The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [76]
McMurray turns to stare at the glass-topped cabinet. “Billington’s not doing this for the good of the nation, needless to say. We’re not sure just what he plans to do with JENNIFER MORGUE if he gets his hands on it, but frankly, CenCom isn’t keen to find out. He needs to be stopped. Which is where we run into an embarrassing problem. He already figured we’d take steps to interdict him, so he’s preempted us.” He glances at Ramona, and her blood freezes at his expression.
“Sir?”
McMurray gestures at the cabinet. “Look at this.”
Ramona peers through the glass warily. She sees a wooden tabletop: perfectly mundane, but for a strange diorama positioned in its center. It seems to consist of a pair of dolls, male and female, wearing wedding clothes; adjacent to them are a pair of engagement rings and a model of a stepped wedding cake. The whole diorama is enclosed within a Möbius-loop design in conductive ink, connected to a breadboard analog-digital converter and an elderly PC.
“This is probably the least dangerous exhibit you’ll find here,” McMurray says calmly, his momentary anger stilled. “You’re looking at a hardware circuit designed to implement a love geas using vodoun protocols and a modified Jellinek-Wirth geometry engine.” His finger traces out the Möbius loop below. “Symbolic representations of the entities to be influenced are placed within a geometry engine controlled by a clocked recursive invocation. There are less visible signifiers here—the skin and hair samples, necessary for DNA affinity matching, and concealed within the dolls—but the intent should be obvious. The two individuals linked by this particular grid have been happily married for sixteen years at this point. It’s a reinforcing loop; the more the subjects work within the framework, the stronger the feedback frame becomes. The geas itself extends its influence by altering the probability gauge metric associated with the subjects’ interactions: outcomes that reinforce the condition are simply rendered more likely to occur while the circuit is operational.”
Ramona blinks. “I don’t understand.”
“Obviously.” McMurray steps back, then crosses his arms. “Try to get your head around the fact that it’s a contagion spell that generates compliant behavior. This couple, for example, started out hating each other. If you were to destroy this generator, they’d be in divorce court—or one of them would be in a shallow grave—within weeks. Now bear in mind that Billington’s cruising around the Caribbean in a huge yacht, plotting some kind of scheme. He isn’t stupid. We figure that about six months ago he created a similar hardware-backed geas engine aboard his yacht, the Mabuse. The precise nature of the geas is not entirely clear to us, but it has been extremely detrimental to our counterforce operations—in particular, attempts to act against him through normal channels fail. Telex requests dispatched to the Cayman police force via INTERPOL get unaccountably lost, FBI agents develop random brain tumors, associates who might plea-bargain their way to giving evidence wake up embedded in concrete foundations, that sort of thing. CenCom’s not convinced, but Sensor Ops believes that Billington has used the geas engine to create a Hero trap—only a single agent conforming to the right archetype can actually approach him; and even then, the geas will screw with their