The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [160]
He looks nervous. “Since last Monday morning.”
“Well, this is the first anyone’s told me about an intern,” I explain carefully, trying to keep my voice level because blaming the messenger won’t help; anyway, if Pete’s telling the truth he’s so wet behind the ears I could use him to water the plants. “So now I’m going to have to go and confirm that. You just wait here.” I glance at my desktop. Hang on, what would I have done five or so years ago . . . ? “No, on second thoughts, come with me.”
THE OPS WING IS A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGEWAYS, all alike. Cramped offices open off them, painted institutional green and illuminated by underpowered bulbs lightly dusted with cobwebs. It isn’t like this on Mahogany Row or over the road in Administration, but those of us who actually contribute to the bottom line get to mend and make do. (There’s a malicious, persistent rumor that this is because the Board wants to encourage a spirit of plucky us-against-the-world self-reliance in Ops, and the easiest way to do that is to make every requisition for a box of paper clips into a Herculean struggle. I subscribe to the other, less popular theory: they just don’t care.)
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