The Fuller Memorandum l-4

by Charles Stross

  But these are just the currently operational lines that are open to the public. There are other lines you probably don’t know about. There are the deep tube tunnels that were never opened to the public, built to serve the needs of wartime government. Some of them have been abandoned; others turned into archives and secure stores. There are the special platforms off the public tube stations, the systems built during the 1940s and 1950s to rush MPs and royalty away from the capital at an hour’s notice in time of war. These are the trains of government, buried deep and half-forgotten.

  And then there are the weird ones. The Necropolis railway that ran from behind Waterloo to Brookwood cemetery in Surrey, along the converted track bed of which I ran last night. The coal tunnels that distributed fuel to the power stations of South London and the buried generator halls that powered the tube network. And the MailRail narrow-gauge tunnels that for over a century hauled sacks of letters and parcels between Paddington and Whitechapel, until it was officially closed in 2003.

  Closed?

  Not so fast.

  The stacks, where the Laundry keeps its dead files, occupy two hundred-meter stretches of disused deep-dug tube tunnel not far from Whitehall. They’re thirty meters down, beneath the hole in the ground where Service House is currently being rebuilt by a private finance initiative (just in time for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN). How do you think we get files in and out? Or librarians in and out, for that matter?

  Angleton has a job for me to do, down in the stacks. And so it is that at one thirty I’m sitting in my office, nursing a lukewarm mug of coffee and waiting for the little man with the handcart to call, when the NecronomiPod begins to vibrate and make a noise like a distressed U-boat.

  “’Lo?”

  It’s Mo. “Bob?” She doesn’t sound too happy.

  “Yeah? You at home?”

  “Right now, yes . . . not feeling too well.”

  I hunch over instinctively. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Yes.” Oh, right. “Listen, about last night—thanks. And thanks for letting me lie in. I’m just wrung-out today, so I’ve begged off my weekly and I was thinking about taking the afternoon to do what we talked about earlier, to go visit Research and Development. But there’s a little job I needed to do in the office and I was wondering if you could . . .”

  I glance at the clock on my desktop. “Maybe; depends what, I’m off to the stacks in half an hour.”

  “The stacks? In person?” She cheers up audibly. “That’s great! I was hoping you could pull a file for me, and if you’re going there—”

  “Not so fast.” I pause. “What kind of file?”

  “A new one, a report I asked for. I can give you a reference code; it should be fresh in today.”

  “Oh, right.” Well, that shouldn’t be a problem—I can probably fit it in with my primary mission. “What’s the number?”

  “Let me . . .” She reads out a string of digits and I read it back to her. “Yes, that’s it. If you could just bring it home with you this evening?”

  “Remind me again, who was it who didn’t want work brought home?”

  “That’s different. This is me being lazy, not you overdoing it!”

  I smile. “If you say so.”

  “Love you.”

  “You too. Bye.”

  AT SEVEN MINUTES PAST TWO, I HEAR FOOTSTEPS AND A squeak of wheels that stops outside my door. I pick up a pair of brown manila files I’m through with and stand. “Archive service?” I ask.

  The man with the handcart is old and worn before his time. He wears a blue-gray boiler suit and a cloth cap that has seen better days; his skin is as parched as time-stained newsprint. He looks at me with the dumb, vacant eyes of a residual human resource. “Archive service,” he mumbles.

  “These are going back.” I hand over the files, and he painstakingly inscribes their numbers on a battered plywood clipboard using a stub of pencil sellotaped to a length of string. “And I’m going with them.”

  He stares at me, unblinking. “Document number,” he says.

  I roll my eyes. “Give me that.” Taking the clipboard I make up a shelf reference number and write it down in the next space, then copy it onto my left wrist with a pen. “See? I am a document. Take me.”

  “Document . . . number . . .” His eyes cross for a moment: “Come.” He puts his hands to the handcart and begins to push it along, then glances back at me anxiously. “Come?”

  For an RHR he’s remarkably communicative. I tag along behind him as he finishes his round, collecting and distributing brown manila envelopes that smell of dust and long-forgotten secrets. We leave the department behind, heading for the service lifts at the back; Rita doesn’t even raise her head to nod as I walk past.

  The heavy freight lift takes forever to descend into the subbasement, creaking and clanking. The lights flicker with the harsh edge of fluorescent tubes on the verge of burnout, and the ventilation fans provide a background white buzz of noise that sets my teeth on edge. There’s nobody and nothing down here except for storerooms and supply lockers: people visit, but only the dead stay.

  Handcart man shuffles down a narrow passage lined with fire doors. Pausing before one, he produces an antiquated-looking key and unlocks a padlock-and-chain from around the crash bar. Then he pushes his cart through into a dimly lit space beyond.

  “How do you re-lock that?” I ask him.

  “Lock . . . at night,” he mumbles, throwing a big switch like a circuit breaker that’s mounted on the wall just inside the door.

  We’re in a narrow, long room with a couple of handcarts parked along one wall. The other side of the room is strange. There’s a depression in the floor, and a hole in each of the narrow ends: rails run along the depression between the holes. Such is the wildly unusual scale of it all that it takes me several seconds to blink it back into the correct perspective and see that I’m standing on the platform of an underground railway station—a narrow-gauge system with tracks about sixty centimeters apart, and an electrified third rail. I hear a sullen rumbling from one of the tunnel mouths, and feel a warm breath of wind on my face, like the belch of a very small dragon. The original MailRail track only ran east to west, but extensions were planned back in the 1920s; I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to find one here, for what else would commend this extremely boring sixties office block to the Laundry as a temporary headquarters?

  I look at handcart man. “Can I ride this?” I ask.

  Instead of answering, he pulls a second lever. I shrug. You’d think I’d have learned better than to ask zombies complex questions by now, wouldn’t you?

  The rumbling builds to a loud roar, and a remarkable object rolls out of the tunnel and screeches to a halt in the middle of the room.

  It’s a train, of course—three carriages, all motorized. But it’s tiny. You could park it in my front hall. The roofs of the carriages barely rise waist-high, and they sport external handles. Handcart man shambles to the front carriage and hinges the roof right up. Not even breaking a sweat, he begins to load the files from his cart into a storage bin.

  “Hey, what about”—I focus on the second carriage. It’s got wire mesh sides, and what looks like a bench—“me?”

  Handcart man lifts a box of files out of the front carriage, deposits it in his cart, and lowers the lid. Then he walks to the second carriage, lifts the roof, and looks at me expectantly.

  “I was afraid you were going to say that,” I mutter, and climb in. The wooden bench seat is about five centimeters above the track bed, and I have to lean backward as he drops the lid with a clang. The carriage is only big enough for a single passenger. It smells musty and dry, as if something died in here a long time ago.

  Turning my head sideways, I watch as handcart man walks over to the big circuit breaker and yanks it down and up, down and up. It must be some kind of trackside signal, because a moment later I feel a motor vibrate under me, and the train starts to roll forward. I make myself lie down: it’d be a really
great start to the mission to scrape my face off on the tunnel roof. And a moment later I’m off, rattling feetfirst into the darkness under London, on a false-flag mission . . .

  AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME I’M FALLING FEETFIRST INTO A PIECE of railway history, another part of the plot is unfolding. Let me try to reconstruct it for you:

  A red-haired woman holding a violin case is making her way along a busy high street in London. Wearing understated trousers and a slightly dated Issey Miyake top, sensible shoes, and a leather bag that’s showing its age, she could be a college lecturer or a musician on her way to practice: without the interview suit, nobody’s going to mistake her for an auction house employee or a civil servant. Which shows how deceptive appearances can be.

  Kids and shoppers and office workers in suits and shop staff in uniforms move around her; she threads her way between them, not looking in shop windows or diverting her attention from the destination in hand. Here’s a side street, and she turns the corner wide—avoiding a baby buggy, its owner nattering on her mobile—and strides along it before turning into another, wider street at a corner where a bland seventies office rises six stories above the pavement.

  The office has glass doors and a reception desk fronting an austere atrium; a bank of lifts behind it promises a rapid ascent into crowded beige cubicle heaven. The woman approaches reception, and holds up an ID card of some sort. The guard nods, signs her in, then waves her on to the lift bank on the right. She could be a session musician turning up at one of the TV production companies listed on the wall panel beside the reception desk, or a member of staff on her way back from a lunchtime lesson.

  But she’s not.

  The lift control panel shows five numbered floors. As the door slides closed, the woman pushes the third-floor button, then first floor (twice), then the fourth floor. The lift begins to move. The illuminated floor display tracks it up from ground to first, second, third—and it goes out. Then, safely stranded between indicated floors, the doors open.

  There are no cubicles here: only rooms with frosted glass doors that lock shut, and red security lights to warn against intrusion. Some of the rooms are offices, and some of them are laboratories, although the experiments that are conducted in them require little equipment more exotic than desktop computers and hand-wired electronic circuitry.

  The red-haired woman makes her way through the building with ease born of familiarity, until she finds room 505. She knocks on the door. “Come in,” the occupant calls, his voice muffled somewhat by the wood.

  Mo opens the door wide. “Dr. Mike,” she says, smiling.

  “Mo?” He has a large head for his average-sized torso: brown hair fighting a hard-bitten retreat, bound in a ponytail; his eyebrows, owlishly peaked, rise quizzically at her approach. “Good to see you!”

  “It’s been too long.” She walks in and they embrace briefly. “Are you busy?”

  “Not immediately, no.” His desk tells a different story, piled high in untidy snowdrifts of paper—there’s a laser printer on a table in one corner, and a heavy-duty shredder right below it—with a coffee mug balanced atop one particularly steep pile. The mug reads: DURING OFF HOURS TRAINS STOP HERE. There’s a bookcase beside the desk, crammed full of phrase books and travel guides, except for one shelf, which is occupied by a tiny Z-gauge model railway layout. “Were you passing through or can I be of service in some way?”

  “I was hoping to talk to you,” she confesses. “About . . .” She shrugs. “Mind if I sit down?”

  “It’s the cross-section growth coefficient, isn’t it?” he asks, and one of his eyebrows tries to climb even farther. “Yes, yes, make yourself comfortable. Everyone has been asking about it this week.” He sighs, then backs towards his own chair, bearish on his short legs.

  “I got an edited, probably garbled, version of it from Andy last week,” she explains. “The original paper isn’t on the intranet so I thought I’d ask you about it.” She nods at the door. “In person.”

  “Yes . . . very wise.” His expression relaxes moment by moment.

  “The scholars of night have been busy.”

  “Word leaked.” Saturnine, he rests one hand on a graph-ruled notepad. “Or so I gather from Angleton.”

  “That’s interesting.” Mo rests her violin against the side of her chair and crosses her legs. “He’s missing too, you know.”

  “That’s very interesting!” Now Ford’s expression lightens. “The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things.”

  Mo nods. “Footwear and naval architecture I know, but I never could get my head around why you’d put wax in the ceiling. Some kind of late-Victorian loft-space insulation?”

  “No, it’s—” Ford stops. “Okay, you won that round. Is this about the paper, or the leak?”

  “The paper.” She leans forward expectantly.

  “The first rule of paper is, there is no paper—well no, not exactly, but it’s not the kind of result I could punt at Nature, is it?”

  “Right. So who reviewed it?”

  Ford nods. “That’s the right question. Whose hat are you wearing?” Mo’s eyes go very cold. “There’s a little girl in Amsterdam whose parents don’t have much time for hair-splitting right now. Not that I’m accusing you of playing games, but I need to know. See, I’m conducting some research in applied epistemology. It would be rather unfortunate if you made a mistake in your logic and the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh have gotten themselves worked up over nothing.”

  “The Brotherhood? I say, are they still going?” He meets her cold stare with one of his own. “That is simply not on. I rather thought we’d put a stop to their antics in Afghanistan a few years ago.”

  “They’re a broad franchise: they’ve got any number of fronts.” She makes a gesture of dismissal. “Whoever. I’m looking into this on my own initiative. Do you have a draft I can see?”

  “I think I could manage that.” He begins to hunt through the papers on his desk. “Ah, here.” He passes her three pages, held together by a paper clip.

  Mo peers at the top page. “Wait, I can’t read—”

  “Ah. Just a moment.” Ford waves his left hand across the paper and mutters something unintelligible under his breath.

  Mo blinks. “Was that entirely safe?”

  He grins. “No.”

  “I, uh, see.” She peers at the abstract. “That’s interesting. Let me paraphrase. You’ve tried to quantify memetic transmission effects among a population exposed to class three abominations and find . . . belief in them spreads? And it’s a power function?”

  He nods. “You must understand, previous models all seem to have looked at how possession spreads through a sparse network, like classical epidemiological studies of smallpox transmission, for example. But that’s flawed: if you posit an uncontrolled outbreak, then people can see their neighbors, random strangers, being possessed. And that in turn weakens the observer-mediated grid ultrastructure, making it easier for the preta to tunnel into our reality. It’s a feedback loop: the more people succumb, the weaker everyone else’s resistance becomes. I modeled it using linear programming and the results are, well, they speak for themselves.”

  “And the closer we come to the Transient Weak Anomaly the more outbreaks we’re going to see, and the—it contributes to the strength of the TWA?” She looks at him sharply.

  “Substantially, yes.” Dr. Mike shuffles uncomfortably in his chair.

  “Well, shit.” She folds the paper neatly and slides it into her handbag. “And here I was hoping Andy had gotten the wrong end of the stick.”

  “Second-order effects are always gonna getcha.” He shrugs apologetically. “I don’t know why nobody looked into it from this angle before.”

  “Not your problem, not my problem.”

  “Says Wernher von Braun, yes, and who says satire is dead?”

  “Tom Lehrer. Or maybe Buddy Holly.”

  “Right. But you said something that interests me strangely. How did the Black
Brotherhood—or whoever wants us to think they’re the BBs—get the news?”

  “That’s what a lot of people are asking themselves right now.” She gives him a peculiar look. “It made quite a stir, unfortunately. Lots of wagging tongues. Unfortunately Oscar-Oscar are drawing blanks and they can’t Audit the entire organization—at least not yet. We’ll have to examine the second-order consequences if the cultists learn they’ve got a turbocharger, though. If you can come up with anything . . .”

  “Angleton would be the one to talk to about that,” he says slyly. “After all, he’s the head of the Counter-Possession Unit.”

  “Angleton’s missing—” Mo freezes.

  For a moment they sit in silence. Then Dr. Mike raises one preposterous eyebrow. “Are you certain of that?”

  I’M GLAD I’M NOT CLAUSTROPHOBIC.

  Well, I’m not very claustrophobic. Lying on my back in a coffin-sized railway carriage, rattling down a steep incline in a tunnel less than a meter in diameter that was built in the 1920s is not my idea of a nice relaxing way to spend an afternoon. Especially knowing that the station staff are zombies and I’m barreling headfirst into the depths of a high security government installation with only my warrant card to speak for me, on a mission of somewhat questionable legality.

  Pull yourself together, Bob. You’ve been in darker holes.

  Yes, but back then Angleton at least had the good grace to tell me what the fuck I was supposed to be doing! This time around it’s just I want you to be my tethered goat. That and the 440 volt DC rail fifteen centimeters below my spine give me a tingling sensation like my balls want to climb right up my throat and hide. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that there’s a back door into the stacks, or that it’s a hinky little narrow-gauge tube system constructed by a Quango and forgotten by everyone except train spotters, but to find myself actually riding it . . . that’s something else.