The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [162]
“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 marred 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