The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [114]
“This looks like a great system,” I say, fingering the frame of the workstation. “So you’ve got access to the eyeballs of anyone who’s wearing Pale Grace™ eye shadow? That must be really hard to filter effectively.” I’m guessing that I’ve got Eileen’s number. I’ve seen her type before, stuck in a pale green annex block out behind the donut in Cheltenham, desperate to show off how well she’s organized her departmental brief. Eileen’s little cosmetics operation is genuine enough, but she came out of spook country just the same as Ellis did: staring at goats for state security. (Forget the whack-jobs at Fort Bragg; there’s stuff the Black Chamber gets up to that makes it very useful to have a bunch of useful idiots prancing around in public out front, convincing everybody that it’s all a bunch of New Age twaddle.) Eileen isn’t much of a necromancer, but she’s got the ghostly spoor of midlevel occult intelligence management all over her designer suit, and she’s desperate for professional recognition.
“It’s top of the range.” She pats the other side of the rack, as if to make sure it’s still there: “This baby’s got sixteen embedded blade servers from HP running the latest from Microsoft Federal Systems division and supporting a TLA Enterprise Non-Stop Transactional Intelligence™ middle-ware cluster11 connected to the corporate extranet via a leased Intelsat pipe.” Her smile softens at the edges, turning slightly sticky: “It’s the best remote-viewing mission support environment there is, including Amherst. We know. We built the Amherst lab.”
Amherst lab? It’s got to be a Black Chamber project. I keep my best poker face on: this is useful shit, if I ever get a chance to tell Angleton about it via a channel who isn’t code named Charlie Victor. But right now I’ve got something more immediate to do. “That’s impressive,” I say, putting all the honesty I can muster at short notice into my voice. “Can I have a look at the front panel?”
Eileen nods. The hairs at the nape of my neck stand on end: for a moment everything seems to be limned in an opalescent glow and her gaze is simultaneously fixed on my face and looking at something a million miles away—no, infinitely far away: at an archetype I’ve borrowed, at an identity with the ability to sway any woman’s sanity, the talent to lie like a rug and charm their knickers off at the same time. “Be my guest.” She giggles, which is a not entirely appropriate sound—but sanity and consistency are in decreasing supply this close to the geas field generator (which, unless I am very much mistaken, is one deck up and five meters over from where we’re standing). I reach up with one hand and flip the front panel down to look at the blinkenlights and status readouts on the front of the box. Eileen’s still looking at me, glassily: I run my hand down the front panel, the palmed thumb drive between two fingers, and a moment later I twitch my finger over the reset button then flip the lid closed.
The screen freezes for a moment, then an error message dialog box flashes up. Eileen blinks and glances at the monitor then her head whips round: “What did you just do?”
I roll out my best blank look. “Huh? I just closed the front panel. Is it a power glitch?” I can’t believe my luck. Now if only Eileen didn’t notice me stick the stubby little piece of plastic in the exposed USB keyboard socket . . .
She leans forwards, over the screen. “One of the servers just went offline.” She sniffs then straightens up and waves the nearest beret over: “Get Neumann back here, his station’s acting up.” She looks at me suspiciously then glances at the workstation, her gaze flickering across the lid of the blade server. “I thought they’d fixed the rollover bug,” she mutters.
“Do you still need me around?” I ask.
“No.” She knows something’s not right but she can’t quite put her finger on it: the alarm bells are ringing in her head but the geas has wrapped a muffling sock disguised as a software bug around