The Apocalypse Codex (Laundry Files, #4)

by Charles Stross

Where I come from, stakeholder management is all about making sure you’ve got your vampire where you want it.

Churches often behave more cultishly the smaller they get, trying to hold on to their children by making it hard to leave—and one of the easiest barriers you can put in someone’s way is to convince them that everyone else is some kind of satanic monster, doomed to hell and all too keen to take you with them.

“There are two types of people in this world,” Pete volunteers helpfully, “those who think there are only two types of people in the world, and everybody else.”

And power is religion, of course. If you’re a humble believer set on doing your deity’s will, then what are you doing spending the take on Lamborghinis and single malt? The real believers are running soup kitchens and emptying bedpans, trying to do good while the televangelists preaching the prosperity gospel are doing it to keep up the payments on the McMansion and the Roller.”

“Since when do you speak Starbucks?” I shrug. “It’s not as if I can help it; they’ve got our office surrounded, and they don’t like it if you try to order in English.”

Two sentences and Julie began to nod like a metronome; it was amazing how fast most people zoned out if you babbled at them, in Persephone’s experience. (It was all true, easily verifiable—drown ’em in data and they won’t suspect you’re holding out.)

I’m thinking on the fly, here. (Although now that I’m in middle management I think I’m supposed to call it “refactoring the strategic value proposition in real time with agile implementation,” or, if I’m being honest, “making it up as I go along.”)

So you end up with divergent sects reading from subtly different versions of the same book—which in turn is a third-generation translation of something which might have been the original codification of an oral tradition—and all convinced that their interpretation overrides such minor obstacles as observable reality. Which still wouldn’t be a problem except that some of the readers think the books are an instruction manual rather than a set of educational parables, a blueprint instead of a metaphor.

Revolving doors made high-rise buildings with elevators possible by allowing pressure equilibration without blowing the windows out whenever a passenger hit the button for the umpteenth floor;