Authors: Charles Stross
His face is stony. For a moment Pete has a vision of an alternate universe where Alex is a stand-up comedian’s straight man, or maybe earns his crust as one-half of a Proclaimers tribute band. Then the ineluctable truth begins to sink in. “You don’t catch fire if exposed to garlic or holy water by any chance? Crosses or other religious symbols?” Alex shakes his head. (In the background, Andy stands and begins to slither doorwards.) “Jolly good. We don’t have much to do with that stuff in the C of E anyway,” he adds, “but it’d be kind of embarrassing to share an office with someone with a garlic bread allergy.” He looks at Andy. “Will you please
stop that
? I know what you’re trying to do, and so does Alex.” To his relief Alex nods rapidly. “I’m sure this young man—”
“I’m twenty-four!”
“This young man has had a very trying few weeks, and you’re not helping by making him wonder if you’re using him as a crash test dummy for the departmental Dr. Van Helsing. Here’s the deal, Alex: I’m in your shoes, just a month further down the line and I got roped into this, this
circus
because I can read Aramaic and a, an acquaintance needed a scriptural translation checking in a hurry. At least you’re here for a reason, at least I
hope
you’re here for a reason, and it’s probably a better one than mine. So Andy here”—at this point the accused jerks and adopts a guiltily sycophantic expression—“wants to off-load you on me. And, you know what? That’s
fine
. I promise not to try to hammer a stake through your heart or set you on fire, as long as you promise not to rip my throat out. Okay? We in the twenty-first century have this marvelous technical innovation, it’s called
civilization
, and it means we don’t have to make promises like that to everyone we meet because we can usually take it for granted. So, um”—Pete stands up, then offers his right hand—“welcome to my office. I’ve got this project that you might be able to help me with. Tell me”—Andy finally vanishes from his office like the memory of a foul smell, as Alex hesitantly takes Pete’s hand and shakes it limply—“what, if anything, do you know about search engine optimization?”
• • •
KARMA’S A BITCH.
No, let me rephrase that:
Karma is your vengeful bunny-boiler ex, lurking in your darkened front hallway wearing an ice-hockey mask and carrying a baseball bat inscribed with BET YOU DIDN’T SEE THIS COMING.
(And, to over-stretch the metaphor, Karma
intends
to whack you upside the head so hard your cranium lands in the bleachers, but the hockey mask has slipped and she usually ends up hitting your blind next-door neighbor’s guide dog by mistake, nine times out of ten, so that when the tenth strike lands true you
really
don’t see it coming.)
But, as usual, I digress.
This is the Laundry. We are part of the secret side of the civil service, so naturally we do committees. Did I say we do committees? We probably invented the damned idea, sometime between the Roman invasion and King Canute’s unfortunate intertidal dilemma. We’re
good
at them, with the kind of polish and proficiency that only arrives after four hundred years of diligent practice. We use committees for all the ulterior purposes for which they might have been designed: diffusion of executive responsibility, plausible deniability, misdirection, providing the appearance of activity without the substance, and protecting the guilty. We also use them for fact-finding, pooling of knowledge about best working practices, and determining policy.
It’s the latter wheeze that concerns me right now.
We’re less than half an hour into the first meeting of the DRESDEN RICE committee, and I am already getting a very bad feeling about the direction we have been channeled in.
Firstly there’s the
what
. From the moment it popped up on my Outlook calendar, flagged in red like an inflamed pimple full of infected bureaucratic pus, I realized there was something wrong with it. “Working group to produce recommendations on the employment requirements and retention of staff exhibiting PHANG syndrome characteristics,” it said, and I’ve been trying desperately to get it shifted, but no, the remit is stuck like a king-sized dildo in a guinea pig.
Secondly, there’s the
who
. Because it has been designed as a cuddly-wuddly touchy-feely care-and-feeding committee, fully half our membership consists of paired buttocks from Human Resources, Health and Safety, Building Services, and IT Support. I’m there
not
in my capacity as Bob Howard, Vampire Hunter Extraordinaire, or Bob Howard, Deputy Eater of Souls, but as Bob Howard, Technical Networking Manager (in other words, cable-crimper-in-chief for the New Annex). We are overstaffed (there are twelve bodies here), flabby (at least three each are from HR and H&S), and indecisive.
Finally, to make matters exponentially worse . . . nobody actually made it a requirement for membership of this committee that members have to be cleared for OPERA CAPE.
So:
“Don’t be silly!” Doris Greene from Health and Safety announces: “Everybody knows vampires don’t exist!”
She looks round the table, her stare challenging any of us to gainsay her. Middle-aged, plump, and gallus in twinset and pearls, Doris is one of the H&S types who seems to have had her sense of humor surgically shrunken and her perm prematurely grayed by exposure to one too many inquests into bizarre workplace accidents that involve cordless hammer drills, sex toys, and the phrase “Watch this!” Her broiler-hen impersonation would be met with fond affection in most situations where she didn’t also have the authority to shut everything down on a whim or call on the Spanish Inquisition for fire support, but it loses some of its charm when there’s actual work to be done.
“Everyone knows you catch vampirism by being bitten by a vampire,” she explains. “So, they drink your blood—and then you rise as a vampire, don’t you? But answer me this—if every vampire drinks blood, how come we aren’t
all
vampires? It stands to reason! Vampire number one drinks from a victim. Then there’s two of them. The next night they both drink from victims. That makes four.” She subvocalizes for a few seconds, counting up powers of two on her fingers. “After a month, there are nearly a billion of them! And a week later, we’re
all
vampires!” She twitches around triumphantly. “So they
can’t
exist. Can they?”
“Nonsense!” announces Bill Heath. Bill is at least a decade north of the mandatory retirement watermark—unfortunately abolished some years back, under cover of the last government’s campaign against ageism in the workplace. He clears his throat, making a disgusting gurgling noise reminiscent of a kitchen waste disposal unit chewing on a week-dead rat, then continues before I can get a word in: “If they don’t exist, what are we doing here? It wasn’t like this during the war. We ’ad no time to discuss nonsense and nightmares back then! Not with Jerry threatening to drop basilisks on us from V-1s. So this is either a waste of time or we should be stockpiling garlic-impregnated stakes.
Which ain’t my department.
So can I go ’ome now?”
Sally Carlyle clears her throat loudly. “Not yet, Bill!” By virtue of age and duration of service Bill gets to sit near the head end of the table, but Sally is chairing the session and keeping minutes. She’s a forty-ish, no-nonsense woman whose occasional impish smile predisposes me to like her, against my better judgment—for she is another denizen of the catacombs of Human Resources, and her usual specialty is mediating disciplinary hearings. Minor stuff—nothing involving the Auditors, much less the Black Assizes—but she’s got the Administrative Procedure Manual and the Staff Ethics and Guidance Handbook memorized flat, so the effect is a little like being in a meeting chaired by an officer of the Gedanken-Geheimpolizei. “Doris, I’m afraid the, um, media portrayal of this condition is somewhat off-target. I am
informed
”—Sally’s eyes narrow ever so slightly as she looks down the table, directly at yours truly—“that there is some truth behind the legend, although exactly how much may, shall we say, be a matter for debate.” She grins. “What would you say, Mr. Howard?”
I take a deep breath. “Vampires exist,” I begin. “I’ve met—”
Basil Northcote-Robinson, sitting at the opposite end of the boardroom table, fiddles with his hearing aid. It makes a hideous high-pitched whistling feedback noise, like fingernails on a blackboard shifted several octaves towards the ultrasonic. “Vampire blancmange!” he shouts, completely derailing my train of thought.
“Would you mind—” I begin.
“Vampire blancmange!”
Sally rolls her eyes. Basil has at least a decade on Bill. We’re into hearing-trumpet and bath chair territory now. But he has an opinion, and he wants us to add it to the minutes. “The original Romanian vampire legend is
not what you think
, young feller-me-lad. Forget those walking corpses, rising from their graves and sucking the life out of the living! That’s just a meta- meta- whatchewmacallit for tuberculosis. A refit. No, if you go back to the
old
days, vampirism was a
curse
. It’s all over the archives, you know.” (Basil works in the archives. He’s a key part of the oral history project. Otherwise they’d have made him retire decades ago.) “You’d get this cursed gift, like an axe or a fiddle or a loaf of bread or something, and the nature of the curse was that it would
cause blood to be spilled
until it was passed on. That’s all. You could catch it yourself—it’d turn you into a bloody-handed murderer—or it would stay on the axe blade—people would cut themselves on it, or murderers would use it—unless you pushed the curse onto
something else
. And literally
anything
could be a vampire. A monkey’s paw. Or a blancmange, for instance. That’s where the Pythons got the idea from, the Wimbledon sketch . . .” He looks around, bewildered. “Anyone else here a fan of Monty Python?”
“Vampire blancmange.” Sally makes a note about something on her pad, then visibly suppresses a sigh. “Noted. You were saying, Mr. Howard?”
“Bananas!” says Bill. “We couldn’t get bananas during the war for love nor money. Had to make do with blancmange instead!” He seems to find it all extraordinarily funny; he’s chortling so hard I expect him to cough his dentures across the room.
This is more than Sally can reasonably take. “Committee will adjourn for five minutes,” she announces. “Coffee and toilet break, not to mention sanity break. Bill, you can go home. In fact, please
do
go home. Your work here is done. I’ll minute you as attending if you just go home and leave us in peace. Is that what you want? Are you happy now?”
“Bananas!” Bill says happily as those of us with any sanity left (not to mention full bladders) break for the meeting room door.
A few minutes later I’m back in the meeting room, a fresh mug of coffee cooling slowly on my blotter. I’m leaning my head against the even cooler surface of the wall when Sally clears her throat behind me. “Mr. Howard,” she begins.
“Hi, Ms. Carlyle.” I stand up and turn around.
“I expect you’re wondering what this committee is all about,” she says hesitantly, “and why you’ve been seconded to it.”
“Yes, I was wondering that,” I begin.
“Well, it’s obviously a blind training scenario,” she says. “And I think you’re here as a counterweight for the ballast. I mean, Basil and Bill are not easy to handle, so the organizers wanted someone sensible to keep the process moving . . . Mr. Howard. What is it?”
I take a deep breath. “Sally, I am going to give you a keyword. Tell me, have you heard of OPERA CAPE?”
“What, you mean—that’s an internal classification?”
“Yes.”
“No, can’t say I have.” Her crow’s-feet wrinkles deepen. “Is it relevant?”
I feel like groaning, but confine myself to a small nod. “Yes, it’s relevant. Unfortunately I can’t tell you why. So, um. You believe this is a blind training scenario, to test our business process for generating procedures for handling new classes of paranormally endowed personnel, am I reading you right?”
“Exactly!” She beams. “And as our go-to structured cabling guy you’re clearly level-headed and approach things systematically. Anyway. As you can tell, we’ve been given a mish-mash of unsuitable personnel, not to say deadweight. Which means the rest of us are going to have to do a lot of the heavy lifting.”
Oh dear. The committee chair isn’t cleared for OPERA CAPE.
Which means I may be the only person on this committee who actually knows anything about vampires.
And if they’re not cleared, I can’t tell them.
“You’re assembling a little subcommittee. Am I right?”
“You are indeed right. Clearly a man of hidden talents!”
“Jolly good. So I assume this means you want me to do something for you. Again, am I right?”
“Ye-e-s . . .”
Every instinct is telling me to run away, very fast. But I harbor a morbid curiosity, and something tells me it’ll be useful and instructive to study the way unbriefed members of the unwashed masses deal with the idea of vampires, and in any case I’m the only person here who has any idea why this committee exists, so . . . I lean closer and say, “Tell me more.”
She tells me. After which I want to set fire to my beard and flee, screaming. And I don’t even
have
a beard.
• • •
HOMEWORK: I HAVE IT.
I have the angries, too.
“This is such bullshit!” I brandish a fistful of email printouts in the general direction of Lockhart’s desk, carefully not pointing it at him directly—it’s not his direct responsibility in any case. “The committee is overloaded with coffin dodgers. I mean, even Sally Carlyle couldn’t get Basil to stay on-topic for more than thirteen consecutive seconds, and as for Bill . . .”
“Sit
down
, Mr. Howard!” booms Lockhart, in a stentorian tone that is familiar to sergeant-majors everywhere.
I sit, hastily, balancing on the edge of the visitor’s chair in his office.
“Your point that nobody else on the DRESDEN RICE committee has been cleared to know about persons infected with OPERA CAPE is well-taken.” Lockhart moderates his voice. “But has it occurred to you that there might be a reason for that?”