Angleton’s office: here be monsters. Silent and cold, it is home to the ghosts of a war colder by far than the one the ignorant public thought we won in 1989-a room walled in floor-to-ceiling file drawers, a gunmetal desk with organ-pedals and teletype keyboard, dominated by a hooded microfiche reader-the silent heart of an intelligence stilled, no longer beating out the number station signals across the Iron Curtain. I half-expect to see cobwebs in the corners, to smell the stale cigarette ash of a thousand tense nights beneath the arctic skies, waiting for the bombers.
I shake myself. History lies thick as winter snow in this room: I could drown beneath its avalanche weight if I don’t pull myself together. And in any case, Angleton was here-in his office I mean, not in this actual spot-before the cold war. I’ve seen a photograph from 1942, the man himself smiling at the camera, visibly no older (or younger) than he is today. It’s an open question, the extent to which he was involved in the occult affairs of government before the Second World War. Just how far back does he go? Human Resources don’t have a home address on file, which is itself suggestive. I wonder…
Before I sit down behind his desk, I scan the walls, floor, and ceiling up and down with the NecronomiPod. Sure enough, certain of the file drawers are booby-trapped with lethal-looking webworks of magic-not drawn in the plodding journeyman hand of the outer door’s vandal, but sketched in Angleton’s spidery scrawl, complex arcs and symbols linking arcane declarations and gruesome probability matrices. I could reverse engineer them in time and maybe worm my way inside, but knowing the boss there’s probably nothing there but nitrogen triiodide on the drawer rails and a jack-in-the-box loaded with tear gas: he was a firm believer in keeping the crown jewels in his head-or its annex, the thing in the green metal desk.
The Memex…
You’ve got to understand that although I’ve read about the things, I’ve never actually used one. It’s an important piece of the history of computing, leaked to the public as a think-piece commissioned by the Atlantic Weekly in 1945; most of the readers thought it was a gosh-wow-by-damn good idea, but were unlikely to realize that a number of the things had actually been built, using a slush fund earmarked for the Manhattan Project. The product of electromechanical engineering at its finest, not to mention its most horrendously complex, each Memex cost as much as a B-29 bomber-and contained six times as many moving parts, most of them assembled by watchmakers. It wasn’t until HyperCard showed up on the Apple Mac in 1987 that anything like it reached the general public.
I believe Angleton’s Memex is the only one that is still working, much less in day-to-day use, and to say it takes black magic to keep it running would be no exaggeration. I approach the seat with considerable caution, and not just because I’m absolutely certain he will have taken steps to ensure that anyone who sits in it without his approval and pushes the big red on button will never push another button in their (admittedly short) life; he knows how to use the thing, but if I crash it or break the cylinder head gasket or something and he comes back, the only shoes I’d be safe in would be a pair of NASA-issue moon boots (and maybe not even then).
I drag the wooden chair back from the Memex-the tiny casters squeak like agonized rodents across the worn linoleum floor-and lower myself gingerly into the cracked leather seat. The oak arms are worn smooth beneath my hands, where his palms have pressed upon them over the decades. I grab the solid sides of the desk and ease myself forward until my feet rest lightly on the pedals. There’s an angled glass strip facing me from the far end of the desk, and a light in the leg-well that comes on as my heels touch the kick-plate: it’s a periscope, giving me a view of my toes and the letters at the back of each pedal. I turn the gunmetal turret of the microfiche reader towards me, place the NecronomiPod on the desktop, and push the power button.
There’s a clunk of relays closing, and then a thrumming vibration runs through the machine. It’s easy to forget that though it weighs more than a ton, its average component weighs less than two grams: the gears alone took two months’ entire output from the largest watch factory in America. I stare into the hooded circular screen in something like awe. Machined to submicron precision, yet less powerful than the ancient 68EC000 in my washing machine, these devices were the backbone of the Laundry’s Intelligence Analysis section in the late 1940s. It’s like a steam locomotive or a stone axe: just because it’s obsolete doesn’t make it any less of an achievement, or any less fit for purpose.
The screen lights up-not like an LCD monitor, or even an old cathode ray tube, but more like an antique film projector.
WRITE USERNAME.
The moment of truth: I cautiously kick-type BOB, then spend a fruitless minute hunting for the return key before I realize there’s a paddle-shaped lever protruding level with my left knee-like the handle on a manual typewriter. I nudge it.
There’s a clunk from inside the desk and the injunction vanishes, to be replaced by a picture of the organization coat of arms. Then more words appear, scrolling in from the bottom of the screen, wobbling slightly:
WRITE CLEARANCE.
What the hell? I laboriously type BLOODY BARON, and knee the return paddle. (There’s something weird about the foot-keyboard: then I twig to the fact that its abbreviated supply of characters means it’s probably a Baudot Code system. Which figures. Older than ASCII…)
The screen fades to white after a couple of seconds, then a bloody sigil flashes into view. It doesn’t kill me to look at it, but the disquieting sense that the void is inspecting the inside of the back of my skull makes me squirm on my seat. There is an eye-warping loop to one side of it that feels familiar, as if it’s tied to my soul somehow.
WRITE: STILL ALIVE? Y/N:
Knees knocking, I type Y (RETURN).
WELCOME BOB, YOU ARE AUTHENTICATED.
If you are reading this message, I am absent. Welcome to the dead man’s boots: hope you don’t find them too tight. You are one of only four people who have access to this machine (and at least two of them are dead or dying of K Syndrome). You may: read all files not flagged with a Z-prefix, search all files not flagged with a Z-prefix, and print any files flagged with a prefix from A to Q. You may not: read or search Z-prefix files. Print files flagged with a prefix from S to Z. Dismantle or reverse-engineer this instrument.
WARNING: LETHAL ENFORCEMENT PROTOCOLS ARE ENFORCED.
WRITE: GOTO MAIN MENU? Y/N:
This is Angleton. He doesn’t bluff. I make a note of those clearances on my phone, then, hesitantly, I type Y.
I have, in fact, seen worse-designed user interfaces. There are abominations out there that claim to be personal media players that-but I digress. The Memex is a miracle of simplicity and good design, as long as you bear in mind that it’s operated by foot pedals (except for the paper tape punch), the display is a microfilm reader, and it can’t display more than ten menu choices on screen at any time. Unlike early digital computers such as the Manchester Mark One, you don’t need to be Alan Turing and debug raw machine code on the fly by flashing a torch at the naked phosphor memory screen; you just need to be able to type on a Baudot keyboard using both feet (with no delete key and lethal retaliation promised if you make certain typos). There’s nothing here that’s remotely as hostile as VM/CMS to a UNIX hacker. I’ve just got an edgy feeling that the Memex is reading me, and sitting in quietly humming judgment. So I spend half an hour reading the quick start guide, and then…