Charles Stross - The Annihilation Score

Charles Stross is a full-time science fiction writer and resident of Edinburgh, Scotland. The author of six Hugo-nominated novels and winner of the 2005 and 2010 Hugo Awards for best novella (The Concrete Jungle and Palimpsest), Strosss works have been translated into over twelve languages.

Like many writers, Stross has had a variety of careers, occupations and job-shaped catastrophes in the past, from pharmacist (he quit after the second police stake-out) to first code monkey on the team of a successful dot-com start-up (with brilliant timing he tried to change employer just as the bubble burst). Along the way he collected degrees in Pharmacy and Computer Science, making him the worlds first officially qualified cyberpunk writer (just as cyberpunk died).

In 2013 he was Creative in Residence at the UK-wide Centre for Creativity, Regulation, Enterprise and Technology, researching the business models and regulation of industries such as music, film, TV, computer games and publishing.

Find out more about Charles Stross and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at www.orbitbooks.net.

Saturns Children

Singularity Sky

Iron Sunrise

Accelerando

Glasshouse

Wireless: The Essential Collection

Halting State

Rule 34

Neptunes Brood

The Laundry Files

The Atrocity Archives

The Jennifer Morgue

The Fuller Memorandum

The Apocalypse Codex

The Rhesus Chart

The Annihilation Score

COPYRIGHT

Published by Orbit

978-0-3565-0533-6

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright 2015 by Charles Stross

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

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The Annihilation Score

Table of Contents

For Martin and Kirsty

Please allow me to introduce myself

No. Strike that. Period stop backspace backspace bloody computer no stop that stop listening stop dictating end end oh I give up.

Will you stop doing that?

Starting all over again (typing this time: its slower, but dam speech recognition and auto-defect to Heckmondwike):

My husband is sometimes a bit slow on the uptake; youd think that after ten years together hed have realized that our relationship consisted of him, me, and a bone-white violin made for a Mad Scientist by a luthier-turned-necromancer. But no: the third party in our mnage trois turns out to be a surprise to him after all these years, and he needs more time to think about it.

Bending over backwards to give him the benefit of the doubt, this has only become an issue since my husband acquired the ability to see Lecter thats what I call my violin when I argue with him for what he is. (He. She. It. Whatever. ) Bob is very unusual in having lately developed this ability: it marks him as a member of a privileged elite, the select club of occult practitioners who can recognize what theyre in the presence of and stand fast against it rather than fleeing screaming into the night. Like the Vampire Bitch from Human Resources, and what was she doing in the living room at five oclock in the morning ?

Issues. Vampires, violins, and marital miscommunications. Im going off-topic again, arent I? Time out for tea!

Take three.

Hello.

My name is Mo; thats short for Dominique OBrien. Im forty-three years old, married to a man who calls himself Bob Howard, aged thirty-eight and a quarter. We are currently separated while we try to sort things out things including, but not limited to: my relationship with my violin, his relationship with the Vampire Bitch from Human Resources, and the End Of The World As We Know It (which is an ongoing work-related headache).

This is my introduction to my work journal during OPERATION INCORRIGIBLE, and the period immediately before and after it. Were supposed to keep these journals in order to facilitate institutional knowledge retention in event of our death in the line of duty. And if you are reading it, you are probably a new Laundry recruit and I am probably not on hand to brief you in person because Im dead.

Now, you might be wondering why this journal is so large. I could soft-soap you and claim that I just wanted to leave you with a full and balanced perspective on the events surrounding OPERATION INCORRIGIBLE its certainly a valid half-truth but the real reason is that Ive been under a lot of stress lately. Nervous breakdowns are a luxury item that we dont have time for right now, and anyway, all our security-cleared therapists are booked up eight months in advance: so the only psychotherapy Im getting is the DIY kind, and pouring it all out into a private diary thats going to be classified up to its armpits and buried in a TOP SECRET vault guarded by security zombies until Im too dead to be embarrassed by it seemed like a good compromise. So I wrote it this way, and I dont have the time (or inclination, frankly) to go back and take all the personal stuff out: duty calls, etcetera, and youll just have to suck it up.

If I were Bob, this journal would probably claim to be written by Sabine Braveheart or some such nonsense, but after OPERATION INCORRIGIBLE my patience with silly pseudonyms is at an all-time low. So Ill use pseudonyms where necessary to protect high-clearance covert assets, and for people who insist on hiding under rocks yes, Bob, if youre reading this Im talking about you but the rest of the time Ill call a spade a bloody shovel, not EARTHMOVER CRIMSON VORTEX.

Anyway, you got this far so let me finish the prelude to the intro by adding that if you can get past all the Bridget Jones meets The Apocalypse stuff you might pick up some useful workplace tips. (To say nothing of the juicy office gossip.)

Now, to the subject matter at hand (feel free to skip the rest of this foreword if you already know it all):

Bob and I are operatives working for an obscure department of the British civil service, known to its inmates of whom you are now one as the Laundry. Were based in London. To family and friends, were civil servants; Bob works in IT, while I have a part-time consultancy post and also teach theory and philosophy of music at Birkbeck College. In actual fact, Bob is a computational demonologist turned necromancer, and I am a combat epistemologist. (Its my job to study hostile philosophies, and disrupt them. Dont ask; itll all become clear later.)

I also play the violin.

A brief recap: magic is the name given to the practice of manipulating the ultrastructure of reality by carrying out mathematical operations. We live in a multiverse, and certain operators trigger echoes in the Platonic realm of mathematical truth, echoes which can be amplified and fed back into our (and other) realities. Computers, being machines for executing mathematical operations at very high speed, are useful to us as occult engines. Likewise, some of us have the ability to carry out magical operations in our own heads , albeit at terrible cost.

Magic used to be rare and difficult and unsystematized. It became rather more common and easy and formal after Alan Turing put it on a sound theoretical footing at Bletchley Park during the war: for which sin, our predecessors had him bumped off during the 1950s. It was an act of epic stupidity; these days people who rediscover the core theorems are recruited and put to use by the organization.