Down on the
Farm
Ah, the joy of
summer: here in the southeast of England it’s the season of
mosquitoes, sunburn, and water shortages. I’m a city boy, so you
can add stifling pollution to the list as a million outwardly
mobile families start their Chelsea tractors and race to their
holiday camps. And that’s before we consider the hellish environs
of the Tube (far more literally hellish than anyone realizes,
unless they’ve looked at a Transport for London journey planner and
recognized the recondite geometry underlying the superimposed
sigils of the underground map).
But I digress . .
.
One morning, my
deputy head of department wanders into my office. It’s a cramped
office, and I’m busy practicing my Frisbee throw with a stack of
beer mats and a dartboard decorated with various cabinet ministers.
“Bob,” Andy pauses to pluck a moist cardboard square out of the air
as I sit up, guiltily: “a job’s just come up that you might like to
look at—I think it’s right up your street.”
The first law of
bureaucracy is show no curiosity outside your cubicle. It’s like
the first rule of every army that’s ever bashed a square: never
volunteer. If you ask questions (or volunteer) it will be taken as
a sign of inactivity, and the devil, in the person of your line
manager (or your sergeant) will find a task for your idle hands.
What’s more, you’d better believe it’ll be less appealing than
whatever you were doing before (creatively idling, for instance),
because inactivity is a crime against organization and must be
punished. It goes double here in the Laundry, that branch of the
British secret state tasked with defending the realm from the scum
of the multi-verse, using the tools of applied computational
demonology: volunteer for the wrong job, and you can end up with
soul-sucking horrors from beyond space-time using your brain for a
midnight snack. But I don’t think I could get away with feigning
overwork right now, and besides: he’s packaged it up as a mystery.
Andy knows how to bait my hook, damn it.
“What kind of
job?”
“There’s something
odd going on down at the Funny Farm.” He gives a weird little
chuckle. “The trouble is going to be telling whether it’s just the
usual, or a more serious deviation. Normally I’d ask Boris to check
it out, but he’s not available this month. It has to be an SSO 2 or
higher, and I can’t go out there myself. So . . . how about
it?”
Call me impetuous
(not to mention a little bored), but I’m not stupid. And while I’m
far enough down the management ladder that I have to squint to see
daylight, I’m an SSO 3, which means I can sign off on petty-cash
authorizations up to the price of a pencil and get to sit in on
interminable meetings, when I’m not tackling supernatural
incursions or grappling with the eerie, eldritch horrors in Human
Resources. I even get to represent my department on international
liaison junkets, when I don’t dodge fast enough. “Not so quick—why
can’t you go? Have you got a meeting scheduled or something?” Most
likely it’s a five-course lunch with his opposite number from the
Dustbin liaison committee, knowing Andy, but if so, and if I take
the job, that’s all for the good: he’ll end up owing
me.
Andy pulls a face.
“It’s not the usual. I would go, but
they might not let me out again.”
Huh? “ ‘ They’? Who
are ‘they’?”
“The Nurses.” He
looks me up and down as if he’s never seen me before. Weird. What’s gotten into him? “They’re sensitive
to the stench of magic. It’s okay for you, you’ve only been working
here, what? Six years? All you need to do is turn your pockets
inside out before you go, and make sure you’re not carrying any
gizmos, electronic or otherwise. But I’ve been here coming up on
fifteen years. And the longer you’ve been in the Laundry . . . It
gets under your skin. Visiting the Funny Farm isn’t a job for an
old hand, Bob. It has to be someone new and fresh, who isn’t likely
to attract their professional attention.”
Call me slow, but
finally I figure out what this is about. Andy wants me to go
because he’s afraid.
(See, I told you the
rules, didn’t I?)
Anyway, that’s why,
less than a week later, I am admitted to a Luna tickal Asylum—for
that is what the gothic engraving on the stone Victorian workhouse
lintel assures me it is. Luckily mine is not an emergency
admission: but you can never be too sure . . .
The old saw that
there are some things that mortal men were not meant to know cuts
deep in my line of work. Laundry staff—the Laundry is what we call
the organization, not a description of what it does—are sometimes
exposed to mind-blasting horrors in the course of our business. I’m
not just talking about the usual PowerPoint presentations and
self-assessment sessions to which any bureaucracy is prone: more
like the mythical Worse Things That Happen at Sea (especially in
the vicinity of drowned alien cities occupied by tenta cled
terrors). When one of our number needs psychiatric care, they’re
not going to get it in a normal hospital, or via care in the
community: we don’t want agents babbling classified secrets in
public, even in the relatively safe confines of a padded cell.
Perforce, we take care of our own.
I’m not going to tell
you what town the Funny Farm is embedded in. Like many of our
establishments, it’s a building of a certain age, confiscated by
the government during the Second World War and not returned to its
former owners. It’s hard to find; it sits in the middle of a
triangle of grubby shopping streets that have seen better days, and
every building that backs onto it sports a high, window-less, brick
wall. All but one: if you enter a small grocery store, walk through
the stockroom into the backyard, then unlatch a nondescript wooden
gate and walk down a gloomy, soot-stained passage, you’ll find a
dank alleyway. You won’t do this without authorization—it’s
protected by wards powerful enough to cause projectile vomiting in
would-be burglars—but if you did, and if you followed the alley,
you’d come to a heavy green wooden door surrounded by narrow
windows with black-painted cast-iron bars. A dull, pitted plaque
next to the doorbell proclaims it to be ST. HILDA OF GRANTHAM’S
HOME FOR DISGRUNTLED WAIFS AND STRAYS. (Except that most of them
aren’t so much disgruntled as demonically possessed when they
arrive at these gates.)
It smells faintly of
boiled cabbage and existential despair. I take a deep breath and
yank the bellpull.
Nothing happens, of
course. I phoned ahead to make an appointment, but even so,
someone’s got to unlock a bunch of doors, then lock them again
before they can get to the entrance and let me in. “They take
security seriously there,” Andy told me. “Can’t risk some of the
battier inmates getting loose, you know.”
“Just how dangerous
are they?” I’d asked.
“Mostly they’re
harmless—to other people.” He shuddered. “But the secure ward—don’t
try and go there on your own. Not that the Sisters will let you,
but I mean, don’t even think about trying it. Some of them are . .
. Well, we owe them a duty of care and a debt of honor, they fell
in the line of duty and all that, but that’s scant consolation for
you if a senior operations officer who’s succumbed to paranoid
schizophrenia decides that you’re a BLUE HADES and gets hold of
some red chalk and a hypodermic needle before your next visit,
hmm?”
The thing is, magic
is a branch of applied mathematics, and the inmates here are not
only mad: they’re computer science graduates. That’s why they came
to the attention of the Laundry in the first place, and it’s also
why they ultimately ended up in the Farm, where we can keep them
away from sharp pointy things and diagrams with the wrong sort of
angles. But it’s difficult to make sure they’re safe. You can solve
theorems with a blackboard if you have to, after all, or in your
head, if you dare. Green crayon on the walls of a padded cell takes
on a whole different level of menace in the Funny Farm: in fact,
many of the inmates aren’t allowed writing implements, and blank
paper is carefully controlled—never mind electronic devices of any
kind.
I’m mulling over
these grim thoughts when there’s a loud clunk from the door, and a
panel just large enough to admit one person opens inward. “Mr.
Howard? I’m Dr. Renfield. You’re not carrying any electronic or
electrical items or professional implements, fetishes, or charms?”
I shake my head. “Good. If you’d like to come this way,
please?”
Renfield is a
mild-looking woman, slightly mousy in a tweed skirt and white lab
coat, with the perpetually harried expression of someone who has a
full Filofax and doesn’t realize that her watch is losing an hour a
day. I hurry along behind her, trying to guess her age.
Thirty-five? Forty-five? I give up.
“How many inmates do you have, exactly?” I ask.
We come to a
portcullis-like door, and she pauses, fumbling with an implausibly
large key ring. “Eighteen, at last count,” she says. “Come on, we
don’t want to annoy Matron. She doesn’t like people obstructing the
corridors.” There are steel rails recessed into the floor, like a
diminutive narrow-gauge railway. The corridor walls are painted
institutional cream, and I notice after a moment that the light is
coming through windows set high up in the walls: odd-looking
devices like armored-glass chandeliers hang from pipes, just out of
reach. “Gas lamps,” Renfield says abruptly. I twitch. She’s noticed
my surreptitious inspection. “We can’t use electric ones, except
for Matron, of course. Come into my office, I’ll fill you
in.”
We go through another
door—oak, darkened with age, looking more like it belongs in a
stately home than a Lunatick Asylum, except for the two prominent
locks—and suddenly we’re in mahogany row: thick wool carpets, brass
doorknobs, light switches, and overstuffed armchairs. (Okay, so the
carpet is faded with age and transected by more of the parallel
rails: but it’s still Officer Country.) Renfield’s office opens off
one side of this reception area, and at the other end I see closed
doors and a staircase leading up to another floor. “This is the
administrative wing,” she explains as she opens her door. “Tea or
coffee?”
“Coffee, thanks,” I
say, sinking into a leather-encrusted armchair that probably dates
to the last but one century. Renfield nods and pulls a discreet
cord by the doorframe, then drags her office chair out from behind
her desk. I can’t help notice that not only does she not have a
computer, but her desk is dominated by a huge and ancient manual
typewriter—an Imperial Aristocrat ‘66’ with the wide carriage
upgrade and adjustable tabulator, I guess, although I’m not really
an expert on office appliances that are twice as old as I am—and
one wall is covered in wooden filing cabinets. There might be as
much as thirty megabytes of data stored in them. “You do everything
on paper, I understand?”
“That’s right.” She
nods, serious-faced. “Too many of our clients aren’t safe around
modern electronics. We even have to be careful what games we let
them play—Lego and Meccano are completely banned, obviously, and
there was a nasty incident involving a game of Cluedo, back before
my time: any board game that has a nondeterministic set of rules
can be dangerous in the wrong set of hands.”
The door opens. “Tea
for two,” says Renfield. I look round, expecting an orderly, and
freeze. “Mr. Howard, this is Nurse Gearbox,” she adds. “Nurse
Gearbox, this is Mr. Howard. He is not a new admission,” she says
hastily, as the thing in the doorway swivels its head toward me
with a menacing hiss of hydraulics.
Whirr-clunk.
“Miss-TER How-ARD. Wel-COME to”—ching—“Sunt-HIL-dah’s”—hiss-clank.
The thing in the very old-fashioned nurse’s uniform—old enough that
its origins as a nineteenth-century nun’s habit are clear—regards
me with unblinking panopticon lenses. Where its nose should be,
something like a witch-finder’s wand points toward me, stellate and
articulated: its face is a brass death mask, mouth a metal grille
that seems to grimace at me in pointed distaste.
“Nurse Gearbox is one
of our eight Sisters,” explains Dr. Renfield. “They’re not fully
autonomous”—I can see a rope-thick bundle of cables trailing from
under the hem of the Sister’s floor-length skirt, which presumably
conceals something other than legs—“but controlled by Matron, who
lives in the two subbasement levels under the administration block.
Matron started life as an IBM 1602 mainframe, back in the day, with
a summoning pentacle and a trapped class four lesser nameless
manifestation constrained to provide the higher cognitive
functions.”
I twitch. “It’s a
grid, please, not a pentacle. Um. Matron is electrically
powered?”
“Yes, Mr. Howard: we
allow electrical equipment in Matron’s basement as well as here in
the staff suite. Only the areas accessible to the patients have to
be kept power-free. The Sisters are fully equipped to control
unseemly outbursts, pacify the overstimulated, and conduct basic
patient-care tasks. They also have Vohlman-Flesch Thaumaturgic
Thixometers for detecting when patients are in danger of doing
themselves a mischief, so I would caution you to keep any occult
activities to a minimum in their presence—despite their hydraulic
delay line controls, their reflexes are very fast.”
Gulp. I nod
appreciatively. “When was the system built?”
The set of Dr.
Renfield’s jaw tells me that she’s bored with the subject, or
doesn’t want to go there for some reason. “That will be all,
Sister.” The door closes, as if on oiled hinges. She waits for a
moment, head cocked as if listening for something, then she
relaxes. The change is remarkable: from stressed-out psychiatrist
to tired housewife in zero seconds flat. She smiles tiredly. “Sorry
about that. There are some things you really shouldn’t talk about
in front of the Sisters: among other things, Matron is very touchy
about how long she’s been here, and everything they hear, she
hears.”
“Oh, right.” I feel
like kicking myself.
“Did Mr. Newstrom
brief you about this installation before he pitched you in at the
deep end?”
Just when I thought I
had a handle on her . . . “Not in depth.” (Let’s not mention the
six-sheet letter of complaint alleging staff brutality, scribbled
in blue crayon on both sides of the toilet paper. Let’s not go into
the fact that nobody has a clue how it was smuggled out, much less
how it appeared on the table one morning in the executive
boardroom, which is always locked overnight.) “I gather it’s pretty
normal to fob inspections off on a junior manager.” (Let’s not
mention just how junior.) “Is that a problem?”
“Humph.” Renfield
sniffs. “You could say so. It’s a matter of necessity, really. Too
much exposure to esoterica in the course of duty leaves the most
experienced operatives carrying traces of, hmm, disruptive
influences.” She considers her next words carefully. “You know what
our purpose is, don’t you? Our job is to isolate and care for
members of staff who are a danger to themselves and others. That’s
why such a small facility—we only have thirty beds—has two doctors
on staff: it takes two to sign the committal papers. Matron and the
Sisters are immune to crossinfection and possession, but have no
legal standing, so Dr. Hexenhammer and I are needed.”
“Right.” I nod,
trying to conceal my unease. “So the Sisters have a tendency to
react badly to senior field agents?”
“Occasionally.” Her
cheek twitches. “Although they haven’t made a mistake and tried to
forcibly detain anyone who wasn’t at risk for nearly thirty years
now.” The door opens again, without warning. This time, Sister is
pushing a trolley, complete with teapot, jug, and two cups and
saucers. The trolley rolls perfectly along the narrow-gauge track,
and the way Nurse Gearbox shunts it along makes me think of wheels.
“Thank you, Sister, that will be all,” Renfield says, taking the
trolley.
“So what clients do
you have at present?” I ask.
“We have eighteen,”
she says, without missing a beat. “Milk or sugar?”
“Milk, no sugar.
Nobody at head office seems able to tell me much about
them.”
“I don’t see why
not—we file regular updates with Human Resources,” she says,
pouring the tea.
I consider my next
words carefully: no need to mention the confusing incident with the
shredder, the medical files, and the photocopies of Peter-Fred’s
buttocks at last year’s Christmas party. (Never mind the complaint,
which isn’t worth the toilet paper it was scribbled on except
insofar as it proves that the Funny Farm’s cordon sanitaire is
leaking. One of the great things about ISO9000-compliant
organizations is that not only is there a form for everything but
anything that isn’t submitted on the correct form can be ignored.)
“It’s the paper thing, apparently. Manual typewriters don’t work
well with the office document-management system, and someone tried
to feed them to a scanner a couple of years ago. Then they sent the
originals for recycling without proofreading the scanner output.
Anyway, it turns out that we don’t have a completely accurate idea
of who’s on long-term remand here, and HR want their superannuation
files brought up to date, as a matter of some
urgency.”
Renfield sighs. “So
someone had an accident with a shredder again. And no photocopies?”
She looks at me sharply for a moment. “Well, I suppose that’s
typical. We’re just another of those low-priority outposts nobody
gives a damn about. I suppose I should be grateful they sent
someone to look into it . . .” She takes a sip of tea. “We’ve got
fourteen short-stay patients right now, Mr. How ard. Of those, I
think the prognosis is good in all cases, except perhaps
Merriweather . . . If you give me your desk number, I’ll post you a
full list of names and payroll references tomorrow. The four
long-term patients are another matter. They live in the secure
wing, by the way. All of them have a nurse of their own, just in
case. Three of them have been here so long that they don’t have
current payroll numbers—the system was first computerized in 1972,
and they’d all been permanently decertified for duty before that
point—and one of them, between you and me, I’m not even sure what
his name is.”
I nod, trying to look
encouraging. The complaint I’m supposed to investigate apparently
came from one of the long-term patients. The question is, which
one? Nobody’s sure: the doorman on the night shift when the
document showed up isn’t terribly communicative (he’s been dead for
some years himself), and the CCTV system didn’t spot anything.
Which is in itself suggestive—the Laundry’s HQ CCTV surveillance is
rather special, extremely hard to deceive, and guaranteed not to be
hooked up to the SCORPION STARE network anymore, which would be the
most obvious route to suborning it. “Perhaps you could introduce me
to the inmates? The transients first, then the long-term
ones?”
She looks a little
shocked. “But they’re the long-term
residents! I assure you, they each need a full-time Sister’s
attention just to keep them under control!”
“Of course”—I shrug,
trying to look embarrassed (it’s not hard)—“but HR have got a bee
in their bonnet about some European Directive on workplace health
and safety and long-term-disability resource provisioning that
requires them to appoint a patient advocate to mediate with the
ombudsman in disputes over health and safety conditions.” I shrug
again. “It’s bullshit. You know it, and I know it. But we’ve got to
comply, or Questions will be Asked. This is the Civil Service. And
they’re still technically Laundry employees, even if they’ve been
remanded into long-term care, so someone has to do the job. My
managers played spin the bottle and I got the job, so I’ve got to
ask you. If you don’t mind?”
“If you insist, I’m
sure something can be arranged,” Renfield concedes. “But Matron
won’t be happy about your visiting the secure wing. It’s very
irregular—she likes to keep a firm grip on it. It’ll take a while
to sort a visit out, and if any of them get wind . .
.”
“Well, then, we’d
just better make it a surprise, and the sooner we get it over with,
the sooner I’ll be out of your hair!” I grin like a loon. “They
told me about the observation gallery. Would you mind showing me
around?”
We do the short-stay
ward first. The ward is arranged around a corridor, with bathrooms
and a nursing station at either end, and individual rooms for the
patients. There’s a smoking room off to one side, with a yellow
patina to the white gloss paint around the doorframe. The smoking
room is empty but for a huddle of sad-looking leather armchairs and
an imposing bulletin board covered in health and safety notices
(including the obligatory SMOKING IS ILLEGAL warning). If it wasn’t
for the locks and the observation windows in the doors, it could be
mistaken for the dayroom of a genteel, slightly decaying Victorian
railway hotel, fallen on hard times.
The patients are
another matter.
“This is Henry
Merriweather,” says Dr. Renfield, opening the door to Bed Three.
“Henry? Hello? I want you to meet Mr. Howard. He’s here to conduct
a routine inspection. Hello? Henry?”
Bed Three is actually
a cramped studio flat, featuring a small living room with sofa and
table, and separate bedroom and toilet areas opening off it
opposite the door. A windup gramophone with a flaring bell-shaped
horn sits atop a hulking wooden sideboard, stained almost black.
There’s a newspaper, neatly folded, and a bowl of fruit. The
frosted window glass is threaded with wire, but otherwise there’s
little to dispel the illusion of hospitality, except for the
occupant.
Henry squats,
cross-legged, on top of the polished wooden table. His head is
tilted in my direction, but he’s not focusing on me. He’s dressed
in a set of pastel-striped pajamas the like of which I haven’t seen
this century. His attention is focused on the Sister waiting in the
corridor behind us. His face is a rictus of abject terror, as if
the automaton in the starched pinafore is waiting to pull his
fingers to pieces, joint by joint, as soon as we
leave.
“Hello?” I say
tentatively, and wave a hand in front of him.
Henry jackknifes to
his feet and tumbles off the table backward, making a weird
gobbling noise that I mistake at first for laughter. He backs into
the corner of the room, crouching, and points past me. “Auditor!
Auditor!”
“Henry?” Renfield
steps sideways around me. She sounds concerned. “Is this a bad
time? Is there anything I can do to help?”
“You—you—” His wobbly
index finger points past me, twitching randomly. “Inspection!
Inspection!”
Renfield obviously
used the wrong word and set him off. The poor bastard’s terrified,
half out of his tree with fear. My stomach just about climbs out
through my ribs in sympathy: the Auditors are one of my personal
nightmares, and Henry (that’s Senior Scientific Officer Third,
Henry Merriweather, Operations Research and Development Group) may
be half-catatonic and a danger to himself, but he’s got every right
to be afraid of them. “It’s all right, I’m not—” There’s a
squeaking grinding noise behind me.
Whirr-clunk.
“Miss-TER MerriWEATHER. GO to your ROOM.” Click. “Time for BED.
IMM-ediateLY.” Click-clunk. Behind me, Nurse Flywheel is blocking
the door like a starched and pin-tucked Dalek: she brandishes a
cast-iron sink plunger menacingly. “IMM-ediateLY!”
“Override!” barks
Renfield. “Sister! Back away!” To me, quietly, “The Sisters respond
badly when inmates get upset. Follow my lead.” To the Sister, who
is casting about with her stalklike Thaumic Thix ometer, “I have
control!”
Merriweather stands
in the corner, shaking uncontrollably and panting as the robotic
nurse points at him for a minute. We’re at an impasse, it seems.
Then: “DocTOR—Matron says the patIENT must go to bed. You have
CON-trol.” Clunk-whirr. The Sister withdraws, rotates on her base,
and glides backward along her rails to the nursing
station.
Renfield nudges the
door shut with one foot. “Mr. Howard, would you mind standing with
your back to the door? And your head in front of that, ah,
spyhole?”
“You’re not, not,
nuh-huh—” Merriweather gobbles for words as he stares at
me.
I spread my hands.
“Not an Auditor,” I say, smiling.
“Not an—an—” His
mouth falls open and his eyes shut. A moment later, I see the
moisture trails on his cheeks as he begins to weep with quiet
desperation.
“He’s having a bad
day,” Renfield mutters in my direction. “Here, let’s get you to
bed, Henry.” She approaches him slowly, but he makes no move to
resist as she steers him into the small bedroom and pulls the
covers back.
I stand with my back
to the door the whole time, covering the observation window. For
some reason, the back of my neck is itching. I can’t help thinking
that Nurse Flywheel isn’t exactly the chatty talkative type who’s
likely to put her feet up and relax with a nice cup of tea. I’ve
got a feeling that somewhere in this building, an unblinking
red-rimmed eye is watching me, and sooner or later I’m going to
have to meet its owner.
Andy was afraid.
Well, I’m not stupid;
I can take a hint. So right after he asked me to go down to St.
Hilda’s and find out what the hell was going on, I plucked up my
courage and went and knocked on Angleton’s office
door.
Angleton is not to be
trifled with. I don’t know anyone else currently alive and in the
organization who could get away with misappropriating the name of
the CIA’s legendary chief of counterespionage as a nom de guerre. I
don’t know anyone else in the organization whose face is visible in
circa-1942 photographs of the Laundry’s lineup, either, barely
changed across all those years. Angleton scares the bejeezus out of
most people, myself included. Study the abyss for long enough, and
the abyss will study you right back; Angleton’s qualified to chair
a university department of necromancy—if any such existed—and
meetings with him can be quite harrowing. Luckily, the old ghoul
seems to like me, or at least not to view me with the distaste and
disdain he reserves for Human Resources or our political masters.
In the wizened, desiccated corners of what passes for his
pedagogical soul he evidently longs for a student, and I’m the
nearest thing he’s got right now.
Knock, knock.
“Enter.”
“Boss? Got a
minute?”
“Sit, boy.” I sat.
Angleton bashed away at the keyboard of his device for a few more
seconds, then pulled the carbon papers out from under the
platen—for really secret secrets in this line of work, computers
are flat-out verboten—and laid them
face down on his desk, then carefully draped a stained tea towel
over them. “What is it?”
“Andy wants me to go
and conduct an unscheduled inspection of the Funny
Farm.”
Whoa. Angleton stares at me, fully engaged. “Did he
say why?” he asks, finally.
“Well.” How to put
it? “He seems to be afraid of something. And there’s some kind of
complaint. From one of the inmates.”
Angleton props his
elbows on the desk and makes a steeple of his bony fingers. A
minute passes before a cold wind blows across the charnel-house
roof. “Well.”
I have never seen
Angleton nonplussed before. The effect is disturbing, like glancing
down and realizing that, like Wile E. Coyote, you’ve just run over
the edge of a cliff and are standing on thin air.
“Boss?”
“What exactly did
Andy say?” Angleton asks slowly.
“We received a
complaint.” I briefly outline what I know about the shit-stirring
missive. “Something about one of the long-stay inmates. And I was
just wondering, do you know anything about them?”
Angleton peers at me
over the rims of his bifocals. “As a matter of fact I do,” he says
slowly. “I had the privilege of working with them. Hmm. Let me
see.” He unfolds creakily to his feet, turns, and strides over to
the shelves of ancient Eastlight files that cover the back wall of
his office. “Where did I put it . . . ?”
Angleton going to the
paper files is another whoa! moment. He
keeps most of his stuff in his Memex, the vast, hulking microfilm
mechanism built into his desk. If it’s still printed on paper, then
it’s really important. “Boss?”
“Yes?” he says,
without turning away from his search.
“We don’t know how
the message got out,” I say. “Isn’t it supposed to be a secure
institution?”
“Yes, it is. Ah,
that’s more like it.” Angleton pulls a box file from its niche and
blows vigorously across its upper edge. Then he casually opens it.
There’s a pop and a sizzle of ozone as the ward lets go, harmlessly
bypassing him—he is, after all, its legitimate owner. “Hmm, in here
somewhere . . .”
“Isn’t it supposed to
be leakproof, by definition?”
“I’m getting to that.
Be patient, Bob.” There’s a waspish note in his voice, and I shut
up hastily.
A minute later,
Angleton pulls a mimeographed booklet from the file and closes the
lid. He returns to the desk, and slides the booklet toward
me.
“I think you’d better
read this first, then go and do what Andy wants,” he says slowly.
“Be a good boy and copy me on your detailed itinerary before you
depart.”
I read the cover of
the booklet, which is dog-eared and dusty. There’s a picture of a
swell guy in a suit and a gal in a fifties beehive hairdo sitting
in front of a piece of industrial archaeology. The title reads:
POWER, COOLING, AND SUBSTATION REQUIREMENTS FOR YOUR
IBMS/1602-M200. I sneeze, puzzled. “Boss?”
“I suggest you read
and memorize this booklet, Bob. It is not impossible that there
will be an exam, and you really wouldn’t want to fail
it.”
My skin crawls.
“Boss?”
Pause.
“It’s not true that
the Funny Farm is entirely leakproof, Bob. It’s surrounded by an
air-gap, but it was designed to leak under certain very specific
conditions. I find it troubling that these conditions do not appear
to apply to the present circumstances. In addition to memorizing
this document, you might want to review the files on GIBBOUS MOON
and AXIOM REFUGE before you go.” Pause.
“And if you see Cantor, give my regards to the old coffin-dodger.
I’m particularly interested in hearing
what he’s been up to for the past thirty years . . .”
Renfield takes me
back to the smoking room and shuts the door. “He’s having a bad
day, I’m afraid.” She pulls out a cardboard packet and extracts a
cigarette. “Smoke?”
“Uh, no thanks.” The
sash windows are nailed shut and their frames painted over. There’s
a louvered vent near the top of the windows, grossly unfit for the
purpose: I try not to breathe too deeply. “What happened to
him?”
She strikes a match
and contemplates the flame for a moment. “Let’s see. He’s
forty-two. Married, two kids—he talks about them. Wife’s a
schoolteacher, his deep cover is that he works in MI6 clerical.”
(You’re not supposed to talk about your work to your partner, but
it’s difficult enough that we’ve been given dispensation to tell
little white lies—and if necessary, HR will back them up.) “He’s
not field-qualified—mostly he does theory—but he worked for Q
Division, and he was on secondment to the Abstract Attractor
Working Group when he fell ill.”
In other words, he’s
a theoretical thaumaturgist. Magic being a branch of applied
mathematics, when you carry out certain computational operations,
it has echoes in the Platonic realm of pure mathematics—echoes
audible to beings whose true nature I cannot speak of, on account
of doing so being a violation of the Official Secrets Act.
Theoretical thaumaturgists are the guys who develop new efferent
algorithms (or, colloquially, “spells”): it’s an occupation with a
high attrition rate.
“He’s convinced the
Auditors are after him for thinking inappropriate thoughts on
organization time. There’s an elaborate confabulation, and it looks
a little like paranoid schizophrenia at first glance, but
underneath . . . We sent him to our Trust hospital for an MRI scan,
and he’s got the characteristic lesions.”
“Lesions?”
She takes a deep drag
from the cigarette. “His prefrontal lobes look like Swiss cheese.
It’s one of the early signs of Krantzberg Syndrome. If we can keep
him isolated from work for a couple more months, then retire him to
a nice quiet desk job, we might be able to stabilize him. K.
Syndrome’s not like Alzheimer’s: if you remove the insult, it
frequently goes into remission. Mind you, he may also need a course
of chemotherapy. At various times my predecessors tried
electroconvulsive treatment, prefrontal lobotomy, neuroleptics,
daytime television, LSD—none of them work consistently or reliably.
The best treatment still seems to be bed rest followed by work
therapy in a quiet, undemanding office environment.” Blue cloud
spirals toward the ceiling. “But he’ll never run a great summoning
again.”
I’m beginning to
regret not accepting her offer of a cigarette, and I don’t even
smoke. My mouth’s dry. I sit down: “Do we have any idea what causes
K. Syndrome?” I’ve skimmed GIBBOUS MOON, but the medical jargon
didn’t mean much to me; and AXIOM REFUGE was even less helpful. (It
turned out to be a dense mathematical treatise introducing a
notation for describing certain categories of topological defect in
a twelve-dimensional space.) Only the power supply for the
mainframe—presumably the one Matron uses—seems remotely relevant to
the job in hand.
“There are several
theories.” Renfield twitches ash on the threadbare carpet as she
paces the room. “It tends to hit theoretical computational
demonologists after about twenty years: Merriweather is unusually
young. It also hits people who’ve worked in high-thaum fields for
too long. Initial symptoms include mild ataxia—you saw his hand
shaking?—and heightened affect: it can be mistaken for bipolar
disorder or hyperactivity. There’s also the disordered thinking and
auditory hallucinations typical of some types of schizophrenia.”
She pauses to inhale. “There are two schools of thought, if you
leave out the Malleus Maleficarum stuff
about souls contaminated by demonic effusions: one is that exposure
to high-thaum fields causes progressive brain lesions. Trouble is,
it’s rare enough that we haven’t been able to quantify that,
and—”
“The other theory?” I
prod.
“My favorite.” She
nearly smiles. “Computational demonology—you carry out
calculations, you prove theorems; somewhere else in the Platonic
realm of mathematics Listeners notice your activities and respond,
yes? Well, there’s some disagreement over this, but the current
orthodoxy in neurophysiology is that the human brain is a
computational organ. We can carry out computational tasks, yes?
We’re not very good at it, and at an individual neurological level
there’s no mechanism that might invoke the core Turing theorems,
but . . . if you think too hard about certain problems, you might
run the risk of carrying out a minor summoning in your own head.
Nothing big enough or bad enough to get out, but . . . those florid
daydreams? And the sick feeling afterward because you can’t quite
remember what it was about? Something in another universe just
sucked a microscopic lump of neural tissue right out of your
intrapa rietal sulcus, and it won’t grow back.”
Urk. Not so much “use it or lose it” as “use it
and lose it,” then. Could be worse,
could be a NAND gate in there . . . “Do we know why some people
suffer from it and others don’t?”
“No idea.” She drops
what’s left of her cigarette and grinds it under the heel of a
sensible shoe. She catches my eye. “Don’t worry about it, the
Sisters keep everything orderly,” she says. “Do you know what you
want to do next?”
“Yes,” I say, damning
myself for a fool before I take the next logical step: “I want to
talk to the long-term inmates.”
I’m half-hoping
Renfield will put her foot down and refuse point-blank to let me do
it, but she only puts up a token fight: she makes me sign a
personal-injury-claims waiver and scribble out a written order
instructing her to show me the gallery. So why do I feel as if I’ve
somehow been outmaneuvered?
After I finish
signing forms to her heart’s content, she uncaps an ancient and
battered speaking tube beside her desk and calls down it. “Matron,
I am taking the inspector to see the observation gallery, in
accordance with orders from Head Office. He will then meet with the
inmates in Ward Two. We may be some time.” She screws the cap back
on before turning to me apologetically. “It’s vital to keep Matron
informed of our movements; otherwise, she might mistake them for an
escape attempt and take appropriate action.”
I swallow. “Does that
happen often?” I ask, as she opens the office door and stalks
toward the corridor at the other end.
“Once in a while a
temporary patient gets stir-crazy.” She starts up the stairs. “But
the long-term residents . . . No, not so much.”
Upstairs, there’s a
landing very similar to the one we just left—with one big
exception: a narrow, white-painted metal door in one wall, stark
and raw, secured by a shiny brass padlock and a set of wards so
ugly and powerful that they make my skin crawl. There are no
narrow-gauge rails leading under this door, no obvious conductive
surfaces, nothing to act as a conduit for occult forces. Renfield
fumbles with a huge key ring at her side, then unfastens the
padlock. “This is the way in via the observation gallery,” she
says. “There are a couple of things to bear in mind. Firstly, the
Nurses can’t guarantee your safety: if you get in trouble with the
prisoners, you’re on your own. Secondly, the gallery is a Faraday
cage, and it’s thauma turgically grounded too—it’d take a black
mass and a multiple sacrifice to get anything going in here. You
can observe the apartments via the periscopes and hearing tubes
provided. That’s our preferred way—you can go into the ward by
proceeding to the other end of the gallery, but I’d be very
grateful if you could refrain from doing so unless it’s absolutely
essential. They’re difficult enough to manage as it is. Finally, if
you insist on meeting them, just try to remember that appearances
can be deceptive.”
“They’re not
demented,” she adds, “just extremely dangerous. And not in a
Hannibal Lecter bite-your-throat-out sense. They—the long-term
residents—aren’t regular Krantzberg Syndrome cases. They’re stable
and communicative, but . . . You’ll see for yourself.”
I change the subject
before she can scare me any more. “How do I get into the ward
proper? And how do I leave?”
“You go down the
stairs at the far end of the gallery. There’s a short corridor with
a door at each end. The doors are interlocked so that only one can
be open at a time. The outer door will lock automatically behind
you when it closes, and it can only be unlocked from a control
panel at this end of the viewing gallery. Someone up here”—meaning,
Renfield herself—“has to let you out.” We reach the first periscope
station in the viewing gallery. “This is room two. It’s currently
occupied by Alan Turing.” She notices my start. “Don’t worry. It’s
just his safety name.”
(True names have
power, so the Laundry is big on call by reference, not call by
value; I’m no more “Bob Howard” than the “Alan Turing” in room two
is the father of computer science and applied computational
demonology.)
She continues. “The
real Alan Turing would be nearly a hundred by now. All our
long-term residents are named for famous mathematicians. We’ve got
Alan Turing, Kurt Godel, Georg Cantor, and Benoit Mandelbrot.
Turing’s the oldest, Benny is the most recent—he actually has a
payroll number, sixteen.”
I’m in five digits—I
don’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Who’s the nameless one?” I
ask.
“That would be Georg
Cantor,” she says slowly. “He’s probably in room
four.”
I bend over the
indicated periscope, remove the brass cap, and peer into the alien
world of the nameless K. Syndrome survivor.
I see a whitewashed
room, quite spacious, with a toilet area off to one side and a
bedroom accessible through a doorless opening—much like the
short-term ward. The same recessed metal tracks run around the
floor, so that a Nurse can reach every spot in the apartment.
There’s the usual comfortable, slightly shabby furniture, a pile of
newspapers at one side of the sofa and a sideboard with a windup
gramophone. In the middle of the floor there’s a table, and two
chairs. Two men sit on either side of an ancient travel chess set,
leaning over a game that’s clearly in its later stages. They’re
both old, although how old isn’t immediately obvious—one has gone
bald, and his liver-spotted pate reminds me of an ancient tortoise,
but the other still has a full head of white hair and an impressive
(but neatly trimmed) beard. They’re wearing polo shirts and grey
suits of a kind that went out of fashion with the fall of the
Soviet Union. I’m willing to bet there are no laces in their
brogues.
The guy with the hair
makes a move, and I squint through the periscope. That was wrong, wasn’t it? I realize, trying to
work out what’s happening. Knights don’t move
like that. Then the implication of something Angleton said
back in the office sinks in, and an icy sweat prickles in the small
of my back. “Do you play chess?” I ask Dr. Renfield without looking
round.
“No.” She sounds
disinterested. “It’s one of the safe games—no dice, no need for a
pencil and paper. And it seems to be helpful. Why?”
“Nothing, I hope.”
But my hopes are dashed a moment later when turtle-head responds
with a sideways flick of a pawn, two squares to the left, and takes
beardy’s knight. Turtle-head drops the knight into a biscuit tin
along with the other disused pieces; it sticks to the side, as if
magnetized. Beardy nods, as if pleased, then leans back and glances
up.
I recoil from the
periscope a moment before I meet his eyes. “The two players. Guy
like a tortoise, and another with a white beard and a full head of
hair. They are . . . ?”
“That’d be Turing and
Cantor. Turing used to be a Detached Special Secretary in Ops, I
think; we’re not sure who or what Cantor was, but he was someone
senior.” I try not to twitch. DSS is one of those grades, the fuzzy ones that HR aren’t allowed
to get their grubby little fingers on. I think Angleton’s one.
(Scuttlebutt is that it’s an acronym for Deeply Scary Sorcerer.)
“They play chess every afternoon for a couple of hours—for as long
as I can remember.”
Right. I peer down
the periscope again, looking at the game of not-chess. “Tell me
about Dr. Hexenhammer. Where is he?”
“Julius? I think he’s
in an off-site meeting or something today,” she says vaguely.
“Why?”
“Just wondering. How
long has he been working here?”
“Before my time.” She
pauses. “About thirty years, I think.”
Oh dear. “He doesn’t
play chess either,” I speculate, as Cantor’s king makes a knight’s
move and Turing’s queen’s pawn beats a hasty retreat. A nasty
suspicious thought strikes me—about Renfield, not the inmates.
“Tell me, do Cantor and Turing play chess regularly?” I straighten
up.
“Every afternoon for
a couple of hours. Julius says they’ve been doing it for as long as
he can remember. It seems to be good for them.” I look at her
sharply. Her expression is vacant: wide-awake but nobody home. The
hairs on the back of my neck begin to prickle.
Right. I am getting a
very bad feeling about this. “I need to
go and talk to the patients now. In person.” I stand up and hook
the cap back over the periscope. “Stick around for fifteen minutes,
please, in case I need to leave in a hurry. Otherwise”—I glance at
my watch—“it’s twenty past one. Check back for me every hour on the
half hour.”
“Are you certain you
need to do this?” Her eyes narrow, suddenly alert once
more.
“You visit with the
patients, don’t you?” I raise an eyebrow. “And you do it on your
own, with Dr. Hexenhammer up here to let you out if there’s a
problem. And the Sisters.”
“Yes, but—” She bites
her tongue.
“Yes?” I give her the
long stare.
“I’m rubbish with
computers!” she bursts out. “But you’re at risk!”
“Well, there aren’t
any computers except Matron down there, are there?” I grin
crookedly, trying not to show my unease. (Best not to dwell upon
the fact that before 1945 “computer” was a job description, not a
machine.) “Relax, it’s not contagious.”
She shrugs in
surrender, then gestures at the far end of the observation gallery,
where a curious contraption sits above a pipe. “That’s the alarm.
If you want a Sister, pull the chain with the blue handle. If you
want a general alarm, which will call the duty psychiatrist, pull
the red handle. There are alarm handles in every
room.”
“Okay.” Blue for a
Sister, Red for a psychiatrist who is showing all the signs of
being under a geas or some other form of compulsion—except that I
can’t check her out without attracting Matron’s unwanted attention
and probably tipping my hand. I begin to see why Andy didn’t want
to open this particular can of worms. “I can deal with
that.”
I head for the stairs
at the far end of the gallery.
There’s nothing
homely about the short corridor that leads from the bottom of the
staircase to the Secure Wing. Whitewashed brick walls, glass bricks
near the ceiling to admit a wan echo of daylight, and doors made of
metal that have no handles. Normally, going into a situation like
this I’d be armed to the teeth, invocations and efferent
subroutines loaded on my PDA, Hand of Glory in my pocket, and a
necklace of garlic bulbs around my neck: but this time I’m naked,
and nervous as a frog in his birthday suit. The first door gapes
open, waiting for me. I walk past it and try not to jump out of my
skin when it rattles shut behind me with a crash. There’s a heavy
clunk from the door ahead. As I reach it and push, it swings open
to reveal a corridor floored in parquet. An old codger in a green
tweed suit and bedroom slippers is shuffling out of an opening at
one side, clutching an enameled metal mug full of tea. He looks at
me. “Why, hello!” he croaks. “You’re new here, aren’t
you?”
“You could say that.”
I try to smile. “I’m Bob. Who are you?”
“Depends who’s
asking, young feller. Are you a psychiatrist?”
“I don’t think
so.”
He shuffles forward,
heading toward a side bay that, as I approach it, turns out to be a
day room of some sort. “Then I’m not Napoleon
Bonaparte!”
Oh, very droll. The terror is fading, replaced by a
sense of disappointment. I trail after him. “The staff have names
for you all. Turing, Cantor, Mandelbrot, and Godel. You’re not
Cantor or Turing. That makes you one of Mandelbrot or
Godel.”
“So you’re
undecided?” There’s a coffee table with a pile of newspapers on it
in the middle of the dayroom, a couple of elderly chesterfields,
and three armchairs that could have been looted from an old-age
home sometime before the First World War. “And in any case, we
haven’t been formerly introduced. So you might as well call me
Alice.”
Alice—or Mandelbrot
or Godel or whoever he is—sits down. The armchair nearly swallows
him. He beams at my bafflement, delighted to have found a new
victim for his doubtless-ancient puns.
“Well, Alice. Isn’t
this quite some rabbit hole you’ve fallen down?”
“Yes, but it’s just
the right size!” He seems to appreciate having somebody to talk to.
“Do you know why you’re here?”
“Yup.” I see an
expression of furtive surprise steal across his face. I nod,
affably. Try to mess with my head, sonny? I’ll
mess with yours. Except that this guy is quite possibly a
DSS, and if it wasn’t for the constant vigilance of the Sisters and
the distinct lack of electricity hereabouts, he could turn me
inside out as soon as look at me. “Do you know why you’re
here?”
“Absolutely!” He nods
back at me.
“So now that we’ve
established the preliminaries, why don’t we cut the
bullshit?”
“Well.” He takes a
cautious sip of his tea, and the wrinkles on his forehead deepen.
“I suppose the Board of Directors want a progress
report.”
If the sofa I was
perched on wasn’t a relative of a Venus flytrap, my first reaction
would leave me clinging to the ceiling. “The who want a—”
“Not the band, the
Board.” He looks mildly irritated. “It’s been years since they last
sent someone to spy on us.”
Okay, so this is the
Funny Farm; I should have been expecting delusions. Play nice, Bob. “What are you supposed to be doing
here?” I ask.
“Oh Lord.” He rolls
his eyes. “They sent a tabula rasa again?” He raises his voice.
“Kurt, they sent us a tabula rasa again!”
More shuffling. A
stooped figure, shock-headed with white hair, appears in the
doorway. He’s wearing tinted round spectacles that look like they
fell off the back of a used century. “What? What?” he demands
querulously.
“He doesn’t know
anything,” Alice confides in—this must be Godel, I realize, which
means Alice is Mandelbrot—Godel, then with a wink at me, “He
doesn’t know anything, either.”
Godel shuffles into
the restroom. “Is it teatime already?”
“No!” Mandelbrot puts
his mug down. “Get a watch!”
“I was only asking
because Alan and Georg are still playing—”
This has gone far enough. Apprehension dissolves
into indignation. “It’s not chess!” I point out. “And none of you
are insane.”
“Sssh!” Godel looks alarmed. “The Sisters might
overhear!”
“We’re alone, except
for Dr. Renfield upstairs, and I don’t think she’s paying as much
attention to what’s going on down here as she ought to.” I stare at
Godel. “In fact, she’s not really one of us at all, is she? She’s a
shrink who specializes in K. Syndrome, and none of you are
suffering from K. Syndrome. So what are you doing in
here?”
“Fish-slice!
Hatstand!” Godel pulls an alarming face, does a two-step backward,
and lurches into the wall. Having shared a house with Pinky and
Brains, I am not impressed: as displays of “look at me, woo-woo”
go, Godel’s is pathetic. Obviously he’s never met a real
schizophrenic.
“One of you wrote a
letter, alleging mistreatment by the staff. It landed on my boss’s
desk, and he sent me to find out why.”
THUD. Godel bounces off the wall again, showing
remarkable resilience for such old bones. “Do shut up, old fellow,”
chides Mandelbrot. “You’ll attract Her attention.”
“I’ve met someone
with K. Syndrome, and I shared a house with some real lunatics
once,” I hint. “Save it for someone who cares.”
“Oh bother,” says
Godel, and falls silent.
“We’re not mad,”
Mandelbrot admits. “We’re just differently sane.”
“Then why are you
here?”
“Public health.” He
takes a sip of tea and pulls a face. “Everyone else’s health. Tell me, do they still keep an IBM
1602 in the back of the steam-ironing room?” I must look blank
because he sighs deeply and subsides into his chair. “Oh dear.
Times change, I suppose. Look, Bob, or whoever you call yourself—we
belong here. Maybe we didn’t when we first checked in for the
weekend seminar, but we’ve lived here so long that . . . You’ve
heard of care in the community? This is our community. And we will
be very annoyed with you if you try to
make us leave.”
Whoops. The idea of a very annoyed DSS, with or
without a barbaric, pun-infested sense of humor, is enough to make
anyone’s blood run cold. “What makes you think I’m going to try and
make you leave?”
“It’s in the papers!”
Godel squawks like an offended parrot. “See here!” He brandishes a
tabloid at me, and I take it, disentangling it from his fingers
with some difficulty. It’s a local copy of the Metro, somewhat sticky with marmalade, and the
headline of the cover blares: NHS TRUST TO SELL ESTATE IN PFI
DEAL.
“Um. I’m not sure I
follow.” I look to Mandelbrot in hope.
“We haven’t finished
yet! But they’re selling off all the hospital Trust’s property!”
Mandelbrot bounces in his chair. “What about St. Hilda’s? It was
requisitioned from the St. James charitable foundation back in
1943, and for the past ten years the Ministry of Defence has been
giving all those old wartime properties back to their owners to
sell off to the developers. What about us?”
“Whoa!” I drop the
newspaper and hold my hands up. “Nobody tells me these
things!”
“Told you!” crows
Godel. “He’s part of the conspiracy!”
“Hang on.” I think
fast. “This isn’t a normal MoD property, is it? It’ll have been
shuffled under the rug back in 1946 as part of the postwar
settlement. We’d really have to ask the Audit Department about who
owns it, but I’m pretty sure it’s not owned by any NHS Trust, and
they won’t simply give it back—” My brain finally catches up with
my mouth. “What weekend seminar?”
“Oh bugger,” says a
new voice from the doorway, a rich baritone with a hint of a Scouse
accent. “He’s not from the Board.”
“What did I tell
you?” Godel screeches. “It’s a conspiracy! He’s from Human
Resources! They sent him to evaluate us!”
I am quickly getting
a headache. “Let me get this straight. Mandelbrot, you checked in
thirty years ago for a weekend seminar, and they put you in the
secure ward? Godel, I’m not from HR; I’m from Ops. You must be
Cantor, right? Angleton sends his regards.”
That gets his attention. “Angleton? The skinny
whippersnapper’s still warming a chair, is he?” Godel looks
delighted. “Excellent!”
“He’s my boss. And I
want to know the rules of that game you were just playing with
Turing.”
Three pairs of eyes
swivel to point at me—four, for they are joined by the last inmate,
standing in the doorway—and suddenly I feel very small and very
vulnerable.
“He’s sharp,” says
Mandelbrot. “Too bad.”
“How do we know he’s
telling the truth?” Godel’s screech is uncharacteristically muted.
“He could be from the Opposition! KGB, Department 16! Or GRU,
maybe.”
“The Soviet Union
collapsed a few decades ago,” volunteers Turing. “It said so in the
Telegraph.”
“Black Chamber,
then.” Godel sounds unconvinced.
“What do you think
the rules are?” asks Cantor, a drily amused expression stretching
the wrinkles around his eyes.
“You’ve got pencils.”
I can see one from here, sitting on the sideboard on top of a
newspaper folded at the crossword page. “And, uh . . .”
What must the world look like from an inmate’s
point of view? “Oh. I get it.”
(The realization is
blinding, sudden, and makes me feel like a complete
idiot.)
“The hospital!
There’s no electricity, no electronics—no way to get a signal
out—but it works both ways! You’re inside the biggest damn grounded
defensive pentacle this side of HQ , and anything on the outside
trying to get in has got to get past the defenses.” Because that’s
what the Sisters are really about: not nurses but perimeter guards.
“You’re a theoretical research cell, aren’t you?”
“We prefer to call
ourselves a think tank.” Cantor nods gravely.
“Or even”—Mandelbrot
takes a deep breath—“a brains trust!”
“A-ha! AhaHAHAHA!
Hic.” Godel covers his mouth, face reddening.
“What do you think
the rules are?” Cantor repeats, and they’re still staring at me, as
if, as if . . .
“Why does it matter?”
I ask. I’m thinking that it could be anything; a 2,5 universal
Turing machine encoded in the moves of the pawns—that would
fit—whatever it is, it’s symbolic communication, very abstract,
very pared-back, and if they’re doing it in this ultimately
firewalled environment and expecting to report directly to the
Board, it’s got to be way above my security clearance—
“Because you’re
acting cagey, lad. Which makes you too bright for your own good.
Listen to me: just try to convince yourself that we’re playing
chess, and Matron will let you out of here.”
“What’s thinking got
to do with—” I stop. It’s useless pretending. “Fuck. Okay, you’re a
research cell working on some ultimate black problem, and you’re
using the Farm because it’s about the most secure environment
anyone can imagine, and you’re emulating some kind of minimal
universal Turing machine using the chessboard. Say, a 2,5 UTM—two
registers, five operations—you can encode the registers
positionally in the chessboard’s two dimensions, and use the moves
to simulate any other universal Turing machine, or a transform in
an eleven-dimensional manifold like AXIOM REFUGE—”
Godel’s waving
frantically. “She’s coming! She’s coming!” I hear doors clanging in
the distance.
Shit. “But why are you so afraid of the
Nurses?”
“Back channels,”
Cantor says cryptically. “Alan, be a good lad and try to jam the
door for a minute, will you? Bob, you are not cleared for what we’re doing here, but you can
tell Angleton that our full report to the Board should be ready in
another eighteen months.” Wow—and they’ve been
here since before the Laundry computerized its payroll system in
the 1970s? “Are you absolutely sure they’re not going to
sell St. Hilda’s off to build flats for yuppies? Because if so, you
could do worse than tell Georg here, it’ll calm him
down—”
“Get me out of here,
and I’ll make damned sure they don’t sell anything off !” I say
fervently. “Or rather, I’ll tell Angleton. He’ll sort things out.”
When I remind them what’s going on here, they’ll be no more
inclined to sell off St. Hilda’s than they would be to privatize an
atomic bomb.
Something outside is
rumbling and squealing on the metal rails. “You’re sure none of you
submitted a complaint about staff brutality?”
“Absolutely!” Godel
bounces up and down excitedly.
“It must have been
someone else.” Cantor glances at the doorway. “You’d better run
along. It sounds as if Matron is having second thoughts about
you.”
I’m halfway out of
the carnivorous sofa, struggling for balance. “What kind
of—”
“Go!”
I stumble out into
the corridor. From the far end, near the nursing station, I hear a
grinding noise as of steel wheels spinning furiously on rails, and
a mechanical voice blatting: “InTRU-der! EsCAPE ATTempt! All
patients must go to their go to their go to their bedROOMs
IMMediateLY!”
Whoops. I turn and head in the opposite direction,
toward the airlock leading up to the viewing gallery. “Open up!” I
yell, thumping the outer door, which is securely fastened, “Dr.
Renfield! Time’s up! I need to go, now!” There’s no response. I see
the color-coded handles dangling by the door and yank the red one
repeatedly. Nothing happens, of course.
I should have smelled
a setup from the start. These theoreticians: they’re not in here
because they’re mad; they’re in here because it’s the only safe
place to put people that dangerous. This little weekend seminar of
theirs that’s going to deliver some kind of uber-report.
What’s the topic? I look round, hunting
for clues. Something to do with applied demonology; what was the
state of the art thirty years ago? Forty? Back in the stone age,
punched cards and black candles melted onto sheep’s skulls because
they hadn’t figured out how to use integrated circuits . . . What
they’re doing with AXIOM REFUGE might be obsolete already, or it
might be earth-shatteringly important. There’s no way to tell . . .
yet.
I start back up the
corridor, glancing inside Turing’s room. I spot the chessboard.
It’s off to one side, the door open and its occupant
elsewhere—still holding the line against Nurse Crankshaft. I rush
inside and close the door. The table is still there, the chessboard
set up with that curious endgame. The first thing that leaps out at
me is that there are two pawns of each color, plus most of the
high-value pieces. The layout doesn’t make much sense—why is the
white king missing?—and I wish I’d spent more time playing the
game, but . . . On impulse, I reach out and touch the black pawn
that’s parked in front of the king.
There’s an odd kind
of electrical tingle you get when you make contact with certain
types of summoning grid. I get a powerful jolt of it right now,
sizzling up my arm and locking my fingers in place around the head
of the chess piece. I try to pull it away from the board, but it’s
no good: it only wants to move up or down, left or right . . .
Left or right? I blink. It’s a state
machine all right: one that’s locked by the law of sympathy to some
other finite state automaton, one that grinds down slow and
hard.
I move the piece
forward one square. It’s surprisingly heavy, the magnet a solid
weight in its base—but more than magnetism holds it in contact with
the board. As soon as I stop moving I feel a sharp sting in my
fingertips. “Ouch!” I raise them to my mouth just as there’s a
crash from outside. “InMATE! InMATE!” I begin to turn as a shadow
falls across the board.
“Bad patient!” It
buzzes. “Bad PATients will be inCAR-cerAT-ED! COME with
ME!”
I recoil from the
stellate snout and beady lenses. The mechanical nurse reaches out
with arms that end in metal pincers instead of hands. I sidestep
around the table and reach down to the chessboard for one of the
pieces, grasping at random. My hand closes around the white queen,
fingers snapping painfully shut on contact, and I shove it hard,
following the path of least resistance to an empty cell in the grid
between the pawn I just moved and the black king.
Nurse Crankshaft
spins round on her base so fast that her cap flies off (revealing a
brushed-aluminum hemisphere beneath), emits a deafening squeal of
feedbacklike white noise, then says, “Integer overflow?” in a
surprised baritone.
“Back off right now
or I castle,” I warn her, my aching fingertips hovering over the
nearest rook.
“Integer overflow.
Integer overflow? Divide by zero.” Clunk. The Sister shivers as a relay inside its
torso clicks open, resetting it. Then: “Matron WILL see you
NOW!”
I grab the chess
piece, but Nurse Crankshaft lunges in the blink of an eye and has
my wrist in a viselike grip. It tugs, sending a burning pain
through my carpal-tunnel-stressed wrist. I can’t let go of the
chess piece: as my hand comes up, the chessboard comes with it as a
rigid unit, all the pieces hanging in place. A monstrous buzzing
fills my ears, and I smell ozone as the world goes
dark—
—And the chittering,
buzzing cacophony of voices in my head subsides as I
realize—I? Yes, I’m back, I’m me, what the
hell just happened?—I’m kneeling on a hard surface, bowed
over so my head is between my knees. My right hand—something’s
wrong with it. My fingers don’t want to open. They’re cold as ice,
painful and prickly with impending cramp. I try to open my eyes.
“Urk,” I say, for no good reason. I hope I’m not about to throw
up.
Sssss . . .
My back doesn’t want
to straighten up properly, but the floor under my nose is cold and
stony and smells damp. I try opening my eyes. It’s dark and cool,
and a chilly blue light flickers off the dusty flagstones in front
of me. I’m in a cellar? I push myself
up laboriously with my left hand, looking around for whatever’s
hissing at me.
“BAD Patient!
Ssssss!” The voice behind my back
doesn’t belong to anything human. I scramble around on hands and
knees, hampered by the chessboard glued to my frozen right
hand.
I’m in Matron’s
lair.
Matron lives in a
cavelike basement room, its low ceiling supported by whitewashed
brick and floored in what look to be the original Victorian-era
stone slabs. The windows are blocked by columns of bricks, rotting
mortar crumbling between them. Steel rails run around the room, and
riding them, three Sisters glide back and forth between me and the
open door. Their optics flicker with amethyst malice. Off to one
side, a wall of pale blue cabinets lines one entire wall: the front
panel (covered in impressive-looking dials and switches) leaves me
in no doubt as to what it is. A thick braid of cables runs from one
open cabinet (in whose depths a patchboard is just visible) across
a row of wooden trestles to the middle of the floor, where they
split into thick bundles and dangle to the five principal corners
of the live summoning grid that is responsible for the beautiful
cobalt blue glow of Cerenkov radiation—and tells me I’m in deep
trouble.
“Integer overflow,”
intones one of the Sisters. Her claws go snicker-snack, the
surgical steel gleaming in the dim light.
Here’s the point:
Matron isn’t just a 1960s mainframe: we can’t work miracles, and
artificial intelligence is still fifty
years in the future. However, we can
bind an extradimensional entity and compel it to serve, and even
communicate with it by using a 1960s mainframe as a front-end
processor. Which is all very well, especially if it’s in a secure
air-gapped installation with no way of getting out. But what if
some double-domed theoreticians who are working on a calculus of
contagion using AXIOM REFUGE accidentally talk in front of one of
its peripheral units about a way of sending a message? What if a
side effect of their research has accidentally opened a chink in
the firewall? They’re not going to exploit it . . . but they’re not
the only long-term inmates, are they? In fact, if I was really
paranoid, I might even imagine they’d put Matron up to mischief in
order to make the point that closing the Farm is a really bad
idea.
“I’m not a patient,”
I tell the Sisters. “You are not in receipt of a valid Section two,
three, four, or 136 order subject to the Mental Health Act, and
you’re bloody well not getting a 5(2) or 5(4) out of me
either.”
I’m nauseous and
sweating bullets, but there is this about being trapped in a
dungeon by a constrained class-four manifestation: whether or not
you call them demons, they play by the rules. As long as Matron
hasn’t managed to get me sectioned, I’m not a patient, and
therefore she has no authority to detain me. I hope.
“Doc-TOR HexenHAMMer
has been SUM-moned,” grates the middle Sister. “When he RE-turns to
sign the PA-pers Doc-TOR RenFIELD has prePARED, we will HAVE
YOU.”
A repetitive
squeaking noise draws close. A fourth Sister glides through the
track in the doorway, pushing a trolley. A white starched-cotton
cloth supports a row of gleaming ice-pick-shaped instruments. The
chorus row of Sisters blocks the exit as effectively as a column of
riot police. They glide back and forth like a rank of Space
Invaders.
“I do not consent to
treatment,” I tell the middle Sister. I’m betting that she’s the
one the nameless horror in the summoning grid is talking through,
using the ancient mainframe as an i/o channel. “You can’t make me
consent. And lobotomy requires the patient’s consent, in this
country. So why bother?”
“You WILL
con-SENT.”
The buzzing voice
doesn’t come from the robo-nurses, or the hypertrophied pocket
calculator on the opposite wall. The summoning grid flickers: deep
inside it, shadowy and translucent, the bound and summoned demon
squats and grins at me with things that aren’t eyes set close above
something that isn’t a mouth.
“You MUST con-SENT. I
WILL be free.”
I try to let go of
the chess piece, but my fingers are clamped around it so tightly
I’m beginning to lose sensation. Pins and needles tingle up my
wrist, halfway to the elbow. “Let me guess,” I manage to say. “You
sent the complaint. Right?”
“The SEC-ure ward
in-MATES are under my CARE. I am RE-quired to CARE for them. The
short-stay in-MATES are use-LESS. YOU will be
use-FUL.”
I see it now: why
Matron smuggled out the message that prompted Andy to send me. And
it’s an oh-shit moment. Of course the enchained entity who provides Matron
with her back-end intelligence wants to be free: but it’s not just
about going home to Hilbert-space hell or wherever it comes from.
She wants to be free to go walkabout in our world, and for that she
needs someone to set up a bridge from the grid to an appropriate
host. (Of which there is a plentiful supply, just upstairs from
here.) “Enjoying the carnal pleasures of the flesh,” they used to
call it; there’s a reason most cultures have a down on the idea of
demonic possession. She needs a brain that’s undamaged by K.
Syndrome, but not too powerful (Cantor and friends would be
impossible to control), nor one of the bodies whose absence would
alert us that the Farm was out of control (so neither Renfield nor
Hexenhammer is suitable).
“Renfield,” I say.
“You got her, didn’t you?” I’m on my feet now, crouched but
balancing on two points, not three. “Managed to slip a geas on her,
but she can’t release you herself. Hexenhammer, too?”
“Cle-VER.” Matron
gloats at me from inside her summoning grid. “Hex-EN-heimer first.
Soon, you TOO.”
“Why me?” I demand,
backing away from the doorway and the walls—the Sister’s track runs
right round the room, following the walls—skirting the summoning
grid warily. “What do you want?”
“Acc-CESS to the
LAUNDRY!” buzzes the summoning grid’s demonic inmate. “We wants
re-VENGE! Freedom!” In other words, it wants the same old same old.
These creatures are so predictable,
just like most predators. It’s just a shame I’m between it and what
it evidently wants.
Two of the Sisters
begin to glide menacingly toward me: one drifts toward the
mainframe console, but the fourth stays stubbornly in front of the
door. “Come on, we can talk,” I offer, tongue stumbling in my
too-dry mouth. “Can’t we work something out?”
I don’t really
believe that the trapped extradimensional abomination wants
anything I’d willingly give it, but I’m running low on options, and
anything that buys time for me to think is valuable.
“Free-DOM!” The two
moving Sisters commence a flanking movement. I try to let go of the
chessboard and dodge past the summoning grid, but I slip—and as I
stumble I shove the chessboard hard. The piece I’m holding clicks
sideways like a car’s gearshift, and locks into place. “DIVIDE BY
ZERO!” shriek the Sisterhood, grinding to a halt.
I stagger a drunken
two-step around Matron, who snarls at me and throws a punch. The
wall of the grid absorbs her claws with a snap and crackle of blue
lightning, and I flinch. Behind me, a series of clicks warn me that
the Sisters are resetting: any second now they’ll come back online
and grab me. But for the moment, my fingers aren’t stuck to the
board.
“Come to MEEE!” the
thing in the grid howls, as the first of her robot minions’ eyes
light up with amber malice, and the wheels begin to turn. “I can
give you Free-DOM!”
“Fuck off.” That
wiring loom in the open cabinet is only four meters away. Within
its open doors I see more than just an i/o interface: in the bottom
of the rack there’s a bunch of stuff that looks like a tea-stained
circuit diagram I was reading the other day—
Why exactly did Angleton point me at the power-supply
requirements? Could it possibly be because he suspected Matron was
off her trolley, and I might have to switch her off?
“Con-SENT is
IRREL-e-VANT! PRE-pare to be loboto-MIZED—”
Talk about design
kluges—they stuck the i/o controller in the top of the power-supply
rack! The chessboard is free in my left hand, pieces still stuck to
it. And now I know what to do. I take hold of one of the rooks, and
wiggle until I feel it begin to slide into a permitted move.
Because, after all, there are only a few states that this automaton
can occupy, and if I can crash the Sisters for just a few seconds
while I get to the power supply—
The Sisters begin to
roll around the edge of the room, trying to get between me and the
row of cabinets. I wiggle my hand, and there’s a taste of violets
and a loud rattle of solenoids tripping. The nearest Sister’s
motors crank up to a tooth-grinding whine, and she lunges past me,
rolling into her colleagues with a tooth-jarring
crash.
I jump forward,
dropping the chessboard, and reach for the master-circuit-breaker
handle. I twist it just as a screech of feedback behind me
announces the Matron-monster’s fury. “I’M FREE!” it shrieks, just
as I twist the handle hard in the opposite direction. Then the
lights dim, there’s a bright blue flash from the summoning grid,
and a bang so loud it rattles my brains in my head.
For a few seconds I
stand stupidly, listening to the tooth-chattering clatter of
overloaded relays. My vision dims as ozone tickles my nostrils: I
can see smoke. I’ve got to get out of
here, I realize. Something’s
burning. Not surprising, really. Mainframe power supplies—
especially ones that have been running steady for nearly forty
years—don’t take kindly to being hard power-cycled, and the 1602
was one of the last computers built to run on tubes: I’ve probably
blown half its circuit boards. I glance around, but aside from one
of the sisters (lying on her side, narrow-gauge wheels spinning
mania cally) I’m the only thing moving. Summoning grids don’t
generally survive being power-cycled either, especially if the
thing they were set to contain, like an electric fence, is halfway
across them when the power comes back on. I warily bypass the blue,
crackling pentacle as I make my way toward the corridor
outside.
I think when I get
home, I’m going to write a report urgently advising HR to send some
human nurses for a change—and to reassure Cantor and his colleagues
that they’re not about to sell off the roof over their heads just
because they happen to have finished their research project. Then
I’m going to get very drunk and take a long weekend off work. And
maybe when I go back, I’ll challenge Angleton to a game of
chess.
I don’t expect to
win, but it’ll be very interesting to see what rules he plays
by.
Afterword—“Down on the Farm”Astute readers may have recognized this as a story about Bob Howard, the put-upon protagonist of my books The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue, and a variety of other shorter works (including the Hugo-winning novella “The Concrete Jungle”).