The Labyrinth Index

by Charles Stross

  “Thank you for coming out here—” Gaby breaks off to yawn, stretching her arms above her head. “Where was I?” She looks confused.

  Pete smiles. “You were just telling us you’ve had a very long day, and so have we.” He puts his mug down. “I think we’re done here.”

  * * *

  I’m about to break the fourth wall again, dear reader. So sorry (not sorry).

  If you’ve been paying attention to this journal—really paying attention, that is—you’ll have accumulated some questions by now, both obvious ones and non-obvious.

  Let me tackle the non-obvious one first: what you’re reading here is not a sanctioned workplace journal, but the unexpurgated and politically perilous truth. I’m writing it down for the usual reason—to prevent loss of institutional knowledge if anything happens to me—but doing so outside work, which is a huge security violation. It’s for the SA’s sub-rosa task force, whereof we do not speak, and if it falls into the wrong hands my skull will probably end up decorating the Prime Minister’s Tzompantli.

  I am keeping an official workplace journal as well, under lock and key in the office, but I’m a whole lot more circumspect in what I put in it because I’m pretty sure Iris’s minions are reading over my shoulder. Iris is a fan of Cardinal Richelieu: “Give me six lines written by an honest man, and I will find something in it with which to hang him.” This means that when you see me express an opinion in this account, it’s what I think, but not necessarily what I say. And if you compare it to my official journal, you’ll see the opinions expressed there are exactly what the New Management would expect of a loyal servant.

  Now, you may well have other questions, concerning my methods. Such as, “How does she know what happened in that meeting of aerospace and tech-sector executives? Surely she wasn’t there?” Or perhaps, “The labyrinth in the Pentagon basement is home to a necrotic human mouthpiece who speaks with the voice of Dread Cthulhu—really?” Or even, “Do you expect us to believe that?”

  Reader, I work with the intelligence sources I’ve got access to. These include remote viewing, divination, and the gnomic utterances of Forecasting Ops, as well as more concrete material such as Gilbert Tancredy’s debriefing transcripts and the satellite uplink from 302 Heavy. But in some cases I just have to make do with educated guesswork.

  History is written by the survivors, a narrative they compose to explain events to themselves. So the historicity of journals like this one—their accuracy and authenticity—is a function of the reliability of the narrator.

  I like to think that I’m a hard-headed realist, but I can’t be everywhere at once, and I can’t swear to the gospel truth of events I didn’t witness and have no direct record of. Critical parts of this narrative depend on circumstances that will forever be inaccessible to us: erased from the record, or even edited out of the timeflow of our universe. If the Mouthpiece of the Lord of Sleep orders the Deputy Director of the Nazgûl to send out for a Desi Chinese carryout, then there’s probably a restaurant somewhere with a written record saying General Tso’s Chicken and Gobi Manchurian—but if the city in question has been inundated by BLUE HADES or lightly nuked by North Korea we’re not going to be able to prove it. Human knowledge has hard limits, and when I reach them, I have to wing it.

  I’m not a professional historian—I only studied it to “A” level—and I have, perforce, winged it quite a lot in preparing this account. I know relatively little about the opposition, who they are, and what makes them tick. I don’t understand them the way I understand Iris and her murderous little helpers from the Cult of the Black Pharaoh. To say nothing of Jonquil, Iris’s backstabbing daughter, or even Yarisol—who, for all that she’s a non-neurotypical elven vampire sorceress, is less alien than some of the minions of the Operational Phenomenology Agency.

  So here’s my take on the OPA.

  They’re a modern intelligence organization—in other words, a bureaucratic enterprise tasked with providing intelligence to policy makers and executing covert operations in accordance with their orders. All large organizations are either superorganisms whose cells are human bodies, or very slow artificial intelligences that use human beings as gears in the Babbage engines that run their code. Pick a metaphor and stick to it: I prefer the biological one, but it’s a matter of taste. Some of the superorganism’s cells are formed into organs that carry out various vital functions. Human Resources is the liver and kidneys, dedicated to purifying and excreting unwanted toxins. Quality Assurance and Standards are the immune system, stamping out rogue cells and insidious infections and other parasitic activities. Project Management is the circadian rhythm, and board-level executives form the cerebral cortex, the source of the organism’s emergent self-directed behavior. Behold Leviathan, anatomized.

  Different countries have different bureaucratic cultures, and different cultures are prone to their own distinctive types of malfunction. In the UK we’re unreasonably prone to regulation by accountancy or, failing that, tradition. Whereas in the US intelligence community, Taylorism and rule-by-MBA run rampant. They’re prone to random reorgs and overstaffing, so wherever they can they try to outsource ancillary work. And their executives counter this by trying to reduce the number of human bodies they employ.1

  The preferred ways of reducing the number of employees in the twenty-first century are automation and outsourcing. About 80 percent of the NSA’s total body count are actually employees of various consultancy firms, because that way they don’t show up on the org chart. Their remaining internal managers can point to the black boxes that do the job and sneer, “Employees? We don’t have no steenking employees!” (Tell that to Edward Snowden.)

  In the case of the OPA, with its emphasis on alien extradimensional nightmares, they outsourced their tentacle monster fighting capability to the thaumaturgic equivalent of Blackwater and Palantir, organizations staffed by tentacle monsters. Then regulatory capture ensued, and the monsters ended up running the asylum.

  Now ask yourself, what are the goals of monsters?

  Many of the worst monsters are regrettably human. We know—history has given us the tools to interrogate them—the goals of Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, of Stalin, Pol Pot, Hernán Cortés, and Andrew Jackson. They’re all too bloody human—more human than I—and all of them can claim a much higher body count than any vampire. (A thought I console myself with when I’m feeling weepy and maudlin after downing my monthly blood meal.) I haven’t even caught up with the Yorkshire Ripper, never mind Harold Shipman: as monsters go, I’m an amateur.

  So much for human monsters: now consider the inhuman ones.

  We know the goals of the members of the alfär host—the Host of Air and Darkness. They’re the surviving military force of a non-human hominid species that evolved on another version of our own planet. They’re repugnant and in many cases downright nasty, but they’re no harder to understand than, say, a particularly bloodthirsty tribe of chimpanzees—if chimps invented Blitzkrieg and were as pretty as Peter Jackson elves: it’s all about survive and prevail, primate dominance hierarchies redux.

  Other monsters are harder to get a handle on. I have spent time in the presence of the Black Pharaoh’s avatar, the Prime Minister. He presents Himself as a human being, with human-scale goals, but He is always at least one jump ahead of us in any conversation. I have the impression that we might not be able to understand His true, esoteric objectives, even if He was willing to share them with us. His humanity is a mask, although it’s intended to be a seductive one.

  In the case of the OPA’s leadership, we don’t know what their ultimate goals are, and arguably we can’t, any more than the dodo birds of Mauritius had any clue about the ultimate objectives of the human sailors who hunted them to extinction.

  We have established some of the OPA’s proximate goals through observation, signals intelligence, technical monitoring, oracular activities, and (occasionally) phoning them up and asking. We know about their plan to dismantle the inner planets o
f the solar system, turn them into a gigantic orbital Dyson swarm of solar-powered quantum processors running the code necessary to reboot Cthulhu (who isn’t dead, merely exiled to an inaccessible computational state), then hand over power to their Dread Lord. This is understood. But their long-term plans—what they expect to do once Cthulhu returns—remain opaque. Maybe they’re like Iris’s people, who think if they willingly throw in their lot as servants they’ll be able to surf to survival on the coat-tails of their chosen deity. Or maybe not. There’s simply no way to be sure.

  So when I present you with a description of a scene involving our friend the Deputy Director—I’m tired of that title: let’s call her DeeDee from now on—presenting the Mouthpiece of Cthulhu with a bag of Cheetos and a bottle of Old Buzzard and begging him for guidance, please grant me your conditional suspension of disbelief: this may not be exactly how it happened, but it’s close enough to serve as a placeholder for our adversaries’ activities, upon which you can base your interpretation of subsequent events.

  * * *

  Back to the story …

  DeeDee stands before the Mouthpiece once more, scrutinizing the avatar of her dead god for clues.

  A week has passed, and the signs of the Mouthpiece’s physical deterioration are now unmistakable: the end is annoyingly close at hand. The once-human body is now visibly degrading, entering its penultimate instar, despite the best efforts of the medical support team with their IV drips and parenteral nutrition line. Muscle and soft tissue liquefies. Hair and skin sloughs away in patches to reveal the chitinous exoskeleton of the avatar. The Mouthpiece’s face has gone soft and floppy, lips sagging open to reveal mandibles taking shape within. His eyeballs have clouded over beneath their unblinking lids. Soon the remaining human flesh will sag loose. The inner arthropod will pick and chew at it, increasingly voracious, recycling the biomass to fuel its growth as it matures.

  To witness the emergence of a perfect miniature copy of the sleeping god from within the flesh of the Mouthpiece is one of the great privileges of DeeDee’s post, but sadly, there comes a point at which the emergent vespid endoparasite can no longer enunciate human words. The deep buzzing of her wings and the harsh stridulation of her yellow-armored legs are unsuited to human communication. When it reaches this stage, a new human host must be brought before the Mouthpiece, who will lay her holy eggs in the new flesh. Next, the High Priests (of whom DeeDee is one) will perform the Rite of Reincarnation, whereby they dedicate the outgoing Mouthpiece’s mortal husk to the new brood. This all takes time, and more time as the spent remains are sent to an SCP Repository for preservation. Further days pass as the dominant larva from the brood (only one survives) migrates to the host’s brain stem and assumes control. Days during which Her guidance will be unavailable.

  “Approach our vessel,” buzzes the wasp inside the decaying skin.

  DeeDee rises from her obeisance and walks forward, stopping at arm’s length. “Glory to the Lord of Sleep. How may I serve you?”

  “This vessel is failing, and we have come to a decision about its replacement,” says the Mouthpiece. “It comes to us that there exists a perfect host body that will serve our immediate need for a mouthpiece, and also compel the submission of the renegades who resist our will.”

  The Mouthpiece stridulates again, rubbing its chitinous hindmost legs against its rotting abdomen to produce a grating, buzzing sound. Fatty, blood-streaked tissue oozes around the edges of the open wounds.

  “Who is this new host my Lord desires?” DeeDee asks cautiously. She can make a pretty good guess, but it’s a bad idea to put words into the mouth of the Lord of Sleep. At best one risks offending them. At worst—

  “The body is that of the one named President,” buzzes the Mouthpiece. “It will make a fitting brood sac for my larvae.”

  This is not an order that DeeDee is happy to receive. The President thinks he’s free, but in reality he’s contained—he hasn’t travelled more than a hundred miles from the Capitol at any time since the geas descended. Meanwhile, his team is doing a splendid job of finding (and thereby exposing) every ad-hoc cell of Sleepless government workers in the DC area. The President makes an irresistible bellwether, and at the current rate, in another couple of weeks, statistical analysis suggests the Sleepless problem should be entirely suppressed. On the other hand, keeping the Lord of Sleep happy is a higher calling, and it occurs to her that the Lord of Sleep, for all that they are utterly inhuman in their thought processes, might be onto something.

  “Let me just be completely clear on this—you want the President to be your next mouthpiece?” The Mouthpiece nods, sagging on its throne. “May I ask what purpose this serves?”

  “The power of President is all that sustains the remaining Sleepless. Once we subsume his form, the rebels will succumb to us.”

  Well, that makes sense: everything will run just that bit more smoothly. Reassured, DeeDee bows before the throne. “It shall be done, Highness.”

  The Mouthpiece’s lips sag open, revealing a split mandible. “Make it so: My Lord hungers.”

  * * *

  There is a single, very tarnished silver lining to the utter shit-show of Jim’s situation: we don’t need to bother with condoms any more. My symbionts will protect me from anything Jim might give me, including pregnancy. So I dry my nose and calm down, we undress each other and cuddle for a while, then abruptly he rolls on top of me and I wrap my arms and legs around him and we rut like it’s the end of the world. I shudder and chew his shoulder gently as I come, and feel the unfamiliar dampness as he shudders convulsively. Afterwards we lie in a sticky tangle, stroking each other gently. It’s good sex, and it still totally sucks. I should be happy, not sad.

  “A penny for your thoughts, love,” he whispers to the curve of my ear.

  I plaster myself along the length of his body, feeling the heat of his core radiating through me. “I don’t want you to die, but I’m afraid you’re not going to like the side effects of option three.” That is, of self-infection with PHANG.

  I run him through the basics at high speed. The extreme ultraviolet photosensitivity. The symmetry-broken auto-prosopagnosia. The drastically upgraded immune system. The ability to draw on the V-symbionts for accelerated reflexes and strength. The dental hypertrophy. And lastly, the Thirst. The Thirst has lethal consequences—Jim totally gets that, from the receiving end. But I feel him tense up and withdraw emotionally as I try to explain it from the other side. “The Thirst never completely goes away. It aches like a stomach ulcer.” (I had one once: a medication side effect.) “Worse when you haven’t fed. When you feed, it subsides—or maybe that’s the endorphin rush.” (Because, believe me, when your V-symbionts get their fangs in, the reward kick they give you is orgasmic.) “It takes a lot of willpower not to feed promiscuously.” (Only about half of the Scrum had what it took. The others are dead.) “You know that old vegan slogan, ‘meat is murder’? I’d like you to imagine you’re a vegan with a life-threatening incurable illness that means you’ve got to eat steak tartare with every meal.”

  “You sound like you hate yourself,” Jim says.

  “When I stop to think about it, yeah. But I’ve had a lot of practice in avoiding looking too closely at what I have to do to survive.” Compliance with the mile-high stack of social expectations you grow up with as a girl turns out to be mandatory if you want to get ahead in business. Be blonde, be skinny, and don’t forget to smile, bitch. Buy the right shampoo, perfume, cosmetics, dress, shoes, and you might be acceptable, but really you’re just deplorable. I worked for years in a high-visibility corporate role where I had to wear hose, heels, and lipstick to fit in. Confronting just about any manifestation of sexism, however aggressive and unpleasant, was a fast track to career failure. I’ve been walking a tightrope over a river full of piranhas all my life. You learn not to look down, or you go mad.

  “I didn’t look like this before I transitioned. V-symbionts modify you to help you hunt better, and they work with whate
ver you’ve got.” (If you’re mouse-blonde and female, they’ll turn you into Vampire Barbie whether you like it or not.) “I’m a fake, it’s just predator camouflage.”

  “You’re not a fake.” He runs his hand down my flank slowly, possessively. I shiver. “What happens to my existing powers if I take the red pill?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell him truthfully. “None of my people started out metahuman. Existing thaumaturgic practitioners don’t seem to lose their mojo when they turn, though. If anything, they got stronger—and it cures their K syndrome. But we can’t count on you remaining mission-effective afterwards.”

  “Shit.” He pulls back from me, and I feel the chill of sweat evaporating.

  I didn’t bring my Fuckboy along on this trip just for the sake of the happy fun sexytimes that shore up our cover story: he’s got a vital part to play. Jim is the type of metahuman we call a tank (subtype: flying). He finds it totally annoying, because when he acquired his powers he was already a Chief Superintendent, the equivalent of a colonel in the army, fasttracked for promotion within the Met. Two years later he’s still a Chief Superintendent (or was, before the PM pulled his name out of the hat). Turns out that being called out of meetings to punch bank robbers is a career black mark when you’re senior management. But we’re not dealing with London Metropolitan Police internal politics anymore, and we did have a role for a skytank with anti-terrorism command experience. We had to ditch his armor back in the hotel in New York—the suit that came in our parcel drop, along with my “engagement presents”—but we could probably hack something together from the sporting goods and military surplus in DC—if he wasn’t already a mission kill.

  “Right now, with your current threat status, you’re not mission ready,” I tell him. “Worse, you’re tying up one of our critical-path capabilities.” (The containment grid we’re lying in right now.) “And I’m not going to order you to transition, because it’s irrevocable and there’s only about a 50 percent survival rate. Next time the grid powers down I’m going to get on the internet and expense you a ticket to Heathrow, seat class no object, on the first available flight.” (And cross my fingers that hostile PHANGs don’t kill him before the plane lands.) “Then we’ll work out some other way to continue the extraction. Are we clear?”