Dead Lies Dreaming

by Charles Stross

  Not rich, Imp eventually realized, was not the same thing as poor. But he’d grown up in the shadow of wealth. Before the walls of dementia closed in completely and left nothing behind but a terrified wailing shell, Grandma told Evie and Jerm stories about life in the old days. Tales of living in a big town house round the corner from a park with a royal palace in it, tales of the chauffeur and the Daimler and tea at Claridge’s, tales of silks and furs and jewels in her box at the opera. Grandma had been an actress in the gone-away days before she met Grandpa, a dashing man about town with an income and expectations, who had an interest in exports, or possibly railways in India.

  The reality was somewhat different, marked by a trail of rich folks’ tears. Grandpa had been coasting on empty in the wake of family tragedies both personal and financial. Grandpa’s two elder siblings had disappeared or died in some scandalous manner that nobody would speak of thereafter. The complicated family trust he’d inherited—set up by his own father, long on Suez Canal bonds and shares in the steam locomotive industry—crashed disastrously in the 1950s. Grandpa’s peculiar profession provided less regular income than the Home Office hangman’s, for Grandpa was a sorcerer. But magecraft was in eclipse for most of the twentieth century, and Grandma’s Russian parentage cost him any chance of employment by the security agency that defended the Kingdom against arcane threats. Grandma had tales of letting the servants go during wartime, but remained silent on the matter of not hiring replacements after the end of hostilities. The death duties levied on Great-grandpa’s estate were the last nail in the coffin of the family fortune: by the time Imp’s father—Grandpa’s sole offspring—stood in line to inherit, the family house had been sold to a hotel baron and Imp’s father had reason to be grateful for his aptitude for numbers.

  Numbers and magic went together like a horse and carriage, and were in roughly similar demand. The family traded in quaint séances and furtive rituals held in dust-sheeted ballrooms by the initiates of strange religions, rather than the great wreakings and summonings that had once shaken the chancelleries of Europe. Imp’s dad had missed out on the strange revival of magic by the secret state, on the gathering momentum of Moore’s Law, the systematization and formalization of computation as a sorcerous speciality. Mum might have had an in, but she’d been squeezed out of the increasingly stuffy and male-dominated British software industry in the eighties, too exhausted and pregnant to do aught but let her skills atrophy from disuse. She and Dad shared a certain way of thinking about things, a common fondness for the secret occult power that could be unleashed by way of Newton’s fluxions. If they’d met a couple of decades later they might have built a great and terrible magical empire. A couple of centuries earlier they could have brokered their insights for wealth and power at the royal court. But they had the supreme misfortune to be born just too late in the age of rationality to profit from his magic, and just too early to make use of hers.

  One rainy half term Tuesday in the February of the year Imp turned twelve, he climbed into the attic in search of distractions. That’s when he found the old steamer trunk with Grandpa’s initials painted on the lid in faded gold leaf. It had been hidden behind an old coffee table and a stack of suitcases full of Mum’s 1970s shoes and dresses. The trunk was locked, but the internet was a thing, and his parents hadn’t yet worked out how much mischief a bored Imp with internet access could get up to. FAQs on lock-picking abounded, and it was much more interesting than doing homework: so the desperate curiosity of a bored tween armed with improvised picks and rakes collided with a woefully insecure chest—or rather, a chest warded so that only an heir of the pure bloodline could open it without fatal consequences. Imp was totally ignorant of this, of course. But then again, he was the heir in question.

  It wasn’t his fault that Dad had held off introducing him to the contents and commencing his training in the old ways out of fear that it would distract him from his GCSEs. It wasn’t Dad’s fault that, after decades of neglect, he’d come to think of magecraft as an eccentric hobby or family tradition, rather than a deadly and puissant art. Nor could Dad be faulted for not realizing that magic was creeping back into the world on the back of proliferating computing devices that attracted the attention of things that thrived on information, so that the arcane arts grew steadily easier and more accessible with every passing year. It wasn’t even Dad’s fault for hoping that Imp would follow him into a safe and secure career as a chartered accountant, or perhaps an Inland Revenue auditor, and hadn’t bothered to explain the family curse to him, or the meaning of the struck-out names on the front page of the family spell book.

  But if you leave a loaded handgun lying around the family home, you shouldn’t be surprised if a child finds it and pulls the trigger.

  * * *

  By midafternoon, the Bond was pissed off.

  If it was galling to be outwitted by a woman, it was infinitely more so to be outfoxed by a dim-witted cycle courier driving a stolen car that was somewhat inferior to the boss’s shiny silver Aston Martin. Women, in the Bond’s opinion, were only good for fucking and cooking. Yet the car thief with the dreadlocks and attitude had dragged the thief-taker back to the stolen Porsche—which had somehow lost the wheel clamp while they’d been making gooey eyes at one another over ice cream—climbed in, and taken off like the London traffic didn’t even exist.

  Not being a total idiot, the Bond had stuck a GPS tracker bug behind the front bumper before he trailed the duo to the ice cream kiosk, so he’d been able to tail the thief out to the North Circular before he lost her. He’d jumped a few traffic lights and tripped a whole series of Gatsos along the way, but Rupert’s corporate vehicle ownership would cover for him: some hapless minion would be fingered for the speeding tickets and get to exchange his driving license for a commuter rail season pass in return for keeping his job.

  But speeding tickets were one thing. What the GPS tracker showed when the getaway driver hit the M25 clockwise was something else entirely: something that could only be described as black magic. The Bond had followed her onto the motorway but after two junctions she was pulling away so fast that continuing the pursuit invited humiliation (not to mention a potentially fatal collision). The Bond swore bitterly and used the next roundabout exit to reverse direction. If he couldn’t keep up with her in a chase, he’d just have to ambush her instead.

  The Bond tracked the Deliverator as she finished a complete lap of London and then slowed right down, driving back into the beating heart of the capital. But she wasn’t coming back to the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea as he’d expected: instead she headed for the trackless squalor of the East End, where no self-respecting billionaire would dream of setting foot.

  Well then. Time for Plan B. The Bond opened his briefcase and pulled out a slim notebook computer which he attached to the picocell head unit. It took a few minutes but he narrowed his suspects down to two cellphone IMEIs that came up consistently: one of them had a SIM that resolved to a corporate account owned by HiveCo; both IMEIs had been in tight proximity for the entire duration of the Deliverator’s wild ride, and the HiveCo phone had messaged the other one some time after they stopped moving. The Bond opened a map view, then made a call to ask for some additional information. Yes, the Porsche was parked round the corner from the thief-taker’s home address. Well. The Bond smiled sharkishly and tapped his steering wheel, then settled down for a wait.

  The getaway driver didn’t stay at the thief-taker’s pad for long. The car stayed parked, but the Deliverator’s phone slowly meandered towards Liverpool Street via a bus route, before abruptly dropping off the cellphone network. Underground, probably. The phone popped up again at High Street Kensington tube station, then drifted at walking pace towards the park before veering into a side-street leading to—the fuck? The Bond thought, confused—a royal palace? I thought the Queen lived in Buckinghamshire? He shook his head. Maybe there were more than one palace—oh. The cellphone’s location plot jumped and the focus narrowed. Obviousl
y there was some signal bounce, and now she was walking along a side-street just to one side of the park.

  And then she stopped moving.

  Well, well, well. This wasn’t what the Bond had been expecting of a petty crook, not at all! But it was extremely suggestive, and begged to be checked out.

  The Bond retreated to his hotel room. Over the next two hours he sniffed around the quiet street electronically. He used Shodan to probe for unsecured camera feeds, the cellco tracking databases to isolate stationary phones in the vicinity of his target, and other, less obvious, research tools.

  The picture that slowly emerged was decidedly hinky. Kensington Palace Gardens wasn’t just any old road: it had the dubious distinction of being the most expensive residential street in the world (unless you counted the Japanese Imperial Palace in Tokyo). The average town house on the street sold for over fifty million pounds and was the property of an offshore investment vehicle, typically a shell company in the Cayman Islands or Dubai owned by a sovereign wealth fund. The Bond thought Rupert de Montfort Bigge was rich; Rupert probably considered himself to be rich; but Rupert could barely afford a tumbledown garden shack on this street.

  Bizarrely, none of these billion-dollar residences were inhabited. The entire street was decaying, with rotting roofs, broken windows, and water running down the grand staircases behind cover of their steel security fences and CCTV cameras. These houses were too valuable for mere humans to be permitted to live in them. They were all uninhabited … except for the house two down from the end of the street. That one had four smartphones sucking signal and a business broadband cable. And when the Bond looked for its security cameras, their feeds had been hacked to relay the view of a different house, three doors along.

  After breaking for a late lunch—a Happy Meal: not ideal, but he could grab it and eat in the car—the Bond drove to the nearest halfway normal street to Kensington Palace (defined as one that featured houses inhabited by human beings rather than abstract corporate asset management vehicles) and parked up. He opened his briefcase and unpacked the drone, swapped out camera modules, then programmed in a flight path, being careful to avoid the no-fly zone around the junior royalty clubhouse. Opening the car door, he checked for rubberneckers before releasing the quadrotor. It buzzed away across the rooftops, camera turret swiveling to bear on the target. He checked his phone. Eight minutes later, dead on the nail, the drone returned.

  Replaying the footage it sent back confirmed his suspicions. Viewed from above, using the far-infrared camera on the drone, his target stuck out like a sore thumb. Heat radiated through the walls—but the front and back windows were oddly dark, as if there was a layer of cold air trapped just inside them. Other hot spots in the walls suggested running electrical appliances, in stark contrast with the neighboring properties which were dark and derelict. However, it wasn’t putting out enough heat to suggest an urban cannabis farm: this was a domicile rather than a factory, albeit a camouflaged one.

  Target confirmed, the Bond drove back to his hotel’s parking garage and went up to his room for a shower and a brief nap, then began to get his kit ready for an evening out on the town.

  * * *

  “He who controls the past controls the present; he who controls the present controls the future.” The Denizen of Number Ten held His cut-crystal goblet of sherry up to catch the light. “I gather from your activities that you agree, Mr. de Montfort Bigge.” There was a look in His eyes like black holes in the sky. “Cheers!”

  A polite round of applause rose from the other diners as they raised their glasses to the Prime Ministerial toast.

  “Bastard,” hissed Rupert, freezing the playback. The Prime Minister paused with His glass raised, immaculate in white tie and tails at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet—a state occasion in which it was traditional for the head of the government to deliver a speech to the council of the City of London Corporation, essentially the hub of the British financial services industries.

  Rupert had been invited to attend. Not being entirely insane he had declined with regrets, citing the winter flu that was doing the rounds. Which was why he was watching the speech from the comfort and privacy of his Jacuzzi in the master suite at Castle Skaro. (The bath, a seven-seater with minibar, mood lighting, high-end home cinema system, and filter/sterilization units, was perfect for entertaining. But sometimes Rupert just wanted to wallow in his own wealth.)

  The PM was neither human nor entirely sane, and took a zero tolerance approach to would-be rivals.

  Rupe rewound a couple of seconds, then replayed the video at a tenth normal speed. There. He backed up and watched the People’s Mandate raise a toast to ruination and the death of gods for a third time: “Wouldn’t you agree?” Glitch. “Mr. de Montfort Bigge?” A tiny judder as something or someone, perhaps some enslaved video editing demon, spliced Rupert’s name into the outgoing stream with random precision, destined for his eyes only. Similar personalized messages were undoubtedly going out to other movers and shakers, the alienated servants of gods who’d lost the toss when His Dreadful Majesty seized power and instituted the New Management of N’yar Lat-Hotep, the Black Pharaoh Returned.

  “Shit,” Rupert mumbled as he reached for the coke mirror.

  Rumbled.

  Magic was a branch of applied mathematics. Systematized in decades and centuries gone by, it had come a long way from its occult roots. The wild efflorescence of computing technology had brought it crashing back to life, a tsunami of inrushing power pouring chaotically back into the world after decades of drought. Now Elder Gods and ancient horrors were awakening in all quarters. Obscure cults could harness the power of imprecatory prayer to damn their enemies and bring prosperity to their fingertips. Barefoot sorcerers awakened daily in ignorance of the real source of their power, and called themselves superheroes or metahumans—at least until the feeders attracted by the magical computation fizzing in their skulls began to eat their brains. It had all gotten a little out of hand, Rupert conceded—especially once the bastard in Downing Street had gotten the drop on his own patron saint, the Mute Poet.

  But when faced with a de facto coup d’état, one must behave with pragmatism and grace, lest one lose one’s head. (Quite literally, given the PM’s predilection for reaping crania to adorn His glass-and-chromed-steel Tzompantli, the modernized Aztec skull rack He’d erected atop Marble Arch.) Rupert had hoped that his activities might meet with, if not active approval, then at least tolerance on the part of the New Management. He’d gone long on the right stocks, shorted others on the back of a handshake and a word of advice from the right lips. Ensured that tithes were paid, in blood as well as money. Tried to look suitably chastened and remorseful for having backed the wrong horse, in other words, meanwhile hoping that his delicate efforts to tip the balance his way would go unnoticed until they bore strange fruit.

  “He who controls the past controls the present; he who controls the present controls the future.” Fuck, busted. Orwell’s famous words spoke not just of propaganda; they could have been an explanation of how markets worked, a rationale of Rupert’s career, or a history of magic in the modern era. But they meant so much more to Rupert: they spoke of a possible path to survival.

  When the New Management came to power, Rupert had pulled in his horns and gone into seclusion for a while to lick his wounds—he hated to come in second, despised being on the losing side—and reflect on lessons learned. And after a while it came to him that the itch he chewed on was caused by an unanswered question: not Why did He seize power? But What stopped Him doing it sooner?

  Magic was getting stronger, true. But magic had been plentiful before. If you gave credence to myths and legend, magic had been everywhere in the Bronze Age, squirting out of the ground like wildcat oil strikes. But in the past couple of centuries there was clear evidence for the rarity of magecraft and the difficulty of executing sorcerous protocols. It was almost as if something had suppressed the metanatural, rendering certain computational processes inacc
essible to practitioners of the high arts. It was an impairment that had, ironically, facilitated the ascendancy of the Age of Reason. (If it hadn’t happened, Sir Isaac Newton might be better remembered for his alchemical research and his interest in infinitesimals as a tool for confining and constraining devils, rather than his work on optics and gravity.) Perhaps it was the result of some secret agency or power, working behind the scenes to suppress all magical phenomena. Or perhaps it was the Age of Reason itself, the ascendancy of the Newtonian view of the universe as a deterministic chew toy for an omniscient god. Whatever the cause, the end result was clear: magic had become increasingly difficult after the sixteenth century, vanishing almost entirely during the late Victorian age, before making a gradual comeback from the 1940s onwards.

  Rupert entertained a bizarre but plausible hypothesis: perhaps the magical drought had come about as a way for the continuum to protect itself from temporal paradoxes—side effects of time travel. Magic gave access to the ghost roads, arcane liminal spaces that linked places and times: to ley lines and paths to other parallel universes, and to the dream palaces of oneiromancer dynasties. But history could only be internally consistent and stable if nobody edited it. Nature abhors a temporal paradox. If magic permitted temporal paradoxes, perhaps magic itself had converged on a local minimum, editing itself out of the historical record until there wasn’t enough of it left to alter the past.

  Be that as it may. Rupert didn’t give a toss what caused it. What Rupert wanted to know was how he could use it.

  Given: some eldritch temporal feedback loop had suppressed magical phenomena on a near-global scale for several centuries until it collapsed in the face of an exponentially burgeoning computational substrate. It seemed likely to Rupert that powerful magical tools had been lost during the drought, rendered about as useful as cellphones in the wake of a disaster that took out the electrical grid they depended on. Similarly, it was possible that even while the drought was in progress, surviving practitioners had continued to create magical tools. Any such artifacts would now be preposterously powerful, supercharged by the wealth of mana available on tap. (Powerful enough, perhaps, to alter the past.) But they might well have been destroyed or misplaced during the drought. He’d long been in the habit of collecting useful-looking ritual objects, slapping golden handcuffs on any child of the great magical bloodlines who crossed his path. With the ascent of the New Management he upped his game, putting out feelers to look for any signs of the old and hidden tools of power resurfacing—anything that might contribute to the success of his Great Working. Stumbling across the scion of a family that had once held in their custody a great and terrible concordance—stumbling across her, with her unaware of her ancestors’ record—had been a wonderful stroke of luck. All that remained was to enslave her and motivate her to bring it to him.