Authors: Charles Stross
“I don’t see why not . . .”
Ten minutes later, when we get back to my office, I find a new piece of email waiting in my inbox. It’s from a software bot and it has an attachment—about 36Mb of Excel data. (It’s formatted for a two-versions-obsolete version of the spreadsheet that has known bugs and everybody is trying to move on from, except that it has a couple of hundred million users going back nearly ten years. Consequently it’s the file format from hell that refuses to die.)
“Okay, let’s see what we can pull out of this,” I say, and instead of firing up Microsoft Office I save the spreadsheet and feed it into a hairball of Python scripts I kluged together—because my programming skills are as obsolescent as Andy’s, but a generation more recent.
“What are you looking for?”
“Severe early onset dementias. Sudden strokes. Neurological stuff, with or without hallucinations. We really need a doctor on the case”—I hesitate to suggest any of the staff from St. Hilda’s—“to help us work out what questions we should be asking. But for now, I’ve got this dump of everything that’s happened in the Greater London area in the past three months, and a script to suck it all into a bunch of MySQL tables. The patient data is supposed to be anonymized but I pulled in their postcodes so we can localize them to within about a hundred meters, pivoted the results on our Criminal Records Bureau and National Insurance database mirrors to get the place of work for everyone who’s on the books, and the pre-processor is turning that into grid reference data so we can plot them on a map or query for areas where the rate of
that’s
funny . . .”
“What’s funny?” Andy stands up and tries to squint at the monitor: a good trick if he can manage it, given that I’ve got a privacy filter clipped to the front. I’m not paying attention to his contortions, though.
“There’s something wrong with the data. Or I messed up the postcode-to-grid location mapping. This
can’t
be right.”
I scroll back through the logfile I had my script barf up in a terminal window. CJD, and it’s cousin nvCJD—the cause of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, aka Mad Cow Disease—is pretty rare; the UK, despite its positively suicidal attempt at ignoring the epidemic in the early ’90s, still only generates about two cases per million people per year. The whole Greater London area, with fifteen million souls in its catchment area, should show about thirty cases a year, or two to three a month. And indeed, three months ago there were two cases. Two months ago there was one case. But in the most recent month for which I have data—last month—I’m seeing twelve.
“What am I looking at?” Andy demands.
“This.” I turn the monitor towards him, then pull off the privacy screen. “CJD detected at autopsy, a four hundred percent spike last month. Um. You know what? This has
got
to be a coincidence. Or a case of creeping data corruption. If the rate of CJD had rocketed like that earlier in the year we’d have been reading about it in the newspapers, there’d be questions in parliament. In fact—”
I hit up the map view. “Oh. Oh dear.” A rash of red spots flicker across the map of London like a bad case of chickenpox. “Hmm, that’s indexed by home address. But we can also look at their medical practice, or their place of work, see if anything jumps out at us—oh. Oh shit.”
All but eight of the red spots vanish when I filter by workplace. But one of them is much, much bigger, flashing malignant crimson. “They all work for the same employer?”
Andy stares at the screen. “That’s odd. Where is it?”
“Let me check.”
Huh.
“It’s an office cleaning agency in the East End.” I frown. “Twelve cases in one month.” Another seven outside it, sprinkled across the rest of London. “That tears it, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, I should say so.” Andy stares at the screen. He looks worried. “If it was evenly spread over the whole of London it’d only be a three-sigma spike, but just in one employer in the East End? I think you may be looking at five sigmas.” He’s thinking what I’m thinking: ten extra cases in a quarter million people in one month corresponds to about thirty
thousand
extra cases a year in the UK as a whole. That’s not just a signal in the noise; it’d be fighting it out with lung cancer and heart attacks as a leading cause of death. “You need to pull those patients’ records so we can double-check that it’s not a database error. Then we need to get a neurology consultant on board who’s cleared for K syndrome so we can rerun the post-mortem examinations.” He falls silent.
“Then what?”
“If we’re lucky, it’s just Mad Cow Disease going nuclear under us. Or some hideous new epidemic getting started. If not, if it’s actually K syndrome, the shit hits the fan.” He reaches into his jacket pocket with a slightly shaky hand and pulls out an electronic cigarette case. “Looks like your ten-percenter just exploded, Bob.” He raises the cigarette to his lips and takes a puff: the tip glows blue. Blue LEDs are the color of progress, the color of the twenty-first century. “Better find out where those cleaners were working, then pull an action plan together. I think you’re about to come to the attention of important people.”
• • •
I AM NOT A MEDICAL STATISTICIAN. I MEAN, I CAN SORT OF
follow a chi-squared regression and I know my standard deviation from my T-test, but I don’t do that stuff for a living. Nor am I a medical informatics guy. For all I know, I fucked up big-time with my SUS trawl. So, first I swear Andy to silence (with an embargo time limit of forty-eight hours). Then I write a very anodyne memo that kinda-sorta explains what I’ve been doing, and send it to my HR admin person and all my various managers, tagged as low priority and with a not
entirely
misleading subject line. Hopefully that means they’ll ignore it for a while. Finally, my ass covered, I shut my office door and do a quick change. Clark Kent uses telephone booths to ditch his suit in favor of the Superman underwear; I do it in reverse. These days I keep a set of office drag on a hangar on the back of my door, against those rare occasions when I have to go somewhere and look invisible in a suit-wearing managerial kind of way.
Like this afternoon. Because I need to visit a hospital and see a man about a brain.
The Laundry has an institutional aversion to loose ends—and especially to the existence of civilians who have, through whatever means, become aware of our work. For many years, if you had the misfortune to be a witness to the uncanny you’d inevitably end up working within the organization. However, since the 1980s the efflorescence of computational systems throughout our society has exposed so many people to the fringes of magic (I use the word cautiously, in the context of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous aphorism, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”) that we simply
can’t
stick them all in an office and have them keep tabs on one another. Nor would it even be a good idea to try. We need people on the outside, in every walk of life, bound to silence by a geas, but available when we need specialist consultancy—and also able to contact
us
if they stumble on something inexplicable. Butcher, baker, candlestick-maker . . . also, experts in biblical apocrypha and brain lesions.
(Other people, accidental witnesses who don’t understand what they’ve seen, are bound to silence and then released—subject to monitoring. Or, if their services are no longer required by the admin side of the organization and they have no special skills, or are card-carrying members of the awkward squad, they can be bound to silence and allowed to quietly reenter civilian life. It’s only the core staff—practitioners, executives, and agents like me—who have no exit options.)
I’m on my way out of the office today to visit a Dr. Wills at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, which is part of the sprawling complex of medical institutions around Great Ormond Street. Dr. Wills works with the National Prion Clinic and is part of a research group at University College’s Department of Neurodegenerative Diseases, which is a long-winded way of saying that if
anyone
has spotted the spike and knows what’s going on, Dr. Wills is probably your man. (Or woman, because all it says in our contact database is “Dr. F. P. Wills, UCLH, MRC Prion Research Unit—cleared per OSA(3).”)
This person is our go-to expert on Krantzberg syndrome and I don’t even get a recognition mugshot or a potted biography?
Great.
• • •
LET ME TELL YOU A BIT MORE ABOUT K SYNDROME: BECAUSE
everything
is better with early-onset dementia.
Magic—the collection of practices that enable us to mess around with the computational ultrastructure of reality—has been around for thousands of years. We’re not entirely sure how it works. One theory holds that computational processes involving observers can influence quantum systems up to the macroscopic level via entanglement. Or, from another angle, we reach out into an infinity of parallel universes and pull rabbits out of the hat—rabbits with too many tentacles, that do what we tell them to. Either way, thinking or cogitating or reasoning or singing or just plain
looking at stuff the wrong way
can make things happen in the physical universe.
So, yes, magic works—although the do-it-in-your-head variety is notoriously hard to master, like solving three-dimensional cryptic crosswords in multiple languages. But if magic has
always
worked, why are successful magicians so rare in the historical record? It turns out that the limiting factor is not just the difficulty of the job: it’s the medical side effects.
Now for a brief diversion:
In the 1950s, Australian medics in Papua New Guinea discovered a perplexing new disease among the women and children of the Fore tribe. The victims would be overtaken by a sudden weakness and muscle pains: they’d succumb to violent shivering, lose the ability to stand up, and eventually die. The disease, known as Kuru, was infectious, although no actual agent was detected until the 1980s. The Fore practiced cannibalism as part of the funeral rites: the bereaved would consume parts of the body of the deceased to return their life force to the community. Men took the choice cuts, muscle from arms and legs: they mostly dodged the bullet. But the women and children ate the leftovers . . . including the brain. If you examined the brain of a Kuru victim with a microscope, you would see odd spongy holes scattered throughout the cerebral cortex; hence the term
spongiform encephalopathy
.
The disease agent in Kuru turns out to be a prion, a malformed version of a naturally occurring protein that catalyses conversion of normal protein molecules into the pathogenic state. It’s a truly weird and scary corner of medical research, because the diseases caused by prions—such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and Fatal Familial Insomnia—kill horribly, first taking the victim’s mind and then their ability to move. Not to mention new variant CJD, also known as Mad Cow Disease.
Now, back to the subject on hand: ritual magicians who perform too many invocations in their head tend to develop a package of symptoms after a while which
eerily
resembles Kuru. It starts with tremors, unsteady gait, slurred speech, and confusion. Then they become unable to walk, suffer from ataxia and uncontrollable tremors, and show signs of emotional instability. They become depressed, but may suffer from fits of maniacal laughter. In the final stages, they lose all muscular control, can’t sit, or swallow, or speak, become unresponsive to their surroundings . . . and from start to finish it can take between three months and three years.
Krantzberg syndrome is a horrible way to die.
Krantzberg syndrome is probably also the only spongiform encephalopathy that is
not
a prion disease. (I say “probably” because there are relatively few cases of it in the first place, which makes it very hard to investigate.) However, prion proteins appear to be absent in K syndrome, and extracts from K syndrome brains don’t cause symptoms in other organisms that they’ve been tested on. (For obvious reasons, nobody’s been able to perform the most important test—on other humans.)
The best theory to account for K syndrome is that ritual magic is intentionally designed to attract extradimensional critters—and not just big ones. There seems to be some variety of microscopically small, dumb eaters that materialize inside the gray matter of the practitioner while they are in the process of carrying out some sort of invocation, take a tiny bite, and disappear again. Brain parasites from beyond spacetime, in other words. The brain is a resilient piece of squishware, but if the K-parasites chew enough tiny holes in the headmeat, its owner will eventually succumb to a dementia-like illness. Furthermore, once the eaters have found a tasty lump of brains to chow down on they keep at it. So the disease is progressive, vile, and fatal if unchecked.
Unchecked? Well, yes: we
can
stop it progressing by putting the victim inside a locked-down protective ward. This is a huge step forward over, say, Kuru or CJD. What’s more, if we isolate the patient for long enough the eaters lose interest and go away; but the victim isn’t going to be casting any spells ever again. (If they’re lucky they’ll still be able to talk coherently and tie their own shoelaces.) It’s a health and safety nightmare.
Especially for me, because when I’m wearing one of my more recently acquired hats (trainee necromancer) I’m
all
about the jamming-with-magic–in–my–head thing. My relationship with K syndrome is like that of a forty-a-day smoker with basal-cell carcinoma: not so much a matter of
if
as of
when
.
Which is why I am not looking forward to my visit with Dr. Wills.
• • •
“EXCUSE ME, IS THIS THE ENTRANCE TO THE DEPARTMENT OF
Neurodegenerative Disease?”
“I have an appointment in the Prion Research Unit . . . ?”
“Hi, I’m here to see Dr. Wills?”
“How do I get to Dr. Wills’s office . . . ?”
I’m lost in a twisty maze of whitewashed corridors, surrounded by glass-fronted cabinets stuffed full of photocopied notices on every side (not to mention a scattering of conference-surplus posters with excessively enlarged cross-sections of gruesomely diseased brains, just for variety). I’ve been wandering in circles for ten minutes now and I’m just beginning to despair of finding my destination. Trish booked me a slot with the doctor for 3:30 p.m., but I’m running a quarter of an hour late. I find myself flagging down an irritated-looking researcher who clearly thinks she has better things to do than give directions to visiting admin people.