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I pointedly pay no attention to McTavish pointedly taking no slight at my pointed rejection of his mistress’s pointed – and unsubtle – attempt to beguile me. I’m somewhat disappointed.
the occupant of this garment is clearly alive only because he wouldn’t be seen dead in one of these things;
‘Any sufficiently advanced lingerie is indistinguishable from a lethal weapon.’
Religious education in schools may be the law of the land, but aside from de-programming successive generations through boredom it’s turned into as much of a political third rail as public transport policy: whatever you do will be wrong for someone.
‘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.’
Uneventful. Boring. Tedious. All good adjectives to apply to long-haul travel; much better than exciting, unexpected, and abrupt.
There’s a certain point beyond which any sufficiently extreme Calvinist sect becomes semiotically indistinguishable from the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh.
Laptops are an inherent security risk – they’re too easy to steal – so the classified stuff all sits on a thumb drive. It has a fingerprint reader, the contents are encrypted, and if someone who isn’t me tries to use my severed thumb to log in, then may dead alien gods have mercy on their soul (because the guardians of the Laundry email system won’t).
I am greeted as usual by a happy fun burning goat-horned skull in a pentacle followed by a prompt to enter my password.
There is good management and bad management: good management is like air – you don’t know it’s there until it’s gone away.
The intel team that raids together stays together.
I feel like an eight-year-old who’s been handed a laser pointer and a bag of catnip and told to go amuse the kittens behind the chain-link fence labelled Siberian Tiger Enclosure;
(Fucking netbooks; you can’t even use one to beat an alien brain parasite to death without it breaking.)
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.’)
Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.
‘Let’s see.’ She fiddles with her terminal and the room card reader. ‘You’re in 403 and 404. Have a nice day.’ I hand Persephone the Forbidden Room card and keep Room Not Found for myself.
She stands on the threshold, clutching her handbag and shifting from foot to foot, edgy as a vampire with toothache.
The featureless plain provides syntax completion and automatic indentation: as she scribes, some of the words change shape and hue subtly.
(There are many (many (nested)) parentheses: ritual magic, realtime spell-casting, hasn’t been the same since John McCarthy.)
Bureaucracies excel at performing tasks that must be done consistently whether the people assigned to them are brilliant performers or bumbling fools. You can’t always count on having Albert Einstein in the patent office, so you design its procedures to work even if you hire Mr. Bean by mistake.’
Bureaucracies are inefficient by design. Inefficiency is the twin sister of redundancy, of overcapacity, of the ability to plow through a swamp by brute force alone.
Never trust a religion whose symbol of faith is a particularly gruesome form of execution,
‘Welcome to Mahogany Row, Mr. Howard. And may whichever god you choose to believe in have mercy on your soul.’
