The Atrocity Archives (3 page)

I nod and close the folder, shove it back across
the table toward Boris. "What next?"

"Timekeeping," says Harriet. "I'm a bit
concerned that you weren't available for debriefing on schedule this
morning. You really need to do a bit better," she adds. (Andy, who I
think understands how I tick, keeps quiet.)

I glare at her. "I'd just spent six hours
standing in a wet bush, and breaking into someone else's premises.
After
putting in a full day's work in preparation." I lean forward, getting
steamed: "In case you've forgotten, I was in at eight in the morning
yesterday, then Andy asked me to help with this thing at four in the
afternoon. Have you ever tried getting a night bus from Croxley to the
East End at two in the morning when you're soaked to the bone, it's
pouring wet, and the only other people at the bus stop are a mugger and
a drunk guy who wants to know if you can put him up for the night? I
count that as a twenty hour working day with hardship. Want me to
submit an overtime claim?"

"Well, you should have phoned in first," she
says waspishly.

I'm not going to win this one, but I don't think
I've lost on points. Anyway, it's not really worth picking a fight with
my line manager over trivia. I sit back and yawn, trying not to choke
on the cigarette fumes.

"Next on the agenda," says Andy. "What to do
with Malcolm Denver, Ph.D. Further action is indicated in view of this
paper; we can't leave it lying around in public. Cuts too close to the
bone. If he goes public and reproduces it we could be facing a Level
One reality excursion within weeks. But we can't
do the usual brush and clean either, Oversight would have our balls.
Ahem." He glances at Harriet, whose lips are thin and unamused. "Could
have us all cooling our heels for months in a diversity awareness
program for the sensitivity-impaired." He shudders slightly and I
notice the red ribbon on his lapel; Andy is too precious by half for
this job, although—come to think of it—this isn't exactly the most
mainstream posting in the civil service. "Anyone got any suggestions?
Constructive ones, Bob."

Harriet shakes her head disapprovingly. Boris
just sits there, being Boris. (Boris is one of Angleton's sinister
gofers; I think in a previous incarnation he used to ice enemies of the
state for the Okhrana, or maybe served coffee for Beria. Now he just
imitates the Berlin Wall during internal enquiries.) Andy taps his
fingers on the desk. "Why don't we make him a job offer?" I ask.
Harriet looks away: she's my line manager—nominally—and she wants to
make it clear that this suggestion does not come with her approval.
"It's like—" I shrug, trying to figure out a pitch. "He's derived the
Turing-Lovecraft theorem from first principles. Not many people can do
that. So he's bright, that's a given. I think he's still a pure theory
geek, hasn't made any kind of connection with the implications of being
able to specify correct geometric relations between power nodes—maybe
still thinks it's all a big joke. No references to Dee or the others,
apart from a couple of minor arcana on his bookshelf. This means he
isn't directly dangerous, and we can offer him the opportunity to learn
and develop his skills and interests in a new and challenging
field—just as long as he's willing to come on the inside. Which would
get him covered by Section Three at that point."

Section Three of the Official Secrets Act (1916)
is our principle weapon in the endless war against security leaks. It
was passed during a wartime spy scare—a time of deep and extreme
paranoia—and it's even more bizarre than most people think. As far as
the public knows, the Official Secrets Act only has two sections;
that's because Section Three is itself classified
Secret
under the terms of the preceding sections, and merely knowing about
Section Three's existence—without having formally signed it—is a
criminal offence. Section Three has all kinds of juicy hidden
provisions to make life easy for spooks like us; it's a bureaucratic
cloaking field. Anything at all can go on behind the shroud of Section
Three as if it simply hasn't happened. In American terms, it's a black
operation.

"If you section him we have to come up with a
job and a budget," Harriet accuses.

"Yes, but I'm sure he'll be useful." Andy waves
languidly. "Boris, would you mind asking around your section, see if
anyone needs a mathematician or cryptographer or something? I'll write
this up and point it at the Board. Harriet, if you can add it to the
minutes. Bob, I'd like a word with you after the meeting, about
timekeeping."

Oh shit,
I think.

"Anything else? No? Meeting over, folks."

Once we're alone in the conference room Andy
shakes his head. "That wasn't very clever, Bob, winding Harriet up like
that."

"I know." I shrug. "It's just that every time I
see her I get this urge to drop salt on her back."

"Yes, but she's technically your line manager.
And I'm not. Which means you are supposed to phone in if you're going
to be late on a day when you've got a kickoff meeting, or else she will
raise seven shades of low-key shit. And as she will be in the
right
,
appeals to matrix management and conflict resolution won't save you.
She'll make your annual performance appraisal look like it's the
Cultural Revolution and you just declared yourself the reincarnation of
Heinrich Himmler. Am I making myself clear?"

I sit down again. "Yes, four very bureaucratic
values of clear."

He nods. "I sympathise, Bob, I really do. But
Harriet's under a lot of pressure; she's got a lot of projects on her
plate and the last thing she needs is to be kept waiting two hours
because you couldn't be bothered to leave a message
on her voice mail last night."

Putting it that way, I begin to feel like a
shit—even though I can see how I'm being manipulated. "Okay, I'll try
harder in future."

His face brightens. "That's what I wanted to
hear."

"Uh-huh. Now I've got a sick Beowulf cluster to
resurrect before Friday's batch PGP cluster-fuck kicks off. And then a
tarot permutator to calibrate, and a security audit for another of
those bloody collecting card games in case a bunch of stoned artists in
Austin, Texas, have somehow accidentally produced a great node. Is
there anything else?"

"Probably not," he murmurs, standing. "But how
did you like the opportunity to get out and about a bit?"

"It was wet." I stand up and stretch. "Apart
from that, well, it made a change. But I might get serious about that
overtime claim if it happens too regularly. I wasn't kidding about the
frogs."

"Well, maybe it will and maybe it won't." He
pats me on the shoulder. "You did all right last night, Bob. And I
understand your problem with Harriet. It just so happens that there's a
place on a training course open next week; it'll get you out from under
her feet and I think you'll enjoy it."

"A training course." I look at him. "What in?
Windows NT system administration?"

He shakes his head. "Computational demonology
for dummies."

"But I already did—"

"I don't expect you to
learn
anything in
the course, Bob. It's the other participants I want you to keep an eye
on."

"The others?"

He smiles mirthlessly. "You
said
you
wanted an active service job … "

We are not alone, the truth is out there, yadda yadda yadda. That kind of pop-culture
paranoia is mostly bunk … 
except there's a worm of truth at the heart of every fictional apple,
and while there may be no aliens in the freezer room at Roswell AFB,
the world is still full of spooks who will come through your window and
trash your hard disk if you discover the wrong mathematical theorem.
(Or worse, but that's another kind of problem, one the coworkers in
Field Ops get to handle.)

For the most part, the universe really does work
the way most of the guys with Ph.D.s after their names think it works.
Molecules are made out of atoms which are made out of electrons,
neutrons, and protons—of which the latter two are made out of
quarks—and quarks are made out of lepto-quarks, and so on. It's
turtles
all the way down, so to speak. And you can't find the longest common
prime factors of a number with many digits in it without either
spending several times the life of the entire universe, or using a
quantum computer (which is cheating). And there really are
no
signals from sentient organisms locked up in tape racks at Arecibo, and
there really are
no
flying saucers in storage at Area 51 (apart
from the USAF superblack research projects, which don't count because
they run on aviation fuel).

But that isn't the full story.

I've suffered for what I know, so I'm not going
to let you off the hook with a simple one-liner. I think you deserve a
detailed explanation. Hell, I think
everybody
deserves to know
how tenuous the structure of reality is—but I didn't get to make the
rules, and it is a Very Bad Idea to violate Laundry security policy.
Because Security is staffed by things that you really don't want to get
mad at you—in fact, you don't even want them to notice you exist.

Anyway, I've suffered for my knowledge, and
here's what I've learned. I could wibble on about Crowley and Dee and
mystics down the ages but, basically, most self-styled magicians know
shit. The fact of the matter is that most traditional magic doesn't
work. In fact, it would all be irrelevant, were it not for the Turing
theorem—named after Alan Turing, who you'll have
heard of if you know anything about computers.

That
kind of magic works. Unfortunately.

You haven't heard of the Turing theorem—at
least, not by name—unless you're one of us. Turing never published it;
in fact he died very suddenly, not long after revealing its existence
to an old wartime friend who he should have known better than to have
trusted. This was simultaneously the Laundry's first ever success and
greatest ever disaster: to be honest, they overreacted disgracefully
and managed to deprive themselves of one of the finest minds at the
same time.

Anyway, the theorem has been rediscovered
periodically ever since; it has also been suppressed efficiently, if a
little bit less violently, because nobody wants it out in the open
where Joe Random Cypherpunk can smear it across the Internet.

The theorem is a hack on discrete number theory
that simultaneously disproves the Church-Turing hypothesis (wave if you
understood that) and worse, permits NP-complete problems to be
converted into P-complete ones. This has several consequences, starting
with screwing over most cryptography algorithms—translation:
all
your bank account are belong to us
—and ending with the ability to
computationally generate a Dho-Nha geometry curve in real time.

This latter item is just slightly less dangerous
than allowing nerds with laptops to wave a magic wand and turn them
into hydrogen bombs at will. Because, you see, everything you know
about the way this universe works is correct—except for the little
problem that this isn't the only universe we have to worry about.
Information can leak between one universe and another. And in a
vanishingly small number of the other universes there are things that
listen, and talk back—see Al-Hazred, Nietzsche, Lovecraft, Poe, et
cetera. The many-angled ones, as they say, live at the bottom of the
Mandelbrot set, except when a suitable incantation in the platonic
realm of mathematics—computerised or
otherwise—draws them forth. (And you thought running that fractal
screen-saver was good for your computer?)

Oh, and did I mention that the inhabitants of
those other universes don't play by our rule book?

Just solving certain theorems makes waves in the
Platonic over-space. Pump lots of power through a grid tuned carefully
in accordance with the right parameters—which fall naturally out of
the
geometry curve I mentioned, which in turn falls easily out of the
Turing theorem—and you can actually amplify these waves, until they
rip
honking great holes in spacetime and let congruent segments of
otherwise-separate universes merge. You really don't want to be
standing at ground zero when that happens.

Which is why we have the
Laundry … 

I slink back to my office
via the coffee maker, from which I remove a mug full of a vile
and turgid brew that coats my back teeth in slimy grit. There are three
secret memos waiting in the locked pneumatic tube, one of which is
about abuse of government-issue toothpaste. There are a hundred and
thirty-two email messages waiting for me to read them. And on the other
side of the building there's a broken Beowulf cluster that's waiting
for me to install a new ethernet hub and bring it back online to rejoin
our gang of cryptocrackers. This is my fault for being the departmental
computer guy: when the machines break, I wave my dead chicken and write
voodoo words on their keyboards until they work again. This means that
the people who broke them in the first place keep calling me back in,
and blame me whenever they make things go wrong again. So guess what
gets my attention first? Yes, you guessed right: it's the institutional
cream and off-green wall behind my monitor. I can't even bring myself
to read my mail until I've had a good five minutes staring at nothing
in particular. I have a bad feeling about today, even though there's
nothing obviously catastrophic to lock onto; this is going to be one of
those Friday the Thirteenth type occasions, even
though it's actually a rainy Wednesday the Seventeenth.

To start with there's a charming piece of email
from Mhari, laundered through one of my dead-letter drops. (You'd
better not let the Audit Office catch you sending or receiving private
email from work, which is why I don't. As I'm the guy who built the
departmental firewall, this isn't difficult.)
You slimy scumbag,
don't you ever show your nose round my place again.
Oh yes, as if!
The last time I was round the flat she's staying in was at the weekend,
when she was out, to retrieve my tube of government-issue toothpaste. I
somehow resisted the urge to squirt obscene suggestions on the bathroom
mirror the way she did when she came round and repo'd my stereo. Maybe
this was an oversight on my part.