Authors: Charles Stross
“Did you use an off-the-shelf code library? Or write your own?” Angleton’s interrogation was gentle, precise, and pointed. I could see him in my mind’s eye, too: tall, cadaverously pale, thin as a mummy, with eyes like ice diamonds.
“I rolled my own code generator in FORTRAN77,” Andy explained. “Atmel AVR machine code, not that high-level Arduino stuff. It seemed more efficient to get down to the bare metal . . .”
Angleton sighed. And
now
my blood ran cold. Because if there’s one thing worse than an IT manager who’s feeling the chill wind of obsolescence blowing down his neck and consequently trying to contribute code to the repository like an actual working developer, it’s an IT manager who’s getting
creative
. And Andy’s project was nothing if not
creative
, for values of creativity that I don’t want to go anywhere near without body armor and HAZMAT gear. “Mr. Newstrom. We will have words about this later.” Angleton paused: I could feel his eyes on me. “Boy. Tell me what you hear?”
He always called me
boy
. From anyone else I’d take it badly; from Angleton it was probably a sign of affection.
“I hear termites,” I said. “About a trillion sixteen-dimensional, elephant-sized termites chewing on the edges of reality.”
“Did you wire in a remote kill switch?” Angleton asked Andy.
There was an eloquent moment of silence, punctuated only by the munching of metaphysical mandibles. Then the sound changed.
“Oh dear,” I said, as Angleton simultaneously said, “Mr. New-strom, evacuate the building. Mr. Howard and I will remain to deal with this.” Then, on the other side of the door, the over-stressed summoning grid ruptured.
The immediate consequence of the summoning grid rupture wasn’t that spectacular; the door grew colder and the runes engraved in it flared up, glowing the eerie deep blue of Cerenkov radiation. The office was warded to a high level, and would hold for at least half an hour longer than the grid on the card table. But the thing Andy had inadvertently summoned was now forcing its way into our universe directly, no longer confined by the meter-diameter circle on the table. And if it was powerful enough to overload one grid, it might well be able to overpower another, including the structural wards built into the walls, floor, and ceiling of the New Annex: in which case, we could have a real problem on our hands.
Angleton closed the gap and stepped past me, extending a hand towards the door. He looked at it quizzically, even hesitantly: an expression I’d never seen on his face before, and most unwelcome. Angleton is a DSS, a Detached Special Secretary: in our unofficial lexicon the acronym really stands for Deeply Scary Sorcerer. This is, if anything, an understatement: he’s known to some as the Eater of Souls. That’s because he’s not actually human—he’s an alien intelligence bound into a human body by a powerful necromantic ritual. Luckily for us, he’s on our side. I’m his assistant, apprentice, whatever you call it. I don’t know the real extent of his power, but I’m a moderately competent necromancer in my own right; anything that gives Angleton cause for concern is, by definition, frightening.
“Boy,” he said conversationally, “this is going to be messy. Please verify that all the human staff are off the premises, then fetch the night watch.”
“Fetch the—what,
all
of them?”
“Yes, Bob. We’re going to need zombies. Lots of zombies.”
“Wait, what—” I looked back at the door. Either I had a sudden eyestrain or the wards on it were bulging ominously. I glanced at my smartphone again. The thaum field was strengthening rapidly, and the flux had exceeded a thousand milli-Parsons per minute. “Er, yes. Right away.” I fled in the direction of the front door, leaving Angleton to face the glowing door alone, like an eldritch remix of the little Dutch boy on the dyke.
There is a formal procedure for evacuating the New Annex: it involves filling out six forms in quadruplicate to obtain the key to a key cupboard containing the key to a cabinet containing a silver hammer (that bit would normally be done in advance, daily, by the Security Officer on Duty), then using the aforementioned hammer to break the glass cover on a brass box containing a bell inscribed with mystic runes—
I hit the fire alarm. Then I raised my metaphysical fingers to my astral lips and emitted the most deafening mental whistle I’m capable of. Then I began to chant doggerel in Old Enochian:
On Ilka Moor Bah’t ‘At
, or maybe,
Get your shambling undead asses up here on the double
. This saved a breakneck dash down a darkened staircase (not to mention all the SOD form-filling and the hammer stuff), buying me sufficient time to dash across to my own office and rummage around in the assorted crap on top of the filing cabinet for my pigeon’s foot, cigarette lighter, silver paint spray can, packet of sharpies, and pocket camera—all the while carrying on the chant. Thus equipped I dashed back into the open-plan area just in time to see the first of the night watch shamble towards me, arms outstretched in classic Bela Lugosi style.
“Be so good as to make a new grid, boy,” Angleton murmured, not looking away from the haunted office door. “Make it big; I need an airlock.” I began to spray conductive paint in a big circle behind him, across the beige carpet tiles and continuing on up the walls and as high as I could reach.
I paused before sketching in the second arc, stopped chanting, and turned to face the night watchmen.
“Acknowledge my authority,”
I ordered them in my halting Old Enochian. Slowly, with creaking joints, the wizened corpses in their blue uniforms went to their knees. Eight mummified faces turned to blindly inspect me. I could feel their attention, eager for flesh and life but bound to obey.
“I am your lawful knight-commander,”
I added.
“Under oath by way of my liege.”
They followed my gaze to Angleton, and cringed, suitably terrified.
“A hostile intruder lies past yonder portal. Attend.”
I went back to sketching in the new, larger grid around Angleton and the door. I could feel his concentration focussed on the wards around the office, intent and precise as that of any surgeon. “Nearly done,” I murmured, sketching glyphs rapidly: Elder Sign, Horned Skull, NAND Gate. “What do you want me to do?”
“Move two zombies in here, boy.” (Angleton predates political correctness.) “Then activate the grid as soon as I’m clear of it.”
I waved the first two night watch shamblers forward, then ducked to connect the grid terminals to a clunky-looking wireless transponder controlled by my smartphone. “Ready when you are, boss.”
Angleton stepped back sharply. “Now, boy,” he said. I poked at the touchscreen and opened my inner eye. The new grid shimmered pale blue around a smaller violet doorway, fronting the roiling darkness around Andy’s office—I could see the thing right through the walls and floor.
“Thou,”
Angleton said sharply, in Old Enochian,
“it is thine honor upon my word to open the door. And
thou
shalt step through the portal and be my ears and eyes and tongue for that which lies within—”
I twitched slightly. Was Angleton really going to use a zombie as a webcam? I’ve gotten used to dealing with the metabolically challenged over the past year, but even so, that was a level of intimacy I wouldn’t willingly approach.
“Sssss,”
said one of the night watchmen, reaching for the doorknob. I could feel the taste of its mind, half-afraid and half-eager to discover whatever waited behind the door, ready to
eat
—
It touched the doorknob. And pushed.
The door swung open to reveal a luminous chaos. Green-edged shadows flickered across the room, dazzling me, as the other zombie lurched forward, straight into the embrace of a tangled skein of many-jointed limbs and a hairball of writhing tentacles, some of them sprouting fern-like leaves that quested blindly around the edges of the door. One of them sprouted, extending swiftly into the room; it reached the edge of the inner grid and sizzled, recoiling violently. The mass of wildly waving intrusive appendages spasmed and twitched, pulling back—with the zombie dangling in its grasp, unmoving. “Close the door!” called Angleton, and the other zombie pulled, hard. The door scraped shut, the warding on it sucking it back into place in its frame.
“Well, that didn’t go so well,” he remarked conversationally, pulling a starched white cotton handkerchief from his breast pocket. He wiped his forehead: the cloth came away pink, smeared with perspiration and blood. Angleton glanced at the kerchief disapprovingly, then folded it neatly and tucked it away. Then he looked at me. “The natives are restless tonight.” A mirthless smile. “A capital learning opportunity don’t you think, boy? Quick. Tell me what you saw.”
“I—” I swallowed.
You have got to be shitting me.
This was Angleton all over. What you or I would recognize as an alien invasion by tentacled horrors from beyond spacetime Angleton would see as a teachable moment. I could swear there was liquid helium running in his veins. “Morphologically diverse subsentient entity, didn’t even notice it was in physical contact with a vessel for the feeders in the night; the usual death patterning didn’t touch it.” (One of the reasons the night watch are so dreadful—to most people—is that skin-to-skin contact with one of them is usually about as survivable as skin-to-metal contact with an electric chair. Angleton is made of sterner stuff, and I’m immune to them for a different reason. But even so.) “What next?”
The mirthless smile broadened. “You send in another body and watch what happens, while I see what I can find out about the world on the other side of that door.”
I turned to the group of Residual Human Resources in the corner. They looked singularly unenthusiastic for the fate Angleton had in mind for them, even by zombie standards. “You can’t just go using the night watch as meat probes!” A residual budget-focussed reflex prompted me to protest. “There’ll be hell to pay in the morning! Security will have a cow!”
“Security will have a much bigger problem to deal with if we can’t close down this portal by then, boy.” Angleton glanced at Andy’s office. The remaining zombie in the outer ward was still clutching the door handle. After a moment I realized it was frozen to it. “Do you have any suggestions?”
“We don’t have any spare nukes on the premises, do we?”
Don’t be silly, Bob,
I told myself. “Well, hmm. It depends if what is on the other side of the door is still Andy’s office, with a portal inside it, or if the grid’s ripped wide open and the door is actually opening into another domain.”
“The latter, I believe.” Angleton cocked his head on one side. “You are considering the question of damage containment?”
“Yeah.” I scratched my head, then pulled my hand back when I felt my hair dripping with sweat. “Send a bomb through, kill or injure whatever is pushing through from the other side, use the opportunity to exorcise everything on the other side of the door—”
“I have a better solution than exorcism,” Angleton stated. “Your camera, boy. Have you loaded the basilisk firmware?”
“Um, let me check.” My pocket snapper is a hacked 3D digital camera, with firmware that turns it into a not-terribly-accurate basilisk gun. “Yes, but I wouldn’t recommend using it at this range . . .”
Basilisk guns are a nasty little spin-off of research into medusae, and our happy fun way of dealing with other universes. It’s an observer-mediated quantum effect that applies a rather odd probability field to whatever it focusses on. About one carbon-12 or carbon-13 nucleus in a hundred, in the target, is spontaneously swapped for a silicon-28 or silicon-29 nucleus. (Yes, this violates the law of conservation of mass/energy: we reckon it works via a tunneling process from another universe.) The effect is rather dramatic. Lots of bonds break, lots of energy comes spewing out. Protein molecules go
twang
, nucleotide chains snap, everything gets rather hot. To a naive bystander, the target turns to stone—or rather, to red-hot, carbon-riddled cinderblock.
On the one hand, it’s a lethally powerful hand weapon. On the other hand, you really don’t want to use one at close range—say, at something on the other side of a door. The smallest area of effect it has is a bit like a sawn-off shotgun; at worst, it’s an air strike in a pocket-sized package. Right now I was standing close enough that if I pointed it at Andy’s door the blast effect would probably kill me.
“I have an idea. Wait here, boy, I need to fetch something from my office. If the ward on the door fails, snap away by all means: you’ll be dead either way.” And with that reassuring message, Angleton turned and scampered helter-skelter back towards his den.
• • •
ANGLETON WAS ONLY GONE FOR A MINUTE, BUT IT FELT LIKE AN
eternity as I stood watching the vapor-smoking door in the pentacle. The zombie with the handle was slowly slumping towards the floor, leaning against the side of the door frame; I could hear him in the back of my head, growing sluggish and faint as if the feeder that animated his body was slowly being drained.
I hefted my camera, checked the battery status, and pointed it at the portal, knowing that if the wards didn’t hold it was probably futile; anything that could break in from another universe under its own motive power was out of my league. Possibly out of Angleton’s, too. The night watch shuffled anxiously in the corner between the reception desk and the dying potted rubber plant; I could feel their unease gnawing at the back of my head. As a rule, Residual Human Resources don’t
do
unease: they’re placid as long as they’ve got some flesh to embody them and the occasional hunk of brains to munch on. (Any old slaughterhouse brains will do: they eat them for the fatty acids. At a pinch, you can substitute a McDonald’s milk shake.) But these RHRs were definitely unhappy about something on the other side of the portal, and that was enough for me.
Man up, Bob,
I told myself. I checked the camera again, double-checked that I had the basilisk firmware loaded rather than the charming novelty 3D snapshot firmware that had come with it, shifted from foot to foot. That’s when the moment of blinding insight went off inside my head like a flashbulb. I peered at the display back and frantically scrolled through the settings menu. Pinky and Brains, our departmental Mad Scientist unit, had somehow gotten hold of the original source code and hacked the basilisk functionality into it, hadn’t they? It had to operate as a stereo camera, or the medusa effect wouldn’t work, but normally I just left it on auto-focus. But had they left the original features—the
other
features, like aperture, exposure, focus, special photographic effects—intact? Because if so . . .