The Labyrinth Index

by Charles Stross

  Dry-swallowing, the Deputy Director approaches her ruler’s mouthpiece.

  The backless throne is a rococo nightmare, Louis Quinze by way of H. R. Giger. Everything about it is subtly wrong. Its seat is set at the wrong height for human knees and its legs (all seven of them) have four joints (two of which bend the wrong way) and end in barbed ebon claws. But the throne is by no means the worst part. Silver chains thick enough to anchor a truck rise from the corners of the dais and converge on the throne’s occupant, who is manacled at throat and thorax by solid metal bands, as if they might murder any supplicants if left unrestrained.

  The occupant tracks the Deputy Director as she walks the path, and for a moment she sees through the living corpse to the animating intelligence beyond. It regards her from all seven compound eyes, frond-like emerald antennae waving lazily as they taste the breeze from the air conditioning. Then she blinks, and her vision fades back to the formerly human body of her liege’s Mouthpiece.

  “Master and mistress of time, ruler of space, let your miserable slave abase herself before you and bask in the ecstasy and terror of your regard,” she recites in Old Enochian, as she completes the final loop of the maze. “Glory,” chorus the five silver guardians of the corners as she approaches each vertex; “Glory to the Lord of Sleep.” They speak in unison, a single voice emerging from many mouths.

  The Deputy Director reaches the end of the glowing labyrinth and goes to her knees before the dais. Then she bows her head and lowers the tip of the scepter to dip into the skull chalice. The stark shadows of the room pool within it and ripple like a dark fluid, as if it is full of blood rather than the absence of light. After a few seconds the shadows overflow the brim and drip across her lap.

  “Rise and approach our vessel.” The occupant speaks with a voice like wind sifting through the debris of long-forgotten tombs.

  The Deputy Director stands, not without effort (for she is in early middle age), and steps onto the dais. In front of the throne stand plinths with supports for the scepter and chalice: she places them in their niches and bows three times, then steps between them and bows to the occupant.

  “Brief me,” says the Mouthpiece of the Lord of Sleep.

  The Deputy Director stands to attention, and begins to list the significant developments of the past day, translating fluently into the language of the ancient ones, the tongue that controls reality itself. For the most part there’s not a lot to report: 95 percent of the time the government runs on cruise control, a huge juggernaut of bureaucracy rumbling predictably along its tracks. Even the presidency, an office freighted with a mystical level of respect by the citizenry, has so little room for maneuver that officeholders with diametrically opposite ideologies can often appear identical from outside the Beltway.

  As she delivers her briefing, she examines the throne’s occupant for signs of deterioration. The Mouthpieces of her Lord are small endoparasitic projections of His multidimensional self, constrained by the physical reality in which humanity dwells. Small autonomous organisms in their own right, at this stage in their life cycle they are linked to the will of their Lord and control a human vessel from within, using it to communicate with their servants. When the true resurrection is finally engineered, her God will manifest fully in this reality, no longer filtered through these biological sock puppets, tiny parodies of His true self.

  This particular Mouthpiece speaks through the body of a man in his late twenties, Middle Eastern, with matted beard and straggly hair. The CIA delivered him from some undisclosed interrogation operation, listed as surplus to requirements and available to the OPA to be used to destruction. His crimes, while alive, are no longer of any importance. His unseeing eyeballs glow softly green, tendrils writhing in their luminous depths; his orange jumpsuit is soiled and caked with filth, and he is emaciated. Three of his fingers that still have nails are in need of a trim; his other fingertips are blood-crusted ruins tipped in naked bone. His body writhes slowly atop the throne, as if impaled and trying to ease a gut-deep agony. Even though the mind of the occupant is long since gone, erased to make space for the senses of a great one who cannot (yet) fit within the walls of this universe, the peripheral nerves still deliver signals, and deep spinal reflexes twitch muscles in an attempt to minimize the pain.

  The Deputy Director recounts her conversation with the minions of the Black Pharaoh, provides a situation update on THRESHOLD, GODWAKER, and other esoteric codeword programs, and winds up with a swift rundown of various ongoing tasks, including the pursuit of the President. By the end of it, nearly an hour later, her mouth is dry, her throat is sore, and her knees are stiffening. The occupant, for his part, is still fully attentive, although tears of blood trickle down his cheeks when she mentions the latter affair.

  “Do you have any commands, Lord?” she asks.

  “This mouthpiece is failing,” says the body on the throne. “We require a replacement.”

  “Yes, Lord.” Procuring a new host body to serve as the mouth and ears of her Lord will not be hard, nor is this the first time she’s had to replace one: the feeders sent by her Lord consume their victims almost as rapidly as V-parasites. She waits attentively for further instructions.

  “There is a disturbance in the heartland,” says the mouth of her Lord. “Tools of the Black Pharaoh, guided by His Oracles, are at work in Our lands. They seek to free the god-emperor from the sea of dreams. This cannot be permitted.”

  “No, Lord.” The Deputy Director bows her head, hiding her frustration. Her Lord is trying to be helpful, but she already knows that the British are stirring up trouble. The trouble with the Lord’s help is that the Lord has difficulty focussing on minutiae such as street addresses and safe houses.

  “They come in … teams.” The Lord lapses into English for the final word, and the Deputy Director shivers: the current mouthpiece clearly needs replacing very soon, ideally as soon as this audience is over. “One group in Colorado Springs traces the footsteps of the former High Priest of the Sleeper in the Pyramid, cursed be his name. Another group in this temple fastness”—the Enochian word shares the meanings of royal palace and capital city—“seeks to raise the god-emperor.” They mean the President. “You must stop them.”

  Tell me something I don’t know, the Deputy Director thinks frustratedly, then tells him, “I hear and obey, Lord.” After a pause, “Do you have further instructions for me?”

  “Go,” the Mouthpiece says dismissively. “Seek for us a new garment of flesh, that our eggs may be clothed in life when they conduct the orchestra of our awakening. Continue to build out the thinking machines that sing hymns to our vastness, that they may power our thoughts. Continue to prepare the chariots of our ascent to the heavenly spheres, that the weakening of the false vacuum shall proceed apace. And defend Our lands against the unbelievers. That is all that is required of you now. You will be summoned if further words are required.”

  The Deputy Director bows deeply, and begins to retrace her path, retrieving the scepter and chalice along the way. She does not look back at the Mouthpiece of the Lord of Sleep, the sock puppet of Dread Cthulhu impaled atop their throne. Behind her, unseen and unwatched, the decaying once-human body stares into the shadows and begins to eat another finger.

  * * *

  Three and a half hours later Jim and I are sitting in first class on an implausibly slow express train—I’ve seen faster tortoises—and I have begun to hope that we’ve gotten clean away from New York. At least, we gave it our best shot.

  After our interrupted lunch, I had dragged Jim into Macy’s, made a beeline to the restrooms to tidy up, then rushed us both through all eighty-six floors of clothing. It was strictly utilitarian shopping: one change of hipster-casual outfits, one of business attire, and a shoulder bag for each of us. After we’d paid and changed, we dived down to the subway for half an hour of switchbacks we hoped would shake off anybody who was following us and hopefully confuse the enemy about our intended destination.

  Alon
g the way Jim tried to buy me a replacement phone, but it turned out that anything you can buy in a drugstore is too underpowered or insecure to run our firmware, and anything you can buy in a mobile phone shop requires you to give your date of birth, bank details, bra size, blood group, and your great-grandmother’s email address. Even if I’d been willing to give them all that, the setup process would have eaten at least an hour of our evasion time. So we noped out of the T-Mobile store, and for about the first time in eighteen years I was totally phoneless. It felt like going commando in a miniskirt on a Saturday night in town, even after Jim sent an email to ensure that there’d be a shiny new Samsung waiting for me in DC. Not knowing I could check my team’s timesheets on my phone at 3 a.m. felt profoundly wrong.

  But my lack of a phone isn’t what gives me the ugly, sick feeling as I sit in the train, beanie pulled down, periodically moving my scarf away from my mouth so I can take another sip of coffee while I wait for the other shoe to drop.

  “It may not happen,” Jim reassures me quietly. He reaches across the table—we’re in opposite seats—and takes my hand. “It was a busy restaurant and there was a lot of running and shrieking happening.”

  I tighten my grip on his fingers. “Yes, and the condom was just a little bit torn, and I was just a tiny bit over the drink-driving limit, and there were only a few drops of blood, sweetie, and you are whistling past the graveyard.” I keep my voice low. There’s nobody in the seat behind Jim, and nobody across the aisle from us, but I’m still acutely self-conscious.

  “Most of the blood was theirs. Ill-gotten or otherwise.”

  I try to think of a way to change the subject without being obvious because I don’t want to alarm him, but I’m getting the hunger again, and the nauseating dread isn’t helping. I’ve got a feeling that this is what Mr. Kadir must have felt like, waiting for me to arrive. It’s like a horrible cloud hanging over my head, waiting to drop and choke me to death. Except it’s not me, is it?

  “If they could sample you—”

  “—I’m immune to them—”

  “—Track and trace, love.” My stomach twists again. I wish he wouldn’t use that word. “Law of sympathy and contagion, isn’t that what the double-domes call it? They can set sniffers on it, those eyeless multidimensional dog-things—”

  “—Hounds,” I say, helplessly pedantic. They’re not the worst. You can shield yourself against hounds by taking shelter in a non-Euclidean space, or you can even banish them with the right kind of demonological pepper spray. But I don’t want to tell him the worst I can imagine, because to speak your fears is to give them shape, and the well of terror is bottomless.

  “—Or automated face recognition on CCTV, remember we’re coming into Washington DC.”

  I steal a quick glance at him. He’s wearing his cop face right now, doing his best move-along-now-nothing-to-see-here public-reassurance shtick. It’s heartbreaking: Officer Friendly is trying to comfort me. He thinks I’m scared. But he’s the one who should be bricking it.

  “Jim.” I smile, squeeze his fingers again, and put just enough extra force behind it—a little mental shove—to remind him that I’m not as easy to break as I look. “We are on this train, and they are not”—I hope—“and when we get off we will have support—”

  His phone rings, the peculiar trilling tone of the end-to-end encrypted voice service we use internally.

  I watch Jim take the voice call. He cradles the phone delicately in his right hand, rock-steady despite the seasick wobble of the train (I had no idea any developed nation was worse at track maintenance than Network Rail back home). There’s no sign of tremor, although I should have bought him a nail file when we were shopping—he chipped a couple. He listens intently. I focus on his eyelashes, which are long and almost feminine, in stark contrast to his square jawline and buzz cut. I want this man in my life, I think, but I only have him on loan. This cover story was a big mistake. I can’t maintain an appropriate professional detachment.

  “Yes … huh … okay, do that, I’ll tell her, thanks.… Yes, you, too. Bye.” He ends the call and looks at me pensively.

  “What?” I ask.

  “That was J. She’s got a phone waiting for you, and D. has made contact, or so he says. I think there’s some difference of opinion as to what constitutes contact.” His lips thin. “When we get in, let’s catch the underground a couple of stops before we get a cab, shall we?”

  “Yes—” I begin, just as he says something like “Fuuuh,” and slumps sideways against the window.

  Time crystalizes around me. I reach out instinctively and grab his phone before it falls. The light through the window, barely tolerable, is brightening ferociously as the chittering in my head gets louder. I can hear them: not mine, theirs, the same ones I heard in Times Square and in the restaurant. They’ve found him and they’re excited, it’s a new lunch buffet and I can feel tiny invisible mandibles digging in across the table from me—

  My ward is buzzing and growing hot but I’m not the one of us who’s in immediate danger.

  I take Jim’s hand and press his index finger against the sensor on the back of his phone, turn the screen towards me, and desperately search for the OFCUT suite. He’s put it in his quick launch bar, clever lad. I tap it and lean across the table towards him, forehead to forehead in desperation, feeling him twitch. It’s the onset of the seizure I’ve been expecting for the past three hours.

  So cold.

  The main screen comes up and I finger-crawl through it by muscle memory, thanking whatever guardian angels keep an eye out for lovelorn vampires that we both use the same countermeasures app. And here it is, the icon for the firewall: not an internet firewall but a cognitive blockade, an electronic version of the protective wards we use.2 I set it running, then wrap Jim’s fingers around his phone. A furtive glance tells me nobody has noticed Jim’s slump or my blur of motion—only seconds have passed. I can still hear the chittering, rustling noises around him, a sound like bacon in a deep fat fryer and a smell like stale blood. What else can I do?

  I reach into the mock-turtleneck collar of my bodysuit and tug on my ward, which is still vibrating and warm. I pull the cord up and over my head. It snags on my wooly cap for a few seconds and I smell burning skin as I stuff it over his neck, then hunker down in my seat and tug my turtleneck up. The back of my neck stings horribly and still nobody’s noticed anything wrong. I stare across the table and check Jim’s fingers on the phone, the ward around his neck—he’s got one of his own, the more the better—as I wrestle my hat and scarf back into position one-handed. I can’t help Jim if my head is on fire. I grab his other arm, the one that’s slipped down behind the table, and pull it up until I can hold his hand, wishing, willing him to stay alive, to fight back, gorge rising in my throat.

  His eyelids flicker. A few seconds later he half-grunts/half-coughs. His hand squeezes convulsively, and if I was the old Mhari Murphy I’d scream because his grip is bone-crushingly tight, the super-strength cutting in. “Muh-whuh—”

  I nearly faint with relief before the truth comes crashing home. It isn’t over. In fact, it’s barely begun. “Jim. Jim? Can you hear me?”

  His eyes open. I lean towards him urgently. “Smile for me? Can you raise your right arm? Now your left? Say something, Jim—”

  FAST: Face, Arms, Speech, Time. Catastrophic K syndrome often starts with a transient ischemic attack, a mini-stroke. V-parasite infestation—transmitted by having your blood supped on by PHANG-symbionts—looks much the same at first.

  “What,” he says, dazed.

  “Smile and raise your arms,” I tell him.

  “What?”

  “Just do it—”

  “—My phone—”

  “—Don’t let go!” My urgency gets through to him, or he’s becoming more aware, more focused by the second, because he frowns and then meets my eyes, alert. Superpowered recovery is part of the Officer Friendly package, but it’s not going to last.

  “What hap
pened?” he demands.

  “You—” I realize I’m short on air: I take a couple of deep, gasping breaths—“had a seizure, I dropped my ward and the OFCUT on your phone on you, it passed. About twenty, thirty seconds.” Gasp some more. “V or K, can’t tell which, but we’ve got to get you inside a containment grid or—”

  My vision is blurring. After a moment I realize the gasping is turning to sobs. For a few seconds I was sure he was dying, and it wasn’t like the scene at the restaurant. I’ve never been so frightened for somebody in my life: I felt totally powerless. You can’t punch extradimensional parasites out of your boyfriend’s brain. He was pulling on his mojo like crazy back there, fighting the silver mannequin people. It’d be just our luck if he’s fended off K syndrome for a couple of years, only for his feeders to get bored and start nibbling on his cerebellum right now, although the K syndrome will stop progressing if he just never uses his power ever again. But what really worries me is that he left bloodstains back at the restaurant. If one of the adversary’s PHANGs sampled his leavings, the V-parasites—

  —Oh god, I sensed V-parasites while he was seizing.

  It is them.

  And as he looks at me I realize that he understands, because he just gives me a little nod, a jerk of the chin, and says, “How long do you think I’ve got?”

  * * *

  We humans—or ex-humans, in the case of some of us—are used to thinking of ourselves as being the top of the food chain. But we are not at the top of the food chain—not even remotely. Plenty of things eat us in various ways. Let’s start at the bottom, with the microscopic. Viruses, bacteria, protozoa: these are familiar, everyday threats. In our line of work, those of us who formerly worked for the Laundry run into others. Feeders in the night are a classic—mindless feeders that take over a human nervous system and control its body, spreading by touch, as deadly as a high-tension cable and about as intelligent. So are K syndrome parasites, which are drawn to people who carry out thaumaturgic invocations in their own heads and like BSE chew their victims’ brains into soggy, bleeding lace. The closely related class of C-parasites thankfully prefer the taste of our silicon chips.