The Nightmare Stacks (Laundry Files, #7)

by Charles Stross

(Alex hasn’t been a vampire for very long, and he isn’t very good at it yet. But at least he’s still alive—if that’s the right word for his condition—unlike several other members of his brood.)

When you subject a statistically significant sample size of otherworldly male nerds to this treatment what you end up with is a certain proportion of twenty-four-year-old virgins.

It’s an age of miracles and wonders. Some people are in the news headlines this year because they’ve acquired superpowers and can fly, or turn everyone in the Albert Hall into zombies, or something. Me? I just came down with the magical equivalent of AIDS.

“Wotcher, cock! Ow’s yer whippet?”

“Listen.” Alex tries not to spit: “I grew up in Leeds. I spent eighteen years here before I escaped. Trust me, it’s a stupid idea.”

He seems to spend most of his office time reading sermons, checking some really strange Bible concordances, and frowning furiously. (NB: I don’t know many vicars, so for all I know they’re all like this, but I’m just saying: he’s not what I expected.)

Alex doesn’t explain that he has this part of the Leeds bus timetable memorized cold.

“Aye, I can do that, but I was ’aving me tea? Can tha be waiting five minutes?” “Did someone say tea?” Pete brightens. Alex doesn’t have the heart to translate the word into London-speak: tea means supper up here.

Alex makes out the runic inscription ACCOUNTS PAYABLE 88-89 on the spine of one of the binders.

They’re living the dream, for Marks & Spencer values of the dream, working really hard at being sober-sided middle-class professionals.

The computational density of the noösphere has been rising non-monotonically since about 1800, and on top of the population bubble—now slackening, but still adding about 1020 additional synapses per second to the ensemble—we have the Moore’s Law bubble, with upwards of twenty microprocessors per human being—again, on the order of a billion operations per second, even the embedded controllers in your washing machine—and so, given that magic is a side effect of applied mathematics, we’re approaching the Twinkie singularity.”

Those ancient alien civilizations didn’t die of old age, Alex; they were murdered.”

I can now tell you that the Laundry has an answer to the question of whether the Great Filter lies in our past or our future, and the answer is neither—the Great Filter is now.

In fact, once I’ve finished the course and have been certificated I’ll be entered in the books as a light tank for purposes of international arms control treaties.

and do

22. We’ve

“But you’ve got to learn to think like a state if you work in the Civil Service.

the entire

You’re looking forward to unleashing your Vril-powered clone army and taking over the world, but before you can get your marching mojo on it’s a good idea to do due diligence and figure out who you’re taking over the world from.”

The decaying thaum field of a thousand hopeful gamers’ wishes, harnessed by the DM’s occult paraphernalia, slows to local lightspeed when the dice hit the blotter: they glow ghostly blue with Cerenkov radiation.

“Games iterate. You win, you lose, you get another throw of the dice.” Lockhart examines the surface of his spectacles in minute detail, looking for dust motes. “In real life there are no health potions, no respawns. People play for keeps.

while gaping at one of the largest collections of murder cutlery in the entire world.

Has he really told her his true name? (The urük seem oddly fearless about identity theft.)

However I am conditionally confident of the accuracy of the advice Pete gave me, which was to treat any behavior showcased by the male lead in a Hollywood romantic comedy as dangerously abusive.

Alex’s experience of dating is similar to his experience of string theory: abstract, intense, and entirely theoretical due to the absence of time and opportunities for probing such high-energy phenomena.

Cassie has no memory of ritual castration as a tool of management in this place, unless it’s symbolized by the neck-wrappings many male urük wear as part of their uniforms.

Jim Jarmusch romantic comedy starring Tilda Swinton against Tom Hiddleston, vamping it up as a pair of immortal star-crossed lovers.

She gets it now: she’s dealing with great power coupled with total dorkish innocence and an unaccountable sense of shame.

Then apply Stockholm syndrome proactively.” Lockhart twitches. “I do not think Stockholm syndrome means quite what you think it means.” “What, the tendency of people—usually women—in unfamiliar societies to enculturate rapidly?”

“She’s an elven princess—” His tongue stumbles into shocked silence as he recognizes what’s been under his nose all along. Those ears, he thinks, still enchanted despite the shiny new protective ward hanging against his breastbone, they’re not falsies. “And I’m a vampire,” he adds, unsure whether he’s courageously outing himself or merely supporting Cassie’s conceit.

But quantity”—he hands Pete a shoebox full of mail gauntlets woven in a non-repeating Penrose tile design—“tends to have a quality all of its own.

“Trust me, I’m a very good liar.”

(Best to sound barbarous: that’s the next thing to stupid in a bigot’s mind.)

But his gunner is merely sickened, and he points his first missile straight at the middle of the whirlpool of nausea in the sky and hits the firing stud.

a blowtorch.

Ami freezes. An idiot lyric from her granddad’s CD collection repeats in her head: Guided by the beauty of our weapons, guided by this birthmark on our skin—

The alfär are stupidly wasteful, throwing raw thaum currents at each other as if they don’t understand the elegant mathematical underpinnings of magic: How inelegant, his inner detached observer thinks scornfully as the new macro he triggered begins to count up from zero.

We aren’t actually undead, unlike the Residual Human Resources on the night shift: we’re just socially undead.

Y2K was a real end-of-civilization problem. And the people who could deal with it treated it as such, working flat-out on disaster management for the last year-long countdown. With the result that the end-of-the-world scenario didn’t happen . . . causing everyone not directly involved to conclude that it was a false alarm.