"Emma MacDougal, I presume"
She turns my way, spitting blood. "If it wasn't for you meddling hackers, I'd have gotten away with it!" Oops, she's raising her magic wand. "Gotten away with what?" I ask politely. "Don't you want to explain your fiendish plan, as is customary, before totally obliterating your victims? I mean, that's a Dho-Na curve there, so you're obviously planning a summoning, and this server is inside Ops block. Were you planning some sort of low-key downsizing"
She snorts. "You stupid Ops heads, why do you always assume it's about you?"
"Because — " I shrug. "We're running on a server in Ops.
What do you think happens if you open a gateway for an ancient evil to infest our departmental LAN"
"Don't be naive. All that's going to happen is Pimple-Features here is going to pick up a good, little, gibbering infestation then go spread it to Mama. Which will open up the promotion ladder once again." She stares at me, then her eyes narrow thoughtfully. "How did you figure out it was me"
"You should have used a smaller mainframe emulator, you know; we're so starved for resources that Bosch runs on a three-year-old Dell laptop. If you weren't slurping up all our CPU resources, we probably wouldn't have noticed anything was wrong until it was too late. It had to be someone in HR, and you're the only player on the radar. Mind you, putting poor Peter-Fred in a position of irresistible temptation was a good move. How did you open the tunnel into our side of the network"
"He took his laptop home at night. Have you swept it for spyware today?" Her grin turns triumphant. "I think it's time you joined Pete on the summoning-grid sacrifice node."
"Plan B!" I announce brightly, then run up the wall and across the ceiling until I'm above Pete.
P1AN 8 :):):) The room below my head lurches disturbingly as Pinky rearranges the furniture. It's just a ninety-degree rotation, and Pete's still in the summoning grid, but now he's in the target node instead of the sacrifice zone. Emma is incanting; her wand tracks me, its tip glowing green. "Do it, Pinky!" I shout as I pull out my dagger and slice my virtual finger.
Blood runs down the blade and drops into the sacrifice node — And Pete stands up. The chains holding him to the floor rip like damp cardboard, his eyes glowing even brighter than Emma's wand. With no actual summoning vector spliced into the grid it's wide open, an antenna seeking the nearest manifestation. With my blood to power it, it's active, and the first thing it resonates with has come through and sideloaded into Pete's head. His head swivels. "Get her!" I yell, clenching my fist and trying not to wince. "She's from personnel"
"Personnel?" rumbles a voice from Pete's mouth — deeper, more cultured, and infinitely more terrifying. "Ah, I see.
Thank you," The being wearing Pete's flesh steps across the grid — which sparks like a high-tension line and begins to smolder. Emma's wand wavers between me and Pete. I thrust my injured hand into the Bag of Holding and stifle a scream when my fingers stab into the bag of salt within. "It's been too long." His face begins to lengthen, his jaw widening and merging at the edges. He sticks his tongue out: it's grayishbrown and rasplike teeth are sprouting from it. Emma screams in rage and discharges her wand at him. A backwash of negative energy makes my teeth clench and turns my vision gray, but it's not enough to stop the second coming of "Slug" Johnson. He slithers towards her across the floor, and she gears up another spell, but it's too late. I close my eyes and follow the action by the inarticulate shrieks and the wet sucking, gurgling noises. Finally, they die down.
I take a deep breath and open my eves. Below me the room is vacant but for a clean-picked human skeleton and a floor flecked with brown — I peer closer — slugs. Millions of the buggers. "You'd better let him go," I intone.
"Why should I?" asks the assembly of molluscs.
"Because — " I pause. Why should he? It's a surprisingly sensible question. "If you don't, HR — Personnel — will just send another. Their minions are infinite. But you can defeat them by escaping from their grip forever — if you let me lay you to rest."
"Sendme on, then," say the slugs.
"Okayy." And I open my salt-filled fist over the molluscs — which burn and writhe beneath the white powderfall until nothing is left but Pete, curled fetally in the middle of the floor. And it's time to get Pete the hell out of this game and back into his own head before his mother, or some even worse horror, comes looking for him.
AFTERWORD: THE GOLDEN AGE OF SPYING THE MARY-SUE
"MY NAME IS BOND — JAMES BOND."
These six words, heard by hundreds of millions of people, are almost invariably spoken during the first five minutes of each movie in one of the biggest media success stories of the twentieth century. Unless you've lived under a rock for the past forty years, you hear them and you know at once that you're about to be plunged into a two-hour-long adrenaline[1 And testosterone.]-saturated extravaganza of snobbish fashionable excess, violence, sex, car chases, more violence, and Blowing Shit Up — followed by a post-coital cigarette and a lighthearted quip as the credits roll.
It wasn't always so. When Casino Royale was first published in 1953, it got a print run of 4,750 hardcover copies and no advertising budget to speak of; while the initial reviews were favorable, comparing Ian Fleming to Le Queux and Oppenheim (the kings of the prewar British spy-thriller genre), it took a long time for his most famous creation to set the world on fire. Despite his rapidly rising print runs Casino Royale eventually sold over a million paperbacks in the UK alone), and despite his increasing prominence among the postwar thriller writers, a decade elapsed before any of Fleming's novels were filmed; indeed, their author barely lived to see the commercial release of Dr. No and the runaway success of the icon he created. (Nor were the films seen as a runaway success before they wete made — Dr. No was notoriously made on a tight budget, even though it went on to gross nearly $60 million around the world.) Literary immortality — or indeed, mere postmortem survival — is dauntingly hard for a novelist to achieve. The limbo of postmortem obscurity awaits ninety-five percent of all novelists — almost all novels go out of print for good within five years of the death of their author. But in addition to being a million-selling bestseller, Fleming was a ferociously well-connected newspaper executive with a strong sense of the value of his ideas, and he pursued television and film adaptation remorselessly. Cinematic success arrived just in time for his creation, and the synergy between bestselling books and massive movie hype has sufficed to keep them in print ever since.
James Bond is a creature of fantasy, perhaps best described using a literary term looted from that most curious and least respected of fields, fan fiction: the Mary-Sue. A Mary-Sue character is a place-holder in a script, a hollow cardboard cutout into whose outline the author can squeeze their own dreams and fantasies. In the case of Bond, it's cruelly easy to make a case that the famous spy was his author's Mary-Sue, for Fleming had a curious and ambiguous relationship with spying.
A dilettante and dabbler for his first three decades, unsuccessful as a stockbroker, foreign correspondent, and banker, Fleming fortuitously landed his dream job on the eve of the Second World War: Secretary to the Director of Naval Intelligence in the Admiralty. The war was good for Ian Fleming, broadening and deepening him and giving him a job that captured his imagination and drew out his not inconsiderable talents. But Fleming was the man who knew too much: privy to too many secrets, he was wrapped in tissue paper and prevented from pursuing his desire to go into the field. He ended the war with a distinguished record — and absolutely no combat experience (if one excludes being bombed by the Luftwaffe or watching the Dieppe raid from a destroyer safely far off the Normandy coastline).