Rhesus Chart (9780698140288)

by Stross, Charles

  “That the shit has just hit the fan.” I twitch, then drain my coffee mug. “Nothing you can help with; sorry, you’re on your own—I’m out of here.”

  And with that, I head for the stairs up to Mahogany Row.

  • • •

  NOT MANY PEOPLE KNOW THIS:

  The Laundry is a government agency. It runs on rules: like all bureaucracies, it is designed to get the job done, regardless of the abilities of the individual human cogs in the machine.

  However, once you get above a certain level, the practice of magic is somewhat idiosyncratic. Some people have a natural aptitude for it, perhaps for the same reason that abilities are not evenly distributed among computer programmers. Some folks can’t handle abstract reasoning and formal logic, others thrive on it.

  And so we have the everyday working stiffs, folks who in another age would have spent their days grinding out COBOL reports in a dinosaur pen somewhere. And we have the wizards, the people who write the COBOL compilers. In our case, they’re literally wizards. We call them Mahogany Row—a little piece of misdirection, as most of the folks in the bureaucracy think that Mahogany Row is about management. The actual corridor with the plush offices and the decent carpet and the collection of paintings from the National Art Collection is usually deserted; the joke in the lower ranks is that our management have all sublimed or transsubstantiated or something. The truth is that they’re not management—but they’re scattered throughout the organization, given special privileges, and they can call on the full force of the agency to back them up as and when it becomes necessary. Once upon a time they were known as the Invisible College, presided over by John Dee at the behest of Sir Francis Walsingham, operating on the House of Lords black budget; today they’re the powerful sorcerers at the heart of the organization.

  For my part, I’m apprenticed to (and, it would seem, entangled with) a very nasty, very powerful entity who just happens to have thrown in his lot with the Laundry; I’m learning the principles of optimizing compiler design, so to speak. I’m at a high enough level to stick my head above the parapet and see what the non-bureaucracy portions of the organization get up to, while not actually being one of those movers and shakers (yet). So when I open the door to Briefing Room 201 I am extremely relieved to see Angleton sitting at one end of the table and staring at me as if he expects me to confess how I drunkenly broke into his office and threw up in his paper recycling bin last night.

  (Because when you really need backup, even an Angleton who’s pissed at you for disturbing his quiet Tuesday morning is better than no Angleton at all.)

  “Hi, boss. Better cancel your lunch plans.”

  “This had better be serious, Mr. Howard.” Angleton is gaunt and pale, his eyes slightly sunken: he has all the intensity and warmth of a public school mathematics teacher preparing to ream out a particularly delinquent schoolboy. I must confess to playing up to his expectations from time to time: I think he likes having a target who won’t flee screaming every time he says “boo.” But this is no time for games.

  “I believe it is,” I say soberly.

  I take a seat just as the door opens again and Lockhart enters. He’s another late-middle-aged ex-military alpha type. Most people in the organization think EA are in the business of tracking paper clips we’ve loaned to other government departments. This misunderstanding is highly convenient for EA. What they actually do is provide backup to external assets—high-level operatives working unaccountably and without official sanction, all very Mission: Impossible.

  “What’s this about, Mr. Howard?” he demands.

  I glance at my watch. Four minutes: not bad. “I’m waiting for Andy, Jez, and Mona to show up. They’re on rotation this week, right?”

  “They’ll be along, boy.” Angleton leans forward. “What have you been doing?”

  The door opens; it’s Andy. “It’s my ten-percenter project,” I begin. “I’m investigating possible uses we can make of access to the NHS Spine’s Secondary Usage Service—a data warehouse for clinical medical information, statistics on medical treatment, outcomes, and so forth. The original proposal from the suggestions box was to use it for advance warning of outbreaks of, well, anything relevant. Last week I began a run, and as a test case I went looking for cases of Krantzberg syndrome, expecting to find nothing at all because, let’s face it, your average K syndrome case is an occultist who crawls into a hole and dies rather than clogging up the emergency room.”

  Andy is clearly one step ahead of my briefing because his muffled “Oh shit” is loud enough to draw a disapproving look from Lockhart, who is Old School about etiquette and bad language and so forth.

  Angleton looks at me grimly. “I assume you called us here to tell us your assumption was mistaken?”

  “Twelve cases in the last month,” I say flatly. “Diagnosed at post-mortem, which is wrong for K syndrome. It normally presents like CJD, months before death, gives us plenty of time to treat it. It’s up from a baseline of effectively two or three cases a year. I asked Dr. Wills at UCLH—she’s one of ours—to investigate in case I’d made a mistake and she just got back in touch to confirm that it’s for real. They all worked as office cleaners for an agency in the East End. I’m about to go round to the National Prion Unit and see what Dr. Wills has got, and will take it from there, but I declared Code Blue right now because”—I shrug—“do I need to draw you a diagram?”

  “Oh dear,” says Jez. She slipped in while I was talking, right behind Andy. She’s management, subtype: sarcastic old IT hand, female, came out of Cambridge and has forgotten more about functional programming than I ever knew. I spot Mona as well. “Twelve cases, one month. How serious can it be?”

  “Up from zero the month before that,” I remind her. “The worst case, if I understood Dr. Wills properly, is we’re watching the early stages of an epidemic’s exponential take-off. There was another case this morning. Even if it’s not going exponential, it’s going to be very hard to sweep under the rug—it’s a major spike in the national CJD mortality statistics. It all depends what we’re looking at, but by the end of next month we could be into Twelve Monkeys territory. Or 28 Days Later. Or Captain Trips.”

  Angleton looks at me blankly but Lockhart is suitably disturbed and Jez and Andy turn gray. Yay for pop-culture references. “Well bloody get moving then,” grates Lockhart, his hairy caterpillar of a mustache bunching defensively along his upper lip.

  “What resources do you need?” asks Angleton.

  “Right now?” I look along the table. “Andy, do you have a couple of hours to come off-site with me?” I look back at Angleton. “I’m on first response. If you could prime OCCULUS, just in case I need backup? Andy can handle direct liaison with this committee and be my backup during initial enquiries. My first objective is to quantify the outbreak, identify its scope and geographical distribution, find out where the victims worked as opposed to where their head office is based, and identify what level of response is appropriate. Then I intend to shake the data and see if anything falls out—a pump handle for the cholera epidemic. Any comments?”

  Angleton nods. “It’s your show: get on the road, boy. Call if you need assets in the field, otherwise we should aim to reconvene here in four hours.”

  Jez looks at me. “Do you have any leads on the source? If this is K syndrome?”

  “If it isn’t, it’s the world’s fastest outbreak of Mad Cow Disease. Or something worse.” I shove my hands in my pockets to keep from waving them around; it doesn’t do to look agitated when you’re trying to organize a measured response. “How we’re going to keep the lid on this, I have no idea.”

  Medical scandals are a specialty of the British press, and with the government hell-bent on privatizing the NHS via the back door, they’re sniffing around for anything that might make headline material. A dozen exotic deaths in one cleaning company will be all over the front pages if it gets out
.

  “I’ll notify Public Affairs,” says Jez. “Anything else?”

  There is some more back-and-forth over things people present feel they can usefully take off my shoulders. Not because we’ve got the collegiate warm fuzzies for each other, but because they realize that the more balls I’m juggling the greater the chance that I’ll drop one, or get myself killed, and then they’ll have an even bigger mess to clean up. At least we’re all grown-ups here: nobody is questioning the severity of the situation, or the need for calling a Code Blue emergency.

  I glance at my watch again. Elapsed time: twenty-eight minutes since I made the call. Good. “Andy? We’d better blow.”

  “Ten-four, good buddy.” And on that ironic note, we leave the hornets’ nest I’ve just kicked over.

  • • •

  ELAPSED TIME: ONE HOUR AND FORTY-SIX MINUTES.

  (I am keeping a written note of this in a little black book app on my current work smartphone, a bulky Android device from a dubious South Korean chaebol that oozes more raw processing power than the Laundry’s entire supercomputing dinosaur pen at the time I was recruited. The phablet lives in a pocket of my ScotteVest fleece, a garment consisting almost entirely of pockets held together with cable ducts that is marketed at geeks who have mistaken utility for elegance. In my case, I wear it because the other pockets are full of useful stuff, ranging from a couple of Hands of Glory (reprocessed from pigeon feet) to a battered digital camera (featuring some very dangerous firmware) and enough USB cables and rechargeable batteries to improvise a suicide belt if I’m feeling desperate. What the well-dressed agent is wearing about London today: a bulging fleece, faded Google tee shirt, combat pants, and Dutch army-surplus paratroop boots, with added occult firepower.)

  In medical academia-land I am a lot more conspicuous than I was the day before, even accompanied by Andy (in his regular office weeds). I’m too old to pass for a student, too louche to be staff. However, in addition to warding off the zombies on the night shift, a raised Laundry warrant card can make eyes glaze over at twenty meters: non-compliance is not an issue I have to deal with. I march up to the reception desk in the Prion Research Unit and the secretary boggles in my general direction until I say, “I’m here to see Dr. Wills,” at which point he points along a corridor I recognize and I head down it at a brisk march.

  Dr. Wills is waiting for me, tapping her fingers; she does a double take at Andy. “He’s with me,” I announce. “Andy, this is Dr. Wills. Andy is here to liaise with my backup team.”

  Andy nods agreeably. “Where have we gotten to?” he asks.

  “Bodies—” Dr. Wills sniffs. I get the feeling that she’s looking for someone to blame for this, and I’m top of her list. Bringer of bad news, and so on. “There was another last night. She’s downstairs, awaiting transfer to the mortuary in Poplar.”

  “Oh dear.” Dead bodies, one of my favorite things. (Not.) “You’ve had a chance to look at her?”

  “Yes.” Her fingers whiten around the pen she’s twirling. “I thought you might want to see what I found.”

  “Okay, let’s go—what?”

  “Sit down, Mr. Howard. We haven’t confirmed this is K syndrome yet, rather than a new, highly contagious, rapidly progressive, and extremely fatal prion disease, so until we’ve done that, nobody’s going anywhere near the cadaver without full protective gear. In the meantime, I’ve got her records.” She eyeballs Andy. “Yes? You have something to contribute?”

  “The other cases,” Andy says diffidently. “They all worked for the same agency. Have you gotten anywhere with their actual work assignments? Other information that might help us narrow them down more accurately?”

  “Yes.” She shoves her monitor round towards us. “Move around here so you can both see this comfortably.” Then she goes into full-on professorial mode. I’m used to it from living with Mo, but it’s still impressive. “We have thirteen cases so far, all with underlying similarities. At autopsy, the first eleven brains were found to have the characteristic spongiform lesions of K syndrome or CJD. The two most recent cases were not subjected to post-mortem dissection but we used an MRI scanner to non-invasively obtain soft tissue images and they’re consistent with the earlier ones. They test negative for nvCJD and other known prion diseases—classic CJD included. There is no family history. They were all flagged as dead on arrival, which implies extremely rapid progression, but ended up in different hospitals because most of them died at home. Upon doing some further research I determined that six of them had reported symptoms in the three days leading up to sudden death—ataxia, tremors, muscle weakness, one case that was misdiagnosed as migraine due to visual disturbances and nausea.

  “You asked about geographical distribution. Here’s where it gets odd. The agency they work for handles janitorial and cleaning arrangements for some of the large corporate offices in and around Canary Wharf. I can’t confirm that they all covered the same building yet, but it’s a striking lead—enough to raise suspicions in its own right. There were a couple of outliers. One is—was—a medical phlebotomist at UCH, which has got us extremely spooked, to be perfectly honest. And one worked for a wholesale meat supplier at Smithfield Market.”

  She pauses and clears her throat. “Then there was the other thing.”

  “The other”—Andy takes the bait—“thing?”

  “All of them had recent needle-stick signs. But none of them have any of the usual indications of drug abuse, or recently gave blood samples. You’ll want to check their police records, but they don’t look like addicts: they had recent injections around the median cubital, but no regular tracks or collapsed veins.”

  What I don’t say is, “Holy phlebotomists, Batman!” (Because that would be in excruciatingly bad taste, given that a baker’s dozen families are mourning their dead right now.) But I’m shaken, and when I get shaken, my irreverent sense of humor comes out to play, and so I think it in the privacy of my own skull. Then I say the second thing that comes into my mind. “Is there any chance this could be some new street drug?”

  “What kind?” Dr. Wills looks at me as if I’m a particularly slow-on-the-uptake student. “One shot and you’re a downer? Mr. Howard, with all due respect, addicts don’t start by injecting the hard stuff. They usually have a prior history, and work their way up to the overdose over a period of years. What we’re looking at here is a cluster of relatively well-adjusted members of society, all of them working, albeit in low-paid jobs, all in decent health—well, the oldest was fifty-nine and had osteoarthritis that was going to cause trouble if she didn’t get on the waiting list for a tin hip—but taken as a group, they’re almost the exact opposite of the picture we’d get if this cluster was due to contaminated street drugs.”

  Andy scribbles something on his notepad—the old-fashioned paper variety. “So. I assume you think the needle-signs are significant?” She nods emphatically. “Therefore we’re now looking for where they got them. That implies it’s blood-born? And one of the victims was a medical phlebotomist?”

  “Yes, from right here at this hospital. She phoned in sick one evening last month—she was on out-of-hours cover—and according to her husband she took to her sick bed. Self-diagnosed whatever it was as the flu: shivering, incoherent, not running an obvious fever . . . he went to work the next day, came back that evening to find her dead. That gives us a window from initial symptoms to mortality of around 36-48 hours, which is a bit worrying.”

  Worrying? From what I know of K syndrome it’s unheard of for it to progress that fast. So I find myself reluctantly asking a question I’ve been dreading. “Can I have a look at the body that came in last night?”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t see what you could achieve, Mr. Howard—”

  I glance at Andy. He nods, imperceptibly: best if she hears this from someone else. “Mr. Howard is a necromancer, Dr. Wills.”

  “A what?”


  I sigh. “Ritual magician. Specialty”—I’m the new trainee Eater of Souls—“raising the dead as zombies, among other things. Actually I almost certainly can’t raise a body that’s been subjected to a post-mortem dissection, but I might be able to learn something from it.” It’s the lose-my-lunch approach to finding out what somebody died of. Some people aspire to necromancy; others have necromancy thrust upon them; me, I just didn’t scream and run away fast enough when necromancy came and kicked down my office door. I’m slow that way. I rub the sore patch on my upper right arm and frown. “I need to be in physical proximity to the body before I can tell.”

  “That’s—you’ll pardon me for saying this, Mr. Howard—somewhat problematic. As I said, until we can definitely rule out a highly contagious, rapidly lethal prion infection—yes, I agree it’s unlikely, but you never know—we’re keeping them in sealed biohazard storage. So you can’t—”

  “I don’t need to touch it. I just have to get within a couple of meters. Even on the other side of a closed door. Can you manage that?”

  “Oh, that’s different. Let me make a call.” She picks up her desk phone without waiting for a reply.

  I’m used to seeing her odd combination of relief and queasy disgust from other people. Coughing to necromantic tendencies isn’t quite as bad as admitting you’re sexually attracted to six year olds, but it’s not far removed (at least among people who are aware that it’s not just a bad cliché). It’s the equivalent of admitting at a swingers’ party that you’ve got leprosy and AIDS, but they’re both under control, honest. People get seven shades of funny around death and corpses, in my experience: death is one of the three big loci for taboos, along with sex and food.

  “All right, I can take you down to the mortuary. You can look, but you can’t touch—you’ll have to do whatever it is that you do through a freezer door.”

  • • •

  ANDY AND I FOLLOW DR. WILLS OUT OF HER OFFICE AND INTO the maze that is UCLH.* It takes us about twenty minutes to wend our way between buildings, up floors, over connecting walkways, and down elevators until we reach the mortuary. Dr. Wills signs us in: not, I am sorry to say, without Andy and me having to make use of our warrant cards. It’s a relatively small unit: this isn’t a hospice. Bodies of people who died in hospital are generally only stored here until they can be sent to the district mortuary for post-mortem examination and subsequent transfer to the undertakers. There’s a lobby area, then a room, one wall of which is given over to refrigerated storage, and another room with a pair of dissection tables. Dr. Wills has a brief conversation with the mortuary attendant, who lets us into the storage room and leads us to one of the drawers. “This is the one,” Dr. Wills informs us. “Her name was Sara. Sara Siad. She was fifty-nine.” Her hand lingers on the drawer handle, then she lets it drop. “I can’t let you get any closer, I’m afraid. She’s double-bagged and not to be opened without contagious diseases precautions.”