Wireless Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Missile Gap

  Rogue Farm

  A Colder War

  MAXOS

  Down on the Farm

  Unwirer

  Snowball’s Chance

  Trunk and Disorderly

  Palimpsest

  Ace Books by Charles Stross

  SINGULARITY SKY

  IRON SUNRISE

  ACCELERANDO

  THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES

  GLASSHOUSE

  HALTING STATE

  SATURN’S CHILDREN

  THE JENNIFER MORGUE

  WIRELESS

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

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  This is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2009 by Charles Stross.

  Previous publication information can be found on page 353.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  eISBN : 978-1-101-08156-3

  1. Short stories, American. I. Title.

  PR6119.T79W57 2009

  823’.92—dc22

  2009010394

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For David Pringle, Gardner Dozois,

  and Sheila Williams

  Introduction

  Hello, and welcome to Wireless.

  This is not a novel. This is a short-story collection. This is not a short story. This is the introduction to a short-story collection. This is not fiction. This is a sequence of concepts that I am transferring into your conscious awareness via the medium of words, some of which may be false. Danger: here be epistemological dragons . . .

  I’m Charlie Stross, and I have a vice I indulge in from time to time: I write short fiction. I’ve been writing short stories (in various length factors) and getting them published in magazines for a long time—my first short story in the British SF magazine Interzone came out in 1986—and although I don’t make much money at it, I still keep doing it, even though these days I write full-time for my living.

  Short stories are a famously dead format in most genres of written fiction. Back in the 1950s, there was a plethora of fiction magazines on the shelves of every newsagent: but changes in the structure of the magazine-publishing business killed the fiction markets, and what had once been a major source of income for many writers turned into a desert. Even science fiction—which has a long tradition of short stories as a major subfield, going back to the 1920s and the pages of Astounding Science Fiction, and which has fared better than other genres in terms of the survival of the monthly magazines—isn’t a terribly fertile field to plow. Because of the way the publishing industry has evolved, if you want to earn a living, you really need to write novels: short-fiction outlets, with a very few exceptions, pay abysmally.

  It wasn’t always thus. The science fiction novel was itself something of a novelty until the 1950s; the famous names of the early-SF literary canon—Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and less-well-remembered names such as Fredric Brown and Cyril Kornbluth and Alfred Bester—were primarily short-fiction writers. With dozens of monthly newsstand pulp-fiction magazines demanding to be fed, and a public not yet weaned to the glass teat of television, the field was huge. Video didn’t so much kill the radio star as it did for the short-fiction markets, providing an alternative distraction on demand for tired workers to chill out with.

  But the SF short-story field survives to this day. It’s in much better shape, paradoxically, than other genres, where the form has all but died. It would be hard to describe it as thriving, at least compared to the golden age of pulps—but science fiction readers are traditionalists, and those of us who write short fiction aren’t primarily in it for the money: we’ve got other, less obvious, incentives.

  (Actually, I’m not sure I know anyone who writes fiction at any length solely for money. If you’ve got the skill to string words into sentences, there are any number of ways to earn a living, most of which are far less precarious than the life of a freelance fiction writer. At the risk of overgeneralizing, it’s one of those occupations you go into because you can’t not do it, and any attempts to justify it by pointing to commercial success are, at best, special pleading. If Stephen King had failed to get his big break with Carrie, if J. K. Rowl ing’s first Harry Potter book had sold out its first thousand-copy print run and thereafter gone out of print, I’m willing to bet that they’d have kept on writing regardless.)

  Speaking for myself, I’m an obsessive fiction writer. I write because I’ve got a cloud of really neat ideas buzzing around my brain, and I need to let them out lest my head explode. But having ideas is only part of the reason I write—otherwise, I could just keep a private journal. The other monkey riding my back is the urge to communicate, to reach out and touch someone. (Or to lift the lid on their brainpan, sprinkle some cognitive dissonance inside, stir briskly, then tiptoe away with a deranged titter.) Everyone I know who does this job has got the same monkey on their shoulders, urging them on, inciting them to publish or be damned, communicate or die.

  If you’re a compulsive communicator, nothing gets your attention like feedback from the public—a signal saying “message received.” To many writers, money is one kind of feedback; nothing says “message received” quite like the first royalty check after your book earns out the advance. It tells you that people actually went out and bought it. (And it pays the grocery bills.) Then there are the reviews, be they brilliant or misguided, or occasionally brilliant and misguided, which tell you a little bit about how the message was received or misunderstood. They don’t pay the grocery bills, but they still matter to us.

  But the feedback from a novel is slow to arrive, and thin beer indeed after the amount of effort that went into fermenting the brew.

  Imagine you’ve got an office job. You go to work every day, and there’s a perk: the office is about
ten feet from your bedroom door. (No lengthy commute!) You sit in that office—alone, for the most part—and write, hopefully without interruption or human companionship. Sometimes you get bored and take a day or two off, or go do the housework, or go shopping. And sometimes you find yourself working there at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night because you took Friday off, and Thursday before it, and your demon conscience is whispering in your ear, reminding you to put in the hours. You’re almost always on your own.

  You’ll find it generally takes somewhere between a month and a year to write a novel—sometimes more, sometimes less. And once it’s written, you deliver it to your agent or editor, and it disappears for a couple of months. Then it reappears as a job in the publisher’s production queue, moving in lockstep through a series of well-defined processes on its way to being turned into cartons of finished books. There’s a little wiggle room, but in general if you turn in a book, it will take a year to show up in hardcover (and then another year before it’s reprinted in paperback).

  So: once a year, you get the fanfare and fireworks show of a new book coming into print. And then the reviews and reader comments trickle in, usually over a period of a couple of months. Then the long silence resumes, punctuated by the odd piece of fan mail (a surprising proportion of which is concerned with pointing out the same hugely significant typo on page seven—that escaped both you and your editors—as the previous sixteen e-mails) . . .

  Short stories are different: they push the reward-feedback button much more frequently than novels. (And that’s why a lot of us start out writing short stories before we tackle novels.) There’s an addictive quality to writing short stories, like being a rat in a behavioral-science experiment that rewards correct performance of some complex task with a little electric shock to the medial forebrain bundle. Not only do they not take months or years to write (when things are going well, it’s more like hours or days), but you can send them out to a magazine or anthology editor with some hope of hearing back within a couple of months. Better still, if a magazine decides to buy your story, it can be in print in a couple of months. Push the button harder, rat! It’s great training for acquiring the motivation to engage with the bigger, slower job of writing a novel.

  The speed of the short-story publication cycle brings me to the second reason I write them: I get to play with new ideas in a way I can’t manage at novel length. Novels are huge, cumbersome projects that take a long time to bolt together; in contrast, short stories are a quick vehicle for trying out something new, the fiction writer’s experimental workbench. I can focus on a particular idea or technique to the exclusion of everything else—which brings it into focus and lets me explore it to the full without worrying about whether it unbalances the plot development or fits with the protagonist’s motivations or whatever.

  The lack of money also means there’s less at stake. If I’m working on a novel, I can’t afford to try out an untested new writing technique in it. At worst, I might end up having to throw six months’ writing in the trash when it proves unfixable: a mess in any situation, and potentially catastrophic if you’re self-employed and working to deadline. But I can take a day or two off to write a short story and see if it works: throw it at a magazine, put it out in public, and see if my readers throw rotten tomatoes or gold sovereigns. Or, for a bigger idea—a new stylistic experiment, for example—I can treat it as a pilot project for a novel: take a month, write a couple of novelettes or a novella, find a home for them in an anthology or a magazine.

  Anyway: here’s Wireless.

  I wrote the stories in this collection between 1998 and 2008. Some of them were purportedly written for money—at least, an editor approached me, and said, “Would you like to write me a story about Subject X? I’ll pay!”—but none of them was cost-effective; the money was just the excuse. They span the spectrum from the short-short “MAXOS” all the way up to “Palimpsest” and “Missile Gap,” novellas that bump up close to the complexity and depth associated with novels. Some of them were written in response to a specific challenge from an editor (“Unwirer,” for example, had to fit a theme anthology’s remit—tales in which the developmental history of science and technology had followed a different path) while some were written in response to challenges from within (“Snowball’s Chance” because an imp of the perverse taunted me to write a traditional Pact with the Devil story). Some were stylistic experiments (“Trunk and Disorderly” might, had things gone differently, become the opening of a novel; instead, I settled for the easier technique of Saturn’s Children) while others were exercises in a familiar key (“Down on the Farm,” for example, is one of a piece with my other Laundry stories, collected in The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue).

  What they’ve all got in common, however, is that they’re a communication channel. Hello, are you receiving? Over.

  Missile Gap

  BOMB SCARE

  Gregor is feeding pigeons down in the park when the sirens go off.

  A stoop-shouldered fortysomething male in a dark suit, pale-skinned and thin, he pays no attention at first: the birds hold his attention. He stands at the side of a tarmac path, surrounded by damp grass that appears to have been sprayed with concrete dust, and digs into the outer pocket of his raincoat for a final handful of stale bread crumbs. Filthy, soot-blackened city pigeons with malformed feet jostle with plump white-collared wood pigeons, pecking and lunging for morsels. Gregor doesn’t smile. What to him is a handful of stale bread is a deadly business for the birds: a matter of survival. The avian struggle for survival runs parallel to the human condition, he thinks. It’s all a matter of limited resources and critical positioning. Of intervention by agencies beyond their bird-brained understanding, dropping treats for them to fight over. Then the air-raid sirens start up.

  The pigeons scatter for the treetops with a clatter of wings. Gregor straightens and looks round. It’s not just one siren, and not just a test: a policeman is pedaling his bicycle along the path toward him, waving one-handed. “You there! Take cover!”

  Gregor turns and presents his identity card. “Where is the nearest shelter?”

  The constable points toward a public convenience thirty yards away. “The basement there. If you can’t make it inside, you’ll have to take cover behind the east wall—if you’re caught in the open, just duck and cover in the nearest low spot. Now go!” The cop hops back on his black boneshaker and is off down the footpath before Gregor can frame a reply. Shaking his head, he walks toward the public toilet and goes inside.

  It’s early spring, a weekday morning, and the toilet attendant seems to be taking the emergency as a personal comment on the cleanliness of his porcelain. He jumps up and down agitatedly as he shoves Gregor down the spiral staircase into the shelter, like a short troll in a blue uniform stocking his larder. “Three minutes!” shouts the troll. “Hold fast in three minutes!” So many people in London are wearing uniforms these days, Gregor reflects; it’s almost as if they believe that if they play their wartime role properly, the ineffable will constrain itself to their expectations of a humanly comprehensible enemy.

  A double bang splits the air above the park and echoes down the stairwell. It’ll be RAF or USAF interceptors outbound from the big fighter base near Hanworth. Gregor glances round: a couple of oafish gardeners sit on the wooden benches inside the concrete tunnel of the shelter, and a louche City type in a suit leans against the wall, irritably fiddling with an unlit cigarette and glaring at the NO SMOKING signs. “Bloody nuisance, eh?” he snarls in Gregor’s direction.

  Gregor composes his face in a thin smile. “I couldn’t possibly comment,” he says, his Hungarian accent betraying his status as a refugee. (Another sonic boom rattles the urinals, signaling the passage of yet more fighters.) The louche businessman will be his contact, Goldsmith. He glances at the shelter’s counter. Its dial is twirling slowly, signaling the marked absence of radon and fallout. Time to make small talk, verbal primate grooming: “Does it happen often?”

>   The corporate tough relaxes. He chuckles to himself. He’ll have pegged Gregor as a visitor from stranger shores, the new NATO dominions overseas where they settled the latest wave of refugees ejected by the communists. Taking in the copy of the Telegraph and the pattern of stripes on Gregor’s tie, he’ll have realized what else Gregor is to him. “You should know, you took your time getting down here. Do you come here often to visit the front line, eh?”

  “I am here in this bunker with you.” Gregor shrugs. “There is no front line on a circular surface.” He sits down gingerly on the bench opposite the businessman. “Cigarette?”

  “Don’t mind if I do.” The businessman borrows Gregor’s cigarette case with a flourish: the symbolic peace offering accepted, they sit in silence for a couple of minutes, waiting to find out if it’s the curtain call for World War IV, or just a trailer.

  A different note drifts down the staircase, the warbling tone that indicates the all clear these days. The Soviet bombers have turned for home, the ragged lion’s stumpy tail tickled yet again. The toilet troll dashes down the staircase and windmills his arms at them: “No smoking in the nuclear bunker!” he screams. “Get out! Out, I say!”

  Gregor walks back into Regent’s Park, to finish disposing of his stale bread crumbs and ferry the contents of his cigarette case back to the office. The businessman doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to be arrested, and his English nationalist/neutralist cabal interned: meanwhile, Gregor is being recalled to Washington DC. This is his last visit, at least on this particular assignment. There are thin times ahead for the wood pigeons.