Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

"Ah, really," I say faintly. "How interesting." (Thank you, Bridget.)

"All I wanted was to visit the factory that supplies our PCs out in Taiwan," Nick mutters darkly. "All part of our ISO certification cycle, assuring that they're following best industry practices in motherboard assembly and testing…"

The door opens. "Ah, Nick! Nice to see you! How's Miriam?"

It's a new arrival. He's the very image of a schoolteacher: a thin, weedy-looking guy with big horn-rimmed spectacles and thinning hair. Except, when he positively leaps into the room, he gives the impression of being made of springs. Nick obviously knows him: "She's fine, fine-and how are you yourself? Uh, Bob, have you met Alan?"

"Alan?" I stick out a hand tentatively. "With what department? If I'm allowed to ask?"

"Umm-" He pumps my hand up and down then looks at me oddly as I nurse my bruised fingertips-he's got a grip like a vice. "Probably not, but that's okay," he announces. "Let's not get carried away, eh!" Over his shoulder to Nick: "Hillary's fine, but she's having a devil of a time with the guns. We're going to need a new cupboard soon, and the rental in Maastricht is horrible."

Guns? "Alan and I belong to the same shooting club," Nick explains diffidently. "With all the fuss a few years ago we had to either move our guns out of the country to somewhere where it's legal to own them, or turn them in. Most of us turned ours in and use the club facilities, but Alan's a holdout."

"Handguns?"

"No, long arms. That's recreational shooting, by the way. I'm just an amateur but Alan takes it a bit more seriously-trained for the Olympics a way back."

"What's the club?" I ask.

"Damned impudent infringement of our civil rights," Alan huffs. "Not trusting their own citizens to own automatic weapons: a bad sign. But we do what we can. Artists' Rifles, by the way. Drop in if you're ever in the neighbourhood, ha ha. So we're just waiting for Sophie now."

"Could be worse." Nick ambles over to the table beside the door and prods at what looks like a thermos jug. "Ah, coffee!" I kick myself mentally for not noticing it first.

"You going anywhere?" asks Alan.

"Just back." I shrug. "Didn't even know this course existed."

"Business or pleasure?"

"Milk or sugar, Alan?"

"Business. I wish it had been pleasure. They didn't brief me and nothing was the way I expected it-"

"Ha ha. Milk, no sugar. Typical Laundry turf war, by the sound of it. So your boss's boss's first cousin sent you for remedial classes, stay late after school, dunce cap in the corner, the usual rigmarole?"

"That's about it. Hey, pour me one too?"

"Seen it a dozen times before," offers Nick. "Nobody ever thinks to tell anyone when they're expected-" I yawn. "You tired?"

"Still jetlagged, thanks." I blow on my coffee.

The door opens and a woman in a brown tweed suit-Sophie, I presume-walks in. "Hello, everybody," she says. "Alan, Nick-you must be Bob." A brief grin. "Glad you're all here. Today we're going to go over some basic material by way of reminding you of the proper protocol for dealing with foreign agencies while posted abroad on neutral or friendly but not allied territory." She plonks a bulging briefcase down on the desk at the front of the classroom.

"If I can just confirm-all three of you are due to fly out to California in the next few days, is that right?"

Uh-oh. "I'm just back," I say.

"Oh dear. You've done the 120.4 course before, then? This is just a refresher?"

I take a deep breath. "I can honestly say that the fact that this seminar exists is news to both myself and my immediate supervisors. I think that's why I'm here now."

"Oh well!" She smiles brightly. "We'll soon see about that. Just as long as your trip was productive and nothing went wrong! This course is about procedures that should only be necessary in event of an emergency, after all." She digs into the case and hands us each a hefty wedge of course notes. "Shall we begin?"

IT'S BEEN SIX WEEKS SINCE I WAS CERTIFIED FIT for active duty, and three weeks since I came back from Santa Cruz in business class with a bandage around my head. Bridget has had her little joke, I've suffered through about two weeks of seminars intended to bolt, padlock, and weld shut the stable door in the wake of the equine departure, and I'm slowly going out of my skull with boredom.

For my sins I've been posted to a pokey little office in the Dansey Wing of Service House-little more than a broom closet off a passageway under the eaves, roof wreathed in hissing steam pipes painted black for no obvious reason. There's a valuable antique that Services claims is a computer network server, and when I'm not nursing it from one nervous breakdown to the next I am expected to file endless amounts of paperwork and prepare a daily abstract based on several classified logs and digests that cross my desk. The abstract is forwarded to some senior executives, then shredded by a guy in a blue suit. In between, I'm expected to make the tea. I feel like a twenty-six-year-old office boy. Overqualified, naturally. To add insult to injury, I have a new job title: Junior Private Secretary.

I would, I think, be right out of my skull and halfway down the road by now, chased by men in white coats wielding oversized butterfly nets, were it not for the fact that the word "secretary" means something very different from its normal usage in the steamy little world of the Laundry. Y'see, before the 1880s, a secretary was a gentleman's assistant: someone who kept the secrets. And there are secrets to be kept, here in the Arcana Analysis Section. In fact, there's a whole bloody wall of filing cabinets full of 'em right behind my cramped secretarial chair. (Some wag has plastered a Post-it note on one of the drawers: THE TRUTH IS IN HERE, SOMEWHERE.) I'm learning things all the time, and apart from the bloody filing work, not to mention the coffee pot from hell and the network server from heck, it's mostly okay. Except for Angleton. Did I mention Angleton?

I'm standing in for Angleton's junior private secretary, who is on sabbatical down at the funny farm or taking a year out doing an MBA or something. And therein lies my problem.

"Mr. Howard!" That's Angleton, calling me into the inner sanctum.

I stick my head round his door. "Yes, boss?"

"Enter." I enter. His office is large, but feels cramped; every wall-it's windowless-is shelved floor-to-ceiling in ledgers. They're not books, but microfiche binders: each of them contains as much data as an encyclopaedia. His desk looks merely odd at first sight, an olive-drab monolith bound with metal strips, supporting the TV-sized hood of a fiche reader. It's only when you get close enough to it to see the organlike pedals and the cardhopper on top that, if you're into computational archaeology, you realise that Angleton's desk is an incredibly rare, antique Memex-an information appliance out of 1940s CIA folklore.

Angleton looks up at me as I enter, his face a blue-lit washout of text projected from the Memex screen. He's nearly bald, his chin is two sizes two small for his skull, and his domed scalp gleams like bone. "Ah, Howard," he says. "Did you find the material I requested?"

"Some of it, boss," I say. "Just a moment." I duck out into my office and pick up the hulking dusty tomes that I've carried up from the stacks, two basements and a fifty-metre elevator ride below ground level. "Here you are. Wilberforce Tangent and Opal Orange. "

He takes the tomes without comment, opens the first of them, and starts sliding card-index sized chunks of microfilm into the Memex input hopper. "That will be all, Howard," he says superciliously, dismissing me.

I grit my teeth and leave Angleton to his microfilm. I once made the mistake of asking why he uses such an antique. He stared at me as if I'd just waved a dead fish under his nose, then said, "You can't read Van Eck radiation off a microfilm projector." (Van Eck radiation is the radio noise emitted by a video display; with sophisticated receivers you can pick it up and eavesdrop on a computer from a distance.) Back then I hadn't learned to keep my mouth shut around him: "Yeah, but what about Tempest shielding?" I asked. That's when he sent me off to the stacks for the first time, and I got lost for two hours on sublevel three before I was rescued by a passing vicar.