The Fuller Memorandum (30 page)

Greedy:
check
. Authoritarian:
check
. Worshipers of the most bizarre, anti-human monsters you can imagine:
check
. That’s the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh (and their masks like the Free Church of the Universal Kingdom) and all of their ilk. Hateful, dangerous, unpleasant, greedy, and all-around bad people who you don’t want to have anything to do with if you can help it.

There’s just one problem with this picture . . .

That bit about
in the beginning was the endless void
?

They’re right.

(Oops.)

Here’s the problem:

We live in a hideously reticulated multiverse, where most of the dimensionality of spacetime is hidden from our view—curved in on themselves in closed loops, tucked away in imaginary spaces—but the stuff we can observe is a tiny fraction of the entirety of what we live in. Magic, the stuff I deal with in the office on a day-to-day basis, involves the indirect manipulation of information flow through these unseen dimensions, and communication with the extra-dimensional entities that live elsewhere. I’m an applied computational demonologist—how can I
not
believe this stuff?

Not the bit about original creation, oh no. Beings like N’yar lath-Hotep didn’t mold us out of the black clay of the Nile delta: I’ve got no beef with modern cosmology. But those of them who take an interest in our kind find it useful for humans to believe such myths, and so they encourage the cultist numpties through their pursuit of forbidden lore.

We aren’t alone in this cosmos; we aren’t even alone on this planet, as anyone who’s met a BLUE HADES can attest (there’s a reason all those domed undersea cities of the future never got built in the 1950s) . . . and don’t get me started on DEEP SEVEN, the lurkers in the red-hot depths. But our neighbors, the Deep Ones and the Chthonians, are adapted for wildly different biospheres. There is no colonial overlap to bring us to the point of conflict—which is a very good thing, because the result would be a very rapid
Game Over: Humans Lose
.

The things that keep me awake in the small hours aren’t anything like as approachable as a Deep One. (Hell, I’ve
worked
with a Deep One. Left a part of my soul behind with her. No matter.) The things that terrify me are blue-green worms, twisting and coiling luminous intrusions glimpsed in the abruptly emptied eyes of a former colleague; minds patient and incomprehensibly old that find amusement in our tortured writhing; Boltzmann Brains from the chaotic, necrotic depths of the distant future, reaching back through the thinning ultrastructure of spacetime to idly toy with our reality. Things that go “bump” in the night eternal. Things that eat us—

There is a fourth and final philosophy by which some of us live our lives, and it boils down to this:
do not go quietly into that dark night
. Draw a fourth circle on that now-crowded Venn diagram and you’ll see that while it intersects the greedy and authoritarian circles, and even has a tiny overlap with the greedy authoritarian bit, it doesn’t
quite
intersect with the third circle, the worshipers. It holds up a mirror to their self-destruction. Call it the circle of the necromantic apostates. That’s where I stand, whether I’m greedy or authoritarian or both. (I don’t think I’m either, but how can I be sure?)

I may
believe
in mind-eating horrors from beyond spacetime, but they’ll have to break my neck before I bend it to their yoke.

MO CARRIES HER VIOLIN AND FOLLOWS DR. WILLIAMS AS HE
picks up a chipped plywood tea tray and backs through a swinging door, carrying the jar of paper clips and the stapler. The glass window in the door is hazed by a fine wire mesh, and the edges of the door are lined with copper fingers that close against a metal strip inside the frame. Williams places the tray on one end of an optical workbench, then bolts the door and flips a switch connected to a red lamp outside his office.

“You’ve worked with one of these before?” he asks.

“Of course.” Mo shrugs out of her jacket and hangs it on a hook. “It’s the entanglement-retrieval bit I’m unfamiliar with. That, and I may need a lab report. I know my limits.”

“Good.” Williams’s smile is humorless. “Then if I tell you to stay in the isolation grid over there you know what the consequences are for getting things wrong.”

“Indeed.” She opens the violin case and removes her bone-white instrument and its bow. Williams stares at it for a moment.

“Do you really need that?”

“When I said they’re targeting me, I wasn’t exaggerating. Besides, the document they stole was a report on this very instrument. If they’re trying to backtrack from it to find the original, then when you bring up the Adams-Todt resonance it might lead them here.”

Dr. Williams snorts. “I’m sure the front desk will be very happy to see them.” He turns to the bench and unclamps a swinging arm, uses it to position a glass diffraction grating in a path defined by a set of curious pentagonal prisms positioned at the ten vertices of an irregular pentacle. “Would you pass me the data logger? It’s the second one along on the top shelf . . .”

It takes Dr. Williams a quarter of an hour to set up the forensic magician’s workbench. Apart from the odd geometric layout it doesn’t resemble the popular imagination’s picture of a sorcerer’s laboratory. Colored chalk lines and eye of newt are gone, replaced by solid-state lasers and signal generators: pointy hats and robes have given way to polarized goggles and lab coats. The samples, stripped of their containers, are transferred to windowed containers using perspex tongs. Williams slots them into place in the observation rig. “Okay, stations,” he says conversationally. “I haven’t modified the beam line so there should be no overspill, but I’ll run a low power test first just in case.”

Mo and the forensic demonologist move to stand inside complex designs inlaid in the floor in pure copper. “How’s your personal ward?” he asks.

Mo reaches for the fine silver chain around her neck. “Mine’s fine,” she says slowly. “Damn, I should have drawn a spare for Bob. It’s a bit late now, do you have any kicking around?”

“I’ll see what I can do afterwards. Okay, goggles on, lights going out. Testing in ten, nine, eight . . .” He pushes a switch. The red laser beam is only visible where it passes through the prisms. “You getting any overspill?”

“None.” The room is dark, the only light source the faint trickle through the thickly frosted glass of the window in the door.

“Good.” Williams cuts the power, then reaches across the bench by touch and rotates the sample tubes a quarter turn, lining them up with the beam path. Then he adjusts a mirror, flipping it to face a different and bulkier laser. “Okay, I’m switching to the high power source. Going live in ten, nine, eight . . . .”

An image shimmers faintly in the darkness, stitched out in violet speckles across the translucent face of the screen on the optical bench. A pallid rectangle, violet with black runes.

“That might be it,” Mo says quietly.

“I expect so. I’m upping the power.” The rectangle fills in, glowing brighter and brighter. “Okay, I’m exposing the photographic paper now.”

“What kind of camera . . . ?”

“Pinhole, with two holes. Yes, it’s a double-split interferometer. Quiet, now . . .” There’s a soft click. Ten seconds later there’s another click. “Okay, I got the exposure done. Shame we can’t use CCDs for this job, but you wouldn’t want to feed some of the things we look at to a computing device . . . Right. You want to look at the bearer?”

“Yes.” Mo leans forward, careful to stay within her ward (which glows pale blue, the nacreous glimmer washing over her feet). “It might retrieve Mr. Dower; I can identify him. If it’s anyone else, I’d like a portrait, please.”

“I’ll just reload the interferometer. Wait one . . . Okay, I’m ready. Now comes the fun bit. Do you know Zimbardo’s Second Rite?”

Mo pauses for a while. “I think so.”

“Good, because we’re going there. Don’t worry, your part isn’t hard. Let’s get started.”

After five minutes of minute adjustments, Williams runs a certain specialized script on his workstation, which starts up a sound track of chants in an esoteric language and sends a sequence of commands to the microcontrollers in the workbench. As the baritone voices intone meaningless syllables with the mindless precision of a speech synthesizer, he whispers to her: “Some visitors say it spoils the fun, but I rather think it’s better than taking the risk of a slip of the tongue . . .”

A new image begins to fuzz into being in the screen, the drawn face of a male, fifty-something, wearing an expression of intent concentration.“That’s Dower,” Mo confirms. “He wrote the report. Who do you get next?”

“Let’s see. It’ll cycle through the bearers soon enough . . .”

Dower’s face is melting, morphing into a likeness. Mo’s breath catches in her throat. “Shit.”

“You get around, do you?” Williams sounds amused.

“No, I told you they’re targeting me directly—” She stops, her voice rising. “It would be the best way to get the report out of Dower—send an agent who looks like me—”

“I believe you.” The amusement drops from his voice. “Thousands wouldn’t.”

“Let them.” She takes a deep breath. “Is there anyone else?”

“Wait.” The face is fading, slowly. As it dims, Mo sees a faint shimmer about the eyes: the only sign that it may be a false sending. Whoever is behind the glamour is very good. “Come on, come on . . .” Dr. Williams murmurs under his breath.

Mo shifts her weight uneasily from one foot to the other, as she does when her feet are complaining about too many hours in smart shoes. She glances sidelong into the darkness, where the shadows are swirling and thickening. A faint spectral scatter of spillage from the violet laser shimmers across the wall. “Any res—”

She is in the process of turning her head back towards Dr. Williams and the workbench as the imago shudders and distorts, twisting into another’s face.

Williams is meticulous, and doesn’t cut corners. This is why he and Mo survive.

There’s a crack like a gunshot, and two near-simultaneous bangs from the power supplies that feed the workbench: high-speed krytron switches short the output to earth. A rattle of broken glass follows, as shards from the diffraction screen and some of the pentaprisms follow. The synthesized voices stop. Seconds later, a thin wisp of smoke begins to curl from the top of the laptop.

“Sitrep,” snaps Williams.

“Contained and uninjured. Yourself?” Mo raises a hand to her cheek. One finger comes away damp with blood:
not uninjured
. The pain hasn’t reached her yet.

“Keep your goggles on and stay in the grid until I say you’re clear.” The smoke is nauseatingly thick. Williams reaches out with the perspex tongs and flips the light switch. “Thaumometer says we’re grounded. Clear to step out of the grid.” He demonstrates. “Damn, what a mess.”

Mo swallows. “Is there a CCTV track?”

“What did I tell you earlier about images and computers . . . ? No, but we ought to be able to confirm whether it’s your document.” He sounds unhappy. “Did you get a glimpse of, of whatever that was?”

She nods. “Been there, done that.”

“Countermeasures.”
Williams makes an obscenity of the word. “Does that tell you anything useful?”

“Yes.” Mo picks up her handbag from the workbench on the opposite wall, hunting for a tissue. “Whoever’s got the report knows what it is—and they’re willing to fight to keep it.” She draws a deep, shuddering breath. “Do you have a secure voice line? I need to make a call.”

 

 

I stand very still. The sound of a shotgun slide being racked at a range of less than three meters is a fairly good indication that your luck has run out—especially if you can’t see where the shooter’s positioned.

“Very good, Mr. Howard.” The speaker is male, standing somewhere behind me. He’s on the embankment, of course. Even the B-Team learn eventually. (Maybe I
should
have tried to shoot them the other night. And maybe I should cultivate my inner psychopath some more. Oh well.) “Do what I say and I won’t shoot you. If you understand, nod.”

I nod like a Churchill dog, thinking furiously. His accent is odd.
Welsh?
I can’t place it.

“When I stop speaking I want you to slowly remove your pistol and place it on the ground in front of you. Then I want you to turn around. Do you understand?”

“But I’m not—”

“Did I
ask
you to speak?” His voice is icy. I shut up fast.

“If you understand, nod,” he repeats. I nod. It’s not my job to disillusion him about my imaginary invisible handgun. Like I said: the B-Team are more dangerous than the A-Team, just like sweating dynamite is more dangerous than Semtex. “Do it,” he says. “Do it
very slowly
or I’ll shoot you.”