blofeld moved front and center, and acquired a life of his own that far exceeded his prominence in the novels. Arguably, Fleming’s death in 1964 freed up the movie series to diverge from their original author’s plans; and so Blofeld may be seen as a demon of necessity, conjured up from the vasty deep in order to provide Bond with a worthy adversary.

  ’Twas not always so. Back at the turn of the twentieth century, around the time that the British spy thriller was gradually cohering out of the mists of the penny dreadful and the literature of suspense (via the works of John Buchan and Erskine Childers—not to mention the tangential contributions of Arthur Conan Doyle, by way of Sherlock Holmes), there was no dualistic vision of the great champion confronting the villainous heart of evil. There was no mighty champion: we were on our own against the masters of night and mist, the great and terrible supercriminals. Professor Moriarty, Holmes’s nemesis—the Napoleon of Crime—was but one of these: Fantômas, the 1911 creation of Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, is another. The emperor of crime, Fantômas was a master of disguise and an agent of chaos (not to mention standing astride Paris in black mask, top hat and tails in the posters for the 1913 movie of the same name: an icon of decadent wealth and criminal chaos). Nor was he alone. Guy Boothby’s 1890s supervillain Dr. Nikola fits the bill, too, right down to the fluffy lap-cat and the fiendish plans. But perhaps the root of Bond’s nemesis can be found in his full-fledged form somewhat later, and somewhat further to the east—in the guise of Dr. Mabuse.