The Labyrinth Index

by Charles Stross

  “The—what—” And just like that, he had me standing outside the windows of my comfort zone, looking in. “You tell me?”

  “Ancient history lecture coming up.” Dr. Armstrong leaned back in his antique chair, coil springs squeaking underneath, and gazed at the ceiling. “During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most of the chancelleries of Europe had Black Chambers whose job was to open and read the post of nobles and dignitaries. The United States was unusual in not having one until the twentieth century, when during the First World War the State Department set up a Black Chamber for monitoring international telegraphy. Because of the Zimmerman Telegram and all that,” he added. I made a mental note to look it up on Wikipedia later. “Anyway. It got shut down in the late 1920s by a particularly idealistic Secretary of State—‘Gentlemen do not read other gentlemen’s correspondence,’ Mr. Stimson said—but was resurrected during the next war, and it evolved into the National Security Agency. The American equivalent of GCHQ, our codebreakers.”

  So far so much bureaucratic genealogy: I half-expected him to haul out a family photo album and start cooing over baptismal portraits of baby espionage agencies. Holiday snaps of middle-aged directors in three-piece suits whooping it up at classified seaside resorts. But then he threw in a surprise.

  “It turns out the Black Chamber wasn’t abolished in 1929. Only the Cipher Bureau was disbanded. The real work continued: a bunch of occult research, largely mumbo-jumbo but containing some nuggets of unspeakable truth, that had been going on in DC since the 1780s. Originally it was the Grand Masonic Lodge, influenced by the Illuminati, who maintained an Esoteric Texts Repository in the Library of Congress. But the BC took it over and expanded on it, and during the Second World War they turned it into an offensive occult agency. John von Neumann worked for them, and a chunk of Manhattan Project funding was siphoned off in their direction. That’s where the budget for Vannevar Bush’s Memex machines came from, like the one in Dr. Angleton’s office. By the early 1950s they were focussed on penetrating the wards around the Kremlin and trying to second-guess whether the Reds were in league with Blue Hades.”

  By this point I was shaking my head. “Please stop. Too much?”

  The SA looked chagrined. “Sorry, sorry. I lived through the tail end of the necromantic cold war: it brings back memories. Shoggoth Gap and all that.”

  “You’re telling me—” I picked up my teacup and wet my lips again. “You said they were an offensive agency. Surely you don’t mean they were a cold war weapon?”

  “I’m afraid that’s exactly what I mean,” said the SA. His eyes glittered.

  “But that—” I stopped.

  There are generally two types of secret agency: defensive and offensive. Defensive agencies focus on things like counter-espionage—catching spies—and paranormal protection. Offensive agencies focus on sending spies and actively sabotaging their rivals. In the UK, SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, does the spying stuff; MI6, the Security Service, sticks to counter-espionage and anti-terrorism duty. Of course, in some areas there’s a hot mess of overlapping responsibilities. GCHQ used to be a codebreaking, electronic espionage agency with a tiny defensive electronic security department embedded in it. Very unbalanced. The NSA was the same.

  If the OPA are anything like the NSA …

  “For decades, the OPA has been long on offensive capability and binding non-human entities to service,” Dr. Armstrong continued. “We try to retain our humanity in the Laundry, or at least remain on speaking terms with it—exceptions like Dr. Angleton and Mr. Howard aside, of course. The OPA have traditionally been less restrained. DAEMINT, they called it, use of daemonic servitors for intelligence.”

  He must have noticed my reaction at that point, because he gave me a pained little smile as he nodded. “Yes, and like yourself. Now consider Case Nightmare Green, which we are currently experiencing. The cosmological conjunction. Too many thinking networks in too small a volume of spacetime. All thaumic resonances amplified. The Lovecraftian Singularity. Ask yourself how many unaltered human beings are on the list the PM handed you for SOE field ops, then ask yourself how much worse it must be inside the OPA.”

  “Do they—” I paused and started again. “Are they suffering, in your opinion, from regulatory capture?”

  He nodded.

  Regulatory capture is a management disease of task-focussed organizations. Suppose your job is to run nuclear reactors. They’re risky things, so there needs to be a regulatory oversight authority to keep an eye on the folks running them. But they’re so complex that the only people who really understand what’s being regulated are the operators. So when it’s time to staff the regulatory authority, who ends up running the regulator but the very people they’re supposed to be overseeing? Honest risk assessment becomes impossible when the supposedly well-controlled regulators are captured by the operators.

  It’s not just nuclear reactors, either. It could be food safety, or airliner maintenance, or pharmaceuticals, or covert operations agencies. In particular, offensive covert agencies that rely on bound, superhumanly intelligent alien nightmares as force multipliers.

  “Oh dear,” I said faintly, and drained my cup to minimize the risk of a spill due to my shaking hand.

  “More tea, Baroness?”

  “I’d rather not.” I put my cup down.

  “The Nazgûl have been successfully colonized by a parasitoid superorganism—a group mind, if you like. They’re cultists, but not the boringly simple religious fanatics we’re used to over here. They dedicate their minds to the service of the great dreamer, dread Cthulhu—who, contrary to the more popular imagery, doesn’t have bat wings or tentacles, that was just Lovecraft’s seafood phobia speaking. Think exoskeleton and ovipositor and parasitoid brain-control maggots—at least, we think he’s a megascale vespiform, that might be just another juvenile instar—anyway. Bootstrapping their lord to full immanence is a big job, and partly thanks to you, that maniac Schiller blew their best opportunity.”

  “Thank you!” I don’t get the opportunity to bask in the SA’s praise very often.

  “You’re welcome.” He continued: “But they’re nothing if not persistent, and now they’re trying again. This time, they plan to use a computational brute-force attack. They’re preparing to build a gigantic swarm of orbital solar-powered processors so huge it’ll eventually eclipse the sun: a thing called a Matrioshka brain. Brute forcing the solution is inefficient, so their hypercomputer has to be really big to run cthulhu.exe. When I say big, they’re planning to dismantle entire asteroids and planets for construction materials. Eventually they may dismantle the Earth, although I suppose Blue Hades and Deep Six might express reservations on that account.”

  “Good grief.” Words fail me.

  “I hasten to emphasize that all this lies a few years in the future—a decade, perhaps, if we’re lucky. I mention it just to demonstrate why it’s imperative that we kneecap them now, before this insane scheme gets underway. I am reasonably certain that the US government—those bits of it that haven’t been co-opted by the Nazgûl—would take a dim view of them dismantling the planet out from under the lot of us. They’re as much under alien occupation as we are, but the fight isn’t over yet. The long-term goal of your organization is to link up with the domestic opposition and help them.”

  EIGHT

  A GAME OF VAMPIRES

  Mattingley and OSCAR confer for some time. Sam, temporarily off watch, holes up in the kitchen, where he discovers a high-end bean-to-cup machine. This is good, but thanks to his run out to pick up Tancredy he’s the last to get to it, and the first cup of espresso is lip-curlingly foul, rancid with bitter oils. So Sam rummages in the kitchen drawers for the manual, turns to the maintenance section, and begins to systematically field-strip and clean the coffee maker. He has the parts laid out neatly in a row on the kitchen counter and is degreasing and polishing them between yawns when Sylvia Haas looks in on him.

  “Sam. Busy?”


  “Routine maintenance.” He stifles another yawn. “If you want a brew I’m afraid you’ll have to wait—”

  “It’s not that. Matt wants you?” Sam tenses. “They’ve finished yelling and Arthur basically ordered Matt to send the Postal Service guy home. So I figure you’ve got another taxi run—”

  “Gotcha.” Sam is relieved. The President is a decent guy. Senior Officer Mattingley is a decent guy. Sam’s a straight-up guy, too, he likes to think. Still, he was nerving himself for the order to shut down Tancredy. The stakes at this table are far too high to let ordinary human decency get in the way of cold-blooded expediency. “Do I have time to finish up in here first?”

  “Normally no, but”—Sylvia takes in the disassembled coffee machine—“I’ll check.” She heads back into the house and Sam begins to reassemble the grinder and feeder assembly. Half-clean is better than nothing, he thinks. Officer Haas used to be as well-groomed as any other officer on White House duty, but the insane shift arrangements are taking their toll. Her hair is getting oily and lank, eyes red-rimmed, no energy to spare for makeup. The guys have it easy, he realizes; they’re expected to look a little rough. He yawns again as he clips the bean feeder into place. There’s a muffled clank from behind the closed door to the laundry room next door. He ignores it at first, but then, bubbling up from the sluggish depths of his subconscious, comes a realization that nobody has entered the laundry room while he’s been in the kitchen, and the machines aren’t running either. Something—Sam’s hand goes to the butt of his service pistol—is wrong.

  With his left hand, Sam picks up the filter head and drops it into the empty water tank, then rattles the tank to make some noise as he tiptoes towards the laundry-room door, holding his gun muzzle-down and safety off. He puts the tank down at the end of the counter and takes up a position alongside the door.

  “Sam—” Haas enters the kitchen. Her voice catches momentarily, then she continues speaking, “Matt wants to know how long until you can get the coffee maker working again? He wants to put in an order: latte with an extra shot for himself, double espresso for Arthur—” Meanwhile, she draws her gun and moves into a shooter’s stance to cover the other side of the laundry room. She raises an eyebrow at Sam: You sure?

  Sam nods. “Let’s get started,” he says, and, bringing his weapon to bear, swiftly kicks the doorknob.

  Someone is standing right behind the door and they grunt as it hits them, but the sound is drowned out by Sylvia’s pistol as she fires three times and steps sideways to clear his line of fire. Sam crouches and shoots through the door at chest height.

  The reply is an immediate burst of automatic fire, spraying through the doorway and drywall at waist height.

  Sam’s ears are ringing. Someone is shouting, “Cease fire!” The blind spray of bullets missed him somehow. He scrambles backwards towards the nearest cover, sliding on a smear of fresh blood that is sprayed across the kitchen floor. There’s a big island in the middle of the kitchen and as he rolls around it he shoulder-checks Sylvia, who gives an agonized grunt—she’s been hit, he realizes—but there’s no time because the next step in this dance is a flash-bang and then they storm the house—if he hadn’t been working quietly in the kitchen and one of them hadn’t stumbled, it would have worked—

  Out of time. There’s a rattle of automatic fire from the front, then the deafening crack of the .50 caliber upstairs as the officers on watch light up the infiltrating hostiles. Sam covers his eyes and opens his mouth in a yawn: the kitchen flashes bright as the noonday sun with a concussion that feels like slamming a door on his head.

  Ears ringing and mind a blank, Sam rolls round the side of the kitchen island and shoots at the blurry silver figures storming the room. He knows he’s going to die now, but he can buy time for the others. Sylvia, lying in an expanding ruby puddle, doesn’t move. Sam concentrates on shooting repeatedly, and at least one silver figure goes down in front of him. Then a mule-kick hammers him in the chest. He pulls the trigger again and the slide locks open. Muscle memory prompts him to reach for a spare magazine, but his left arm isn’t working and there are more shots behind him, and now the pistol is too heavy to hold and everything is too dark.

  The shooting dies down. Sam and Sylvia took the brunt of the main incursion; Mal and Cho, the sniper team on the rooftop, spot and kill six more intruders out front. The shaken survivors move quickly, hustling out to their parked vehicles without grabbing the gear they’ve just unloaded. OSCAR and Mattingley are the last out the door, almost a minute late: Mattingley delayed by overriding his charge’s angry demands to say goodbye to those who remain behind.

  Sam lies on the kitchen floor, unseeing, and forgets his President for the last time.

  * * *

  Gilbert Tancredy hunkers down on the jump seat in the load bed of the big SUV, listening as the President turns the air blue. They hurtle out of the suburban driveway, nose to tail with a pickup full of twitchy officers openly pointing automatic weapons in all directions. The POTUS is a scatological artist, Gilbert realizes. It’d be absolutely hilarious if the circumstances weren’t so awful.

  Two miles and three turns later the President winds down. “How many people did we lose?” he demands.

  The anonymous-looking man with the crew-cut hair and distant gaze holds a walkie-talkie to his mouth. “Mattingley. Roll call.”

  Over the next couple of minutes the other vehicles call in. The atmosphere in the cab is suffocating even though the AC is running full blast. “We lost three, sir,” Mattingley finally reports. “Haas, Penrose, and Jensen. Haas and Penrose were in the kitchen when the bad guys came in. They went down fighting. Jensen was in the dining room, took a stray bullet through the drywall. Cho and Berry are both walking wounded, stable but they could use a medevac.”

  “Do you have any of those knock-out pills left? You can dose them up and leave them at an ER. If they lose consciousness they’ll forget about me again and they won’t be able to tell the OPA anything.”

  “I’ll consider that as a last resort, sir. But if the OPA can do this thing to our memory, who’s to say they can’t reverse it at will?”

  “Fuck.”

  Here goes nothing, Gil thinks as he clears his throat.

  “What?” demands Mattingley.

  “Is there anything my people can do to help, sir?”

  “Hold that thought,” says the President. “Matt. Where are we going now?”

  The senior officer sits up straighter. “Sir, we have a couple of fallback houses as diversions, and the lamplighter team is setting up more of them ahead of us. But we had zero warning of that attack. I think either they picked up Officer Penrose leaving the rendezvous with Mr. Tancredy here, or the lamplighters are compromised. We can’t move to our alternates until we know one way or the other. So for now we hit the highway and keep moving. If we have to stop we’ll stake out a motel for a few hours.”

  “Right. So we’re going nowhere in particular.” The President’s tone indicates how much he thinks of this plan, which is very little indeed. “Mr. Tancredy, do you have any insights?”

  “Wh-wh-what”—Gil doesn’t normally stutter, but his mouth doesn’t seem to want to work properly—“Sorry, sir. What about the Brits?”

  “What indeed,” says the President, then pauses thoughtfully. “Mr. Tancredy, do you have anywhere else you need to be today or tomorrow?”

  “Uh, sir? I don’t think so. I mean, if you need me—”

  “Just checking.” Arthur closes his eyes and tilts his head back.

  “Sir?” asks Mattingley.

  “While they run us from pillar to post we stay too focussed on survival to think strategically. Which is what they want.” The President opens his eyes. “Here we are, running around Maryland trying to wake up people one or two at a time, get enough together to form a cell, a spark of awareness within an office here or a department there—woke people who see what’s happening and can form a shadow government in exile, a resistance. Except
—” He wets his lips. “—that’s pretty much exactly what they did to us, under our nose without us spotting it. They’re better at this game than we are. Hell, they’re playing with us, keeping us busy and grinding us down. This is, what, the third ambush in six weeks? The first we’ve taken serious casualties from, but … they only need to get lucky once. We need to be lucky every time.”

  “Sir, we—”

  “We need to change the rules on them!” Arthur snaps. “They wouldn’t be chasing me if they didn’t think I was some kind of a threat to them. Even if it’s just providing a figurehead, symbolizing something. Mr. Tancredy. Your group. How many of you are there? What can you do?”

  For the next half hour Gilbert gives the President a briefing on the background and current status of the Comstock organization, to the extent that he can—he wasn’t senior management, let alone executive level, to begin with, and since the amnesia spell took hold he’s lost track of everyone but his local stay-behind cell, embedded under deep cover in other government departments. “We actually forgot about you for about two months, sir,” he says ruefully. “In addition to the geas, the bad guys have been trying to erase the presidency from the historic record. We ran across a book they hadn’t destroyed or removed from the stacks in the Library of Congress, and while we were trying to figure out what was so important about it we woke up, and since then we’ve been sleeping in shifts—working to stay on top of the amnesia.”

  The President nods. It’s a story he’s heard before. Individual government workers accidentally waking, forming networks with friends and colleagues, staying loyal, keeping the mission alive. No geas is 100 percent effective all the time, according to the double-domes from the Thaumaturgic Research Office at DARPA: if it fails one in a million times, that’s a third of a thousand awakenings every morning. But if those who are fully aware are isolated, the next time they sleep they’ll forget everything again. And convincing someone that an outrageous ritual has caused them to forget the constitutional bedrock of their society is hard. For every hundred who remember one morning, ninety-five will have forgotten on the morrow. Maybe one in a thousand awakenings will infect others, creating a group of loyalists. There may be a hundred groups scattered throughout the federal machinery at any time, but as long as they remain isolated, they can’t swim against the tide of forgetfulness.