The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [39]
SLIDE 3: Grainy black-and-white photographs, evidently taken from TV screens: a long cylindrical structure grasped in the claws of an enormous grab. From below, thin streamers rise up towards it.
“BLUE HADES took exception to the intrusion into their territory and chose to exercise their salvage rights under Article Five, Clause Four of the Benthic Treaty. Hence the tentacles. Now . . .”
SLIDE 1 (Repeat): This time the man in the middle is circled with a red highlighter.
“This fellow in the middle is Ellis Billington, as he looked thirty years ago. Ellis was brilliant but not well socialized back then. He was attached to the ‘B’ team as an observer, tasked with examining the circuitry of the cipher machine they hoped to recover from the sub’s control room. I didn’t pay much attention to him at the time, which was a mistake. He already had his security clearance, and after the JENNIFER debacle he moved to San Jose and set up a small electronics and software business.”
SLIDE 4: A crude-looking circuit board. Rather than fiberglass, it appears to be made of plywood that has been exposed to seawater for too long, and has consequently warped. Sockets for vacuum tubes stud its surface, one of them occupied by the broken base of a component; numerous diodes and resistors connect it to an odd, stellate design in gold that covers most of the surface of the board.
“This board was taken from a GRU-issued Model 60 oneiromantic convolution engine found aboard the K-129. As you can see, it spent rather longer in the water than was good for it. Ellis reverse-engineered the basic schematic and pieced together the false vacuum topology that the valves disintermediated. Incidentally, these aren’t your normal vacuum tubes—isotope imbalances in the thorium-doped glass sleeves suggest that they were evacuated by exposure in a primitive wake-shield facility, possibly aboard a model-three Sputnik satellite similar to the one first orbited in 1960. That would have given them a starting pressure about six orders of magnitude cleaner than anything available on Earth at the time, at a price per tube of about two million rubles, which suggests that someone in the GRU’s scientific directorate really wanted a good signal, if that wasn’t already obvious. We now know that they’d clearly cracked the Dee-Turing Thesis by this point and were well into modified Enochian metagrammar analysis. Anyway, young Billington concluded that the Mod-60 OCE, NATO code ‘Gravedust,’ was intended to allow communication with the dead. Recently dead, anyway.”
SLIDE 5: An open coffin containing a long-dead body. The corpse is partially mummified, the eyelids sunken into the empty sockets and the jaw agape with lips retracted.
“We’re not sure exactly what a Gravedust system was doing aboard the K-129. According to one theory that was remarkably popular with our friends at ONI around the time, it had something to do with the former Soviet Union’s postmortem second strike command-and-control system, to allow the submarine’s political officer to ask for instructions from the Politburo after a successful decapitation stroke. They were very keen on maintaining the correct chain of command back then. There’s just one problem with that theory: it’s rubbish. According to our own analysis after the event—I should add, the Black Chamber was remarkably reluctant to part with the Gravedust schemata, we finally got it out of them by remote viewing—Billington underestimated the backreach of the Gravedust interrogator by a factor of at least a thousand. We were told that it would only allow callbacks to the recently dead, within the past million seconds. In actual fact, you could call up Tutankhamen himself on this rig. Our best guess is that the Soviets were planning on talking to something that had been dead for a very long time indeed, somewhere under the ocean.”
SLIDE 6: A Russian submarine, moored alongside