Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

"Yes? Oh, it's you."

"It's ten to six," I say diffidently. "Another ten minutes and an orangoutang in a blue suit will come round and lock you in for the night. I know some people enjoy that sort of thing, but you didn't strike me as the type. So I was thinking, could you do with a glass of wine and that explanation we were talking about?"

She looks at me deadpan. "Sounds better than facing the urban gorillas. I've got to get home for nine but I guess I can spare an hour. Do you have anywhere in mind?"

We end up at an earning-facilitated nerd nirvana called Wagamama, just off New Oxford Street: you can't miss it, just look for the queue of fashion victims halfway around the block. Some of them have been waiting so long that the cobwebs have fossilised. My impressions are of a huge stainless steel kitchen and Australian expat waiters on rollerblades beaming infrared orders and wide-eyed smiles at each other from handheld computers as they skate around the refectory tables, where earnest young things in tiny rectangular spectacles discuss Derrida's influence on alcopop marketing via the next big dot-sad IPO, or whatever it is the "in" herd is obsessing about these days over their gyoza and organic buckwheat ramen. Mo is crammed opposite me at one end of a barrack-room table of bleached pine that looks as if they polish it every night with a microtome blade; our neighbours are giggling over some TV studio deal, and she's looking at me with an analytical expression borrowed from the laboratory razor's owner.

"The food's very good," I offer defensively.

"It's not that"-she gazes past my shoulder-"it's the culture. It's very Californian. I wasn't expecting the rot to have reached London yet."

"We are Bay Aryans from Berkeley: prepare to be reengineered in an attractive range of colour schemes for your safety and comfort!"

"Something like that." A waitron whizzes past and smart-bombs us both with cans of Kirin that feel as if they've been soaked in liquid nitrogen. Mo picks hers up and winces at me as it bites her fingertips. "Why do they call it the Laundry?"

"Uh…" I think for a moment. "Back in the Second World War, they were based in a requisitioned Chinese laundry in Soho, I think. They got Dansey House when the Dustbin's new skyscraper was commissioned." I pick up my beer carefully, using a mitten improvised from my sleeve, and tip the can into a glass. "Claude Dansey, he was stuck in charge of SOE. Former SIS dude, didn't get on well with the top nobs-it was all politics; SOE was the cowboy arm of British secret ops during the war. Churchill charged SOE with setting Europe ablaze behind German lines, and that's exactly what they tried to do. Until December 1945, when SIS got their revenge, of course."

"So the bureaucratic infighting goes that far back?"

"Guess so." I take a sip of beer. "But the Laundry survived more or less intact after the rest of SOE was gutted, like the way GCHQ survived even though the Bletchley Park operation was wound up. Only more secretively." Hmm. This is not stuff we should be talking about in public; I pull out my palmtop and tap away at it until a rather useful utility shows up.

"What's that?" she asks interestedly, as the background clatter and racket diminishes to a haze of white noise.

"Laundry-issue palmtop. Looks like an ordinary Palm Pilot, doesn't it? But the secret's in the software and the rather unusual daughterboard soldered inside the case."

"No, I mean the noise-it isn't just my ears, is it?"

"No, it's magic."

"Magic! But-" She glares at me. "You're not kidding, are you? What the hell is going on around here?"

I look at her blankly: "Nobody told you?"

"Magic!" She looks disgusted.

"Well okay, then, it's applied mathematics. I thought you said you're not a Platonist? You should be. These boxes"-I tap the palmtop-"are the most powerful mathematical tools we've developed. Things were done on an ad-hoc basis until about 1953, when Turing came up with his final theorem; since then, we've been putting magic on a systematic basis, on the QT. Most of it boils down to the application of Kaluza-Klein theory in a Linde universe constrained by an information conservation rule, or so they tell me when I ask. When we carry out a computation it has side effects that leak through some kind of channel underlying the structure of the Cosmos. Out there in the multiverse there are listeners; sometimes we can coerce them into opening gates. Small gates we can transfer minds through, or big gates we can move objects through. Even really huge gates, big enough to take something huge and unpleasant-some of the listeners are big. Giants. Sometimes we can invoke local reversals or enhancements of entropy; that's what I'm doing right now with the sound damper field, fuzzing the air around us, which is already pretty random. That's basically the business the Laundry is in."

"Ah." She chews her lower lip for a moment, appraising me. "So that's why you were so interested in me. Say, do you have any references for this work of Turing's? I'd like to read up on it."

"It's classified, but-"

"Wtyjdfshjwrtha rssradth aeywerg?"

I turn and look at the waitress who's beaming at me inscrutably. " 'Scuse me." I tap the "pause" button on screen. "What was that again?"

"I said, are you ready to order yet?"

I shrug at Mo, she nods, and we order. The waitron skids off and I tap the "pause" button again. "I didn't originally volunteer for the Laundry," I feel compelled to add. "They drafted me much the same way they drafted you. On the one hand, it sucks. On the other hand, the alternatives are a whole lot worse."

She looks angry now. "What do you mean, worse?"

"Well"-I lean back-"for starters, your work on probability engineering. You probably thought it was mostly irrelevant, except to theoretical types like Pentagon strategic planners. But if we mix it up with a localised entropy inversion we can make life very hot for whoever or whatever is on the receiving end. I'm not clear on the details, but apparently it's at the root of one particularly weird directed invocation: if we can set up a gauge field for probability metrics we can tune in on specific EIs fairly-"

"EIs?"

"External Intelligences. What the mediaeval magic types called demons, gods, spirits, what have you. Sentient aliens, basically, from those cosmological domains where the anthropic principle predominates and some sort of sapient creatures have evolved. Some of them are strongly superhuman, others are dumb as a stump from our perspective. What counts is that they can be coerced, sometimes, into doing what people want. Some of them can also open wormholes-yes, they've got access to negative matter-and send themselves, or other entities, through. As I understand it, general indeterminacy theory lets us target them very accurately: it's the difference between dialling a phone number at random and using a phone book. I think."

A crescent-shaped plate of gyoza appears on the table between us, and for a couple of minutes we're busy eating; then bowls of soup arrive and I'm busy juggling chopsticks, spoon, and noodles that are making a bid for freedom.

"So." She drains her bowl, lays the chopsticks across it, and sits up to watch me. "Let's summarise. I've stumbled across a research field that's about as critical to your-the Laundry-as if I'd been working on nuclear weapons research without realising it. In this country, everyone who works on this stuff works for the Laundry, or not at all. So the Laundry has sucked me in and you're here to give me an update so I know what I'm swimming in."

"Other people's dirty underwear, mostly," I say apologetically.

"Yeah, right. And this concern for keeping me updated was all your own idea too, huh? Just what the hell was going on in Santa Cruz? Who were those guys who snatched me, and what were you doing?"