The Labyrinth Index

by Charles Stross

  DeeDee is accustomed to running an organization with hundreds of management cells working under her, supervising tens of thousands of bound servitors directly, liaising with budgetary oversight committees at federal agency level. In contrast, managing a handful of surveillance and pursuit teams and a coordination committee liaising with the various DC police and security services is fun. She’s actually about to work out in the field for the first time in over a decade. Admittedly she’s embedded in a headquarters team based in a mobile command center, with a Marine Corps helicopter squadron on call for logistic support and the entire weight of all of DC’s police forces behind her—but, fieldwork!

  “Good morning, everybody!” DeeDee announces brightly from the front of the briefing room. It’s a full house today. Besides her core team (PA, communications tech, Assistant Director (Operations), and two silver-suited blood guards), she’s facing a mob drawn variously from the Secret Service, the FBI, the United States Capitol Police, the DC Metropolitan Police, the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, the Marine Corps, Homeland Security, and the Parks Police. About the only federal enforcement entity not present today is the Postal Inspection Service, which is in the doghouse as far as DeeDee is concerned. The back of the room is packed wall to wall by nearly twenty more blood guards, standing eerily motionless.

  “You’re here to minimize interagency communication bottlenecks and reduce the risk of blue-on-blue fire in today’s operation. Which, in case you haven’t reviewed your briefing”—she flashes them a friendly grin, because she knows that everyone has felt mysteriously compelled to read and memorize the backgrounder her PA sent out the evening before—“is all about taking down a terrorist cell that we’ve been tracking around the DC area for the past few weeks before they assemble and commit the atrocity they’ve been planning.”

  Just about everyone in her audience sits up and leans forward. News of a high-profile terrorist incident is guaranteed to get their undivided attention, like a blood-dipped rag before hounds straining at the leash.

  DeeDee makes a peculiar gesture with her left hand, which she conceals from her audience behind her podium. “The group in question are highly trained and motivated political subversives protecting a kingpin they call the President.” Her hidden fingertips are briefly suffused by an electric glow as she utters the word, and she tenses, but none of her audience show any sign of woken recognition. “They believe that if they can seize control of the national media on their own terms, they will be able to spark a mass public uprising against the federal government. We’ve been tracking them for some time”—nearly 227 years—“and we believe that in the next two to three days they intend to activate multiple cells around the nation and commence a preplanned campaign.” She smiles grimly. “We’re not going to give them the chance. Instead, we’re going to round them up and shut the President’s conspiracy down hard, wherever possible taking them in possession of materials sufficient to secure a conviction for treason or sedition.”

  For the next hour, DeeDee delivers a quick rundown of the order of operations for today. She introduces the various team leads to one another, explains the role of the blood guard in liaising with her command center, and how she wants the so-called Presidential Protection Detail and their secondary terrorist cells to be detained, held incommunicado, and prepared for interrogation. “Zero hour is sixteen hundred,” she sums up. “And please remember, it’s essential that we apprehend the so-called President alive. The other cells are fair game and I expect you to prioritize neutralization over capture, but my boss is particularly keen to question the terrorist leader in person. So let’s make sure that happens.”

  There is a rumble of approval from her audience. They’re good people, she thinks, the best. “Let’s go to work!”

  * * *

  The grid shuts down twice more in the night. After the second time I mumble my apologies and retreat to the sofa, leaving him on the sleeping bag with a tablet for company. There’s some light reading on it: a low-classification orientation backgrounder on PHANG syndrome I wrote for briefing outsiders with clearance. I warn him there’ll be an exam later, if he lives long enough. (If he’s serious about turning, I can probably walk him through the process using the tablet as a teaching tool: damn Alex for inventing such an easy-to-understand visualization. If you could broadcast it over a TV channel … my blood runs cold at the thought.)

  But Jim’s plight is a problem for tomorrow, and right now I need some “me” time to clear my head. So I lie on the sofa, tense and anxious. If I wasn’t me I’d totally fire myself right now: I’m not fit to run this project. Fact is, we need the grid and we need Jim’s special talent. They’re both critical-path dependencies. But thanks to me screwing up and being spotted by the adversary in New York, Jim’s life is in immediate danger, and I’m desperately worried it’s impairing my managerial objectivity. Remind me again whose great idea it was to have him on this team? I mean, just because His Majesty sent me a list of names with heavy underlining, and some strong hints from Forecasting Ops, I didn’t have to plan to use his peculiar talents … hah hah, only kidding.

  Eventually I find I can no longer lie around, so shortly before six I write up a sitrep and send it via secure email for the boss’s afternoon briefing. There are some new reports waiting for me, including one from parts west—Yarisol has arrived, Brains and Pete have done their thing, and they’re awaiting extraction, which means, fuck, Jim has to be out of the grid by nine at the latest. The big white bird is ready to fly at two hours’ notice. All the pieces are converging on their zero-hour locations, which means that it’s time for Derek to make a call and roll his lucky dice.

  Derek has the second bedroom at the back of the house. I nudge the door ajar and take a quick look. He sleeps with the curtains drawn, bundled up under the quilt like a plump blood-filled burrito. His snores are far cuter than the rest of him, I decide, and he’s had plenty of sleep, so I hop onto the end of the bed and remorselessly peel the duvet back from his face. “Rise and shine!” I carol in his ear. He emits a pulse of terror sweat as he spasms awake: it smells heavenly. “It’s going to be a bright, sunny day and I need you to make a phone call!” I singsong at his stunned face. Or, if I’m honest about it, his more-than-slightly terrified one: Possibly I should have delegated his wake-up call to someone who doesn’t have enhanced dental assets? Too late to worry now. I see he’s wearing PJs, so I step down from the bed, taking the duvet with me. “Coffee downstairs in five!” I trill, then go next door to roust Janice.

  Janice is already up and dressed, not to mention grumpy. “What was that in aid of?” she asks. She’s packing her suitcase, clearly thinking ahead.

  “Misery loves company.” I shrug. “My offer of coffee stands. We need a briefing while Jim’s available.”

  The kitchen is still comfortably dark. I set the coffee machine going, then wait in the living room for the grid to power down. “Keep it off for now,” I tell Janice. To Jim, a trifle waspishly, “How do you feel?”

  Jim sits up, rubs his forehead, and yawns. He’s skinned down to underwear and is in the sleeping bag. “Not bad,” he says, then stills, listening. “I can’t hear them. That’s a good sign, right?”

  “Yes. Okay, I need you to clear out of the grid and suit up now.” I see the tablet. “Did you do your homework?”

  “I found the visualization,” he says. “It made my head hurt, like a random-dot stereoisogram, but I couldn’t make head nor tail of those, either.”

  Huh. “Maybe Janice can talk you through it later—”

  “—Now wait a minute—” she tries to interrupt.

  “—But right now we need the grid clear and reconfigured as a ghost-road endpoint.” That’s what the alfär call the extradimensional paths we know as ley lines. They’re stabilized wormholes, I think, but as we’re dealing with Jon and she’s forgotten more about this stuff than we’ve ever learned, we’ll use her terminology. “We’ve got people coming through in a couple of hours.”
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  “But I thought you wanted Jim isolated—”

  “Yeah, about that,” Jim tells her. “It’s not going to work: keeping me in a grid for life, I mean. So I vote we just get on with the mission and worry about fixing me later—you never know, I might get an opportunity to find and kill the PHANGs who hooked into me.”

  Janice peers at him dubiously from under her fringe. “Mission first?”

  “This is not a democracy, people,” I remind them. “But for what it’s worth, Jim’s right and the mission comes first.” I’ve had time to think, unfortunately. There’s a lot riding on us. I will be really upset if I lose anyone, especially Jim (who am I fucking kidding? I’ll be distraught), but I’ll deal with it when I get home. For now, the mission comes first, because if we fail, the PM will blame all of us. “Derek.” The man himself is just shuffling downstairs as I speak: he gives me a hangdog look. He looks as crumpled as an empty crisp packet. “Coffee’s getting cold.”

  Derek nods wordlessly and heads for the kitchen. I wince as I hear the crackling of his knee joints. He’s the oldest of us by quite a way, and he’s in poor shape. Maybe I shouldn’t have ridden him so hard, but he reliably manages to annoy me, and—

  I snap my fingers. “Phone,” I call after him.

  “What?”

  “I need you to phone the Comstock guy. Leave voicemail. Tell him to set up a meeting with the President at 11 a.m., or on the hour at any subsequent hour, the sooner the better. Party of two, me and Jim. They get to decide when and where and call us back on your burner number.”

  Derek returns from the kitchenette, holding his near-overflowing coffee mug in a death-grip. “A meeting with the President. Right.”

  “Oh, and I want you on standby to roll your dice some time today, at zero notice.” I grin at him and he twitches, slopping coffee on the cream carpet.

  “What? I can’t just—”

  “Oh yes you can,” I tell him. “It’s a straight-up, two-way choice between Plan A and Plan B, but I don’t want you to make the roll until I call the shot.”

  “Oh, now I get it. Is that the real reason I’m here?”

  “Yes, Derek,” I tell him, “we hauled you four thousand miles out of your comfort zone just so you could make a saving throw vs. Cthulhu. Happy now?”

  The thing about Derek is that his dice are almost as strange as he is. And he is pretty strange to begin with. Take a bunch of teenage D&D players, rounded up during the Satanic D&D Panic of the early ’80s. Drop them into Camp Sunshine, the Laundry’s detention center for occult offenders. Now release all of them except the Dungeon Master (who would be diagnosed with Asperger’s if it happened in the 1990s, but consequently strikes the ignorant interrogation crew as just possibly being fucked-up enough to be a type of cultist they’ve not previously encountered). By the time they realize he is, in fact, harmless, he’s been institutionalized. That’s Derek.

  Derek spent a third of a century moderating a very weird role-playing game as rehab therapy for a constantly changing audience of captured cultists. Quite how weird his game had become was something we didn’t actually establish until his dice became a problem that could no longer be ignored.

  If you roll a normal d6—a cubic dice—repeatedly, the mean of the random number sequence it outputs is 3.5 ((1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6) / 6). Derek’s d6 dice, which he made himself out of god-knows-what raw materials he found in Camp Sunshine, and which glow with Cerenkov radiation, aren’t weighted … but when you roll them they average 3.1415926535 and so on, grinding endlessly to converge on an average score of π. And don’t get me started on his d4, d8, d12, d20, and dTeapot. The contents of Derek’s dice bag should probably be a state secret, but every mathematician we’ve sent to study them has required months of therapy afterwards, so now we leave them in the custody of their creator.

  The purpose of rolling dice is to generate a random number—one as close to truly random as you can get. True randomness is apparently rather difficult to approach using computational—which is to say, magical—techniques. Derek’s irrational dice don’t merely generate truly random numbers; rolling them is like throwing chaff in the face of an oracle’s radar vision. Forecasting Ops hate them. They blur the future. And that’s why I brought them, and their carrier, along on this mission. They’re backup for my imposter syndrome.

  “Derek?” I repeat his name to get his attention.

  “What?” He shakes himself.

  “Comstock, phone, snap to it.”

  Janice looks unhappy. “Wait, you’re just going to walk into a—”

  Jim cracks his knuckles. “Papers?” he asks me.

  “They’ll be here by ten.” The special passports with diplomatic visas will arrive by courier later this morning. Jim is an officially accredited representative of H.M. Government. I’m an actual legislator. It’s not bulletproof and it won’t keep the Nazgûl from messing with us, but this is DC and the ordinary cops are used to dealing with foreign VIPs. Or not dealing with them, because they can’t legally arrest someone with diplomatic immunity, and the mountain of paperwork (not to mention negative press attention) that results from shooting a foreign diplomat is memorably traumatic. “Let’s do breakfast, then get ready.”

  * * *

  Derek phones Mr. Tancredy’s voicemail and leaves a message, reading from my tablet, as Jim cooks up breakfast—scrambled eggs, a metric ton of toast, orange juice, and some nameless fried meat that claims to be bacon but isn’t. Since he’s distracting himself in the kitchen, I have a quiet word with Janice, who goes to the grid in the living room and reconfigures it for its original purpose. While Jim and I are off meeting the President, she’ll see if she can scrounge up enough extra components to make a portable isolation grid for Jim, but it doesn’t look promising. If we had some way of backtracking to the source of a V syndrome contagion … but no. And I’m wasting too much time overthinking this shit.

  After breakfast Jim and I dress as if we’re about to spend a day in front of a parliamentary committee. I wear my anti-sunlight body stocking under my business suit, and Janice helps me with the latex face paint so I look less artificial than usual—more TV news presenter, less alien android. I stash an emergency makeup kit in the backpack full of gear Janice and Derek laid in for us yesterday when we called to say we’d lost our luggage, along with a basic first-aid pack. Then we sit around and wait.

  At nine thirty the doorbell rings. Derek answers it, and signs for a slim envelope. I open it and quickly flip through my passport before handing Jim his own. Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern … with an added bound-in insert that says in flowery diplo-speak Yeah, we’re serious this time. Oh my, it’s official: I’m now a representative of the government. Being me, I tuck a short but extremely sharp ceramic knife blade between the pages. Because you never know when you’ll get thirsty.

  Jim scrutinizes his new passport with a faint frown. He doesn’t fool me: I hear his pulse accelerate unevenly. “It’s really happening,” he says.

  “Yes, it is.”

  Janice is not the world’s most sensitive person, but she picks up on what’s going on. She grabs Derek by the sleeve of his cardigan and leads him in the direction of the grid in the living room, asking him something about timesheets. I meet Jim’s gaze. “Feel anything unusual?” I ask, too casually.

  He shrugs. “Should I?” The frown deepens. “Nothing like yesterday’s attack on the train, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Well, okay—” My phone vibrates for attention and I glance at it. “That’s the Colorado Springs team. They’re about to come through. That’s our ten-minute warning.” I swallow and look back at him.

  “How long will they take to get here?” he asks.

  “I have no idea.” Could be thirty seconds, or thirty minutes. Anything more than three hours would be bad, very bad. The ghost roads distort distance and time. They also need to be nailed down at both en
ds lest the travelers end up lost forever. I raise my voice: “Janice? I just got the yellow alert from Jon. We need to bring the grid up in anchor mode.” Jim just nods at me silently, and for a moment I wish I hated him. It’d make this so much easier.

  I raise my voice again: “Janice? When you’re done there, I’d like you to spend some time with Jim, with Alex’s visualizer. See if you can make it clear to him.”

  To infect someone with PHANG, it’s not enough just to look at an eyeball-melting, higher-dimensional projection. You need to understand it, not just admire it. I’m not a programmer or a mathematician, although I’ve picked up some stuff over the years. (You can’t work in the Laundry or run a team of software devs and not do that.) It took Alex several hours of one-to-one tuition to get it into my head (before we realized that it wasn’t such a good idea, of course).

  Jim is a cop. Admittedly he’s a very senior one with a postgraduate degree. He can write spreadsheet macros and run regression analyses of crime hotspot statistics, but whatever paranormal abilities he’s got are strictly superhero track, not ritual or computational. It’s no surprise that Jim couldn’t figure it out on his own. And Janice didn’t work her way through a PhD at Oxford as a part-time teaching assistant the way Alex did: her teaching skills are non-existent. So this is a long shot—it’s just better than doing nothing.

  But before Janice can take Jim aside, Derek rushes in. “I got a reply!” he says excitedly. “I got a reply! The President wants to meet you at eleven!” He waves a sheet of paper covered in scrawled instructions. “Here!”

  Jim and I stand as I take the paper and glance at it. “Okay,” I tell Derek, “we’re on our way. If we’re not back and you don’t hear from us by one o’clock, assume we’re blown and execute Plan C.”