Duplicated for preservation. If you happen to own the copyright and you would like this removed, please email me and we’ll get it sorted. Originally found on Infinity Plus.
Langford wrote some followup stories and prequels, which are published in his short story collection. I won't duplicate those, but they’re worth checking out.
It was like being caught halfway through a flashy film-dissolve. The goggles broke up the dim street, split and reshuffled it along diagonal lines: a glowing KEBABS sign was transposed into the typestyle they called Shatter. Safest to keep the goggles on, Robbo had decided. Even in the flickering electric half-light before dawn, you never knew what you might see. Just his luck if the stencil jumped from under his arm and unrolled itself before his eyes as he scrabbled for it on the pavement.
That would be a good place, behind the 34 (a shattered 34) bus stop. This was their part of town; the women flocked there each morning, twittering in their saris like bright alien canaries. A good place, by a boarded-up shop window thick with flyposted gig announcements.
Robbo scanned the street for movement, glanced at his own hand to be reassured by a blurred spaghetti of fingers. Guaranteed Army issue goggles – the Group had friends in funny places – but they said the eye eventually adjusts. One day something clicks, and clear outlines jump at you. He flinched as the thick plastic unrolled; then the nervy moment was past, his left hand pressing the stencil against a tattered poster while in his right the spray-can hissed.
The sweetish, heady smell of car touch-up paint made it all seem oddly distant from an act of terrorism.
He found he’d been careless, easy in this false twilight and through these lenses: there were tacky patches on his fingers as he re-rolled the Parrot. A few hours on, in thick morning light, the brown women would be playing the wink game…. Jesus, how long since he’d been a kid and played that? Must be five years. The one who’d drawn the murder card caught your eye and winked, and you had to die with lots of spasms and overacting. To survive, you needed to spot the murderer first and get in with an accusation – or at least, know where not to look.
It was cold. Time to move on, to pick another place. Goggles or no shatter-goggles, he didn’t look back at the image of the Parrot. It might wink.
SECRET // BASILISK
Distribution UK List B[iv] only
... so called because its outline, when processed for non-hazardous viewing,
is generally considered to resemble that of the bird. A processed
(anamorphically elongated) partial image appears in Appendix 3 of this
report, page A3-ii. THE STATED PAGE MUST NOT BE VIEWED THROUGH ANY FORM
OF CYLINDRICAL LENS. PROLONGED VIEWING IS STRONGLY DISRECOMMENDED. PLEASE
READ PAGE A3-i BEFORE PROCEEDING.
2-6. This first example of the Berryman Logical Image Technique (hence the
usual acronym BLIT) evolved from AI work at the Cambridge IV supercomputer
facility, now discontinued. V.Berryman and C.M.Turner [3] hypothesized that
pattern-recognition programs of sufficient complexity might be vulnerable to
“Gödelian shock input” in the form of data incompatible with internal
representation. Berryman went further and suggested that the existence of
such a potential input was a logical necessity ...
2-18. Details of the Berryman/Turner BLIT construction algorithms are not
available at this classification level. Details of the eventual security
breach at Cambridge IV are neither available nor fully known. Details of
Cambridge IV casualty figures are, for the time being, reserved (sub judice).
“IRA got hold of it somehow,” Mack had said. “The Provos. We do some of our shopping in the same places, jelly and like that … slipped us a copy, they did.”
The cardboard tube in Robbo’s hand had suddenly felt ten times as heavy. He’d expected a map, a Group plan of action; maybe a blueprint of something nasty to plant in the Sikh temple up Victoria Street. “You mean it works?”
“Fucking right. I tried it … a volunteer.” He’d grinned. Just grinned, and winked. “Listen, this is poison stuff. Wear the goggles around it. If you fuck up and get a clear squint at even a bit of the Parrot, this is what you do. They told me. Shut yourself up with a bottle of vodka and knock the whole lot back. Decontamination, scrubs your short-term visual memory, something like that.”
“Jesus. What about the Provos? If this fairy story’s got teeth, why haven’t they …?” Robbo had trailed off into a vague waving gesture that failed to conjure up a paper neutron bomb.
Mack’s smile had widened into an assault-course of brown jagged teeth, as it did when he talked about a major Group action. “Maybe they don’t fancy new ideas … but could be they’re biding their time for a big one. Ever thought about hijacking a TV station? Just for an hour? Don’t think things like that, it’ll be bad for you.”