Free The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel by Charles Stross Page B

Twinkie singularity stuff begins to come alive, and to think: mostly stuff that shouldn’t. Stuff like Facebook, or Vodafone, or your teacup – the Internet of Things That Go Bump in the Night. Invasion by superintelligent hostile cafeteria fixtures, if you like. (At least, I
think
that’s what Jez was getting at. My brain had halfway shut down by the time she got to YELLOW.) It’s your classic nerd-rapture hard-takeoff singularity, but it’s a lot less fun than the Silicon Valley set seem to think when it sprouts tentacles and sucks your brain out through your ears. This one doesn’t end well either.
    There are a number of other NIGHTMARE cases for which remediation protocols exist. Viral SETI signals. Weaponized memes – Rickrolling didn’t come out of nowhere, you know. Lunatic cultists waking up GOD GAME BLACK, whatever the hell that is. (There’s always some idiot who thinks that after the revolution they’ll be the one sitting on top of the hill of corpses, dining on caviar served out of a bowl made from a chromed baby’s skull.) But the one thing they’ve all got in common is that, left to play out in accordance with their internal logic,
none
of them end with anyone getting to live happily ever after.
    The big problem with all of this is that the CASE NIGHTMARE remediation protocols haven’t been tested – by definition they
can’t
be tested ahead of time. The risk of mass civilian casualties is unacceptably high. (They go so far into Thinking the Unthinkable territory that some of the cleanup strategies include – well, if you ever wondered why successive British governments have insisted on retaining the capability to nuke London until it glows in the dark, you’re on the right track.) But on the other hand, the cost of failure is infinite: with an existential anthropic threat you don’t get a second chance.
Everybody
dies.
    How does this affect me?
    Well, apparently we’re
already
in the early stages of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. The shit
is
hitting the fan as previously forecast, as witness all the Marvel Comics wannabes who are showing up in the news. So the organization is hitting the gas pedal, and ramping up in anticipation of wartime-level operations within the next twelve months. Normally they’d have taken two years to train me before letting me anywhere near an active duty assignment (“the organization is very careful about embedding feral sorcerers,” as Jez put it), but it turns out that they simply don’t have time.
    So:
     
    •  
 
    The Laundry is going to move into Quarry House in Leeds, whatever I may think of the wisdom of the idea. It’s close to the geographical center of the country, it’s defensible, it was designed as a center for continuity of government after World War Three, and we don’t have time to build something better. So fuck me, I’m screwed (family spare bedroom, here I come).
•  
I’m going to be given an accelerated self-study course in higher-dimensional portal management, ley line construction, and existential anthropic threat analysis and countermeasures. Then they’re going to send me on a firearms safety course so that I qualify for a firearms license, because Health and Safety say they’re mandatory for all personnel who can cause explosions at a distance, and the “countermeasures” bit in my training course is a euphemism for what fantasy writers call “battle magic” or “throwing thunderbolts.” 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.
•  
Then they’re going to assign me a code name and an active duty role…
    Alex is still new to the Laundry. He hasn’t yet realized that training for the end of the world is an ongoing part of the job. Or that however senior the managers he’s working for, there may be stuff that they haven’t been briefed on either.
    Six months before Alex has cause to moan in his