The Atrocity Archives (46 page)

This is the twentieth (and early twenty-first)
century, an age of spooks and wonder, of conspiracies and Cold War, an
age in which the horror of the pulp magazines lurched forth onto the
world stage in trillion-dollar weapons projects capable of smashing
cities and incinerating millions. This is not the era of the two-fisted
hero-scientist putting the finishing touches on his spherical
exploration machine before setting off on a flight to Galaxy Z. Nor is
it the age of the mad scientist in his castle basement, laboriously
stitching together the graveyard trawl while Igor flies a kite from the
battlements to bring the animating power down to the thing on the slab.
It
is
the decade of the computer scientist, the fast-thinking
designer of abstract machines that float on a Platonic realm of thought
and blink in or out of existence with a mouseclick.

We can get some ideas about the lives and
occupations of these people by extrapolating from the published
material about the intelligence services. James Bamford's
Body of
Secrets,
a deep and fascinating history of the US National Security
Agency, offers some hints from outside—as do other histories of the
cryptic profession, such as David Kahn's
The Codebreakers
and
Alan Hodges's masterful biography of Alan Turing—for if any agency
gets
its hands on tools for probing the Platonic
realm, it will be a kissing cousin of the kings of cryptography.

We can draw some other conclusions from the
unspoken and unwritten history of the secret services. Why, for
example, was the British Special Operations Executive disbanded so
suddenly in 1945? One version is that the rivalry between SOE and the
established Secret Intelligence Service was bitter, and after the 1945
election SIS lobbied the new government to disband SOE. But we know
that when other similar organisations have disbanded they have left
ghosts behind. US Secretary of State Henry Stimson disbanded the Black
Chamber in 1929, with the immortal phrase, "gentlemen do not
read each
other's mail," but that didn't stop the Black Chamber's secrets
ending
up in Room 3416 of the Munitions Building, there to become the core of
the Army's new Signal Intelligence Service.

British governments are less forthcoming—many of
Whitehall's deepest secrets are stored in boxes labelled for release no
less than a hundred years after the events they describe—but we can
guess at similar revenants of SOE surviving the winter of the war, just
as we know that many of the secrets of Bletchley Park's codebreaking
operation ended up in Cheltenham, at the new (and unimportant-sounding)
Government Communications Headquarters. SOE was deeply engaged with
resistance operations against the Nazi occupation of Europe during the
Second World War; if by some chance the Ahnenerbe-SS
were
sheltering ghastly secrets, it is unlikely that the subsequent
custodians of such knowledge would have joined their comrades mustering
out of service at the end of the conflict.

We can extrapolate somewhat from the post-1945
growth of the intelligence agencies. Back in 1930, when William
Friedman became the first chief of the US Army Signal Intelligence
Service, the new successor to the Black Chamber had just three
employees. By the year 2000, Crypto City—the NSA headquarters in
Maryland—had a population of 32,000 regular workers and an annual
budget on the order of seven billion dollars. The
much smaller Government Communications HQ (GCHQ)—Britain's equivalent
of the NSA—still has a budget measured in the high hundreds of
millions. Information is power, and these agencies wield it without
much restraint on the purse strings and without substantial external
oversight. We can assume that even a relatively small 1945-vintage
occult intelligence operation would have grown over the years into a
sprawling organisation with either a huge central office or, possibly,
multiple secure sites dotted around the country.

Finally, this brings us back to the Laundry. The
Laundry squats at the heart of a dark web, the collision between
paranoia and secrecy on one hand, and the urge to knowledge on the
other. Guardians of the dark secrets that threaten to drown us in
nightmare, their lips are sealed as tightly as their archives. To get
even the vaguest outline of their activities takes a privileged
trickster-fool hacker like Bob, nosy enough to worm his way in where he
isn't supposed to be and smart enough to explain his way out of
trouble. Some day Bob will grow up, fully understand the ghastly
responsibilities that go with his job, shut the hell up, and stop
digging. But until then, let us by all means use him as our unquiet
guide to the corridors of the Fear Factory.

While I was writing "The Atrocity
Archive," my
friend Andrew Wilson (science fiction reviewer for
The Scotsman
)
kept telling me: "For God's sake, don't read
Declare
by
Tim
Powers until you finish the novel."

Powers is a remarkable writer, and in
Declare
he explored an arcane world remarkably close to that of "The
Atrocity
Archive." The points of similarity are striking: rogue
departments
within SOE that survive the end of the war, operations in the British
secret intelligence community that focus on the occult and run
independently of anything else for a period of
decades—even a protagonist who, with a special SAS team, tries to take
on a supernatural horror.

Luckily for me, I listened to Andrew. He was
right: if I'd read
Declare
it would have derailed me
completely. And that would have been a shame, because in tone and
attitude the two novels are very different.
Declare
is perhaps
best read as an homage to John Le Carré, whereas the
outlook of "The
Atrocity Archive" is perhaps closer to Len Deighton, by way of
Neal
Stephenson.
Declare
is about disengagement and the abandonment
of former responsibility; "The Atrocity Archive" is
more interested in
coming of age in a world of ghosts and shadows.
Declare
is
about the secret services that waged The Great Game; "The
Atrocity
Archive" is about the agencies that fought the Wizard War. The
two
novels are sufficiently far apart that they stand on their own merit.
I'll just leave the topic by saying, if you liked this book, you'll
probably enjoy
Declare.

About six months
after
the scare over
Declare
another friend said, "Hey, have you ever heard of Delta
Green?"

I used to be big on role-playing games, but it's
been close to two decades since I was last involved in the scene to any
extent. So the whole Chaosium phenomenon had passed me by. It turns out
that Lovecraft's horrors have found a fertile field (or swamp) in the
shape of the game
Call of Cthulhu.
In
Call of Cthulhu
,
gamers role-play their way through one or another 1920s-era scenario
that usually involves solving bizarre mysteries before something
hideous sucks their brains out through their ears with a crazy straw.
"Delta Green" is an almost legendary supplement to
Call
of Cthulhu
that attempts to bring the mythos role-playing game up-to-date. There's
a rogue intelligence agency battling to prevent infestations of
extradimensional horrors … sound familiar?

All I can say in my defense is, no: I hadn't
heard of "Delta Green" when I wrote "The
Atrocity Archive." "Delta
Green" has such a markedly American feel that "The
Atrocity Archive" is
right off the map. (Which is odd, because in tone
if not in substance they feel a lot closer than, say,
Declare
.)
So I'll leave it at that except to say that "Delta
Green" has come
dangerously close to making me pick up the dice again.

Charles Stross Edinburgh, UK
April 2003

BA
British
Airways [UK]

BLACK CHAMBER
Cryptanalysis agency officially disbanded in 1929, secretly retasked
with occult intelligence duties [US]

CESG
Communications Electronics Security Group, division within GCHQ [UK]

CIA
Central
Intelligence Agency [US]

CMA
Computer
Misuse Act, the law governing hacking [UK]

COTS
Cheap,
Off The Shelf—computer kit; a procurement term [US/UK]

CPU
Counter-Possession Unit, a specialised team operating across
departmental lines within The Laundry [UK]

DARPA
Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency, formerly ARPA, a government
scientific research agency affiliated with the Department of Defense
[US]

DEA
Drug
Enforcement Agency [US]

DERA
Defense
Evaluation and Research Agency, privatised as QinetiQ [UK]

DGSE
Direction Générale de la
Sécurité Extérieure, the
external
intelligence organisation (French equivalent of CIA)

[France]

DIA
Defense
Intelligence Agency [US]

EUINTEL
European Union Intelligence Treaty—fictional [EU]

FBI
Federal
Bureau of Investigation [US]

FO
Foreign
Office [UK]

FSB
Federal
Security Service, formerly known as KGB [Russia]

GCHQ
Government Communications HQ (UK equivalent of NSA) [UK]

GCSE
General
Certificate of Secondary Education—high school qualification; not to
be
confused with CESG [UK]

GRU
Russian
Military Intelligence [Russia]

HMG
Her
Majesty's Government [UK]

JIC
Joint
Intelligence Committee [UK]

KCMG
Knight-Commander of the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St.
George—honours service overseas or in connection with foreign or
Commonwealth affairs [UK]

KGB
Committee
for State Security, renamed FSB in 1991 [Russia]

LART
Luser
Attitude Readjustment Tool—see
The New Hacker's Dictionary,
edited by Eric S. Raymond, MIT Press, ISBN 0-262680-92-0 [All]

THE LAUNDRY
Formerly SOE Q Department, spun off as a separate organisation in 1945
[UK]

MI5
National
Security Service, also known as DI5 [UK]

MI6
Secret
Intelligence Service, also known as SIS, DI6 [UK]

NEST
Nuclear
Emergency Search Team (US equivalent of OCCULUS) [US]

NKVD
Historical predecessor organisation to KGB, renamed in 1947
[USSR/Russia]

NSA
National
Security Agency (US equivalent of GCHQ) [US]

NSDAP
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—National Socialist
German Workers Party, aka Nazi Party [Germany]

OBE
Order of
the British Empire—awarded mainly to civilians
and service personnel for public service or other distinctions [UK]

OCCULUS
Occult Control Coordination Unit Liaison, Unconventional Situations
(UK/NATO equivalent of NEST) [UK/NATO]

ONI
Office of
Naval Intelligence [US]

OSA
Official
Secrets Act, the law governing official secrets [UK]

OSS
Office of
Strategic Services (US equivalent of SOE), disbanded in 1945,
remodelled as CIA [US]

Q DIVISION
Division within The Laundry associated with R&D [UK]

QINETIQ
See
DERA [UK]

RIPA
Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, the law governing
communications interception [UK]

RUC
Royal
Ulster Constabulary, the paramilitary police force deployed in Northern
Ireland during the Troubles [UK]

SAS
Special
Air Service—British Army special forces [UK]

SBS
Special
Boat Service—Royal Marines special forces [UK]

SIS
See MI6
[UK]

SOE
Special
Operations Executive (UK equivalent of OSS), officially disbanded in
1945; see also The Laundry [UK]

TLA
Three
Letter Acronym [All]

[04 jun 2006—scanned without attribution]

[22 mar 2010—proofed by ECS (Escaped Chicken Spirits)]