The Labyrinth Index (Laundry Files, #9)

by Charles Stross

The PM smiles, and for a moment I see a flickering vision where His face should be: an onion-skin Matryoshka doll of circular shark-toothed maws, lizard-man faces, and insectile hunger. “A word in my study if you don’t mind. Right this way.”

skeletal. “It would hardly be unprecedented, don’t you think? “So here’s your new assignment: you will establish a new agency, recruit agents, and direct them—I have a little list of those who won’t be missed, tum-de-dum, I shall send it to you presently—in order to develop and deliver a HUMINT capability directed against the United States. You are to bring the new organization to operational readiness, then lead them in penetrating the continental land mass, peering behind the blackout curtain that has so abruptly descended,

There’s a fire on the hillside just above Skyland and it’s like to go wild if we

weak.on how rural Americans actually talk @cstross

Our new allies are weak and unreliable and mean us ill. We need a new kind of arsenal if we are to defend democracy and freedom, and the first step in rebuilding our defenses is to build a hypercomputing cloud in solar orbit, one powerful enough to summon the Lord of Sleep to lead us…”

American police arrangements are utterly weird to British eyes, with every municipality and state and transport authority potentially having its own sheriff’s department or police force or state troopers or thief takers or whatever. And that’s before you even think about the federal agencies like the FBI and DEA.

but on the ridgeline up by Magic Meadows there’s a place where the trees are all flattened outwards in a circle and there’s a scorched symbol in the dirt, kinda like a five-pointed star with an eye in the middle, like the Brotherhood

Terry Pratchett callout by @cstross

“Brother Drake from the Circle of Friends of the Lord of Sleep, with a message about Billie Jean, who called earlier. There is a reason we don’t talk about the Man, why we forget we ever heard of the Man, and a message for anyone who thinks talking about the Man is a good idea: get some sleep and you’ll find a whole new perspective.

CLASSIFIED: SECRET NOFORN OPA GODWAKER

Low grade

In the view of the Laundry’s executive oversight tier and expert practitioners—Mahogany Row—the Americans’ Operational Phenomenology Agency has been taken over by the eldritch horrors it is supposed to hold in check, in the most disastrous case of regulatory capture ever. But from the perspective of the Nazgûl, the Laundry is the lapdog of a hostile alien god.

it’s fractal contingency plans all the way down.”

Perversely, the worst kind of misconduct is the hardest for an organization to admit

she’s essentially a people person. All she’s good at is manipulating victims. Yarisol,

uneasy. She counts the floor tiles once again, just to be sure they haven’t been breeding between eye-blinks,

Sam lies on the kitchen floor, unseeing, and forgets his President for the last time.

“the Baroness started out human, and if a cure for her unfortunate condition becomes available I’m certain she’ll take it in a second.” I nod vehemently. “On the other hand, the Prime Minister role-plays humanity as his chosen character class. And the OPA threw away their humanity and never looked back.”

our PM needs worshippers. He’s an ancient horror, but He’s also a narcissist that’s adopted our species as His pet project.

Nor can I tell him—lest the SA’s command override cause my arterial blood vessels to burst and my eyeballs to catch fire—about Long-Term Continuity Operations and the Resistance.

the hashtag must have been tempting here @cstross

“Constable.” Jim salutes with deliberate irony: the President can’t be expected to be familiar with foreign police ranks, but it’s the fastest and steepest demotion Jim’s ever had. “Sir.”

It seems people don’t want to be awake these days. Apocalypses are easier slept through than experienced.