The Fuller Memorandum (Laundry Files, #3)

by Charles Stross

Summer in England THOSE WORDS ARE SUPPOSED TO CONJURE UP HALCYON SUNNY afternoons; the smell of new-mown hay, little old ladies on bicycles pedaling past the village green on their way to the church jumble sale, the vicar’s tea party, the crunching sound of a fast-bowled cricket ball fracturing the batsman’s skull, and so on.

The realm of pure mathematics is very real indeed, and the . . . things . . . that cast shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave can sometimes be made to listen and pay attention if you point a loaded theorem at them.

good management is a bit like oxygen—it’s invisible and you don’t notice its presence until it’s gone, and then you’re sorry.

Magic is a branch of applied mathematics,

To my way of thinking, an omnipotent being who sets up a universe in which thinking beings proliferate, grow old, and die (usually in agony, alone, and in fear) is a cosmic sadist.

I’m sure it’s all very eerie, but when reality starts to imitate a second-rate computer game you know the bad guys have over-egged the pudding. Some fuckhead is hitting me with a glamour in hope of spooking me. It’s the sort of tactic that might stand a chance of working if I was a little less cynical, or if they had enough imagination to make it, oh, you know, horrifying , or something. Luckily for me they don’t seem to have grasped the difference between a Sam Raimi movie and standing by your dad’s hospital bed trying to work up the nerve to switch off the ventilator. So I find the fact that they’re sending me woo-woo noises and mist perversely encouraging.

THERE IS A PHILOSOPHY BY WHICH MANY PEOPLE LIVE THEIR lives, and it is this: life is a shit sandwich, but the more bread you’ve got, the less shit you have to eat. These people are often selfish brats as kids, and they don’t get better with age: think of the shifty-eyed smarmy asshole from the sixth form who grew up to be a merchant banker, or an estate agent, or one of the Conservative Party funny-handshake mine’s-a-Rolex brigade. (This isn’t to say that all estate agents, or merchant bankers, or conservatives, are selfish, but that these are ways of life that provide opportunities for people of a certain disposition to enrich themselves at the expense of others. Bear with me.) There is another philosophy by which people live their lives, and it goes thus: you will do as I say or I will hurt you. It’s petty authoritarianism, and it frequently runs in families.