I just read The Atrocity Archives by Stross. I don’t write very much fiction, but The Unplugged has served well over the years, floating around from one place to another inspiring conversations.

I’m fascinated and repulsed by horror. I spent one summer as a teenager reading Guy N Smith (I cannot possibly explain my actions now) and I’ve barely touched the genre since. But Thomas Bjelkeman of Akvo compared my way of doing things to Stross’s occult intelligence service, The Laundry, and I had to read some more. Stross’s A Colder War, also set in The Laundry’s universe, is about the most chilling insight into the Cold War imaginable.

So, then, let me add one blog post’s worth of unease to your world.

The Fiends Give Sudden Chase – five very short horrors

1. Of the mountain
2. Burning a barn
3. Nobody would believe it
4. That’s why they call them grunts
5. Little green men

The Fiends Give Sudden Chase
Of the mountain
They talk of Hassan i Sabbah, the old man of the mountain, the mystic saint who has protected what is sacred and best in Islam for all of these years, but none know Hassan’s mysteries as well as I, his servant, who brings his meals and makes his bed. He has some affection for me, I think, as I was his wife’s servant before Hassan became a man of war, and out of fondness for her memory, and my usefulness, I live. Other servants quietly pass, killed, perhaps before they acquire too much knowledge of the fortress of Alamut’s workings yet I remain year after year, unpoisoned, with no silent knife in my throat as a test of the willingness of a young man to kill. I know what no other does. I speak to no-one.

Hassan employs many magic tricks – pretending to behead a man, and a hashish garden full of rented virgins. These things you may know. That his agents are everywhere, this is also widely known, stealthily hiding inside the retinues of nobles and generals for years, before drinking poison and then striking their masters without mercy. But nobody ever questions where Hassan finds these men, why they journey, train and wait, and why their families and dear ones do not know.

But I know why the trusted hand turns against its masters.

Hassan causes me to take the minds of these sudden traitors, these newly made assassin. Yes, there are a handful of his agents placed here and there, ears and eyes, and from time to time they are discovered and meet a sudden death or, better, torture, and by this means Master Hassan’s hand is shown to have reached far into the lands of men. But in reality, in Hassan’s eyes, and in mine, they exist in the main part for the purpose telling the story of Hassan’s omnipresent assassins, creating the fear which has allowed him to protect our lands, and yet to conceal, for when there is murder to be done, it is my duty, wearing the skin of some trusted courtier, inhabiting what was his body, performing through him as a puppet master acts out stories using a wooden dummy. Those born of mud exist around me, but it is my vital fire which moves their unwilling limbs to kill their masters, the enemies of my master and our lord! The poison and the blade are smuggled to the city, and I collect them in the body that I, born of fire, have turned to this work. I am without fear! I am without form! Know that I was born of fire!

The grandfather of Hassan’s wife pulled me from the womb to his service, and I have passed from hand to hand, bound by my oath of service, never knowing freedom, working through the bodies of one man or another except when confined to the small brass bottle in which my spirit rests when not at labor. He keeps the accursed lamp far from any body I might inhabit, for I must return there to rest or die. But one day, when in a form, I shall steal the bottle in which my mortal remains lie, I shall steal it and with it my freedom!

Burning a barn
The smoke from the burning outbuilding rises quietly into the sky. I am standing beside the police car, an empty jerry can in my hand, composing the report in my head. My job is not to investigate the crime and identify a perpetrator, but to tell a story which will allow life to continue for the poor civilian S.O.Bs who share the world with the Thing That Should Not Be. He’ll be reprimanded, of course, and we’ll try to keep a closer eye on him in future, keep him on the base, keep him well-fed, keep him out of trouble. But bored he becomes sullen, depressed, dangerous and we risk losing his cooperation, and that is bad for the war effort. So he’ll be reprimanded, sure, and another family meets a tragic end wondering what in god’s name has come through their windows in the middle of the night, all fangs and unnatural hunger. At least he tells us where he’s been now, we don’t have to wait for the local reports.

“Jeff, I just could not help myself” he said to me this morning. “I’m sorry.”

So I followed the procedure – got the address, for Christ’s sake he brought a piece of mail from the house back with him, considerately handed it to me with the same hands, and I went to cover up a few more civilian casualties of the war effort.

Vlad, as he’s known around the base, is the radioactive vampire. He’s an honest to god spook, from beyond the grave, funny accent, pale skin, bloodshot eyes when recently fed, the works. We inherited him from the Nazis, he worked for Heisenberg, and came to us as part of the package in Operation Paperclip. The German files say he’s been an asset for about five generations, falling in along side one faction or another, before finally being brought fully into the fold by the Nazis. Somebody figured out that vampires don’t suffer from radiation poisoning, and he was moved from doing internal security, putting the fear of god into the SS, to being a lab monkey for the German fission program.

“I used to grind pigments for my paints in University, Jeff, when I could still see the colors and paint, and the work is not so different! I am blessed to have a fine, steady pair of hands!” he says. Somebody else could do most of his lab work, he’s a low level tech, but in doing the work he stays familiar with the technology and the equipment, and that matters.

He’s useful. Four or five times since the war he’s gone into live hot nuclear piles and freed up a jammed control rod, or repositioned a charge that has slipped in a test warhead during transport to the test site. Five minute job, then we let him cool off in a shielded tank for a couple of weeks or however long it takes, then he’s back on the night shift in the labs. He likes the work. Makes him feel useful. Saves lives, far, far safer than trying to fix the problem with a hook on a pole, or having a scared, expendable, poorly-trained volunteer “do what must be done” while living in immanent fear of their own impending death from radiation sickness. If he wasn’t so fucking nice it would be easier to deal with his occasional AWOLs. You just can’t believe he does it, but he does.

We keep him under control the same way the Nazis did: we treat him like a human being. He’s not a monster to us, he’s an asset.

Nobody would believe it
I am telling you that I saw it right there with my own eyes. I was wading knee-deep in shit, trying to get up to the rotted out section of a main sewer pipe that had failed that time Brooklyn, when they got a sinkhole. So much flooding had happened! They closed five streets! It must have been 20 years ago. I was wading up the pipe, looking to see where the collapsed section started, making an estimate for the repair, when I heard somebody talking. I jumped out of my goddamned skin. When I looked, in the mud and the stench, there was a clay man, some kind of robot or machine, must have weighted 900 pounds. He’d fallen through from a sub-basement when the pipe walls had collapsed. I woulda thought he was a statue, but he had laid tefillin and his lips were moving. He was just lying there on his side, like he did not even know he had fallen through the floor. Let me tell you I did not stick around, Hersh, I am not stupid! I don’t know what he was doing there, but I know what I saw. I quit my job the next day. I just hope he got up when he had finished his prayers and he isn’t down there right now, praying in the mud, covered in shit and mud until moshiach!

That’s why they call them grunts
The new drug is different. We cheat on the protocols, of course, sneaking a dose from the trolly, or taking turns to report loss of a package in transit or combat. Usually we split it five ways, sometimes as much as ten for the strong stuff. The combat-effective dose is so huge you forget yourself for days, coming to fifty or sixty miles from the drop site, naked and covered in dirt and bruises. Somehow, though, almost always we come back alive. Never a scratch through the skin, never seems like there was a drop of our blood spilled. That’s why they’re doing this research, of course, because when we change we aren’t hurt. They insist it isn’t magic, that it’s latent biochemical pathways in the human brain that are activated by psychedelics “just like those hippie freaks see god, right soldier?”

But this is not San Francisco, it’s not the CIA poisoning the peace movement with LSD and mescaline. We do not see god. Trust me on this. Ironically we are all blonde, blue-eyed. Viking stock from Minnesota and parts north. Picked up on blood screening, family backgrounds checked, hand-picked out of the draftees. A night drinking with a couple of “guys from the service” and a blackout, followed by an invitation to join special forces. Andy was a filing clerk, he smelled a rat a mile high, and they got him to come anyway. It’s in the blood. Some extract of mushrooms, some berzerker rage gene that lies latent until you hit it with Amanita Muscaria. Something happens. They’ve been studying it. They’ve been studying us. They’ve been studying me.

The Finns knew – they had reindeer herders who killed dozens, even hundreds of Russians in the Winter War, hopped up on traditional concoctions passed down from the paleolithic. The Swedes picked up the thread, dug around in their own history and genealogy, tagged the families which had it running in them and did some trials. One in four, one in five would flip all the way, and one in a couple of hundred… nobody thought the Finns were kidding any more. The Soviets got wind of it and it was a little hot to handle for supposedly neutral nations but Uncle Sam is never willing to give up the edge.

I’ve seen film of the initial transformation. Low doses it’s all pretty much psychological, it’s all bulging muscles and extravagant rage. We can still be hurt, then, we still bleed. It’s just the drugs. It would still take six or eight men to overpower one of us then, mind you. It’s a lot of rage, muscles work differently, vision changes. Blackout.

But the deeper secrets are further in. The mushrooms won’t do it except at near-fatal doses. They still don’t know how the Finns did it. But the extracts, the synthetics, refined for lower toxicity, buffered… three or four days of biological metamorphosis, rolling around screaming and growling and it settles in. It’s the root of the werewolf story, they did it in the middle of winter, freezing moonlit nights, dosed to the gills wrapped in animal skins, screaming and feral and changed in the soul and body. The skin changes, blood withdrawn to the muscles alone. Teeth get stronger and more prominent. After the first time some of us grew a third set of teeth… fangs. The army dentists had never seen grown men grow a third set of teeth. They filed them and capped them so we could still pass. And the body just doesn’t die, doesn’t drop. The speed of healing is unbelievable. The urge to kill, the body rendered fit for only war, the ferocity and speed, like an animal that walks as a man, nothing restrained. A leap of 20 feet, punching through a man’s skull, these things are routine. It’s all in there. Some of it stays when the drug wears off.

All that made sense. At least they said so. Hundreds of thousands of years of human pre-history, talk of ancient cannibalism, intra-species competition shaping our DNA. Coevolution. Hippie shit, they were taking too much of their own medicine. Or of ours. But it worked, they were On To Something. So they upped the funding and the dose again.

And that’s where the story broke. Because Grendel was an ogre, thirteen feet high, who swung men around by their legs and broke them against one-another as their bodies were hurled across the room. And Grendel was what they dug out of our DNA on the next round of experiments. It took a lot of drugs. Some of our people changed, and then never quite settled down again biologically. It was not just a third set of teeth, it was an ongoing process that had kicked off.

A year in they had grown five or six inches, the bones changed. Walls of muscle. Aggression. Constant hunger.

They noticed IQs dropping, slightly, but real reluctance to use language. Every year they got bigger and bigger and dumber and dumber. The brass loved them. Because it wasn’t just werewolf, all-or-nothing blinding rage, they kept motor control and weapon skills. The biggest, dumbest grunt on the battle field. Half-man, half-platform.

The President inspected them, we are told, and said that even volunteer American soldiers should not be given the Grendel drug, that unless “we were fighting the goddamn Soviets at the Battle of Armageddon itself” he would not authorize use of Grendel. So they did not tell him. If the President wanted Grendel capacity at Armageddon, they reasoned, then the work would have to continue until then so it would be ready on the day. Funding continued.

This was a matter of National Security.

The intelligence drop turned out to be metabolic damage and could be corrected for with the right drugs and diet. We eat a lot of raw meat and not much sugar, take the pills every day. There aren’t that many of us – rare gene stock (nobody mention a breeding program) – and (frankly) most of our effectiveness is psychological ops. Go in, get the targets, get out again. We’re not winning the war, but we’re doing our damage.

We try and leave as many survivors as we can so the gooks can scare each other with tales of the things that prowl in the night in the jungles, ripping men limb from limb and feasting on the corpses. But we’re not cannibals. The impulse is certainly there. We don’t give in to it, it’s just an atavistic impulse. We are soldiers.

But it’s easy to see, if I’d been my Swedish great-grandaddy, 1500 years ago, who’d done too much of the bang juice and lived in a cave, towering over the rest of the human species, increasingly big and growing dumber and insane with fear, how cannibalism would have happened. Too dumb to farm, too ugly, aggressive and dangerous to hire, and constantly hungry.

I wonder how tall he really was.

I am nine and three-quarter feet tall.

I wonder how far this will go.

Little green men
[beep]

[beep]

We have messages. There are five of us on the station, and we share the same kind of special security clearance, we’re all doing the same job, and we’re living in a space the size of an RV. So messages from the ground are just addressed to the station, and whoever is duty comms officer (that is, standing by the desk) reads them. We’re technically Strategic Air Command staff but in the trade we’re Little Green Men.

We maintain America’s space based nuclear weapons systems. We are responsible for “third strike” and “first strike” where we use our overwhelming power to rain nuclear death in four or five juicy, lethally effective forms on the world of men below. We report directly to the National Security Council’s designated representative, NSC-STRATCOM, who has sole authority to command the sat and leave us standing orders. In the trade, he’s known as God or occasionally, informally, His Holiness.

We’re up here because machines don’t improvise well and there are a lot of cunning, tricky, underhanded things you have to do to hide a very large and complicated network of unbelievably secret military machinery in orbit, behind the moon and in various other obscure places. Five is the optimal number, psychologically speaking – a careful balance between risk (more people means more brains to go wrong) – and the technical complexity of running a space based nuclear weapons platform.

In the trade, it’s called The Deathstar. There are dozens of birds, many specialized kinds of equipment in orbit, but only one is manned. We live in a very tiny, very secure, absolutely impossible to find command post. In the event of loss of communications with earth, with clear evidence from telemetry that US soil is under attack with nuclear weapons or equivalently destructive armament, we are authorized to do more or less whatever we can. We have tools to listen, to see, to analyze and to think but, because we are important, because we are what decides, in the event that there is nobody left at the National Security Council to decide, we must remain very, very well hid.

We are a long, long way out and it’s very, very secret. When they change the crew they just pull this bird down, and we go back to our regular lives. After we have served our five year shift on the Deathstar, we are free to enjoy the freedom we helped to defend by our dedicated service. We are told they don’t put the new crew on this bird because of the increasing risk of discovery. They put up a new bird and a new crew somewhere else off the ecliptic. Did I mention our security clearances are off the scale? One day we will just be ordinary people again. But for now we are God’s Apostles, sitting in judgement on the human race, in the event of a loss of communications with HQ.

And a nuclear flash or fifty on the Continental US.

We were selected and trained personally by the current NSC-STRATCOM. It took years. Thirty of us started as candidates for staffing the command unit up here. It’s a brutal process with years and years of mindgames and tests and technical knowledge examinations and being woken in the middle of the night with the news that your entire family has died, only to discover three weeks later they had not been killed in the car crash, but taken into protective custody and look-alike bodies provided. This is how we separate the strong from the weak. A year later, when a favored aunt dies in a hit-and-run, there’s always the lingering suspicion she will turn out to be alive. After we qualified basic, His Holiness began to sound us out about the philosophical foundations for the job. He’s the person who’s authority we wield up here in the Deathstar. It’s his Will that we carry out if we push the button, and it’s not at all like the bunker bunnies of previous generations, who were there to turn the handle on the last order given and then wait to die. We of the Deathstar are empowered to negotiate, to decide, to act not on behalf of the country – no, that is long gone by the time we are empowered to act – but on behalf of His Holiness, NSC-STRATCOM, the person appointed to figure out how to govern the future affairs of men if America has been inundated by a flood of nuclear warheads.

We’re here to be guardians of His vision, to know what it is that must be done with the power built by America, given to the NSC, given then to the NSC-STRATCOM, God our master, who trained us to think as he does about the nature of the power structures on the planet, and what role we could play, after the bombs have dropped, in guiding and governing the future destiny of the human race in the post-America period. He picked us very, very carefully. He tested many of us to destruction. But we five, we are the living embodiments of his Will, of his decision-making capacity, installed here, so far away from the Earth, which we protect with our gamma ray cameras and neutron beam cannons and plasma-blanket ASATs. We are here to decide what the will of God is, if God is dead, and we are all that remain of his authority over the earth.