Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

By the time I roll into the office, four hours late and yawning with sleep deprivation, Harriet is hopping around the common room as if her feet are on fire, angrier than I've ever seen her before. Unfortunately, according to the matrix management system we operate she's my boss for 30 percent of the time during which I'm a technical support engineer. (For the other 70 percent I report to Angleton and I can't really tell you what I am except that it involves being yanked out of bed at zero four hundred hours to answer code blue alerts.)

Harriet is a back-office suit: mousy and skinny, forty-something, and dried up from spending all those years devising forms in triplicate with which to terrorize field agents. People like Harriet aren't supposed to get excited about anything. The effect is disconcerting, like opening a tomb and finding a break-dancing mummy.

"Robert! Where on earth have you been? What kind of time do you call this? McLuhan's been waiting on you-you were supposed to be here for the licence policy management committee meeting two hours ago!"

I yawn and sling my jacket over the coat rack next to the "C" department coffee station. "Been called out," I mumble. "Code blue alert. Just got back from Milton Keynes."

"Code blue?" she asks, alert for a slip. "Who signed off on it?"

"Angleton." I hunt around for my mug in the cupboard over the sink, the one with the poster on the front that says CURIOUS EYES COST LIVES. The coffee machine is mostly empty, full of black tarry stuff alarmingly similar to the toxic waste they make roads out of. I hold it under the tap and rinse. "His budget, don't worry about it. Only he pulled me out of bed at four in the morning and sent me off to"-I put the jug down to refill the coffee filter-"never mind. It's cleared."

Harriet looks as if she's bitten into a biscuit and found half a beetle inside. I'm pretty sure that it's not anything special; she and her boss Bridget simply have no higher goal in life than trying to cut everyone else down so they can look them in the eye. Although, to be fair, they've been acting more cagy than usual lately, hiding out in meetings with strange suits from other departments. It's probably just part of their ongoing game of Bureaucracy, whose goal is the highest stakes of all-a fully vested Civil Service pension and early retirement. "What was it about?" she demands.

"Do you have GAME ANDES REDSHIFT clearance?" I ask. "If not, I can't tell you."

"But you were in Milton Keynes," she jabs. "You told me that."

"Did I?" I roll my eyes. "Well, maybe, and maybe not. I couldn't possibly comment."

"What's so interesting about Milton Keynes?" she continues.

"Not much." I shrug. "It's made of concrete and it's very, very boring."

She relaxes almost imperceptibly. "Make sure you get all the paperwork filed and billed to the right account," she tells me.

"I will have before I leave this afternoon at two," I reply, rubbing in the fact that I'm on flexitime; Angleton's a much more alarming, but also understanding, manager to work for. Due to the curse of matrix management I can't weasel out completely from under Bridget's bony thumb, but I must confess I get a kick out of having my other boss pull rank on her. "What was this meeting about?" I ask slyly, hoping she'll rise to it.

"You should know, you're the administrator who set up the mailing list," she throws right back at me. Oops. "Mr. McLuhan's here to help us. He's from Q Division, to help us prepare for our Business Software Alliance audit."

"Our-" I stop dead and turn to face her, the coffee machine gurgling at my back. "Our audit with who ?"

"The Business Software Alliance," she says smugly. "CESG outsourced our COTS application infrastructure five months ago contingent on us following official best practices for ensuring quality and value in enterprise resource management. As you were too busy to look after things, Bridget asked Q Division to help out. Mr. McLuhan is helping us sort out our licencing arrangements in line with guidelines from Procurement. He says he's able to run a full BSA-certified audit on our systems and help us get our books in order."

"Oh," I say, very calmly, and turn around, mouthing the follow-on shit silently in the direction of the now-burbling percollator. "Have you ever been through a BSA audit before, Harriet?" I ask curiously as I scrub my mug clean, inside and out.

"No, but they're here to help us audit our-"

"They're funded by the big desktop software companies," I say, as calmly as I can. "They do that because they view the BSA as a profit centre. That's because the BSA or their subcontractors-and that's what Q Division will be acting as, they get paid for running an audit if they find anything out of order-come in, do an audit, look for anything that isn't currently licensed-say, those old machines in D3 that are still running Windows 3.1 and Office 4, or the Linux servers behind Eric's desk that keep the departmental file servers running, not to mention the FreeBSD box running the Daemonic Countermeasures Suite in Security-and demand an upgrade to the latest version under threat of lawsuit. Inviting them in is like throwing open the doors and inviting the Drugs Squad round for a spliff."

"They said they could track down all our installed software and offer us a discount for volume licensing!"

"And how precisely do you think they'll do that?" I turn round and stare at her. "They're going to want to install snooping software on our LAN, and then read through its take." I take a deep breath. "You're going to have to get him to sign the Official Secrets Act so that I can formally notify him that if he thinks he's going to do that I'm going to have him sectioned. Part Three. Why do you think we're still running old copies of Windows on the network? Because we can't afford to replace them?"

"He's already signed Section Three. And anyway, you said you didn't have time," she snaps waspishly. "I asked you five weeks ago, on Friday! But you were too busy playing secret agents with your friends downstairs to notice anything as important as an upcoming audit. This wouldn't have been necessary if you had time!"

"Crap. Listen, we're running those old junkers because they're so old and rubbish that they can't catch half the proxy Internet worms and macro viruses that are doing the rounds these days. BSA will insist we replace them with stonking new workstations running Windows XP and Office XP and dialing into the Internet every six seconds to snitch on whatever we're doing with them. Do you really think Mahogany Row is going to clear that sort of security risk?"

That's a bluff-Mahogany Row retired from this universe back when software still meant silk unmentionables-but she isn't likely to know that, merely that I get invited up there these days. (Nearer my brain-eating God to thee…)

"As for the time thing, get me a hardware budget and a tech assistant who's vetted for level five Laundry IT operations and I'll get it seen to. It'll only cost you sixty thousand pounds or so in the first year, plus a salary thereafter." Finally, finally , I get to pull the jug out of the coffee machine and pour myself a mug of wake-up. "That's better."

She glances at her watch. "Are you going to come along to the meeting and help explain this to everybody then?" she asks in a tone that could cut glass.

"No." I add cow juice from the fridge that wheezes asthmatically below the worktop. "It's a public/private partnership fuck-up, film at eleven. Bridget stuck her foot in it out of her own free will: if she wants me to pull it out for her she can damn well ask. Besides, I've got a code blue report meeting with Angelton and Boris and Andy and that trumps administrative make-work any day of the week."