Charles Stross: Overtime

Because this is the last Christmas party at the Laundry.

I pull out my phone to call Mo, then pause. She’s got her hands full with mum right now. Why add to her worries? And besides, this isn’t a secure voice terminal: I can’t safely say everything that needs to be said. (The compulsion to confidentiality runs deep, backed up by my oath of office. To knowingly break it risks very unpleasant consequences.) I’m about to put my phone away when Andy clears his throat. He’s standing right behind me, an unlit cigarette pinched between two fingers. “Bob?”

I take another deep breath. “Yeah?”

“Want to talk?”

I nod. “Where?”

“The clubhouse…”

I follow him, out through a door onto the concrete balcony at the back of the New Annexe that leads to the external fire escape. We call it the clubhouse in jest: it’s where the smokers hang out, exposed to the elements. There’s a sand bucket half-submerged in scorched fag-ends sitting by the door. I wait while Andy lights up. His fingers are shaking slightly, I see. He’s skinny, tall, about five years older than me. Four grades higher, too, managing the head-office side of various ops that it’s not sensible to ask about. Wears a suit, watches the world from behind a slightly sniffy air of academic amusement, as if nothing really matters very much. But his detachment is gone now, blown away like a shred of smoke on the wind.

“What do you make of it?” he asks, bluntly.

I look at his cigarette, for a moment wishing I smoked. “It’s not looking good. As signs of the apocalypse go, the last office Christmas party ever is a bit of a red flag.”

Andy hides a cough with his fist. “I sincerely hope not.”

“What’s Kringle’s track record?” I ask. “Surely he’s been pulling rabbits out of hats long enough we can run a Bayesian analysis and see how well he…” I trail off, seeing Andy’s expression.

“He’s one of the best precognitives we’ve ever had, so I’m told. And what he’s saying backs up Dr. Mike’s revised time frame for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN.” (The end of the world, when-in the words of the mad seer- the stars come right . It’s actually a seventy-year long window during which the power of magic multiplies monstrously, and alien horrors from the dark ages before the big bang become accessible to any crack-brained preacher with a yen to talk to the devil. We thought we had a few years’ grace: according to Dr. Mike our calculations are wrong, and the window began to open nine months ago.) “Something really bad is coming. If Kringle can’t see through to next December 24th, then, well, he probably won’t be alive then.”

“So he stares into the void, and the void stares back. Maybe he won’t be alive.” I’m clutching at straws. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance he’s just going to be run over by a bus?”

Andy gives me a Look, of a kind I’ve been beginning to recognize more since the business in Brookwood-infinite existential despair tempered with a goodly dose of rage against the inevitable, dammed up behind a stiff upper lip. To be fair, I’ve been handing out a fair number of them myself. “I have no idea. Frankly, it’s all a bit vague. Precog fugues aren’t deterministic, Bob: worse, they tend to disrupt whatever processes they’re predicting the outcome of. That’s why Forecasting Ops are so big on statistical analysis. If Kringle said we won’t see another Christmas party, you can bet they’ve rolled the dice more than the bare minimum to fit the confidence interval.”

“So preempt his prophecy already! Use the weak anthropic principle: if we cancel next year’s Christmas party, his prophecy is delayed indefinitely. Right?”

Andy rolls his eyes. “Don’t be fucking stupid.”

“It was a long shot.” (Pause.) “What are we going to do?”

“We?” Andy raises one eyebrow. “ I am going to go home to the wife and kids for Christmas and try to forget about threats to our very existence for a bit. You”-he takes a deep gulp of smoke-“get to play at Night Duty Officer, patrolling the twilit corridors to protect our workplace from the hideous threat of the Filler of Stockings, who oozes through chimneys and ventilation ducts every Dead God’s Birthday-eve to perform unspeakable acts against items of hosiery. Try not to let it get to you-oh, and have a nice holiday while you’re at it.”

My appetite for nocturnal exploration is fading, tempered by the realization that I may not be the only one putting in some overtime in the office tonight. I reach for my ward-hung around my neck like an identity badge-and feel it. It tingles normally, and is cool. Good. If it was hot or glowing or throbbing I could expect company. It’s time to get back to the NDO room and regroup.

I tiptoe back the way I came, thinking furiously.

Item: It’s the night before Christmas, and backup is scarce to nonexistent.

Item: You can fool everyone at an office party with a class three glamour, but you can’t fool a photocopier.

Item: Kringle’s prophecy.

Item: We’re in CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, and things that too many people believe in have a nasty tendency to come true; magic is a branch of applied computation, neural networks are computing devices, there are too many people and the stars are right (making it much too easy to gain the attention of entities that find us crunchy and good with ketchup).

Item: Who or what kind of uninvited entity might want to sit in on Kringle’s little pep talk…?

I’m halfway down the corridor through Mahogany Row, and I break into a run.

“Good afternoon, everyone.”

Kringle wrings his hands as he speaks; they’re curiously etiolated and pale-skinned, like those of a Deep One, but he lacks the hunched back or gills: there’s only the pallid, stringy hair and the thick horn-rimmed glasses concealing a single watery blue eye-the other is covered by a leather patch-to mark him out as odd. But his gaze…

“It will be a good afternoon, until I finish speaking.” He smiles like a hangman’s trapdoor opening. “So drink up now and be of good cheer, because this will be the last Christmas party held by the Laundry.”

Up to this point most folks have been ignoring him or listening with polite incomprehension. Suddenly, though, you could hear a mouse fart.

“You need have no fear of downsizing or treasury cuts to comply with the revised public spending guidelines.” His smile fades. “I speak of more fundamental, irrevocable changes.

“My department, Forecasting Operations, is tasked with attempting to evaluate the efficacy of proposed action initiatives in pursuit of the organization’s goals-notably, the prevention of incursions by gibbering horrors from beyond space-time. Policies are originated, put on the table-and we descry their consequences. It’s a somewhat hit-and-miss profession, but our ability to peer into the abyss of the future allows us to sometimes avoid the worst pitfalls.”

Kringle continues in this vein for some time. His voice is oddly soporific, and it takes me a while to figure out why: he reminds me of a BBC radio weather forecaster. They have this slot for the weather forecast right before the news, and try as I will I always zone out right before they get to whatever region I happen to be interested in and wake up as they’re finishing. It’s uncanny. Kringle is clearly talking about something of considerable importance, but my mind skitters off the surface of his words like a wasp on a plate glass window. I shake my head and begin to look round, when the words flicker briefly into focus.

“-Claus, or Santé Klaas in the mediaeval Dutch usage, a friendly figure in a red suit who brings presents in the depths of winter, may have a more sinister meaning. Think not only of the traditions of the Norse Odin, with which the figure of Santa Claus is associated, but with the shamanic rituals of Lap antiquity, performed by a holy man who drank the urine of reindeer that had eaten the sacred toadstool, Amanita Muscaria -wearing the bloody, flayed skin of the poisoned animals to gain his insight into the next year-we, with modern statistical filtering methodologies, can gain much more precise insights, but at some personal cost-”