My entry for Iron Fic 4, set in the Laundry Files universe by Charles Stross, a blackly humorous but still serious universe which combines spy fiction and Lovecraft. Please give the books a chance, even if you hate the following. 
Have you heard the good news? There is One True Religion, there is a God and He does care for your soul. This God is ancient and infinitely powerful. He sleeps in the quantum foam, in the dark places of dark matter and in far off dimensions which are but a thought away. I have read the CODICIL BLACK SKULL files and sworn the blood oaths of Ulthar to gain access to CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. So trust me when I say this: God is real, He is coming back and he is hungry, hungry for your soul.
Make no mistake; He is not the Christian god. No mortal spear pierced his side and no wooden cross ever held him quiescent. Nor is He the God of our ancestors. He never sold his eye for wisdom or cast His father into the cave of Nyx. He is a God of your nightmares, the Blackest Pharaoh, to whom the Earth is the most insignificant of baubles yet one He will take great pleasure in torturing for all eternity. I use to be an Atheist; now I just wish I was.
If there's one bright note it is this: God yet sleeps and will do so for some years yet. The stars are not right. His dark servants have yet to perform all the needed rites. We have some time yet, time to prepare and ready ourselves for war.
I am Bob Oliver Francis Howard. I have faith. I know what lurks in the dark and this is how I kept it at bay one more day.
It was a normal Thursday in the Laundry, Britain's OCCINTEL agency. That's Occult Intelligence agency for those not up on your spook lingo, the spies who make sure the aforementioned God and His many servants don't rampage through inner London doing horrible things in the name of their dark faith. Scotland we're less concerned about, but that's the Civil Service for you.
I was doing the IT part of my job. So far I'd removed three worms from our system all courtesy of compromised personal email accounts (read the damn rules, people, or at least be smart enough to break them safely!), tracked down one unauthorised wireless access and explained to Logistics that, yes, the Turing-Lovecraft theorem might indeed allow NP-complete problems to be converted to P-complete ones and solved in polynomial time but it was still a really bad idea to use it for our Inventory Routing System. The last thing the Laundry needed was for our IRS to form an ad-hoc Dho-Nha geometry curve the size of mainland Britain. That would be bad. See above bad.
Anyway, I was just getting to grips on the documentation for my proposed server upgrade (hopefully taking our IT backbone from completely crap to just crap) when Angleton called me to his office.
Angleton's my sort of boss. The Laundry, as part of its attempt to become the first ISO-9000 compliant OCCINTEL agency, has nothing as simple as mere bosses. We have resource pools, matrix management and special work groups, all with audit requirements to make forensic accountants simultaneously laugh and cry.
"We have a problem," he said. "I'm sending you to Jupiter."
Okay... I'll admit it. That was not what I expected. My jaw hung open and I may have said something in the vein of 'What!'
"Jupiter," said Angleton with a dry smile on his face. "Surely you've heard of it, boy? Large. Made of gas. Fourth planet from the sun."
"I know what Jupiter is," I said. Then blinked. "Fourth?"
"Ah," he said. "You haven't read WOLF SHEEP ACE yet? Pity. Still, it is not important. You have read LARGE STEP RED and HIGHJUMP, correct?"
This time I nodded and things started to make a bit more sense. HIGHJUMP was a partial invocation of Yog-Sothoth by the Black Chamber in '51, the American counterpart to the Laundry. It proved the viability of space-only Gate travel. Using a HIGHJUMP Invocation, you can punch a Gate (a hole in space) from one point in the material universe to another. You can go from San Francisco to London in a single step. If you do it right, anyway. Do it wrong and you better spend the rest of your life in a room without corners lest the Hounds of Tindalos eat your soul. Remember, the universe enforces causality and does so with very sharp teeth.
LARGE STEP RED was a similar project but British. It was a gateway used to send a man to Mars. We beat the Black Chamber by two weeks. They weren't happy. Still aren't probably.
"Good," said Angleton. "That being so, I'm clearing you for GOD PLAY FIVE and related files." He placed a narrow folder on his desk, covered with 'Top Secret' and 'Kill self before reading' labels. "You can read it on your way to Wales."
Wales is where the Laundry keeps its VLCG or Very Large Containment Grid. We use it for capital B big magic. It's located under the Trawsfynydd nuclear power station, meaning it has a readily accessible source of power which a) doesn't violate Article 2 of the Human Rights Act and b ) doesn't require any messing about with knives, alters and goats.
As the private car drove through packed streets, I opened up GOD PLAY FIVE and started reading.
It started with a photograph, one I'd seen before. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's on Jupiter's Wikipedia page. It showed the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, a huge swirling eye on that great planet. Then I saw the note: Doctored Image, released public. I turned the page and saw a very different photo. It showed the same great eye but this time covered by a dense network of artificial satellites.
I pulled out the report proper and started skimming for key information.
'On November 6, 1973, Pioneer 10 began capturing images of Jupiter...
'Images were transmitted back to Earth where they were received by NASA and vetted by OCCINTEL personnel...
'Within safe release parameters...
'On December 4, 1973 Pioneer 10 began closest approach...
'Class 5 glamour...
Wait, Class 5 glamour? I went back and checked again but there was no mistake. What I read chilled my blood.
According to the report, the Great Red Spot of Jupiter was covered by an immensely powerful glamour, older than mankind. This glamour hid a huge number of space stations and satellites from observation from Earth or anywhere else in the solar system. Pioneer 10 passed within the reach of the glamour and transmitted the first true pictures of Jupiter since dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
Worse still, that wasn't all it was hiding. Analysis of the satellite orbit patterns revealed an inverted Dho-Nha curve as defined by the Dee-Turing Theory, a containment grid in other words.
Containment grids keep Things contained. Remember the One True God from earlier? Well, He isn't the only nasty thing out there. In fact, there's a whole hierarchy of them, from minor annoyances like Ectoplasm Wallahs, through the Feeders in the Night, right up to the big fish like N'yar lath-Hotep.
This containment grid... Well, the lab boffins theorized it might be able to hold a class 5 entity on the Arneson-Crowley scale. It might not hold the One True God if he came-a-knocking but it stood a good chance of holding his little brother. And if little brother was to escape... Well, he might go screaming to the rest of his family. There are many who hold to the One True Religion who'd think that was a very good idea. It's my job to stop them, for I have faith too, of a different kind.
London to Trawsfynydd took a little over six hours and an embarrassingly large part of that was spent within sight of London. My theory that Britain's traffic problems are a fiendishly clever attempt to disrupt cult activities remains unconfirmed. Finally, though, the car rumbled to a halt within the secure parking lot of Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Station and I stepped out. It was good to stretch.
The sun was low in the sky over the Welsh hills and my phone said it had just gone nine o'clock. A white lab coated man ran towards me and I smiled as I saw who it was.
"Brains!"
Brains is my ex-flatmate. He and his partner (Pinkie) work for the Laundry too, though in the research division.
"Bob," he said and smiled. "Good to see you. Come in. We've got much to plan."
He led me into the power station and straight to a lift. There, he pulled out a key card (marked with sigils which made my eyes bend) and pushed it into a slot. The lift clunked and began heading down. A long way down.
"What do you know?" he said.
"I've read GOD PLAY FIVE," I said and he nodded.
"Good but that's only half the task. Have you heard of the Pioneer Brotherhood?"
"Some kind of cult?"
Brains frowned. "Yes, but worse. You've read GOD PLAY FIVE, so you know that Pioneer 10's images were subject to screening by OCCINTEL personnel. At first, this screening was thorough but after multiple months of pointless work, the team started to get sloppy. When the first December 4th images were transmitted they were seen by much of the Pioneer Project staff. The Black Chamber contained the situation, of course, but within those images was a powerful but subtle glamour. Over the following years, many members of the Pioneer staff began demonstrating erratic behaviour. We believe that the creature within the containment grid cast that glamour. The Pioneer Brotherhood is the result, a group of ex-NASA scientists dedicated to releasing LITTLE BROTHER."
Fuck.
At the bottom of the elevator shaft, I had another surprise. It was the Artists' Rifles aka the SAS aka the 21st Battalion Territorial Army aka the Laundry's heavy mob.
"Howe," I said, with a nod towards the sergeant. He looked up from checking his kit (something which looked like a cross between a space suit and battle armour) and grunted back.
"This way," said Brains, pointing off to one side. I followed.
He led me to a small room, where Major Barnes (commander of the heavily armed reprobates outside), Pinkie and Daniels Jack from the British National Space Centre were gathered. Didn't know we had a space agency? Well, that's just how we like it. Apart from a minor front organization mostly used to funnel money to the ESA, most of Britain's space work is Gate based these days.
A large map of the GOD PLAY FIVE satellites was spread out between them, and they were arguing over it.
"And I say it's #222," said Daniels, finger pointing at the lower left hand corner. "It's the heart of the fifth iterative node."
"No, no, no," said Pinkie. "#134. It's the largest. The logical assumption is that it's got command and control functions." He saw me and pointed. "Bob, tell him I'm right."
"Right about what?"
"We're trying to work out where the Pioneer Brotherhood went," said Brains. "There are over five hundred satellites large enough to be valid Gate targets in the constellation."
"Don't we know?"
"No. BABY SITTER reported a Gate opening within the GOD PLAY FIVE exclusion zone, in violation of international treaty. But we don't have a precise fix. It would take years to check each satellite in turn. The Pioneer Brotherhood has already been there ten hours. If we don't hurry, they could succeed in taking down the containment grid. And then..."
"Then we're all dead," said Major Barnes. Every person in the room nodded. No pressure at all.
I stepped forward and looked down at the map. It was a confusing mess, thousands of satellites, marked by complex vector and orbit plots. But... It was also an inverted Dho-Nha curve, a containment grid, something I knew well.
I'm a computational demonologist by trade and training. I work with Dho-Nha curves every day. I could probably preform the necessary equations in my head, though I'd never do so of course. Only insanity and Krantzberg syndrome lies that way, a horrible encephalopathy that afflicts people who try to preform magic using only the Mark 1.0 Monkey Brain. It involves micro-summonings of extradimensional entities which eat your brain. Not nice.
As I was saying... No matter how complicated the satellite constellation might be, it had to follow some basic rules. Looked at that way, it almost made sense. The patterns formed in my mind (which couldn't be healthy) and...
"There," I said, pointing to a satellite, just off centre.
Pinkie leaned down. "#053?" he said. "Why that one?"
"That's where I would attack a containment grid if I was them," I said. "It's where any computational demonologist would." That satellite represented one of the trickiest parts in Dee-Turing Theory. Mistakes there killed more occult inclined computer science students than any other.
"It's big," said Daniels. "Three miles by four miles by one mile."
"I'm sure," I said. I knew I was right. I felt it in my gut and it made sense. #053 was the weakest point. The Pioneer Brotherhood might try and be clever, hit a lesser point to avoid detection, but I didn't think so. This containment grid had stood for a billion years. They'd need every advantage to bring it down.
"I agree," said Brains. "It makes sense."
"Fine," said Pinkie with just a little eye roll. "But if we all die tomorrow I'm saying I told you so."
Nods came from the rest of the group.
And that's how I found myself standing before a rip in space-time, wearing a space suit which only just fit. The Artists' Rifles stood all around, weapons raised and ready.
"Ready in five," came the voice of Brains over a PA system. "Four. Three. Two. One. Go."
The Artists' Rifles streamed forward, a practised motion which spoke to their great skill. Within seconds they'd cleared the Gate, then it was my turn.
The rip hung before me. LITTLE BROTHER and the Pioneer Brotherhood were on the other side. It was more than a little daunting. That didn't matter.
I took a breath and stepped through.
Why? Because I'm a man of faith. I know God is out there. I know what will happen when he returns. And I will do anything to prevent that from happening. Even going to Jupiter to stop insane NASA cultists from waking up His kid brother. All in a day's work at the Laundry.
~~~
LITTLE BROTHER
Have you heard the good news? There is One True Religion, there is a God and He does care for your soul. This God is ancient and infinitely powerful. He sleeps in the quantum foam, in the dark places of dark matter and in far off dimensions which are but a thought away. I have read the CODICIL BLACK SKULL files and sworn the blood oaths of Ulthar to gain access to CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. So trust me when I say this: God is real, He is coming back and he is hungry, hungry for your soul.
Make no mistake; He is not the Christian god. No mortal spear pierced his side and no wooden cross ever held him quiescent. Nor is He the God of our ancestors. He never sold his eye for wisdom or cast His father into the cave of Nyx. He is a God of your nightmares, the Blackest Pharaoh, to whom the Earth is the most insignificant of baubles yet one He will take great pleasure in torturing for all eternity. I use to be an Atheist; now I just wish I was.
If there's one bright note it is this: God yet sleeps and will do so for some years yet. The stars are not right. His dark servants have yet to perform all the needed rites. We have some time yet, time to prepare and ready ourselves for war.
I am Bob Oliver Francis Howard. I have faith. I know what lurks in the dark and this is how I kept it at bay one more day.
~~~
It was a normal Thursday in the Laundry, Britain's OCCINTEL agency. That's Occult Intelligence agency for those not up on your spook lingo, the spies who make sure the aforementioned God and His many servants don't rampage through inner London doing horrible things in the name of their dark faith. Scotland we're less concerned about, but that's the Civil Service for you.
I was doing the IT part of my job. So far I'd removed three worms from our system all courtesy of compromised personal email accounts (read the damn rules, people, or at least be smart enough to break them safely!), tracked down one unauthorised wireless access and explained to Logistics that, yes, the Turing-Lovecraft theorem might indeed allow NP-complete problems to be converted to P-complete ones and solved in polynomial time but it was still a really bad idea to use it for our Inventory Routing System. The last thing the Laundry needed was for our IRS to form an ad-hoc Dho-Nha geometry curve the size of mainland Britain. That would be bad. See above bad.
Anyway, I was just getting to grips on the documentation for my proposed server upgrade (hopefully taking our IT backbone from completely crap to just crap) when Angleton called me to his office.
Angleton's my sort of boss. The Laundry, as part of its attempt to become the first ISO-9000 compliant OCCINTEL agency, has nothing as simple as mere bosses. We have resource pools, matrix management and special work groups, all with audit requirements to make forensic accountants simultaneously laugh and cry.
"We have a problem," he said. "I'm sending you to Jupiter."
Okay... I'll admit it. That was not what I expected. My jaw hung open and I may have said something in the vein of 'What!'
"Jupiter," said Angleton with a dry smile on his face. "Surely you've heard of it, boy? Large. Made of gas. Fourth planet from the sun."
"I know what Jupiter is," I said. Then blinked. "Fourth?"
"Ah," he said. "You haven't read WOLF SHEEP ACE yet? Pity. Still, it is not important. You have read LARGE STEP RED and HIGHJUMP, correct?"
This time I nodded and things started to make a bit more sense. HIGHJUMP was a partial invocation of Yog-Sothoth by the Black Chamber in '51, the American counterpart to the Laundry. It proved the viability of space-only Gate travel. Using a HIGHJUMP Invocation, you can punch a Gate (a hole in space) from one point in the material universe to another. You can go from San Francisco to London in a single step. If you do it right, anyway. Do it wrong and you better spend the rest of your life in a room without corners lest the Hounds of Tindalos eat your soul. Remember, the universe enforces causality and does so with very sharp teeth.
LARGE STEP RED was a similar project but British. It was a gateway used to send a man to Mars. We beat the Black Chamber by two weeks. They weren't happy. Still aren't probably.
"Good," said Angleton. "That being so, I'm clearing you for GOD PLAY FIVE and related files." He placed a narrow folder on his desk, covered with 'Top Secret' and 'Kill self before reading' labels. "You can read it on your way to Wales."
~~~
Wales is where the Laundry keeps its VLCG or Very Large Containment Grid. We use it for capital B big magic. It's located under the Trawsfynydd nuclear power station, meaning it has a readily accessible source of power which a) doesn't violate Article 2 of the Human Rights Act and b ) doesn't require any messing about with knives, alters and goats.
As the private car drove through packed streets, I opened up GOD PLAY FIVE and started reading.
It started with a photograph, one I'd seen before. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's on Jupiter's Wikipedia page. It showed the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, a huge swirling eye on that great planet. Then I saw the note: Doctored Image, released public. I turned the page and saw a very different photo. It showed the same great eye but this time covered by a dense network of artificial satellites.
I pulled out the report proper and started skimming for key information.
'On November 6, 1973, Pioneer 10 began capturing images of Jupiter...
'Images were transmitted back to Earth where they were received by NASA and vetted by OCCINTEL personnel...
'Within safe release parameters...
'On December 4, 1973 Pioneer 10 began closest approach...
'Class 5 glamour...
Wait, Class 5 glamour? I went back and checked again but there was no mistake. What I read chilled my blood.
According to the report, the Great Red Spot of Jupiter was covered by an immensely powerful glamour, older than mankind. This glamour hid a huge number of space stations and satellites from observation from Earth or anywhere else in the solar system. Pioneer 10 passed within the reach of the glamour and transmitted the first true pictures of Jupiter since dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
Worse still, that wasn't all it was hiding. Analysis of the satellite orbit patterns revealed an inverted Dho-Nha curve as defined by the Dee-Turing Theory, a containment grid in other words.
Containment grids keep Things contained. Remember the One True God from earlier? Well, He isn't the only nasty thing out there. In fact, there's a whole hierarchy of them, from minor annoyances like Ectoplasm Wallahs, through the Feeders in the Night, right up to the big fish like N'yar lath-Hotep.
This containment grid... Well, the lab boffins theorized it might be able to hold a class 5 entity on the Arneson-Crowley scale. It might not hold the One True God if he came-a-knocking but it stood a good chance of holding his little brother. And if little brother was to escape... Well, he might go screaming to the rest of his family. There are many who hold to the One True Religion who'd think that was a very good idea. It's my job to stop them, for I have faith too, of a different kind.
~~~
London to Trawsfynydd took a little over six hours and an embarrassingly large part of that was spent within sight of London. My theory that Britain's traffic problems are a fiendishly clever attempt to disrupt cult activities remains unconfirmed. Finally, though, the car rumbled to a halt within the secure parking lot of Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Station and I stepped out. It was good to stretch.
The sun was low in the sky over the Welsh hills and my phone said it had just gone nine o'clock. A white lab coated man ran towards me and I smiled as I saw who it was.
"Brains!"
Brains is my ex-flatmate. He and his partner (Pinkie) work for the Laundry too, though in the research division.
"Bob," he said and smiled. "Good to see you. Come in. We've got much to plan."
He led me into the power station and straight to a lift. There, he pulled out a key card (marked with sigils which made my eyes bend) and pushed it into a slot. The lift clunked and began heading down. A long way down.
"What do you know?" he said.
"I've read GOD PLAY FIVE," I said and he nodded.
"Good but that's only half the task. Have you heard of the Pioneer Brotherhood?"
"Some kind of cult?"
Brains frowned. "Yes, but worse. You've read GOD PLAY FIVE, so you know that Pioneer 10's images were subject to screening by OCCINTEL personnel. At first, this screening was thorough but after multiple months of pointless work, the team started to get sloppy. When the first December 4th images were transmitted they were seen by much of the Pioneer Project staff. The Black Chamber contained the situation, of course, but within those images was a powerful but subtle glamour. Over the following years, many members of the Pioneer staff began demonstrating erratic behaviour. We believe that the creature within the containment grid cast that glamour. The Pioneer Brotherhood is the result, a group of ex-NASA scientists dedicated to releasing LITTLE BROTHER."
Fuck.
~~~
At the bottom of the elevator shaft, I had another surprise. It was the Artists' Rifles aka the SAS aka the 21st Battalion Territorial Army aka the Laundry's heavy mob.
"Howe," I said, with a nod towards the sergeant. He looked up from checking his kit (something which looked like a cross between a space suit and battle armour) and grunted back.
"This way," said Brains, pointing off to one side. I followed.
He led me to a small room, where Major Barnes (commander of the heavily armed reprobates outside), Pinkie and Daniels Jack from the British National Space Centre were gathered. Didn't know we had a space agency? Well, that's just how we like it. Apart from a minor front organization mostly used to funnel money to the ESA, most of Britain's space work is Gate based these days.
A large map of the GOD PLAY FIVE satellites was spread out between them, and they were arguing over it.
"And I say it's #222," said Daniels, finger pointing at the lower left hand corner. "It's the heart of the fifth iterative node."
"No, no, no," said Pinkie. "#134. It's the largest. The logical assumption is that it's got command and control functions." He saw me and pointed. "Bob, tell him I'm right."
"Right about what?"
"We're trying to work out where the Pioneer Brotherhood went," said Brains. "There are over five hundred satellites large enough to be valid Gate targets in the constellation."
"Don't we know?"
"No. BABY SITTER reported a Gate opening within the GOD PLAY FIVE exclusion zone, in violation of international treaty. But we don't have a precise fix. It would take years to check each satellite in turn. The Pioneer Brotherhood has already been there ten hours. If we don't hurry, they could succeed in taking down the containment grid. And then..."
"Then we're all dead," said Major Barnes. Every person in the room nodded. No pressure at all.
I stepped forward and looked down at the map. It was a confusing mess, thousands of satellites, marked by complex vector and orbit plots. But... It was also an inverted Dho-Nha curve, a containment grid, something I knew well.
I'm a computational demonologist by trade and training. I work with Dho-Nha curves every day. I could probably preform the necessary equations in my head, though I'd never do so of course. Only insanity and Krantzberg syndrome lies that way, a horrible encephalopathy that afflicts people who try to preform magic using only the Mark 1.0 Monkey Brain. It involves micro-summonings of extradimensional entities which eat your brain. Not nice.
As I was saying... No matter how complicated the satellite constellation might be, it had to follow some basic rules. Looked at that way, it almost made sense. The patterns formed in my mind (which couldn't be healthy) and...
"There," I said, pointing to a satellite, just off centre.
Pinkie leaned down. "#053?" he said. "Why that one?"
"That's where I would attack a containment grid if I was them," I said. "It's where any computational demonologist would." That satellite represented one of the trickiest parts in Dee-Turing Theory. Mistakes there killed more occult inclined computer science students than any other.
"It's big," said Daniels. "Three miles by four miles by one mile."
"I'm sure," I said. I knew I was right. I felt it in my gut and it made sense. #053 was the weakest point. The Pioneer Brotherhood might try and be clever, hit a lesser point to avoid detection, but I didn't think so. This containment grid had stood for a billion years. They'd need every advantage to bring it down.
"I agree," said Brains. "It makes sense."
"Fine," said Pinkie with just a little eye roll. "But if we all die tomorrow I'm saying I told you so."
Nods came from the rest of the group.
~~~
And that's how I found myself standing before a rip in space-time, wearing a space suit which only just fit. The Artists' Rifles stood all around, weapons raised and ready.
"Ready in five," came the voice of Brains over a PA system. "Four. Three. Two. One. Go."
The Artists' Rifles streamed forward, a practised motion which spoke to their great skill. Within seconds they'd cleared the Gate, then it was my turn.
The rip hung before me. LITTLE BROTHER and the Pioneer Brotherhood were on the other side. It was more than a little daunting. That didn't matter.
I took a breath and stepped through.
Why? Because I'm a man of faith. I know God is out there. I know what will happen when he returns. And I will do anything to prevent that from happening. Even going to Jupiter to stop insane NASA cultists from waking up His kid brother. All in a day's work at the Laundry.
