Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

I go into my outer office, pull out the file server's administration console, log on, and join the departmental Xtank tournament. Fifteen minutes later Angleton's bell dings; I put my game avatar on autopilot and look in on him.

Angleton positively glowers at me over his spectacles. "Check these files back into storage, sign off, then come back here," he says. "We need to talk."

I take the tomes and back out of his office. Gulp: he's noticed me! Whatever next?

The elevator down to the stacks is about to depart when I stick my foot in the door, holding it. Someone with a whole document trolley has got her back to me. "Thanks," I say, turning to punch in my floor as the door closes and we begin our creaky descent into the chalk foundations of London.

"No bother." I look round and see Dominique with the doctorate from Miskatonic: Mo, whom I last saw stranded in America, phoning me for help on a dark night. She looks surprised to see me. "Hey! What are you doing here?"

"It's a long story, but to cut it short I was shipped home after you phoned me. Seems those goons who were watching you picked me up. What about you? I thought you were having trouble getting an exit visa?"

"Are you kidding?" She laughs, but doesn't sound very amused. "I was kidnapped, and when they rescued me I was deported ! And when I got back here-" Her eyes narrow.

The lift doors open on subbasement two. "You were conscripted," I say, sticking my heel in the path of one door. "Right?"

"If you had anything to do with it-"

I shake my head. "I'm in more or less the same boat, believe it or not; it's how about two-thirds of us end up here. Look, my Obergruppenführer will send his SS hellhounds after me if I'm not back in his office in ten minutes, but if you've got a free lunchtime or evening I could fill you in?"

Her eyes narrow some more. "I'll bet you'd like that." Ouch! "Have some good excuses ready, Bob," she says, rolling her file cart toward me. I notice absently that it's full of Proceedings of the Scottish Society of Esoteric Antiquaries from the nineteenth century as I dodge out of the lift.

"No excuses," I promise, "only the truth."

"Hah." Her smile is unexpected and enigmatic; then the lift doors slide shut, taking her down farther into the bowels of the Stacks.

The Stacks are in what used to be a tube station, built during World War Two as an emergency bunker and never hooked up to the underground railway network. There are six levels rather than the usual three, each level built into the upper or lower half of a cylindrical tube eight metres in diameter and nearly a third of a kilometre long. That makes for about two kilometres of tunnels and about fifty kilometres of shelf space. To make matters worse, lots of the material is stored in the form of microfiche-three by five film cards each holding the equivalent of a hundred pages of text-and some of the more recent stuff is stored on gold CDs (of which the Stacks hold, at a rough guess, some tens of thousands). That all adds up to a lot of information.

We don't use the Dewey Decimal Catalogue to locate volumes in here; our requirements are sufficiently specialised that we have to use the system devised by Professor Angell of Brown University and subsequently known as the Codex Mathemagica. I've spent the past few weeks getting my head around the more arcane aspects of a cataloguing system that uses surreal number theory and can cope with the N-dimensional library spaces of Borges. You might think this a deadly boring occupation, but the ever-present danger of getting lost in the stacks keeps you on your toes. Besides which, there are rumours of ape-men living down here; I don't know how the rumours got started, but this place is more than somewhat creepy when you're on your own late at night. There's something weird about the people who work in the stacks, and you get the feeling it could be infectious-in fact, I'm really hoping to be assigned some other duty as soon as possible.

I locate the stack where the Wilberforce Tangent and Opal Orange files came from and wind the aisles of shelving apart to make way; they are both dead agent files from many years ago, musty with the stench of bureaucratic history. I slide them in, then pause: next to Opal Orange there's another file, one with a freshly printed binding titled Ogre Reality. The name tickles my silly gland, and in a gross violation of procedure I flip it out of the shelves and check the contents page. It's all paper, at this stage, and as soon as I see the MOST SECRET stamp I move to flip it shut-then pause, my eyeballs registering the words "Santa Cruz" midway down the first page. I begin speed-reading.

Five minutes later, the small of my back soaked in a cold sweat, I replace the file on the shelf, wind them back together, and head for the lift as fast as my feet will carry me. I don't want Angleton to think I'm late- especially after reading that file. It seems I'm lucky enough to be alive as it is…

"PAY ATTENTION TO THIS, MR. HOWARD. YOU ARE in a privileged position; you have access to information that other people would literally kill for. Because you stumbled into the Laundry through a second-floor window, so to speak, your technical clearance is several levels above that which would be assigned to you if you were a generic entrant. In one respect, that is useful; all organisations need junior personnel who have high clearances for certain types of data. On another level, it's a major obstacle." Angleton points his bony middle finger at me. "Because you have no respect. "

He's obviously seen The Godfather one time too many. I find myself waiting for a goon to step out of the shadows and stick a gun in my ear. Maybe he just doesn't like my T-shirt, a picture of a riot cop brandishing a truncheon beneath the caption "Do not question authority." I swallow, wondering what's coming up next.

Angleton sighs deeply, then stares at the dark greenish oil painting that hangs on his office wall behind the visitor's hot seat. "You can fool Andrew Newstrom but you can't fool me," he says quietly.

"You know Andy?"

"I trained him when he was your age. He has a commitment that is in short supply these days. I know just how devoted to this organisation you are. Draftees back in my day used to understand what they'd got themselves into, but you young ones…"

'Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country has ever done for you?' I raise an eyebrow at him.

He snorts. "I see you understand your deficiencies."

I shake my head. "Not me-that's not my problem. I decided I want to make a career here. I know I don't have to-I know what the Laundry's for-but if I just sat around under the cameras waiting for my pension I'd get bored. "

Those eyes are back on me, trying to drill right through to the back of my head. "We know that, Howard. If you were simply serving your time you'd be back downstairs, counting hairs on a caterpillar or something until retirement. I've seen your record and I am aware that you are intelligent, ingenious, resourceful, technically adept, and no less brave than average. But that doesn't alter what I've said one bit: you are routinely, grossly insubordinate. You think you have a right to know things that people would-and do-kill for. You take shortcuts. You aren't an organisation man and you never will be. If it was up to me you'd be on the outside, and never allowed anywhere near us."

"But I'm not," I say. "Nobody even noticed me until I'd worked out the geometry curve iteration method for invoking Nyarlathotep and nearly wiped out Birmingham by accident. Then they came and offered me a post as Senior Scientific Officer and made it clear that 'no' wasn't on the list of acceptable answers. Turns out that nuking Birmingham overrides the positive vetting requirement, so they issued a reliability waiver and you're stuck with me. Shouldn't you be pleased that I've decided to make the best of things and try to be useful?"