Charles Stross: The Atrocity Archives

"Done with whom?"

I nearly jump right out of my skin as I turn round. Pinky is standing in the doorway, holding his jeans up with one hand and looking annoyed.

"I was having a shit," he says. "Who's the fuss about?"

I point at the power supply, wordlessly.

"You didn't-" He stops. Raises his hands and tugs at his thin hair. "My capacitors! You bastard!"

"Next time you try to burn the house down, and/or summon up a nameless monstrosity from the abyss without adequate shielding, why don't you give me some warning so I can find another continent to go live on?"

"Those were fifty quid each in Camden Market!" He's leaning over the PSU anxiously, but not quite anxiously enough to poke at it without insulated gloves.

"Doesn't matter. First thing I heard was the feedback howl. If you don't shut the thing down before answering a call of nature, don't be surprised when Mrs. Nature comes calling on you."

"Bugger." He shakes his head. "Can I borrow your laser pointer?"

I head back upstairs to carry on watching my plane-crash program. It's at times like this that I think I really need to find a better class of flatmate-if only the pool of security-cleared cohabitants was larger.

IT'S THE AFTERNOON OF DAY TWO OF THE TRAINING course Andy sent me on, and I have just about hit my boredom threshold. Down on the floor of the cramped lecture theatre our teacher is holding forth about the practicalities of summoning and constraining powers from the vasty deeps; you can only absorb so much of this in one sitting, and my mind is a million kilometres away.

"You need to remember that all great circles must be terminated. Dangling links are potent sources of noise in the circuit, and you need to stick a capacitor on the end to drain it and prevent echoes; sort of like a computer's SCSI bus, or a local area network. In the case of the great circuit of Al-Hazred, the terminator was originally a black goat, sacrificed at midnight with a silver knife touched only by virgins, but these days we just use a fifty microfarad capacitor. You, Bob! Are you falling asleep back there? Take some advice: you don't want to do that. Try this and get the termination wrong and you'll be laughing on the other side of your face-because your face will be on the other side of your head. If you still have a head."

Bloody academic theoreticians… "Yes," I said. I've been over this before with Brains; electrical great circles are a bad thing, best shunned by anyone with easy access to decent quality lasers and a stabilised platform. Electricity, for ages the primary tool of the experimental vitalists, is now pretty much obsolete-but it's so well-understood that these ivory-tower types prefer to use it as a vehicle for their research, rather than trying more modern geometry engines based on light, which doesn't have any of the nasty side effects of electrical invocations. But that's the British school for you. Over in the States, when they're not dangling stupid "remote viewing" disinformation tricks in front of the press corps the Black Chamber is busy running experiments on the big Nova laser at Los Alamos that everyone thinks is for bomb research. But do we get to play with safe opto-isolated geometry engines and invocation clusters here? Do we, fuck: we're stuck with Dr. Volt and his thuggish friend Mr. Amp, and pray we don't get a stray ground loop while the summoning core is present and active.

"Anyway, it's time to break for coffee. After we come back in about fifteen minutes, I'm going to move along a bit; it's time to demonstrate the basics of a constraint invocation. Then this afternoon we'll discuss the consequences of an uncontrolled summoning." (Uncontrolled summonings are Bad-at best you'll end up with someone going flatline, their brain squatted by an alien entity, and at worst you'll end up with a physical portal leading somewhere else. So don't do that, m'yeah?)

Teacher claps his hands together, brushing invisible chalk dust from them, and I stand up and stretch-then remember to close my file. The one big difference between this training course and a particularly boring stretch at university is that everything we learn here is classified under Section Three; the penalty for letting someone peek in your notebook can be draconian.

There's a waiting room outside, halfway between the lecture theatres, painted institutional cabbage with frumpy modular seating in a particularly violent shade of burnt orange that instantly makes me think of the 1970s. The vending machine belongs in an antique shop; it appears to run on clockwork. We queue up obediently, and there's a shuffle to produce the obligatory twenty-pence pieces. A yellowing dog-eared poster on the wall reminds us that CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES-it might be indicative of a sardonic institutional sense of humour but I wouldn't bet on it. (Berwick-upon-Tweed was at war with the Tsar's empire until 1992, and it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to discover that one of the more obscure Whitehall departments-say, the Ministry of Transport's Department of long-reach electric forklift vehicle Maintenance Inspectorate, Tires Desk-is still locked in a struggle to the death with the Third Reich.)

It is quite in keeping with the character of the Laundry to be aware of the most peculiar anomalies in our diplomatic heritage-the walking ghosts of conflicts past, as it were-and be ready to reactivate them at a moment's notice. That which never lived sleeps on until awakened, and it's not just us citizens of old-fashioned Einsteinian spacetime who make treaties, right?

A fellow trainee shuffles up to me and grins cadaverously. I glance at him and force myself to resist the urge to sidle away: it's Fred from Accounting, the pest who's always breaking his computer and expects me to fix it for him. About fifty-something, with papery dry skin that looks as if a giant spider has sucked all the juice out of him, he's still wearing a suit and tie on the second day of a five-day course-like he's wandered out of the wrong decade. And it looks slept in, if not lived in to the point of being halfway through a second mortgage and a course of damp-proofing. "Dr. Vohlman seems to have it in for you, eh?"

I sniff, and decide to stop resisting the urge to sidle away. "Metaphorically or sexually?"

An expression of deep puzzlement flits across Fred's face. "What's that? Metawatchically? Nah. He's a bad-tempered old bastard, that's all." He leans closer, conspiratorially: "This is all beyond me, you know? Dunno why I'm on this junket, our training budget is just way over the top. Got to use the course credits or we lose them next year. Irene's off studying Eunuch device drivers, whatever they are, and I got posted here. Luck of the draw. But it doesn't mean anything to me, if you know what I mean. You look like one of those intellectual types, though. You probably know what's going on. You can tell me…"

"Eh?" I try to hide behind my coffee cup and manage to burn my fingers. While I'm cursing, Fred somehow ends up standing behind my left shoulder.

"See, Torsun in HR told me he was sending me here, to learn to be the departmental system administrator so those people in Support can't pull the wool over our eyes. But his Vohlman-ness keeps cracking these weird jokes about devils and knives and things. Is he one of them satanists we got briefed on four years ago, do you suppose?"

I boggle as discreetly as I can manage. "I'm not sure you should be in this course. The material gets technical quickly and it can be dangerous if you're not familiar with the appropriate laboratory safety precautions. Are you sure you want to stay here?"

"Sure? I'm sure! 'Course I'm sure. But I ain't too happy with the content. For one thing, where's all the stuff about license terms and support? That comes first. I mean, pacts with the devil is all very well, but I need to know who to phone for real technical support. And has CESG certified all this stuff for use on government networks?"