The Labyrinth Index (Laundry Files, #9)

by Charles Stross

I was pulled into Continuity Operations by the Senior Auditor and assigned to Active Ops, a specialty I’ve evaded for the past fifteen years because I do not approve of playing James Bond games when there are documents to be processed and meetings to be chaired.

and Mo, Dr. O’Brien, is unavailable. Or maybe I’m just too much of a coward to talk to her since she … changed.

Supposedly wholesome bitcoin mining apps are actually running demon-summoning algorithms in disguise. And don’t get me started on the prevalence of necromantic malware in the app stores.

a hypercomputing cloud in solar orbit, one powerful enough to summon the Lord of Sleep

“It’s a bit like cricket,” Pete agrees. “Weeks of endless boredom interspersed with the occasional moment of existential terror.”

He’s terrifyingly bright in some ways but through no fault of his own he spent forty years in a Laundry-run internment camp for cultists, where paper was rationed and any technology more sophisticated than a manual typewriter was forbidden.

• Big Data: “The Cloud” is Hell (literally)

The Elder Gods—part 3 • Our allies: Dread Cthulhu Currently sleeping Pledged to the service of the OPA by His priesthood Full immanentization requirements are costly: In excess of 109 directed human sacrifices (simple genocide is insufficient)

Yarisol stands up, surprised to discover how she has stiffened during her hour of sitting on a throne of polymerized coal oil.

The Republic of Self can be dissolved, or taken over in a coup, or drastically reformed. I harbor this illusion of unitary identity—but in reality I’m what biologists call a superorganism, a swarm, an ensemble entity. I am not me: I am Hobbes’s Leviathan, or Leviathan’s Representative.

Gaby has a shocked impulse to slap the other woman—then recalls Pete’s advice. On the spectrum? Right. Inappropriate outbursts—are they part of it, or is she just an asshole?

These are good people and they want to help her, and the smoking bodies on the beach will still be dead in the morning.

Brute forcing the solution is inefficient, so their hypercomputer has to be really big to run cthulhu.exe.

Yarisol—who, for all that she’s a non-neurotypical elven vampire sorceress, is less alien than some of the minions of the Operational Phenomenology Agency.

“Just tape a sign to her back saying OTHER END TOWARDS ENEMY,”

I’m twitchy about taking time out this close to D-day, but if there’s one unforgivable sin in any organization, it’s forgetting to keep your manager informed.

His Infernal Majesty leans towards me confidingly. “You have imposter syndrome,” He says, “but paradoxically, that’s often a sign of competence. Only people who understand their work well enough to be intimidated by it can be terrified by their own ignorance. It’s the opposite of Dunning-Kruger syndrome, where the miserably incompetent think they’re on top of the job because they don’t understand it.” He winks—I think—and adds: “It screws with precognition, you know. Almost as much as the DM’s dice. Makes you unpredictable.”

Confusion to the enemy!”

The besetting vice of high office is the temptation to micromanage, to take direct control of a small, concrete, easily understood subsidiary operation and start issuing orders, to the detriment of the chain of command (and the neglect of the big picture). The reason micromanagement is a vice is that it’s a temptation to self-indulgence: it’s too easy to get carried away. Taking on a low-level coordinating role while retaining the full executive authority and fiscal responsibilities of senior rank is like playing a game you’ve mastered on the lowest difficulty level.

“Numbers mean what I want them to mean in this place!”

Derek is a bemused witness as Brains cries, “This is a clear health and safety violation!”

“How did you, personally, get here?” I ask, filling the silence. “The usual way.” She shrugs. “Up through the ranks, same as you. They sentenced me to thirty years of boredom, for—” “—Trying to change the system from within,” I join her, nodding along, and she flashes me a delighted smile of recognition.

Every bitcoin proof-of-work mined is an incremental addition to a vast distributed summoning ritual powering the demon-soul at the heart of the maze, the computational equivalent of a Buddhist prayer wheel spinning in a Himalayan breeze.

The Nazgûl, in stark contrast, did not win any elections, were not handed any magic swords by watery tarts, and aren’t even members of the House of Lords.