Dead Lies Dreaming

by Charles Stross

  In the two years he’d been working full-time on Peter and Wendy: A Cyberpunk Dystopia in Space, Imp had completed eleven drafts of the script. He had also figured out how to get unemployed actors to work for him “for the exposure” (it helped that Imp could convince rain that it was dry and night it was day); how to walk into an Apple Store and blag his way into being given a sweet Mac Pro loaded with video editing software; how to talk his way into endless free training courses in film editing, and even a one-on-one workshop session with Robert McKee; how to cozen his dealer into giving him a 70 percent discount on blow; and how to carry out foolproof bank robberies.

  He hadn’t actually filmed anything yet, although that was going to change real soon now.

  “We start shooting at the beginning of next month, and that’s final,” he announced, staring up at the smoke dragons circling lazily under the ceiling lights. “Before we can do that, we need another job, to pay for the film and the lab time. But don’t worry, I’m sure something will come up…”

  * * *

  The day after she rescued Professor Skullface, Wendy returned to work. Her first destination was the staff canteen for a coffee that hadn’t been festering in its jug for hours, and her second call was Gibson’s office.

  “I’ll take the job,” she said. A cold night in the dark with no electricity had made up her mind for her.

  “Great, first I need you to sign this—” He slid a sheet of paper titled Nondisclosure Agreement across the desk—“then I’ll talk you through this—” a much fatter document titled Employment Contract: Transhuman Investigations Division. “It’ll take a while. Then I can brief you on the job.”

  It did not escape her attention that the NDA came first: but she signed it anyway. It was pretty much what she expected. All the obligations for secrecy were on her, and all the benefits went to HiveCo. The employment contract was a little better. It guaranteed an hourly rate plus a higher pay band when on jobs, plus actual sick pay and annual leave—“This looks like I’m on salary?” she asked.

  “Next clause.”

  “One month probationary period, then I’m permanent, subject to three months’ notice if I want to leave?”

  “Unless we fire you for gross misconduct.” Gibson’s expression was unreadable, but Wendy got the message loud and clear. We need you. Which also meant, she realized, we’re getting you cheap while we can. But with no experience in this higher-level role she had no bargaining leverage—

  “This non-compete.” She put her finger on the next clause. “You know that shit is legally unenforceable in the UK?”

  Gibson smiled. “That is the current law, yes.”

  “Doesn’t matter, I’m not having it.” She crossed her arms and glowered.

  In the end they compromised: three months’ notice with three months’ non-compete, and a no-headhunting agreement on top, rather than the two years’ non-compete the contract started out with. HR had given Gibson some wiggle room for negotiating. Then they signed both copies, after which Gibson shook her hand across the desk and said, “Welcome to Investigations! I knew we’d come to an arrangement. Now you’ve got an appointment in Secure Briefing C for your first assignment.”

  “Wait.” Wendy stood. “Don’t I get the usual HR dog and pony show? Induction, code of conduct, training in procedures, uniform kit?”

  “You get all of that except a uniform,” Gibson said as he walked around his desk, “but we’ll fit it in when you’ve got some dead time—there’s an urgent job waiting for you, and I want you to hit the ground running. Right after lunch, if not before.”

  Secure Briefing C was in a part of the building Wendy hadn’t visited previously. That wing was secured with a smart badge reader that her ID now had permission to open. Other than that, it looked much like any other HiveCo site office until Gibson waved his own badge at a reader outside an unmarked door and ushered her into something out of an X-Men movie. Exposed ductwork and cables lined a hollow concrete cube that contained a transparent-walled room suspended from hooks in the ceiling. Even the furniture in the glass room was transparent—off-the-shelf Louis Ghost chairs and a matching transparent table. The only opaque artifact it contained was a Microsoft Surface tablet sitting on the table.

  “What is this?” Wendy asked, looking around as Gibson shut the outer door and turned a handle. Her ears popped and the hiss of air conditioning dampened.

  “Anti-eavesdropping precautions. We’re suspended inside a Faraday cage with a pressure-controlled, filtered air supply. There are no hiding places for drones or bugs.” Someone had doodled a pentacle from a seventies Hammer Horror movie on the bare cement below the transparent floor. Now it lit up, glowing an eerie green like a poisonous deep-sea creature warning off its predators. “Ah, good, grid’s up. Have a seat, Deere.”

  “What kind of eavesdropping needs this, sir?”

  “Demons.” Gibson said it matter-of-factly. “Also vampires.” He gestured at the ceiling where a couple of LED lights reflected violet highlights off the Perspex roof. “The UV spots are to deal with them.” Above the dangling overhead lights, another pentacle-in-a-circle diagram pulsed red. “Not to mention gates into the dreamlands. You can’t be too careful these days.”

  Wendy took a couple of seconds to catch up. “I thought we were in the business of apprehending criminals, sir.”

  “Yes, but there are criminals and there are criminals.”

  “All this—” her gesture swept the room—“you’re talking about magical shit? I thought we were dealing with transhumans…”

  “Same thing,” he said dismissively. “Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. Where do you think your power comes from, anyway?” Before she could answer he tapped the computer screen, then plugged a small USB key into one port. “It’s a physical authentication token,” he told her. “We don’t just rely on passwords for this stuff.” He stabbed the ball of his thumb with a sterile needle, then smeared a trace of blood onto a glass window in the USB stick. “Soul lock confirmed.” The Windows login screen vanished to reveal a PowerPoint project and a green-screen window that, after a moment, Wendy recognized as a terminal emulator connected to the Police National Computer system. (And how that worked inside a shielded room was anybody’s guess.) “Okay, here we go. First, I want to show you the security camera feed from a robbery at a Pennine Bank branch on Kensington High Street three weeks ago. Then we’ll get to the really interesting stuff—what the perps said in the interview suite.”

  If you caught the robbers why are you showing me this? Wendy wondered. But she was on the clock at her new working pay grade, so she nodded and went with the flow.

  The video side of the presentation divided the screen into quadrants, each showing the view from a different camera covering the interior of a bank branch. The bank was laid out old-style, with three counters separating the clerks from the members of the public queuing in the lobby. A couple of ATMs had been installed along one wall. To one side of the counters there was an armored door with a mirror-glass window, and there were open-plan desks out in front for staff dealing with customer transactions that didn’t involve cash. It was clearly a busy time of day—12:54 according to the clock in one of the CCTV windows, peak lunchtime rush hour—and ten customers were queueing for the clerks at the two staffed windows.

  “Old-school bank at lunchtime. Now watch this,” Gibson said.

  Three figures wearing masks and body-stockings rushed the front door. Wendy leaned forward. They weren’t obviously armed, but—transhumans, she figured—the body language was aggressive and the leader was shouting orders, telling the customers to get on the ground. The elderly video cameras didn’t deliver enough pixels to lip-read from, and there was no audio track.

  “He’s saying, ‘This is a stick-up, you are all hostages, open the door to the back or we start shooting people.’”

  Wendy drew breath sharply. In her thankfully limited experience, sane robbers didn’t do that: robbery
was bad enough, but with just one sentence the leader had added kidnapping and aggravated assault charges on top. Which, under the new laws promulgated by the New Management, pretty much guaranteed a short drop with a sudden stop at the end.

  The bank clerks weren’t stupid: they jumped up and fled. But a couple of seconds later the security door sprang open. Someone in a control center elsewhere, intent on avoiding a massacre, had hit the big red button. (The liability payout if a customer lost their life would be far larger than any amount of cash held in the branch safe.) Two of the robbers rushed through the door into the back office, while the one waiting out front with the hostages struck a pose.

  The camera views switched. In the back room, the villains shoveled the contents of the cash drawers into laundry bags. The staff had all made a clean escape. Desks cleared out, one of the robbers turned and asked the other a question. He shrugged.

  “He asked if the vault was open, if they were supposed to open it and take the contents,” Gibson explained. “He said he didn’t know, it wasn’t in the script.” Wendy squinted, suddenly getting an inkling that this wasn’t business as usual. “Now watch the next bit.”

  The two supervillains stalked out of the back room and lined up beside their colleague. Then, to Wendy’s astonishment, they high-fived and bowed to the hostages.

  “He said, ‘That’s a wrap.’” Gibson narrated. “Quote, ‘We nailed the shoot.’”

  Half the customers stood up and scattered, rushing for the exit. The other half mobbed the supervillains. For a few seconds it was chaos in the bank, then two cops stormed through the door and tased the robbers. “Count them,” Gibson hissed. “Count everybody.”

  “Pause it for me?” Wendy grabbed the Surface and began to scrub back and forth through the video. “Ten customers at first, four when it ends, plus two cops—no, wait, what am I looking for?”

  “The money bags. Where did they go?”

  It took Wendy just a minute to retrace the sequence. “Holy shit. Holy shit.”

  “Did you see that customer’s face?” Gibson demanded.

  “Nuh-no…” Wendy blinked in surprise. “He didn’t show his face to any of the cameras, not at any time.” In admiration. “That was slick. Tell me about the marks?”

  “Three wannabe actors.” Gibson huffed like a frustrated dog after a snatched-away snack. “They answered an ad on Facebook offering work on an amateur video project. Cinema verité, heard of it? The pitch was that the director had rented an old bank building and had replaced the CCTV cameras with the kit they needed to film his movie. The customers and clerks were all extras. The wannabes were given a script and told to make it look good. They thought it was entirely legal and they were doing it for the exposure.”

  “Except it was a real bank and the real robber was waiting to snatch the cash and do a dash while they provided a distraction?”

  “Pretty much.” Gibson scowled.

  “And the transhuman angle?”

  “The marks all met the director. He pitched them in person, script and all, gave them an audition and screen test, and promised them a good day’s pay for a good day’s work. You’d think they could tell us who the guy that hired them was, wouldn’t you? Or that they’d have asked some questions?”

  “They didn’t ask—” Wendy had a suspicious mind at the best of times, and now her inner alarm bells were ringing. “Riiight.”

  “They were tampered with.” Gibson’s scowl deepened. “The loss adjusters hired a forensic psychiatrist to examine them. They were acting under a high-level geas. If it ever goes to trial they’ll probably be found not guilty on grounds of diminished responsibility. The, uh, director has supernatural powers of conviction: people believe whatever he tells them. The bag man is impossible to grab, he’s as slippery as an eel, and the getaway driver—just don’t go there. This isn’t the only job the gang has pulled in the past two months, Deere, or even the first job that’s hit one of our customers.”

  “You want the director and his associates, not the fall-guy actors.”

  “Yes! But it’s not going to be easy. Most bank robbers have a simple MO, which is how we eventually catch them. That, or they talk to someone and we get a tip. These guys are different. Not only do they have transhuman characteristics, but they do a variety of jobs—not just banks. They’re really good at not showing up on videos, and they mix it up creatively.” Gibson pulled the Surface over to his side of the desk. “So let’s talk about their most recent job, when they hit the cash room at Hamleys Toy Shop…”

  * * *

  Bernard wasn’t answering his phone, so Eve decided to pay him a visit.

  She stood on his doorstep, waiting impatiently for him to answer the entryphone. After a minute, she pushed the button again.

  “Dammit, Harris,” she swore quietly. She’d expected him to report back this morning—the commission she’d dangled in front of him should have seen to that. She pulled out her phone—a Caviar-modded iPhone 6S with a 24-carat gold body—and called his landline again. There was no reply, and Harris’s antique tape-based answering machine didn’t cut in.

  She turned to make eye contact with the replacement Gammon. (The old one had proven inadequate; the new one was ex-military and vastly more effective.) He came to attention. “Open it,” she ordered.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He cleared his throat. “If you’d care to stand back…”

  Eve stepped away from the door as the Gammon undid the button on his suit jacket, shrugged to loosen his shoulders, then pivoted and slammed a size thirteen boot into the lock.

  The door crashed open and rebounded. The Gammon caught it before it slammed shut and held it for her: “Ma’am.”

  Eve stepped past him without comment. This one’s an improvement, she noted. Maybe he’s a keeper.

  She took the stairs to the flat at a measured pace, not hurrying—it wouldn’t do to arrive out of breath—but not dawdling, either. Something was clearly wrong. Bernard never forgot to switch on the answering machine on the rare occasions when he went out.

  Eve paused on the top-floor landing. The Gammon arrived behind her, not even huffing. “Ma’am?”

  “One moment.” Eve reached towards the door handle, then paused. “Hmm.”

  “Want me to open it, ma’am?”

  Preoccupied, Eve forgot to bite his head off. (He was, in any case, trailing her own line of thought, albeit a few steps behind.) “Not yet.”

  She clasped her hands behind her back as she reached for the door handle again, this time by force of will alone. Mind over matter, she chanted to herself, quivering with effort. A prickly perspiration broke out across her forehead. Eve had a knack for telekinesis, but to her total disgust, she could bench-press greater weights using her arm muscles alone. Her other abilities were all so risibly feeble that a less determined woman would have given up on them. But Eve had persisted, exploring her limits and learning how to use her powers in combination and to best effect. Precision and perception could, if deployed correctly, compensate for a lack of raw power. So although her mind could barely hold a twenty-kilogram weight against gravity, she could reach behind a keyhole and feel for hidden tumblers. And it took much less than twenty kilos of force to spring a Yale lock.

  There was a click: then the doorknob rotated, and the door swung softly inwards.

  “Ma’am?”

  She pointed: “That’s a steel door frame, and the door’s reinforced. You’d have broken your ankle.” And a broken front door and an unlocked inner door will tell a misleading story if the police come calling. “You go first.”

  The Gammon had already snapped on a pair of blue surgical gloves. He bulled through the door and swept along Bernard’s narrow hallway, one hand concealed under his jacket. He cast left, covering the hall closet and the bathroom, then right, checking out the living room. “Clear,” he called softly. On into the rear of the flat: the compact kitchen, the bedroom. “Clear, clear—” At the end of the hall, the office door stood shut. The Ga
mmon froze beside it, drew his pistol, then looked to Eve for direction.

  “Allow me.” Eve stepped into the bedroom doorway, then reached out with her mind. The door handle turned and the Gammon crouched as he followed the door in, covering the room.

  “Clear,” he said, then paused. “Ma’am, you’re not going to like this.”

  “How long has he been dead?” she asked, stepping out from behind her cover.

  The Gammon knelt beside Bernard’s body. His death had not been dignified. The sleazy book spiv lay face down on the office floor, his head half-covered by a wool cardigan that had fallen on top of him. The feet splayed out behind him were shod in bedroom slippers, their leather soles worn to a high gloss. He was, she observed, still wearing his pajama bottoms. There was a significant amount of blood, but blood loss wasn’t what had killed him.

  “No rigor, ma’am.” The Gammon touched the back of the victim’s neck. “He hasn’t been dead long enough to go cold. I’d say less than six hours, maybe less than four.”

  Eve glanced around the room. The computer’s monitor stared darkly back at her. Its usual hum was absent, and there was a gaping rectangular hole in the front of the system unit where a hard drive would normally be. The desk drawers were open, their contents disturbed.

  “Well.” She composed herself, took a deep breath, and mustered up a smile: “Well! This is a setback.” Stop babbling in front of the help, she admonished herself sternly. Stiff upper lip. “Obviously somebody was extremely eager to preempt the auction.” She toed the corpse distastefully with the tip of one Manolo Blahnik. “Turn him over.”

  “Ma’am? Preserving the crime scene—”

  “Is not our concern,” she said crisply.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He gripped the body by one shoulder and heaved.

  Eve pulled on a pair of gloves and crouched beside him. “Right. Right.” She touched the back of Bernard’s head, through the matted, bloody hair. Bone grated mushily under her fingertips. “A blow to the occipital bone, showing signs of extreme force. Probably sent splinters into the foramen magnum, tearing the medulla oblongata. The hemorrhaging is from the posterior spinal artery: there isn’t much because cardiac arrest was nearly instantaneous.” She stood and contemplated Bernard’s mortal remains for almost a minute. Her hands itched for a scalpel.