Rhesus Chart (9780698140288)

by Stross, Charles

  “This is suspected K syndrome, or a K syndrome-related condition of, um, what’s the right medical term?”

  “Unknown etiology. Yes, that should do it. I need authorization to access medical records of deceased patients suffering from a spongiform encephalopathy of unknown etiology that is possibly associated with K syndrome. In writing. Preferably signed in blood. Can you get me that?” She does the tilt-shift thing again, like she’s trying to view me as a miniature diorama.

  “Yes. I’ll email you a memo as soon as I get back to my office. Is there anything else?”

  “Yes.” She stands. “Better pray to whatever nameless horrors you believe in that you’re wrong, Mr. Howard. If twelve people died of a new sudden-onset form of K syndrome in London in the last month, then you’d better hope it was just a group of cultists who got lucky. Because if it wasn’t, we’re in worse trouble than you can possibly imagine.”

  6.

  RENFIELD PLC

  THE THING ABOUT OSCAR MENENDEZ, IN MHARI’S OPINION, IS that he is intelligent, charming, personable, manipulative, and utterly ruthless. He is not a normal workplace sociopath: he is that much more dangerous phenomenon, a not-quite-neurotypical person who has worked among the regular sociopaths for so long that he can see things from their point of view and manipulate them; a dolphin among sharks. Sociopaths aren’t good at impulse control or deferred gratification. Oscar works out what they want, dangles it in front of them like a shiny bauble in front of a kitten, and ensures that the shortest route from predator to prize takes them right where he wants them to go. Which is why the Bank gave him, if not carte blanche, then at least a clean sheet and a low seven-digit budget with which to establish the Scrum. It has been a pleasure to work with him, and to help steer the Scrum around the worst obstacles in its path. And now she’s going to accompany him to a meeting with their overseers where he is going to try and talk them into giving the Scrum a slightly larger pot to play with.

  He’s assigned her the job of covering the exits, lest any of the cattle try to flee.

  It has been an interesting month since Alex’s accidental flash of insight and their subsequent week-long scramble to research and define the potentials and pitfalls of their new condition. Mhari has been working eighty-hour weeks, and she’s not alone—not that there’s anyone waiting back home for her since Alan fucked off last year. (Or, if you want to be truthful, since she fired him for being an insufficiently supportive partner.) Oscar is similarly, if not single, then moderately unencumbered: his wife Pippa seems content to play the role of arm-candy on demand, keep their two children out of his hair, and look after the house in return for her annual Mercedes SLC and the Royal Opera House season ticket.

  As the managerial side of the Scrum, they’ve barely been out of each other’s presence for the past few weeks as they organized the office move, pushed their people through the planning and early execution stages of what they have come to call the Big Pivot, arranged the tiresome but entirely necessary in-house dental visits for the team, and attended to all the other necessary minutiae of the operation.

  And now it’s time for Oscar’s big pitch.

  “Good evening, Sam, Steph, Ari, and thank you for making time in your crowded schedule, Sir David.” Oscar rolls into his warm-up while Mhari waits at one side of the table, within easy grabbing distance of the laptop and the projector, playing the glamorous assistant to Oscar’s stage magician. “This isn’t a routine report, you’ll be pleased to hear. Five weeks ago one of our theoreticians made a conceptual breakthrough and I decided to put regular work on hold for a week while we explored its potential to revolutionize our operations. I don’t use that word lightly, and I wouldn’t have pulled my entire team off their normal workload if the value proposition represented by the new paradigm wasn’t extreme, with a payback curve that will reach break-even within a single quarter. However, to continue in this new direction I need to confirm that all stakeholders are fully invested. Basically, gentlemen and lady, I need your consent to pivot the Scrum . . .”

  Mhari strokes the remote lighting controller that she holds out of sight behind her back. She’s been dimming the meeting room lights slowly since the four senior execs arrived, taking her cue from Oscar. She’s got no idea how he managed to winkle Sir David out of his oak-paneled penthouse nest, but he’s a prize—the Bank’s director of quantitative trading. The others are all lower-level executives, from the head of the London Stock Exchange IT group to the Lord (or rather, Lady) High Executioner of the regulatory compliance team: but they’re all critically important, because any one of them can spike Oscar’s attempt to change his team’s operation remit if they withhold their consent. Furthermore they’re already beginning to look uneasy at what Oscar is telling them.

  “. . . We will be able to anticipate major trading strategy shifts among the quant-determined strategies of our rival institutions. This is medium-term stuff—a one to ten day lead—but with this fantastic new algorithmic approach we should be able to consistently anticipate the commodities markets. Ironically, the worst drawback is that it’s so good it’ll look eerily like front-running to an outsider—and we don’t want to lay ourselves open to accusations of malfeasance. So we intend to bulletproof ourselves from a regulatory perspective before we go any further, which is why I invited you all here today—”

  What Oscar and Mhari have in mind is not front-running. Front-running is the practice of executing your own trades on the basis of information about pending trades your clients have told you to perform on their behalf—a form of insider trading. But it’s not insider trading if you gaze into the eyes of your opposite number from a rival brokerage or investment bank over an after-work cocktail, calmly order them to adopt a specific spread the next day, and then tell them to forget the conversation ever took place. It’s almost certainly illegal, but vampiric mind control is much harder to prove than front-running. For their part, Oscar and Mhari are happy to leave the question of which laws (if any) have been broken to the eventual SFO investigation, because by the time it happens they intend to be over the horizon and far away.

  Oscar’s voice is intense but somehow mellow and pleasing to the ear: he’s a hypnotic speaker, and Mhari is pleased to see that his small audience is nodding along with him in perfect harmony.

  “I need access to a trading fund with an initial one hundred points of liquidity.” (A point is a million pounds sterling.) “I’ll need to liaise with you, Steph, about setting up appropriate accounting and oversight controls on the new fund, with full record-keeping so that it’s clear that we’re perfectly clean—that we’re genuinely anticipating market movements. Ari, to minimize latency I need to move my group further into the bunker”—the basement levels below the Bank, windowless subterranean vaults full of servers and roaring air conditioning—“and, Sir David, I thought it would be best to keep you in the loop on this because the profits this pivot will generate will show up on the company-wide balance sheet by Q1 next year at the latest, and you’ll want to be fully informed ahead of the next AGM.” Oscar smiles, almost (but not quite) baring his new and very expensive dental work. Mhari runs her tongue around the inside of her upper jaw in unconscious sympathy: it’s still sore and they’re very tender, but at least her teeth won’t raise any awkward questions if she’s seen in public.

  “Thank you, Oscar,” says Sir David. “But you haven’t told us exactly what this new breakthrough is yet. Would you like to elaborate?”

  Sir David is a distinguished-looking gentleman in his mid-sixties, gray-haired and sober-looking—every inch a traditional British bank manager. That’s one of the reasons the board keeps him on, to be wheeled out at press conferences when the unwashed proles need reassuring that everything is fine. Right now he looks, if not alarmed, then at least mildly perplexed. Mhari shivers and fixes her gaze on his collar, avoiding eye contact; also avoiding staring at the blood vessels in his neck, through which surges and hisse
s the stuff of . . . of . . .

  “A fundamental new insight in probability theory,” Oscar says smoothly. “Our existing strategies rely on Bayesian reasoning—which allows us to compute the probability of some event occurring in a given period on the basis of how frequently it has taken place in the past. That’s all very well, but where no prior probabilities can be calculated, we can’t predict future outcomes—or at least that’s the way it’s been in the past. Finding a way of reasoning under conditions of prior uncertainty has been the holy grail in one particular branch of mathematics for decades, like solving Fermat’s last theorem. I’m pleased to say—” He smiles and shrugs. “Well, that would be telling.”

  Mhari flexes her fingers longingly. Then she startles, infinitesimally aware that one of the other audience members is in the process of noticing her staring, so she smiles, tight-lipped (very glad that English girls are taught not to bare their teeth like Americans: it’s a sign of aggression), and glances around the room, registering that Sir David is gazing at Oscar as if hypnotized, his mouth slack. Oscar is laying the charisma on hard—perhaps too hard.

  She intervenes. “We’ve verified the formal proof,” she says smoothly; “that’s what took us a no-holds-barred two-week hiatus in our normal workflow. I’d like to remind you that the Scrum has some of the best pure mathematics PhDs to come out of the Russell Group in the past decade. The lads are a little eccentric but basically sound—naturally they’re a little miffed about not being able to publish and claim their Fields Medal right away, but they put the interests of the organization ahead of their own personal fame, which is why we’re eager to give them the opportunity to earn a bonus that will put the Nobel Prize money to shame.” The latter is strictly irrelevant—there’s no Nobel Prize for mathematics—but she’s not sure her audience have heard of the Fields Medal, and she wants to implant the idea: seven-digit bonuses all round.

  Oscar nods, his expression pinched and intense, and relaxes his grip on Sir David’s gray matter infinitesimally. Sir David twitches, then shuffles himself upright in his chair. “Capital idea!” he announces. “Yes. If you’d be so good as to forward me a copy of the presentation, along with a memo detailing your requirements, I’ll push it forward. Stephanie, please give Mr. Menendez everything he wants, as a matter of urgency. You, too, Mr. McAndrew: if the Scrum requires hosting in the middle of the LSE interconnect, give it to them. Whatever it takes.” He stands, implicitly bringing the meeting to an end. If smiles were luminous, his beaming approval could power a small solar farm.

  The executives stagger out into the corridor, blinking and uncoordinated like excessively well-tailored zombies. “So.” Oscar finally cracks a grin. “How did I do?”

  Mhari takes his arm conspiratorially: “You did brilliantly.” She swallows. “I thought you were laying it on a bit thick towards the end, which is why I jumped in, but it seems to have worked.”

  “Yes. I can barely believe it. It’s not every day I ask for a hundred points on a plate. Much less get it, no questions asked. But I could feel them.” He rubs his throat. “I’m really thirsty.”

  “Me, too.” She lets go of his arm, intrigued by his carefully controlled non-reaction. “It’s a quarter to six. How about we go for a drink after we shut up shop?”

  “I’d like that.” He grins again, this time catching her eye. “I’d like that a lot.”

  • • •

  “DUDE, YOU JUST RENFIELDED OUR REPORTING CHAIN ALL THE way up to board level? Epic win! Achievement unlocked!”

  “Piss off home, Evan,” Mhari says wearily. She’s been working since six in the morning and it’s nearly seven at night. They’ve just moved into the Scrum’s new office on the third subsurface floor of the Bank, and the rough edges still show: the ceiling isn’t finished and a couple of missing floor tiles are surrounded by cones and yellow hazard tape to show where the trolls are still working on the wiring runs by day. There are fresh scars on the walls, and a cloying stench of fresh emulsion paint. But it’s theirs, and it’s safe. There are no windows, the doors lock on the inside, and there are other extras that make it a suitable bolt-hole for a nest of vampires. The specially installed fire escape opens directly into the garage, and there’s a shiny black Mercedes van with mirrored windows parked next to the crash door.

  Oscar bought it, and Evan promptly dubbed it the Mystery Machine: it’s fueled and boasts features such as a minibar fully stocked with 20ml type “O” Scooby snacks and a couple of (discreetly hidden) sets of false number plates. The keys are in the ignition and the satnav is loaded with routes to a bolt-hole in the country. If a Van Helsing wannabe comes at them through the bank lobby, the Scrum can get clear in under thirty seconds.

  “I’ll go home after”—Evan is juggling a set of luminous green furry dice—“sunset, thanks.”

  “Ten minutes,” Oscar warns. The office is already semi-empty. Alex has long since sloped away into the deep underground by tube train, Janice is molesting a server somewhere off-site, and the remaining pigs are oinking away happily in the old office upstairs, anticipating another shitfaced evening at a club where discreet activities involving syringes in toilet cubicles will raise no more eyebrows than usual.*

  “I can tell when I’m not wanted,” Evan snarks. He lets the dice fall as they will, then collects his briefcase and heads for the door. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, ’kay?”

  “Don’t let the doorknob hit you on the way out,” Oscar mouths silently as he leaves. Mhari glances at him. Oscar shares a guilty expression of complicity with her. “You didn’t hear me think that, did you?”

  “Think what?” Their eyes meet: a secret smile is exchanged. “I’m famished. How about you?”

  “I could really do with a post-work drink.” Oscar sounds as tired as she feels, Mhari realizes. He loosens the knot of his tie, then sits down in one of the pigs’ chairs, slumps bonelessly, and turns to face the door.

  Mhari picks up a phone terminal. “Janitorial, please . . . cleaning service for suite B314. Yes? Right now, thank you very much.” She hangs up. “Cleaner’s on her way.”

  “Thank you. You’re brilliant.”

  Behind his head, out of his line of sight, Mhari smiles contentedly. I know, she thinks. Story of my life: I’m brilliant, and nobody gives a shit. Well, that isn’t entirely true. She’s here, working inside the most exciting in-house start-up this city has ever incubated, and she’s part of it. One of the nighttime elite: one of the masters of the universe, if Oscar’s plan comes to fruition. And it will work. Mhari knows this for a fact. She’s been steering Oscar away from certain unfortunate ideas that might draw them to the attention of people she can’t talk about. Through long force of habit Mhari’s thoughts skitter away from that aspect of her prehistory, dead and buried and bound in any case to silence unto the grave.

  Over the years it has become easy for her to avoid thinking about the people she used to work for, as a lowly admin body in a civil service niche role with no prospects. It’s not hard to avoid the bad memories: crap housing, an infuriatingly obtuse boyfriend who couldn’t get a clue if she whacked him between the eyes with it, not enough money. Not to mention the eventual bust-up, although frankly ditching him had been for the best in the long run. It’s even easier to avoid recalling the embarrassing interview in which HR had carpeted her, suggesting more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger that perhaps in view of her personal relationships she would like to be released, might find life more fulfilling on the outside? But then there was the other interview they’d arranged with the Bank, which turned out far better than she could ever have imagined. Oh yes, I’m brilliant. But soon They won’t be able to ignore me anymore. So I’ll have to be at least one step ahead of Them, won’t I? she adds.

  There’s a timid knock on the outside door—the security airlock and Faraday wallpaper aren’t finished yet—then it opens to admit a cleaning cart and a person of no account. “Meals on whee
ls,” Mhari murmurs, laying her hand on Oscar’s shoulder: his muscles tense under her fingers.

  “Ex-excuse?” The cleaner is middle-aged, a recent immigrant with poor English. She’s a regular—they’ve had her before—but she’s still surprised, as if it’s her first time.

  “Don’t be afraid. There’s nothing to worry about.” Oscar stands and moves aside, gesturing at his just-vacated chair. “You’re feeling tired. Why don’t you sit down?”

  “Excuse?” She shakily shuffles towards him, bovine puzzlement lending her an air of geriatric confusion.

  “Sit. Down.” Oscar points. Mhari steps out from behind the chair, keeping her expression calm and unthreatening. “You are very tired. You can relax here. You are among friends; you can sleep if you like.” Oscar keeps his hands in motion, like small birds, fluttering delicately: he studied stagecraft when he was younger, NLP and other approaches to mind manipulation when he was older. It’s magic, of a kind, although Mhari is aware of much more powerful varieties, types of magic that constitute a science rather than an art. She keeps a careful grip on her handbag. It’s a neat black leather number that matches her suit. She keeps the medical supplies inside it.

  “It’s all right to close your eyes,” Mhari assures the woman. “What’s your name?”

  “Sara.”

  “Sara, we know you’ve had a hard day. But you can close your eyes now. It’s nearly over. You can go home soon. Why not take a nap?”

  There are two of them, and one middle-aged woman of Somali origin, whose palsied hands twitch as they force their combined willpower down on her like warm, stifling pillows. They’ve used her before; there is no seduction here, just a brisk sixty-second interlude, at the end of which Sara slumps, snoring very quietly in the expensive office chair. Oscar bends over her and begins to roll up one of her sleeves. “Hang on, better use the right arm this time,” Mhari suggests. “Otherwise we’re going to leave tracks.” And it really wouldn’t do to attract the wrong kind of attention. The Laundry kind . . .