A Conventional Boy (Laundry Files #13)

by Charles Stross

Derek Reilly is the unanticipated. Aged fourteen when he is first drawn to their attention, he’s over the minimum age of criminal responsibility in English law but equally clearly he’s not an adult: he shouldn’t be interned in an adult detention center, but in the middle of a moral panic or a terrorist alert normal rules fall by the wayside in the name of institutional convenience (as we saw with the child detainees in the terrorism detention camps at Guantanamo Bay). Derek hadn’t actually done anything wrong—but, again, being innocent is no protection against anonymous denunciations, which are particularly common during witch hunts. Dungeons and Dragons was sufficiently obscure in the UK at the start of the 1980s that most people had not heard of it, and it would inevitably take some time to evaluate it for risk potential, because board games had not hitherto been something the organization worried about, and how they handled D&D would of course set a precedent. Finally, the discovery that Derek had some aptitude for magic (of the sort with which the Laundry was legitimately concerned) was obviously problematic. Like a teenager mistakenly shipped to Guantanamo and detained at Camp Iguana, he had been exposed to dangerous people and ideas and might present a real risk if released. Better to simply ignore the problem and hope it goes away. And in due time it does indeed cease to be a problem for the people who made that decision, because they’ve all retired.

Afterword.