The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [19]
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