I look Mo in the eyes and realize she’s got me metaphorically surrounded. She’s older than I am—at least, a couple of years older—and more responsible, and as for what she sees in me . . . well. If there’s one disadvantage to living with her it’s that she’s got a tendency to organize me. “But. Crete?”
“Crete, Island of. Home of the high Minoan civilization, probably collapsed due to rapid climactic change or the explosion of the volcano on Thera—Santorini—depending who you read. Loads of glorious frescoes and palace ruins, wonderful beaches, and moussaka to die for. Grilled octopus, too: I know all about your thing for eating food with tentacles. If we aim for late May we’ll beat the sunbathing masses. I was thinking we should book some side tours—I’m reading up on the archaeology—and a self-catering apartment, where we can chill for two weeks, soak up some sun before the temperature goes into the high thirties and everything bakes . . . How does that sound to you? I can practice the fiddle while you burn.”
“It sounds—” I stop. “Hang on. What’s the archaeology thing about?”
“Judith’s had me reading up on the history of the littoral civilizations lately,” she says. “I thought it’d be nice to take a look.” Judith is deputy head of aquatic affairs at work. She spends about half her time out at the Laundry training facility in Dunwich and the other half up at Loch Ness.
“Ah.” I hunt around for a scrap of kitchen roll to use as a bookmark. “So this is work, really.”
“No, it’s not!” Mo closes the newspaper section then picks it up and begins to shake the pages into order. She won’t stop until she’s got them perfectly aligned and smooth enough to sell all over again: it’s one of her nervous tics. “I’m just curious. I’ve been reading so much about the Minoans and the precedent case law behind the human/Deep One treaties that it just caught my interest. Besides which, I last went on holiday to Greece about twenty years ago, on a school trip. It’s about time to go back there, and I thought it’d be a nice place to relax. Sun, sex, and squid, with a side order of archaeology.”
I know when I’m defeated, but I’m not completely stupid: it’s time to change the subject. “What’s Judith got you working on, anyway?” I ask. “I didn’t think she had any call for your approach to, well . . . whatever.” (It’s best not to mention specifics: the house we share is subsidized accommodation, provided by the Laundry for employees like us—otherwise there’s no way we could honestly afford to live in Central London on two civil service salaries—and the flip-side of this arrangement is that if we start discussing state secrets the walls grow ears.)
“Judith’s got problems you aren’t briefed on.” She picks up her coffee mug, peers into it, and pulls a face. “I’m beginning to find out about them and I don’t like them.”
“You are?”
“I’m going down to Dunwich next week,” she says suddenly. “I’ll be there quite some time.”
“You’re what?”
I must sound shocked because she puts the mug down, stands up, and holds out her arms: “Oh, Bob!”
I stand up, too. We hug. “What’s going on?”
“Training course,” she says tightly.
“Another bloody training course? What are they doing, putting you through a postgraduate degree in Cloak and Dagger Studies?” I ask. The only training course I did at Dunwich was in field operations technique. Dunwich is where the Laundry keeps a lot of its secrets, hidden behind diverted roads and forbidding hedges, in a village evacuated by the War Department back during the 1940s and never returned to its civilian owners. Unlike Rome, no roads lead to Dunwich: to get there you need a GPS receiver, four-wheel drive, and a security talisman.
“Something like that. Angleton’s asked me to take on some additional duties, but I don’t think I can talk about them just yet. Let’s say, it’s at least as interesting as the more obscure branches of music theory I’ve been working on.” She tenses against me, then hugs me tighter. “Listen, nobody can complain about me telling you I’m going, so . . . ask Judith, okay? If you really think you need to know. It’s just a compartmentalization thing. I’ll have my mobile and my violin, we can talk evenings. I’ll try to make it back home for weekends.”
“Weekends plural? Just how long is this course supposed to take?” I’m curious, as well as a bit annoyed. “When did they tell you about it?”
“They told me about this particular one yesterday. And I don’t know how long it runs for—Judith says it comes up irregularly, they’re at the mercy of certain specialist staff. At least four weeks, possibly more.”
“Specialist staff. Would this specialist staff happen to have, say, pallid skin? And gill slits?”
“Yes, that’s it. That’s it exactly.” She relaxes and takes a step back. “You’ve met them.”
“Sort of.” I shiver.
“I’m not happy about this,” she says. “I told them I needed more notice. I mean, before they spring things like this special training regime on me.”
I figure it’s time to change the subject. “Crete. You figure you’ll be out of the course by then?”
“Yes, for sure.” She nods. “That’s why I’ll need to get away from it all, with you.”
“So that’s what this Crete thing is all about. Judith wants to drop you headfirst into Dunwich for three months and you need somewhere to go to decompress afterwards.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Ah, shit.” I pick up my book again, then my coffee cup. “Hey, this coffee’s cold.”
“I’ll fix a fresh jug.” Mo carries the cafetière over to the sink and starts rinsing the grounds out. “Sometimes I hate this job,” she adds in a singsong, “and sometimes this job hates me . . .”
THE NAME OF THE JOB IS MATHEMATICS. OR MAYBE metamathematics. Or occult physics. And she wouldn’t be in this job if she hadn’t met me (although, on second thoughts, if she hadn’t met me she’d be dead, so I think we’ll call it even on that score and move swiftly on).
Look, if I come right out and say, “Magic exists,” you’ll probably dismiss me as a whack job. But in fact you’d be—well, I say you’d be—mistaken. And because my employers agree with me, and they’re the government, you’re outvoted. 2
We’ve tried to cover it up as best we can. Our predecessors did their best to edit it out of the history books and public consciousness—the Mass Observation projects of the 1930s were rather more than the simple social science exercises they were presented as to the public—and since then we’ve devoted ourselves to the task of capping the bubbling cauldron of the occult beneath a hermetic lid of state secrecy. So if you think I’m a whack job it’s partly my fault, isn’t it? Mine, and the organization I work for—known to its inmates as the Laundry—and our opposite numbers in other countries.
The trouble is, the type of magic we deal with has nothing to do with rabbits and top hats, fairies at the bottom of the garden, and wishes that come true. The truth is, we live in a multiverse—a sheath of loosely interconnected universes, so loosely interconnected that they’re actually leaky at the level of the quantum foam substrate of space-time. There’s only one common realm among the universes, and that’s the platonic realm of mathematics. We can solve theorems and cast hand-puppet shadows on the walls of our cave. What most folks (including most mathematicians and computer scientists—which amounts to the same thing) don’t know is that in overlapping parallel versions of the cave, other beings—for utterly unhuman values of “beings”—can also sometimes see the shadows, and cast shadows right back at us.
Back before about 1942, communication with other realms was pretty hit and miss. Unfortunately, Alan Turing partially systematized it—which later led to his unfortunate “suicide” and a subsequent policy reversal to the effect that it was better to have eminent logicians inside the tent pissing out, rather than outside pissing in. The Laundry is that subdivision of the Second World War-era Special Operations Executive that exists to protect the United Kingdom from the scum of
the multiverse. And, trust me on this, there are beings out there who even Jerry Springer wouldn’t invite on his show.
The Laundry collects computer scientists who accidentally discover the elements of computational demonology, in much the same way Stalin used to collect jokes about himself.3 About six years ago I nearly landscaped Wolverhampton, not to mention most of Birmingham and the Midlands, while experimenting with a really neat, new rendering algorithm that just might have accidentally summoned up the entity known to the clueful as “Fuck, it’s Nyarlathotep! Run!” (and to everyone else as “Fuck, run!”).4
In Mo’s case . . . she’s a philosopher by training. Philosophers in the know are even more dangerous than computer scientists: they tend to become existential magnets for weird shit. Mo came to the Laundry’s attention when she attracted some even-weirder-than-normal attention from a monster that thought our planet looked good and would be crunchy with ketchup. How we ended up living together is another story, albeit not an unhappy one. But the fact is, like me, she works for the Laundry now. In fact, she once told me the way she manages to feel safe these days is by being as dangerous as possible. And though I may bitch and moan about it when the Human Resources fairy decides to split us up for months on end, when you get down to it, if you work for a secret government agency, they can do that. And they’ve usually got good reasons for doing it, too. Which is one of the things I hate about my life . . .
. . . AND ANOTHER THING I HATE IS MICROSOFT PowerPoint, which brings me back to the present.
PowerPoint is symptomatic of a certain type of bureaucratic environment: one typified by interminable presentations with lots of fussy little bullet-points and flashy dissolves and soundtracks masked into the background, to try to convince the audience that the goon behind the computer has something significant to say. It’s the tool of choice for pointy-headed idiots with expensive suits and skinny laptops who desperately want to look as if they’re in commandof the job, with all the facts at their fiddling fingertips, even if Rome is burning in the background. Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that’s just scratching the surface . . .
I’m sorry. Maybe you think I’m being unjustifiably harsh—a presentation graphics program is just a piece of standard office software, after all—but my experience with PowerPoint is, shall we say, nonstandard. Besides, you’ve probably never had a guy with a shoulder holster and a field ops team backing him up drag you into a stakeout and whip out a laptop to show you a presentation that begins with a slide stating: THIS BRIEFING WILL SELF-DESTRUCT IN FIFTEEN SECONDS. It’s usually a sign that things have gone wronger than a very wrong thing indeed, and you are expected to make them go right again, or something double-plus ungood is going to happen.
Double-plus ungood indeed.
“Destiny-entanglement protocol,” I mutter, as Pinky fusses around behind me and turns the fat-assed recliner I’m sitting in to face the wardrobe while Boris pokes at his laptop. As protocols go, I’ve got to admit it’s a new one on me. “Would you mind explaining—hey, what’s that duct tape for?”
“Sorry, Bob, try not to move, okay? It’s just a precaution.”
“Just a—” I reach up with my left hand to give my nose a preemptive scratch while he’s busy taping my right arm to the chair. “What’s the failure rate on this procedure, and should I have updated my life insurance first?”
“Relax. Is no failure rate.” Boris finally gets his laptop to admit that its keyboard exists, and spins it round so I can see the screen. The usual security glyph flickers into view (I think that particular effect is called wheel, eight spokes) and bites me on the bridge of my nose. It’s visual cortex hackery to seal my lips. “Failure not an option,” repeats Boris.
The screen wheels again, and—morphs into a video of Angleton. “Hello, Bob,” he begins. He’s sitting behind his desk like an outtake from Mission: Impossible, which would be a whole lot more plausible if the desk wasn’t a cramped, green metal thing with a contraption on top of it that looks like the bastard offspring of a microfiche reader by way of a 1950s mainframe computer terminal. “Sorry about the video briefing, but I had to be in two places at once, and you lost.”
I catch Boris’s eye and he pauses the presentation. “How the hell can you call this confidential?” I complain. “It’s a video! If it fell into the wrong hands—”
Boris glances at Brains. “Tell him.”
Brains pulls a gadget out of his goodie bag. “Andy shot it on one of these,” he explains. “Solid-state camcorder, runs on MMC cards. Encrypted, and we stuffed a bunch of footage up front to make it look like amateur dramatics. That and the geas field will make anyone who steals it think they’ve stumbled over the next Blair Witch Project—cute, huh?”
I sigh. If he was a dog he’d be wagging his tail hard enough to dent the furniture. “Okay, roll it.” I try to ignore whatever Pinky is doing on the carpet around my feet with a conductive pencil, a ruler, and a breakout box.
Angleton leans alarmingly towards the camera viewpoint, looming to fill the screen. “I’m sure you’ve heard of TLA Systems Corporation, Bob, if for no other reason than your complaints about their license management server on the departmental network reached the ears of the Audit committee last July, and I was forced to take preemptive action to divert them from mounting a full-scale investigation.”
Gulp. The Auditors noticed? That wasn’t my idea—no wonder Andy seemed pissed off with me. When I’m not running around pretending to be Secret Agent Man and attending committee meetings in Darmstadt, my job’s pretty boring: network management is one component of it, and when I saw that blasted license manager trying to dial out to the public internet to complain about Facilities running too many copies of the TLA monitoring client, I cc’d everyone I could think of on the memo—
“TLA, as you know—Bob, pay attention at the back, there—was founded in 1979 by Ellis Billington and his partner Ritchie Martin. Ritchie was the software guy, Ellis the front man, which is why these days Ellis has a net worth of seventeen billion US dollars and Ritchie lives in a hippie commune in Oregon and refuses to deal with any unit of time he can’t schedule on a sundial.”
Angleton’s sallow visage is replaced (no dissolve, this time) by a photograph of Billington, in the usual stuffed-suit pose adopted by CEOs hoping to impress the Wall Street Journal. His smile reveals enough teeth to intimidate a megalodon and he’s in such good condition for a sixty-something executive that he’s probably got a portrait squirreled away in a high-security facility in New Mexico that gives people nightmares when they look at it.
“TLA originally competed in the relational database market with Ingres, Oracle, and the other seven dwarves, but rapidly discovered a lucrative sideline in federal systems—specifically the GTO5 market.”
Lots of government departments in the ’90s tried to save money by ordering their IT folks to buy only cheap, off-the-shelf software, or COTS. Which is to say, they finally got a clue that it’s cheaper to buy a word processor off the shelf than to pay a defense contractor to write one. After their initial expressions of shock and horror, the trough-guzzling, platinum-wrench defense contractors responded by making GTO editions—ostensibly commercial versions of their platinum-plated, government-oriented products, available to anyone who wanted to buy them—$500,000 word processors with MIL-SPEC encryption and a suite of handy document templates for rules of engagement, declarations of war, and issuing COTS contracts to defense contractors.
“TLA grew rapidly and among other things acquired Moonstone Metatechnology, who you may know of as one of the primary civilian contractors to the Black Chamber.”
Whoops. Now he’s definitely got my attention. The presentation cuts back to Angleton’s drawn-to-the-point-of-mummification face. He looks serious.
“Billington is from California. His parents are known to have been involved in the Order of the Silver Star at one point, although Billington himself claims to be Methodist. Whatever the tr
uth, he has a stratospheric security clearance and his corporation designs scary things for an assortment of spooky departments, I’d reference CRYSTAL CENTURY if you were in London, but you can look it up later. For now, you can take it from me that Billington is a player.”
Now he throws in a fancy fade-to-right to show a rather old, grainy photograph of a ship . . . an oil-drilling ship? A tanker? Something like that. Whatever it is, it’s big and there’s something that looks like an oil rig amidships. (I like that word, “amidships.” It makes me sound as if I know what I’m talking about. I am to seagoing vessels pretty much what your grandmother is to Windows Vista.)
“This ship is the Hughes Glomar Explorer. Built for Summa Corporation—owned by Howard Hughes—for the CIA in the early 1970s, its official mission was to recover a sunken Soviet nuclear missile submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean. It was mated with this—” another screen dissolve, to something that looks like a stainless steel wood-louse adrift at sea—“the HMB-1, Hughes Mining Barge, built by, you’ll be interested to know, Lockheed Missiles and Space.”
I lean forwards, barely noticing the duct tape holding my wrists and ankles against the chair. “That’s really neat,” I say admiringly. “Didn’t I see it in a Discovery Channel documentary?”
Angleton clears his throat. “If you’ve quite finished?” (How does he do that? I ask myself.) “Operation JENNIFER, the first attempt at recovering the submarine, was a partial success. I was there as a junior liaison under the reciprocal monitoring provisions of the Benthic Treaty. The CIA staff was . . . overly optimistic. To their credit, the Black Chamber refused to be drawn in, and to their credit, the other Signatory Party didn’t use more than the minimum force necessary to prevent the recovery. When Seymour Hersh and Jack Anderson broke the story in the Los Angeles Times several months later, the CIA gave up, the Glomar Explorer was formally designated property of the US government and mothballed, a discreet veil was drawn over the fate of the HMB-1—it was officially ‘scrapped’—and we thought that was that.”
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