The Jennifer Morgue

by Charles Stross

  I know my way through these dingy tunnels; I’ve worked here for years. Andy has been a couple of rungs above me in the org chart for all that time. These days he’s got a corner office with a blond Scandinavian pine desk. (It’s a corner office on the second floor with a view over the alley where the local Chinese take-away keeps their dumpsters, and the desk came from IKEA, but his office still represents the cargo-cult trappings of upward mobility; we beggars in Ops can’t be choosy.) I see the red light’s out, so I bang on his door.

  “Come in.” He sounds even more world-weary than usual, and so he should be, judging from the pile of spreadsheet printouts scattered across the desk in front of him. “Bob?” He glances up and sees the intern. “Oh, I see you’ve met Pete.”

  “Pete tells me he’s my intern,” I say, as pleasantly as I can manage under the circumstances. I pull out the ratty visitor’s chair with the hole in the seat stuffing and slump into it. “And he’s been in the Laundry since the beginning of this week.” I glance over my shoulder; Pete is standing in the doorway looking uncomfortable, so I decide to move White Pawn to Black Castle Four or whatever it’s called: “Come on in, Pete; grab a chair.” (The other chair is a crawling horror covered in mouse-bitten lever arch files labeled STRICTLY SECRET.) It’s important to get the message across that I’m not leaving without an answer, and camping my henchsquirt on Andy’s virtual in-tray is a good way to do that. (Now if only I can figure out what I’m supposed to be asking . . . ) “What’s going on?”

  “Nobody told you?” Andy looks puzzled.

  “Okay, let me rephrase. Whose idea was it, and what am I meant to do with him?”

  “I think it was Emma MacDougal’s. In Human Resources.” Oops, he said Human Resources. I can feel my stomach sinking already. “We picked him up in a routine sweep through Erewhon space last month.” (Erewhon is a new Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game that started up, oh, about two months ago, with only a few thousand players so far. Written by a bunch of spaced-out games programmers from Gothenburg.) “Boris iced him and explained the situation, then put him through induction. Emma feels that it’d be better if we trialed the mentoring program currently on roll-out throughout Admin to see if it’s an improvement over our traditional way of inducting new staff into Ops, and his number came up.” Andy raises a fist and coughs into it, then waggles his eyebrows at me significantly.

  “As opposed to hiding out behind the wet shrubbery for a few months before graduating to polishing Angleton’s gear-wheels?” I shrug. “Well, I can’t say it’s a bad idea—” Nobody ever accuses HR of having a bad idea; they’re subtle and quick to anger, and their revenge is terrible to behold. “—but a little bit of warning would have been nice. Some mentoring for the mentor, eh?”

  The feeble quip is only a trial balloon, but Andy latches onto it immediately and with evident gratitude. “Yes, I completely agree! I’ll get onto it at once.”

  I cross my arms and grin at him lopsidedly. “I’m waiting.”

  “You’re—” His gaze slides sideways, coming to rest on Pete. “Hmm.” I can almost see the wheels turning. Andy isn’t aggressive, but he’s a sharp operator. “Okay, let’s start from the beginning. Bob, this fellow is Peter-Fred Young. Peter-Fred, meet Mr. Howard, better known as Bob. I’m—”

  “—Andy Newstrom, senior operational support manager, Department G,” I butt in smoothly. “Due to the modern miracle of matrix management, Andy is my line manager but I work for someone else, Mr. Angleton, who is also Andy’s boss. You probably won’t meet him; if you do, it probably means you’re in big trouble. That right, Andy?”

  “Yes, Bob,” he says indulgently, picking right up from my cue. “And this is Ops Division.” He looks at Peter-Fred Young. “Your job, for the next three months, is to shadow Bob. Bob, you’re between field assignments anyway, and Project Aurora looks likely to keep you occupied for the whole time—Peter-Fred should be quite useful to you, given his background.”

  “Project Aurora?” Pete looks puzzled. Yeah, and me, too.

  “What is his background, exactly?” I ask. Here it comes . . .

  “Peter-Fred used to design dungeon modules for a living.” Andy’s cheek twitches. “The earlier games weren’t a big problem, but I think you can guess where this one’s going.”

  “Hey, it’s not my fault!” Pete hunches defensively. “I just thought it was a really neat scenario!”

  I have a horrible feeling I know what Andy’s going to say next. “The third-party content tools for some of the leading MMORPGs are getting pretty hairy these days. They’re supposed to have some recognizers built in to stop the most dangerous design patterns getting out, but nobody was expecting Peter-Fred to try to implement a Delta Green scenario as a Neverwinter Nights persistent realm. If it had gone online on a public game server—assuming it didn’t eat him during beta testing—we could have been facing a mass outbreak.”

  I turn and stare at Pete in disbelief. “That was him?” Jesus, I could have been killed!

  He stares back truculently. “Yeah. Your wizard eats rice cakes!”

  And an attitude to boot. “Andy, he’s going to need a desk.”

  “I’m working on getting you a bigger office.” He grins. “This was Emma’s idea, she can foot the bill.”

  Somehow I knew she had to be tied in with this, but maybe I can turn it to my advantage. “If Human Resources is involved, surely they’re paying?” Which means, deep pockets to pick. “We’re going to need two Herman Miller Aeron chairs, an Eames bookcase and occasional table, a desk from some eye-wateringly expensive Italian design studio, a genuine eighty-year-old Bonsai Californian redwood, an OC3 cable into Telehouse, and gaming laptops. Alienware: we need lots and lots of Alienware . . .”

  Andy gives me five seconds to slaver over the fantasy before he pricks my balloon. “You’ll take Dell and like it.”

  “Even if the bad guys frag us?” I try.

  “They won’t.” He looks smug. “Because you’re the best.”

  ONE OF THE ADVANTAGES OF BEING A CASH-STARVED department is that nobody ever dares to throw anything away in case it turns out to be useful later. Another advantage is that there’s never any money to get things done, like (for example) refit old offices to comply with current health and safety regulations. It’s cheaper just to move everybody out into a Portakabin in the car park and leave the office refurb for another financial year. At least, that’s what they do in this day and age; thirty, forty years ago I don’t know where they put the surplus bodies. Anyway, while Andy gets on the phone to Emma to plead for a budget, I lead Pete on a fishing expedition.

  “This is the old segregation block,” I explain, flicking on a light switch. “Don’t come in here without a light or the grue will get you.”

  “You’ve got grues? Here?” He looks so excited at the prospect that I almost hesitate to tell him the truth.

  “No, I just meant you’d just step in something nasty. This isn’t an adventure game.” The dust lies in gentle snowdrifts everywhere, undisturbed by outsourced cleaning services—contractors generally take one look at the seg block and double their quote, going over the ministerially imposed cap (which gets imposed rigorously on Ops, freeing up funds so Human Resources can employ plant beauticians to lovingly wax the leaves on their office rubber plants).

  “You called it a segregation block. What, uh, who was segregated?”

  I briefly toy with the idea of winding him up, then reject it. Once you’re inside the Laundry you’re in it for life, and I don’t really want to leave a trail of grudge-bearing juniors sharpening their knives behind me. “People we didn’t want exposed to the outside world, even by accident,” I say finally. “If you work here long enough it does strange things to your head. Work here too long, and other people can see the effects, too. You’ll notice the windows are all frosted or else they open onto air shafts, where there aren’t any windows in the first place,” I add, shoving open the door onto a large, executive office ma
rred only by the bricked-up window frame in the wall behind the desk, and a disturbingly wide trail of something shiny—I tell myself it’s probably just dry wallpaper paste—leading to the swivel chair. “Great, this is just what I’ve been looking for.”

  “It is?”

  “Yep, a big, empty, executive office where the lights and power still work.”

  “Whose was it?” Pete looks around curiously. “There aren’t many sockets . . .”

  “Before my time.” I pull the chair out and look at the seat doubtfully. It was good leather once, but the seat is hideously stained and cracked. The penny drops. “I’ve heard of this guy. ‘Slug’ Johnson. He used to be high up in Accounts, but he made lots of enemies. In the end someone put salt on his back.”

  “You want us to work in here?” Pete asks, in a blinding moment of clarity.

  “For now,” I reassure him. “Until we can screw a budget for a real office out of Emma from HR.”

  “We’ll need more power sockets.” Pete’s eyes are taking on a distant, glazed look and his fingers twitch mousily: “We’ll need casemods, need overclocked CPUs, need fuck-off huge screens, double-headed Radeon X1600 video cards.” He begins to shake. “Nerf guns, Twinkies, LAN party—”

  “Pete! Snap out of it!” I grab his shoulders and shake him.

  He blinks and looks at me blearily. “Whuh?”

  I physically drag him out of the room. “First, before we do anything else, I’m getting the cleaners in to give it a class four exorcism and to steam clean the carpets. You could catch something nasty in there.” You nearly did, I add silently. “Lots of bad psychic backwash.”

  “I thought he was an accountant?” says Pete, shaking his head.

  “No, he was in Accounts. Not the same thing at all. You’re confusing them with Financial Control.”

  “Huh? What do Accounts do, then?”

  “They settle accounts—usually fatally. At least, that’s what they used to do back in the ’60s; the department was terminated some time ago.”

  “Um.” Pete swallows. “I thought that was all a joke? This is, like, the BBFC? You know?”

  I blink. The British Board of Film Classification, the people who certify video games and cut the cocks out of movies? “Did anyone tell you what the Laundry actually does?”

  “Plays lots of deathmatches?” he asks hopefully.

  “That’s one way of putting it,” I begin, then pause. How to continue? “Magic is applied mathematics. The many-angled ones live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set. Demonology is right after debugging in the dictionary. You heard of Alan Turing? The father of programming?”

  “Didn’t he work for John Carmack?”

  Oh, it’s another world out there. “Not exactly, he built the first computers for the government, back in the Second World War. Not just codebreaking computers; he designed containment processors for Q Division, the Counter-Possession Unit of SOE that dealt with demon-ridden Abwehr agents. Anyway, after the war, they disbanded SOE—broke up all the government computers, the Colossus machines—except for the CPU, which became the Laundry. The Laundry kept going, defending the realm from the scum of the multiverse. There are mathematical transforms that can link entities in different universes—try to solve the wrong theorem and they’ll eat your brain, or worse. Anyhow, these days more people do more things with computers than anyone ever dreamed of. Computer games are networked and scriptable, they’ve got compilers and debuggers built in, you can build cities and film goddamn movies inside them. And every so often someone stumbles across something they’re not meant to be playing with and, well, you know the rest.”

  His eyes are wide in the shadows. “You mean, this is government work? Like in Deus Ex?”

  I nod. “That’s it exactly, kid.” Actually it’s more like Doom 3 but I’m not ready to tell him that; he might start pestering me for a grenade launcher.

  “So we’re going to, like, set up a LAN party and log onto lots of persistent realms and search ’n’ sweep them for demons and blow the demons away?” He’s almost panting with eagerness. “Wait’ll I tell my homies!”

  “Pete, you can’t do that.”

  “What, isn’t it allowed?”

  “No, I didn’t say that.” I lead him back towards the well-lit corridors of the Ops wing and the coffee break room beyond. “I said you can’t do that. You’re under a geas. Section III of the Official Secrets Act says you can’t tell anyone who hasn’t signed the said act that Section III even exists, much less tell them anything about what it covers. The Laundry is one hundred percent under cover, Pete. You can’t talk about it to outsiders, you’d choke on your own purple tongue.”

  “Eew.” He looks disappointed. “You mean, like, this is real secret stuff. Like Mum’s work.”

  “Yes, Pete. It’s all really secret. Now let’s go get a coffee and pester somebody in Facilities for a mains extension bar and a computer.”

  I SPEND THE REST OF THE DAY WANDERING FROM desk to desk, filing requisitions and ordering up supplies, with Pete snuffling and shambling after me like a supersized spaniel. The cleaners won’t be able to work over Johnson’s office until next Tuesday due to an unfortunate planetary conjunction, but I know a temporary fix I can sketch on the floor and plug into a repurposed pocket calculator that should hold “Slug” Johnson at bay until we can get him exorcised. Meanwhile, thanks to a piece of freakish luck, I discover a stash of elderly laptops nobody is using; someone in Catering mistyped their code in their Assets database last year, and thanks to the wonders of our ongoing ISO 9000 certification process, there is no legal procedure for reclassifying them as capital assets without triggering a visit by the Auditors. So I duly issue Pete with a 1.4 gigahertz Toshiba Sandwich Toaster, enlist his help in moving my stuff into the new office, nail a WiFi access point to the door like a tribal fetish or mezuzah (“this office now occupied by geeks who worship the great god GHz”), and park him on the other side of the spacious desk so I can keep an eye on him.

  The next day I’ve got a staff meeting at 10:00 a.m. I spend the first half hour of my morning drinking coffee, making snide remarks in e-mail, reading Slashdot, and waiting for Pete to show up. He arrives at 9:35. “Here.” I chuck a fat wallet full of CD-Rs at him. “Install these on your laptop, get on the intranet, and download all the patches you need. Don’t, whatever you do, touch my computer or try to log onto my NWN server—it’s called Bosch, by the way. I’ll catch up with you after the meeting.”

  “Why is it called Bosch?” he whines as I stand up and grab my security badge off the filing cabinet.

  “Washing machines or Hieronymus machines, take your pick.” I head off to the conference room for the Ways and Means Committee meeting—to investigate new ways of being mean, as Bridget (may Nyarlathotep rest her soul) once explained it to me.

  At first I’m moderately hopeful I’ll be able to stay awake through the meeting. But then Lucy, a bucktoothed goth from Facilities, gets the bit between her incisors. She’s going on in a giggly way about the need to outsource our administration of office sundries in order to focus on our core competencies, and I’m trying desperately hard not to fall asleep, when there’s an odd thudding sound that echoes through the fabric of the building. Then a pager goes off.

  Andy’s at the other end of the table. He looks at me: “Bob, your call, I think.”

  I sigh. “You think?” I glance at the pager display. Oops, so it is. “’Scuse me folks, something’s come up.”

  “Go on.” Lucy glares at me halfheartedly from behind her lucky charms. “I’ll minute you.”

  “Sure.” And I’m out, almost an hour before lunch. Wow, so interns are useful for something. Just as long as he hasn’t gotten himself killed.

  I trot back to Slug’s office. Peter-Fred is sitting in his chair, with his back to the door.

  “Pete?” I ask.

  No reply. But his laptop’s open and running, and I can hear its fan chugging away. “Uh-huh.” And the disc wallet is lying op
en on my side of the desk.

  I edge towards the computer carefully, taking pains to stay out of eyeshot of the screen. When I get a good look at Peter-Fred I see that his mouth’s ajar and his eyes are closed; he’s drooling slightly. “Pete?” I say, and poke his shoulder. He doesn’t move. Probably a good thing, I tell myself. Okay, so he isn’t conventionally possessed . . .

  When I’m close enough, I filch a sheet of paper from the ink-jet printer, turn the lights out, and angle the paper in front of the laptop. Very faintly I can see reflected colors, but nothing particularly scary. “Right,” I mutter. I slide my hands in front of the keyboard—still careful not to look directly at the screen—and hit the key combination to bring up the interactive debugger in the game I’m afraid he’s running. Trip an object dump, hit the keystrokes for quick save, and quit, and I can breathe a sigh of relief and look at the screen shot.

  It takes me several seconds to figure out what I’m looking at. “Oh you stupid, stupid arse!” It’s Peter-Fred, of course. He installed NWN and the other stuff I threw at him: the Laundry-issue hack pack and DM tools, and the creation toolkit. Then he went and did exactly what I told him not to do: he connected to Bosch. That’s him in the screenshot between the two half-orc mercenaries in the tavern, looking very afraid.

  TWO HOURS LATER BRAINS AND PINKY ARE BABY-SITTING Pete’s supine body (we don’t dare move it yet), Bosch is locked down and frozen, and I’m sitting on the wrong side of Angleton’s desk, sweating bullets. “Summarize, boy,” he rumbles, fixing me with one yellowing, rheumy eye. “Keep it simple. None of your jargon, life’s too short.”