The Atrocity Archives

by Charles Stross

  The Ahnenerbe-SS collection is in a subbasement guarded by locked steel doors; one of the curators–a civilian in jeans and sweater–takes us down there. "Don't you be staying too long," she advises us. "This place, it gives me creeps; you not sleeping well tonight, yah?"

  "We'll be all right," I reassure her. The Ahnenerbe collection has about the strongest set of guards and wards imaginable–nobody involved in looking after it wants to worry about lunatics and neo-Nazis getting their hands on some of the powerfully charged relics stored here.

  "You say." She looks at me blackly, then one eyebrow twitches. "Sweet dreams."

  "Just what are we looking for?" asks Mo.

  "Well, to start with–" I clap my hands. We're facing a corridor with numbered storage rooms off to either side. It's well lit and empty, like a laboratory where everyone has just nipped out for afternoon tea. "The symbols painted on the walls of the apartment in Santa Cruz," I say. "Think you'd recognise them if you saw them again?"

  "Recognise? I, uh . . . maybe," she says slowly. "I wouldn't like to say for sure. I was half out of my head and I didn't get a real good look at them."

  "That's more than I got, and the Black Chamber didn't send us any postcards," I say. "Which is why we've come here. Think of it as a photo-fit session for necromancy." I read the plaque on the nearest door, then push it open. The lights come on automatically, and I freeze. It's a good thing the lights are bright, because the contents of the room, seen in shadow, would be heart-stopping. As it is, they're merely heart-breaking.

  There's a white cast-iron table, a thing of curves and scrollwork, just inside the doorway. Three chairs sit around it, delicate-looking white assemblies of struts and curved sections. I blink, for there's something odd about them, something that reminds me of the art of Giger, the film set of Alien. And then I realise what I'm looking at: the backs of the chairs are vertebrae, wired together. The chairs are made of scrimshaw, carved from the thigh bones of the dead; the decorative scrollwork of the table is a rack of human ribs. The table-top itself is made of polished, interlocking shoulder blades. And as for the cigarette lighter–

  "I think I'm going to be sick," whispers Mo. She looks distinctly pale.

  "Toilet's down the corridor," I bite out, gritting my teeth while she hurries away, retching. I take in the rest of the room. They're right, I think in some quiet, rational recess of my mind, some things you just can't tell the public about. The Holocaust, even seen at arm's length through newsreel footage, was bad enough to brand the collective unconscious of the West with a scar of indelible evil, madness on an inconceivable scale. Hideous enough that some people seek to deny it ever happened. But this, this isn't something you can even begin to describe: this is the dark nightmare of a diseased mind.

  There were medical laboratories attached to the death camp at Birkenau. Some of their tools are stored here. There were other, darker, laboratories behind the medical unit, and their tools are stored here, too, those that have not been destroyed in accordance with the requirements of disarmament treaties.

  Next to the charnel house garden furniture sits a large rack of electronics, connected to a throne of timber with metal straps at ankle and wrist–an electric chair; the Ahnenerbe experimented with the destruction of human souls, seeking a way to sear through the Cartesian bottleneck and exterminate not only the bodies of their victims, but the informational echoes of their consciousness. Only the difficulty of extinguishing souls on a mass production basis kept it from featuring prominently in their schemes.

  Beyond the soul-eater there's a classical mediaeval iron maiden, except that the torturers of the Thirty Years War didn't get to play with aluminium alloy and hydraulic rams. There are other machines, all designed to maim and kill with a maximum of agony: one of them, a bizarre cross between a printing press and a rack made of glass, seems to have materialised from a nightmare of Kafka's.

  They were trying to generate pain, I realize. They weren't simply killing their victims but deliberately hurting them in the process, hurting them as badly as the human body could stand, squeezing the pain out of them like an evil seepage of blood, hurting them again and again until all the pain had been extracted–

  I'm sitting down but I don't remember how I got here. I feel dizzy; Mo is standing over me. "Bob?" I close my eyes and try to control my breathing. "Bob?"

  "I need a minute," I hear myself saying.

  The room reeks of old, dead terror–and a brooding malevolence, as if the instruments of torture are merely biding their time. Just you wait, they're saying. I shudder, open my eyes, and try to stand up.

  "This was what the . . . the Ahnenerbe used?" asks Mo. She sounds hoarse.

  I nod, not trusting my voice. It's a moment before I can speak. "The secret complex. Behind the medical block at Birkenau, where they experimented with pain. Algemancy. They took Zuse's Z-2 computer, you know? It was supposed to have been bombed by the Allies, in Berlin. That was what Zuse himself was told, he was away at the time. But they took it . . ." I swallow. "It's in the next room."

  "A computer? I didn't know they had them."

  "Only just; Konrad Zuse built his first programmable computer in 1940. He independently invented the things: after the war he founded Zuse Computer Company, which was taken over by Siemens in the early sixties. He wasn't a bad man; when he didn't cooperate they stole his machine, demolished the house where he had built it, and claimed the destruction was an Allied bomb. The cabbalistic iterations, you see–they rebuilt it at Sobibor camp, using circuits soldered with gold extracted from the teeth of their victims." I stand up and head for the door. "I'll show you, but that's not really why we're . . . hell. I'll show you."

  The next room in the Atrocity Archive contains the remains of the Z-2. Old nineteen-inch equipment racks tower ceiling-high; there are mounds of vacuum tubes visible through gaps in the front panels, dials and gauges to monitor power consumption, and plugboards to load programs into the beast. All very quaint, until you see the printer that lurks in the shadowy recess at the back of the room. "Here they ran the phase-state calculations that dictated the killing schedule, opening and closing circuits in time to the ebb and flow of murder. They even generated the railway timetables with this computer, synchronising deliveries of victims to the maw of the machine." I walk toward the printer, look round to see Mo waiting behind me. "This printer." It's a plotter, motors dragging a Ouija-board pen across a sheet of–it would have been parchment, but not from a cow or a sheep. I swallow bile. "They used it to inscribe the geometry curves that were to open the way of Dho-Na. All very, very advanced: this was the first real use of computers in magic, you know."

  Mo backs away from the machines. Her face is a white mask under the overhead strip lighting. "Why are you showing me this?"

  "The patterns are in the next room." I follow her out into the corridor and take her by the elbow, gently steering toward the third chamber–where the real Archive begins. It's a plain-looking room, full of the sort of file drawers you find in architects' offices–very shallow, very wide, designed to hold huge, flat blueprints. I pull the top drawer of the nearest cabinet out and show her. "Look. Seen anything like this before?" It's very fine parchment inscribed with what looks like a collision between a mandala, a pentagram, and a circuit diagram, drawn in bluish ink. At the front and left, a neat box-out in engineering script details the content of the blueprint. If I didn't know what it was meant to be, or what the parchment was made of, I'd think it was quite pretty. I take care not to touch the thing.

  "It's–yes." She traces one of the curves with a fingertip, carefully holding it an inch above the inscription. "No, it wasn't this one. But it's similar."

  "There are several thousand more like this in here," I say, studying her expression. "I'd like to see if we can identify the one you saw on the wall?" She nods, uneasily. "We don't have to do it right now," I admit. "If you would rather we took a breather there's a cafe upstairs where we can have a cup of coffee and relax a bit fir
st–"

  "No." She pauses for a moment. "Let's get it over and done with." She glances over her shoulder and shudders slightly. "I don't want to stay down here any longer than I have to."

  * * * *

  About two hours later, while Mo is halfway through the contents of drawer number fifty-two, my pager goes off. I scrabble at the waistband of my jeans in a momentary panic then pull the thing out. One of the news-greppers I left running on the network servers back home has paged me: in its constant trawl through the wire feeds it's come across something interesting. KILLING IN ROTTERDAM, it says, followed by a reference number.

  "Got to go upstairs," I say, "think you'll be okay here for twenty minutes?"

  Mo looks at me with eyes like bruises. "I'll take you up on that coffee break if you don't mind."

  "Not at all. Not having much luck?"

  "Nothing so far." She yawns, catches herself, and shakes her head. "My attention span is going. Oh God, coffee. I never realised it was possible to be horrified and bored out of your skin at the same time."

  I refrain from calling her on the unintentional pun; instead I make a note of where she's got up to–at this rate we could be here for another week, unless we get lucky–and slide the drawer shut. "Okay. Time out."

  The coffee shop is upstairs, attached to the museum shop; it's all whitewash and neat little tables and there's a stand with patisseries on it next to the counter. All very gezelig. A row of cheap PCs along one wall offer Internet access for the compulsives who can't kick their habit for a day of high culture. I home in on one and begin the tedious process of logging into one of the Laundry's servers by way of three firewalls, two passwords, an encrypted tunnel, and an S/Key challenge. At the end of the day I'm onto a machine that isn't exactly trusted–the Laundry will not allow classified servers to be connected on the net, by any arrangement of wires or wishful thinking–but that happens to run my news trawler. Which, after all, is fishing in the shallow waters of Reuters and UPI, rather than the oceanic chasm of state secrets.

  So what made my pager go off? While Mo is drinking a mug full of mocha and contemplating the museum's catalogue of forthcoming attractions, I find myself reading an interesting article from the AP wire service.

  DOUBLE KILLING IN ROTTERDAM (AP):

  Two bodies discovered near a burned-out shipping container in the port appear to be victims of a brutal gangland-style slaying. Blood daubed on the container, victims–ah, a correlation with a restricted information source, something sucked out of the Police National Computer and not available in the usual wire service bulletin. One victim is a known neo-Nazi, the other an Iraqi national, both shot with the same gun. Is that all? I wonder, and go clickety-click, sending out a brief email asking where was the shipping container sent from and where was it bound for because you never know . . .

  I shake my head. The article dinged my search filter's "phone home" bell by accumulating little keyword matches until it passed a threshold, not because it's obviously important. But something nags at the back of my mind: there's seawater nearby, graffiti in blood on the wall, an Iraqi connection. Why Rotterdam? Well, it's one of the main container-port gateways into Europe, that's for starters. For seconds, it's less than fifty kilometres away.

  There's no other real news. I log out and leave the terminal; time to drink a coffee and get back to work.

  * * * *

  Three hours later: "found it," she says.

  I look up from the report I'm reading. "Are you sure?"

  "Certain." I stand up and walk over. She's leaning over an open drawer and her arms are tense as wires. I think she'd be shaking if she wasn't holding herself still and stiff. I look over her shoulder. The drawing is a geometry curve all right. Actually, I've seen ones like this before. The aborted summoning Dr. Vohlman demonstrated in front of the class that day–was it only a few weeks ago?–looked quite similar. But that one was designed to open a constrained information channel to one of the infernal realms. I can't quite see where this one is directed, at least not without taking it home and studying it with the aid of a protractor and a calculator, but a quick glance tells me it's more than a simple speakerphone to hell.

  Here we see a differential that declares a function of tau, the rate of change of time with distance along one of the Planck dimensions. There we see an admonition that this circuit is not to be completed without a cage around it. (A good thing the notation we use, and that of the Ahnenerbe, is derived from the same source, or I wouldn't be able to figure it out.) This formula looks surprisingly modern, it's some sort of curve through the complex number plane–each point along it is a different Julia set. And that is where the human sacrifice is wired into the diagram by its eyeballs while still alive, for maximum bandwidth–

  I blank for a second, flashing on the evil elegance of the design. "Are you sure this is it?" I mumble.

  "Of course I'm sure!" Mo snaps at me. "Do you think I'd–" She stops. Takes a deep breath. Mutters something quietly to herself, then: "What is it?"

  "I'm not 100 percent certain," I say, carefully placing the notepad I was reading from down on my chair and moving to one side so I can inspect the diagram from a different angle, "but it looks like a resonator map. A circuit designed to tune in on another universe. This one is similar to our own, in fact it's astonishingly close by; the energy barrier you have to tunnel through to reach it is high enough that nothing less than a human sacrifice will do."

  "Human sacrifice?"

  "It doesn't take much energy to talk to a demon," I explain. "They're pretty much waiting to hear from us, at least the ones people mostly want to talk to. But they come from a long way away–from universes with a very weak affinity to our own. Information leakage doesn't imply an energy change in our own world; it's concealed in the random noise. But if we try to talk to a universe close to home there's a huge potential energy barrier to overcome–this sort of prevents causality violations. The whole thing is mediated by intelligence–observers are required to collapse the wave function–which is where the sacrifice comes in: we're eliminating an observer. Done correctly, this lets us talk to a universe that isn't so much next door as lying adjacent to our own, separated by a gap less than the Planck length."

  "Oh." She points at the map. "So this thing . . . it's a very precise transformation through the Mandelbrot set. Which you guys have used as a map onto a Linde continuum, right? Why don't they just set up an n-dimensional homogeneous matrix transformation? It's so much more intuitively obvious."

  "Uh–" She manages to surprise me at the damnedest times. "I don't know. Have to read up on it, I guess."

  "Well." She pauses for an instant and looks very slightly disappointed, as if her star pupil has just failed a verbal test. "This is very like what I saw. Got any suggestions for what to do next, wise guy?"

  "Yes. There's a photocopier upstairs. Let's call the curator and run off a copy or two. Then we can get someone back home to compare it to the photographs of the shipping container at that murder site in Rotterdam. If they're similar we have a connection."

  * * * *

  Our hotel has a bijou bar and a breakfast room, but no restaurant; so it seems natural that after running off our copies we should go home, head for our respective rooms, freshen up, and head out on the town to find somewhere to eat. (And maybe share a drink or two. Those hours in the basement of horrors are going to give me bad dreams tonight, and I'd be surprised if Mo is any better.) I spend half an hour soaking in the bathtub with a copy of Surreal Calculus and the Navigation of Everett-Wheeler Continua–hoping to brush up on my dinner-table patter–then dry myself, pull on a clean pair of chinos and an open-necked shirt, and head upstairs.

  Mo is waiting at the bar with a cup of coffee and a copy of the Herald Tribune. She's wearing the same evening-out-on-the-town outfit as last time. She folds the newspaper and nods at me. "Want to try that Indonesian place we passed?" I ask her.

  "Why not." She finishes the coffee quickly. "Is it raining outside?"<
br />
  "Wasn't last time I looked."

  She stands up gracefully and pulls her coat on. "Let's go."

  The nights are drawing in, and the evening air is cool and damp. I'm still self-conscious about navigating around the roads–not only do they run on the wrong side, but they've got separate bike lanes everywhere, and, to make matters worse, separate tram lanes that sometimes don't go in the same direction as the rest of the traffic. It makes crossing the road an exercise in head-twitching, and I nearly get mown down by a girl on a bicycle riding without lights in the dusk–but we make it to the tram stop more or less intact, and Mo doesn't laugh at me out loud. "Do you always jerk around like that?"

  "Only when I'm trying to avoid the feral man-eating mopeds. Is this tram–ah." Two stops later we get off and head for that Indonesian place we passed earlier. They have a vacant table, and we have a meal.

  I turn on my new palmtop's antisound and Mo talks to me over her satay: "Was that what you were hoping to find at the museum?"

  I dribble peanut sauce over a skewer before replying. "It was what I was hoping not to find, really." She has her back to the plateglass window and I have a decent view of the main road behind her shoulder. Which is important, and I keep glancing that way because I am on edge–our friendly neighbourhood abductors seem to go to work at dusk, and when all's said and done this is a stakeout and Mo is the goat. I look back at her. She's very decorative, for a goat: most goats don't wear ethnic tops, large silver earrings, and friendly expressions. "On the other hand, at least we know we're dealing with something profoundly unpleasant. Which means that Carnate Gecko gets something solid to chew on and we've got a lead to follow up."

  "Assuming it doesn't follow us up instead." Her expression clouds over in an instant: "Tell me the truth, Bob?"

  My mouth turns dry: this is a moment I've been dreading even more than the discovery in the basement. "What?"