The Labyrinth Index (Laundry Files, #9)

by Charles Stross

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.

as you have probably realized by now, it is very unwise to ask certain questions about the New Management, lest they ask questions about you.

The British ruling class was never noted for its expertise in haut cuisine. Rumors that they conquered a quarter of the planet in search of a decent meal cannot be discounted.

Rule Number One is don’t die. Corollary Number One is don’t poke things that will certainly kill you, like high-tension cables and hostile level-six Existential Anthropic Threats.

Firm but fair: strong and stable; the slogans of the New Management.

The ship of state is a supertanker with a turning circle so vast that it takes years to change course—but there is constant, frantic activity on the bridge as it begins to steer.

A stirring declaration by the Prime Minister that there will be no referendum on leaving the EU, because He is determined to take us out of the union anyway4—He has a mandate to do so, after all, a mandate for strong and stable government.

Botnets spread through unpatched copies of Windows 2003 running on medical diagnostic equipment, spamming arcane prayers on behalf of things better left unworshipped. 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.

“All glory to the Hypnotoad.”

Rick is at AMD these days, working on fab line configuration, and Ira is part of Apple’s we-could-tell-you-but-then-we’d-have-to-kill-you internal chip design team.

Here are the hex-casters, the shadow wreakers and night haunts. Here dwell the senders of nightmares and the breakers of rebel souls.

(Mo’s husband insists that all hotel corridors join up eventually via those doors labelled EMPLOYEES ONLY in a hyperdimensional manifold he calls Hotelspace, but he’s always been a few screws short of a full set, and I’ve long since given up trying to figure him out—not my problem anymore.)

One does not simply walk into Mordor these days; one drives a rented Cadillac Escalade the size of a county, shiny black and chrome, with a fake walnut dash, and enough black leather to clothe a battalion of Hell’s Angels.

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

Not that she’s happy with Bob. Iris still hasn’t forgiven him for unintentionally massacring most of her congregation, cocking up a very important summoning which might have shaved four years off the critical path to the New Management, and always being late with his timesheets.

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.

Doomed lovers in late Weimar Germany had it easy in comparison.

“We’re from the government, and we’re here to help.” “Help? You’re not helping us!” “Indeed.”

I am not me: I am Hobbes’s Leviathan, or Leviathan’s Representative.

(There is an International Standards Organization specification for brewing tea—ISO 3103, based on British Standards Institution BS 6008—but the SA violates it egregiously, every time, by using roughly triple the prescribed quantity of loose-leaf Assam, resulting in a bold and somewhat bitter brew.)

“An organization’s internal culture channels the way its agents attempt to discharge their duties, how they perceive their mission,”

“We try to retain our humanity in the Laundry, or at least remain on speaking terms with it—exceptions like Dr. Angleton and Mr. Howard aside, of course.

Regulatory capture is a management disease of task-focussed organizations.

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

All large organizations are either superorganisms whose cells are human bodies, or very slow artificial intelligences that use human beings as gears in the Babbage engines that run their code.

Some of the superorganism’s cells are formed into organs that carry out various vital functions. Human Resources is the liver and kidneys, dedicated to purifying and excreting unwanted toxins. Quality Assurance and Standards are the immune system, stamping out rogue cells and insidious infections and other parasitic activities. Project Management is the circadian rhythm, and board-level executives form the cerebral cortex, the source of the organism’s emergent self-directed behavior. Behold Leviathan, anatomized.

Different countries have different bureaucratic cultures, and different cultures are prone to their own distinctive types of malfunction. In the UK we’re unreasonably prone to regulation by accountancy or, failing that, tradition. Whereas in the US intelligence community, Taylorism and rule-by-MBA run rampant. They’re prone to random reorgs and overstaffing, so wherever they can they try to outsource anci...

In the case of the OPA, with its emphasis on alien extradimensional nightmares, they outsourced their tentacle monster fighting capability to the thaumaturgic equivalent of Blackwater and Palantir, organizations staffed by tentacle monsters. Then regulatory capture ensued, and the monsters ended up running the asylum.

“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.”

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.

“Yes, Derek,” I tell him, “we hauled you four thousand miles out of your comfort zone just so you could make a saving throw vs. Cthulhu. Happy now?”

“The truth is . . . our PM needs worshippers. He’s an ancient horror, but He’s also a narcissist that’s adopted our species as His pet project. Sure, He enjoys tormenting us, some of us, some of the time—but if we go extinct, He won’t be able to do that any more. So He’s taken over the UK for His personal captive audience.

It’s too bad that I have to keep the future to myself, because some nightmares cry out to be shared.

“This is America: electric kettles are a Communist plot, and tea is a Chinese conspiracy. Would you like some coffee instead? They haven’t figured out it comes from Arabia yet.”

American cops are so heavily militarized these days that the only way I can tell the difference between them and the army is the color of their body armor—that, and the army is less trigger-happy.

The Nazgûl are not our friends. Forget the so-called Special Relationship; it’s been a dead letter for decades, more an aspirational touchstone for fossils on the 1922 Committee to fret over than anything meaningful.

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.

The PM’s smile is like a dead star rising above the horizon of an airless moon.

Ten Improvements Cthulhu’s Awakening Will Bring to American Politics (and you won’t believe number six!)—