The Rhesus Chart (9 page)

I show him my warrant card, and he scrawls something that might be cryptographically related to my name and departmental number on a dog-eared sheet clipped to a board hanging by the door. Then he goes back to his solitaire game.

I turn the key, reach round the door to flick on the light switch, and together Pete and I enter the KGB.2.YA archive.

 • • • 

IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT HER MAJESTY’S GOVERNMENT FINDS IT
extremely
difficult to throw anything away. Like your mad old aunt who lives in a flat with sixteen commemorative Royal Family tea sets, thirty cubic meters of yellowing newspapers, and an incontinent dachshund, the government hangs on to stuff until long after it becomes obvious that it lacks any conceivable use:

• As late as 1982, they kept a strategic reserve of 160 steam locomotives in a vast underground complex at Corsham, near Bath, in case they had to rebuild the British railway network after a nuclear war. (They also kept a Second World War jeep factory, five million battery-powered radios, and twenty-three million body bags at the same depot.)
  
• The official Government Random Number Generator used for seeding new encryption keys is a thing of legend, running as it does on a type of punched paper tape that hasn’t been manufactured since the 1950s. (We had to invent some really neat hacks using digital cameras to read it into our oldest trailing-edge minicomputers in order to
  use
  those numbers . . .)
  
• And rumor has it that the Central Ammunition Depot hanging off Box Tunnel still contains two thousand barrels of iron-tipped English longbow arrows, in case it becomes urgently necessary to re-fight the Battle of Crécy.
  

But these pale into insignificance compared to the glorious, pointless obsolescence that fills the MAGIC CIRCLE OF SAFETY warehouse.

“Dear
God
,” whispers Pete, “it’s full of posters!”

He’s not wrong. The warehouse is full of floor-to-ceiling, heavy-duty steel shelves, construction built to take timbers. The nearest aisle to us is not full of wood, though. Instead, every available niche is jammed with pallets laden with broadsheet-sized posters, stacked half a meter deep and strapped in place. I do some quick mental arithmetic and realize there has to be upwards of a hundred thousand public notices here. I really don’t want to risk any of the shelves falling on me.

While the pallets are tagged for easy identification, someone has taken the trouble to hang a copy of each poster by the side of the shelves that hold the stock. The design values are classical, and not in a good way. Two-color printing on plain white paper:
Here
is the par-liamentary portcullis-and-crown symbol, sitting atop a perspective-flattened summoning grid, menaced by cartoonish green tentacles to ram home the message—
STAY IN THE CIRCLE
. And
there
is a symbolic nuclear family (tall male toilet-door figure, shorter female toilet-door figure, two small mini-me’s) gathered under an Elder Sign—
CULTIST DANGER: WATCH YOUR NEIGHBOURS FOR THIS SIGN
. I wince at this latter. (The next cultist I meet who can tell an Elder Sign from Transport for London’s new logo will be the first. And don’t get me started on the occult symbol they used for the Olympics . . .)

I look down the aisle. Yes, there it is:
PROTECT AND SURVIVE
with added magic circle goodness. Tentacles replace mushroom clouds in the variant semiological design language of pants-wetting despair at imminent brain-eating catastrophe.

“Is that,” Pete says in an awe-muffled voice, pointing, “a box of LPs?”

I follow his aim. Yes, there is indeed some sort of ancient gramophone contraption sitting on one of the shelves, next to an open box containing black plastic disks about thirty centimeters in diameter. “You mean the things they used to use before compact discs?”

“Yes, Bob. Surely you must remember—”

Yes, I remember. (Just.) I walk towards the music player. There’s something wrong with these disks, they’re not quite the same as the ones my dad used to play. I get a bit closer before I can see properly. “They’re too thick.”

“That’s bakelite, Bob, modern disks are made of vinyl. Ahem.” Pete carefully extracts one of the disks from the velvet-lined box they’re racked in. “Wow! Look, these are 16s.”

“What’s that?”

“You play them at 16 revolutions per minute, not 33 or 45. Lousy high-frequency response but great for speech, and they run for twice as long. I bet these were specially mastered in the late sixties. They didn’t know how well magnetic tape would survive.”

“But what would they do with them?”

“Broadcast them, probably. From the emergency command and control bunkers they had set up for running the country in event of a nuclear war: they had radio transmitters, didn’t they? I saw a TV drama about it years ago, called
Threads
.” He looks at me, curiously: “Would public broadcasting still work after an invasion of wibbly-wobbly nasties? What about the internet?”

I scuff my shoe on the bare concrete. “This stuff is useless. They haven’t blown the dust off it in thirty years!” I look around. “I mean, it’s useless except for kitsch value. Well, that’s not quite right. You might get the service museum curator excited. But I don’t see any of this junk going viral like
KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON
.”

“It lacks a certain
je ne sais quoi
,” Pete agrees. “But what am I going to do?”

I shrug. “You’re going to dig out the original brief for the folks who came up with this stuff. I figure it’ll turn out to be ‘come up with a public information campaign’ or something along those lines. Then you’re going to write a proposal for how to update the brief for a new generation, so that the New Media hipsters can all point and laugh at us. It’ll get outsourced to a security-cleared agency, who in turn will pitch an iPhone app and a Facebook page, but by then you’ll be signed off the job, so tearing off their heads and shitting down their necks as you explain in words of one syllable that we can’t trust Apple or Facebook won’t be your problem.” I pause. “I can help you with that: it shouldn’t take more than a couple of days. On the other hand, I’ve got a little project of my own I’m working on, and I could do with some help. And a library researcher is
exactly
what I need. Are you up for it?”

Thus I seal my fate.

“DUDES, THIS IS
NOT
WHAT I SIGNED UP FOR! WHERE ARE MY
fangs? Why can’t I turn into a bat? This
sucks
!”

“Silence, minion!” Mhari turns her nose up with turbocharged hauteur and places one hand on her hip, theatrically poised, as she faces down Evan. “There will be no whining among the pigs!”

“Vampires.”

“Goats, chickens, whatever.” She waves it off. Alex stares at her, enthralled. They had to duct-tape Mhari to her Aeron and lecture her for six hours straight before she could wrap her head around just enough of the Core Theorem (as he and Evan had named it) to open her inner eyes to whatever they were all seeing in the visualizer, but eventually she got it. Vampirism becomes her. Her skin is paler and clearer than before, her hair more golden-blonde, as if some personal contrast slider has been turned up; and the city slicker uniform of sharp jacket, black dress, and heels goes well with the territory. The effect of turning post-human on the boy-pigs isn’t quite as obvious—they already had the self-aware swagger of the masters of the universe, apart from Alex—but the change has bestowed an odd desmodontid magnetism on the Scrum Mistress, and Alex is an iron filing trapped in her field.

“We need to try the blood thing. I’m
dying
for a drink,” says Dick. It’s true: every last one of them has become aware of an unpleasantly intimate thirst since the change, a thirst unslaked by water or champagne. Denial isn’t an option.

“Where are our fangs?” Evan deadpans compulsively.

“Who the fuck knows? Maybe they don’t come out until we hunt.” Dick hunches around his stomach as if he’s in pain.

“Teeth don’t grow overnight,” Evan says, more thoughtfully; “maybe we ought to book a dental X-ray?”

“We could corner one of the cleaners,” suggests Janice. The Scrum’s sysadmin got with the program immediately, and now she’s even scarier than ever: her hair spikier, her trouser-suits sharper. Alex half-expects her to whip out a red and black armband and announce that backsliders will be shot. “Use the hypnosis thing. Even if it doesn’t work, how are they going to identify us? We all look the same to them—pasty-skinned Anglos in suits.”

“Have they found Mr. White yet?” Alex had coughed to telling the smirking chimp in the bathroom to get lost during the daily stand-up meeting. (That was when the sprint on vampirism had been proposed and unanimously actioned as an emergency spike.) Oscar’s discreet digging had subsequently revealed that one Barry White from the Rare Earth Futures desk had not returned to work since the evening of the confrontation; according to the police he was last seen booking a one-way flight to Mataveri airport on Easter Island.

“Not so far.” Mhari wrinkles her nose. “That’s a loose end we’ll have to tie up. What
were
you thinking, Alex?”

“I was thinking I had sunburn and someone had slipped me some acid.”

Mhari turns away dismissively, focusses on Janice instead, eyes gleaming. “The cleaners are a bad idea, Janice. We might—have you ever watched
Buffy
?—end up tearing them limb from limb. Or losing control and killing them. Cleaners have team leaders and contract management. Families, even. It could get messy, unless we know
exactly
what we’re doing. I think we need to deal with this in a businesslike way. Oscar . . . ?”

Until now, Oscar has been sitting in his office at the far end of the boardroom, door flung wide so he can watch from afar. It’s a pose he has: one ankle crossed over the other knee, brooding in his super-villain’s swivel chair (a horribly expensive luxury item modeled after a Blofeldian excess from one of the earlier Bond movies). Now he stands.

Forty-ish, bald and skinny and intensely animated, Oscar is both the Scrum’s leader and their interface to the institution they are embedded in. They all know it, and as soon as he steps forward they all look towards him. “Okay, people. Here’s what I’m hearing: we have a huge opportunity, but it doesn’t mesh with our deliverables list. And it certainly doesn’t play to any of the user stories I’m seeing here.” He looks at Mhari. “It comes with certain costs attached, the stomach ache and sunburn. But it also comes with some remarkable value-proposition increments”—Mhari had sold him on it the instant she regurgitated Alex’s
get lost
anecdote—“and I think it constitutes a net benefit that we should add to our core skills matrix for all personnel.” Everyone nods, glassy-eyed, unable to look away. Oscar in full flow was charismatic even before they sat him down in front of Alex’s tracer bullet demo and turned him into one of them. Now he’s positively mesmerizing, able to turn the driest of spreadsheet statements into a Shakespearean soliloquy.

“We need to explore the envelope of this new capability
immediately
, then determine how to apply it to our core production targets. We need to learn what it takes to deal with the stomach ache. We need to explore ways and means of minimizing daylight exposure. We need to identify the existential threats we face and develop procedures that maximize our chances of surviving them. You’ve all seen the movies: you know what happens to the unprepared, the unfit?
We are not going to be unfit.
We are going to confront this challenge and surmount it together.

“For my part, I’m going to feed a stall warning up the pipeline and tap-dance around it to give you a one-week window of opportunity. I repeat: regular work is
cancelled for one week
, and I’ll do whatever it takes to cover for you while you get to grips with our new toolkit. Unless anyone wants more than that one-week extension?” (Nobody nods.) “Good. So right now you’re going to sit down and we’re going to brainstorm the stories we’re going to generate tasks from for the one-week sprint on vampirism. On this theme,
you
are the customers and your work is going to define our deliverables. The definition of done for this sprint is: we will know what hurts us, we will know what helps us, we will know what we can do that we couldn’t do before, and we will know what extra things we can do when we go back to business.”

He grins, toothily. Is it Alex’s imagination, or are Oscar’s canines longer than they were yesterday?

“Note that I didn’t say ‘back to business
as usual
.’ Because I don’t think we’re going to be playing the same game again. We just got a power-up, people. And once we find out how big it is, we’ll be in a better position to know how high we can raise our game . . .”

 • • • 

MIDNIGHT IN THE SPRINT PLANNING MEETING. ALL THE PIGS
and most of the hens are present, standing around the table (to keep things moving). They’ve barricaded the door to the suite to keep the cleaners out, ordered in a pile of pizzas (for though the stomach ache is ubiquitous and insatiable, the old mammalian metabolism still demands food), and Mhari is keeping track on the whiteboard.

“Okay, what else?” she demands, brandishing a red marker.

“Sunlight, threat, or menace?”

“Thank you, Evan.” She swings to the board, writes SUNLIGHT and circles it in yellow. After a moment she adds rays. “Well?”

“I got burned,” says Alex, “but only my hands and face.”

“Protective clothing,” mumbles Dick. His suit probably qualifies as such, at least if it’s his virginity he’s trying to protect—it came from a charity shop, a coarse green tweed pig farmer’s number that is more effective dissident garb in this environment than any amount of tie-dye and patchouli oil. “Hey, what about latex face paint, like in
Mission: Impossible
?”

Mhari adds two linked circles to the board: PROTECTIVE CLOTHING and LATEX MASKS.

“Hats,” offers Janice. “Becca gave me a lovely new trilby . . .”

HATS goes on the board.

“Keep it moving, people,” Mhari says briskly. Alex’s attention wanders. He notices she’s wearing opaque black leggings under her dress.

“Shouldn’t we move the office down a few levels?” he asks. “And further away from the exterior?” The Scrum’s office is already shielded in the heart of the bank’s building, well away from any possible exposure to laser microphones or long-lens cameras.

“I’ll action that with Oscar, but that’s not strictly a user story,” she reminds him. “Stories, people!”

“Blood: animal or human?” offers Evan.

“Good one. Does it have to be fresh from the artery, or can it be stored?” This from John.

“I saw this film once,” Alex stumbles momentarily; “in it, the vampire had taken over a local hospital—it was set in the mid-west—and was using the blood bank . . .”

“Jolly good!” BLOOD BANK and FRESHLY SQUEEZED BULL went on the board. “Next?”

“Mind control.” Janice took her turn. “We need to explore it. Can we all do it?
How
do we do it? What are the limits? What if the target is resisting?”

“Excellent points, one and all.” Mhari turns to the board and scribbles: HYPNOSIS, RESISTANCE, LIMITS. After a moment she scrubs out HYPNOSIS and writes in BRAINWASHING instead. “Anything else?”

Alex rubs his jawline. It itches. “The mirror thing. How does it apply to cameras? Because if—”

“Nonsense, Alex!” Janice is nodding along with Mhari. “We already know that one.”

“But—”

“Because I had to use FaceTime on my fucking iPad to do my makeup this morning. It can’t fool cameras, or I’d be a real mess.”

Janice holds up a cautionary finger: “Unless you swap the image right-for-left. Is that what you were wondering?”

“No, but—” Alex stares at Janice, then at Mhari. “It’s a mental effect! Whatever stops us seeing our reflections, it’s in
us
, not in the mirror or the camera.”

“Huh.” Mhari sounds skeptical, but turns back to the board anyway and adds: FACE BLINDNESS. “Anything else?”

“Garlic.”

“Coffins!”

“Holy water.”

“Anyone got a crucifix? Or going to holy communion?”

“Wait up, if you believe in the strict trans-substantiation, then if the host and wine turns into the body and blood of Christ, does that mean it could fix the stomach upset? Or would it set fire to us?”

“Dude,
consecrated ground
. Also: holy water!”

(Mhari doesn’t interrupt the flow, but writes JESUS STUFF on the board.)

“But what if someone invites you in?”

“I can settle that one,” says Janice. “The thing about needing an explicit invitation? Is nonsense.” She sounds a little too smug, to Alex’s ears.

(LET THE RIGHT ONE IN goes up on the board. RIGHT ONE is then struck out and replaced by WRONG ’UN.)

“Stakes,” says John. He is greeted by stony, unwelcoming silence. “Did I say something wrong?”

“There is an obvious joke,” Mhari says tightly. “You’re all thinking it, so you can pat yourselves on the back and keep it to yourselves. But in current company if you say it
aloud
I will have to make a determination whether it constitutes workplace harassment and/or discrimination against persons-of-hemophagia.
Am I clear?
”

Alex bites his lip. The moment passes; nobody utters the words
stakeholder management
in any context, tasteless or otherwise. But he’s managed to make his lip bleed, and the trickle oozing onto his tongue tastes like, no, it smells like,
no
, it reminds him of . . .

Mhari is saying something about teams and assigning a sprint backlog and prepping a new burndown chart and who takes on what roles. Alex shivers imperceptibly, and tries to shut the memory of his first orgasm back in whatever dusty memory box it crept out of: this is no time to be distracted. “John, Dick, you’re on BRAINWASHING: go find a bar and practice your pickup lines. Janice and Evan, you’re taking BLOOD BANK. Those are tonight’s tasks. Tomorrow Janice can return the samples while Evan and Alex tackle the JESUS STUFF items. If you need support I’ll pitch in. I’m going to take PROTECTIVE CLOTHING and LATEX MASKS but I’ve got some shopping for equipment to do first, so we can work on it tomorrow; I’ll need one of you boys. And Dick and Alex can team on FRESHLY SQUEEZED BULL. Okay, on to phase two: let’s start drawing up our work units . . .”

 • • • 

A PAIR OF VAMPIRES WITH CLIPBOARDS WALK INTO THE ACUTE
Receiving Unit at a busy London teaching hospital, shortly after eight o’clock at night.

One is male and one is female. They’re both smartly dressed, with badges on lanyards around their necks. Everything about them screams
outsourced private sector management
, except it’s nine in the evening and there is no way that consultants from Accenture or PwC would be seen dead working this late amidst the vomit and screams of the unwashed sick plebs.

The male discreetly elbows his companion (pin-striped trouser suit, short spiky hair with racy violet highlights) and whispers, “We should have come as doctors. All it takes is a stethoscope, how hard can it be?”

“Don’t be fucking stupid,” she hisses at him. “What if somebody asked us to
fix
someone?”

“We could tell them they feel better? They’d believe it.” (It was true: to everybody’s astonishment, they’d sent John and Dick to test it. John, because he fancied himself as a pickup artist, and Dick because he was clearly a hopeless case, the twenty-something programmer most likely to still be a virgin. But Dick had scored with his first attempt.
Despite
his pig farmer’s suit, questionable personal hygiene, bulging, watery hyperthyroidal eyes, and the miasma of squalid dissipation that trailed around behind him at all times, he’d slouched into a high-end club and squelched out again after half an hour; wearing the stunned, toad-like grin of a first-time winner in life’s lottery, sandwiched between a pair of mistrustful anorexic blondes who clung to his arms possessively and glared daggers at one another across his prematurely thinning pate. John, aghast, had stuck around only long enough to obtain photographic evidence of the coup, then chickened out of his own chicken run and went home to commune with a bottle of limoncello instead, depressed by the ease with which Dick had devalued his expertise with the ladies.)