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  For everyone who’s ever had to sign the Official Secrets Act

  PART

  ONE

  PROLOGUE

  Hello, diary.

  My name is Bob Howard, and this is my workplace journal. It’s classified TOP SECRET BORING, BIN BEFORE READING, and it really is, so if you’ve read one of these journals before you can skip this entire chapter, which is just background bullshit.

  My name is Bob Howard, and I’m a mid-level officer in the British Government Security Service that guards the United Kingdom against magical threats to the realm. I’ve been working here for nearly two decades and going by my pay grade I should actually be about a third of the way up the senior civil service promotion ladder, but instead I’ve got unique responsibilities of my own (ahem: I wear a pair of dead man’s shoes inherited from my former boss and predecessor, Dr. Angleton). I’m a troubleshooter: the kind of trouble I shoot comes with tentacles and magic attached.

  Maintaining a workplace journal is a requirement for all employees tasked with active operational roles. It’s a measure intended to help retain institutional knowledge in the event of the unexpected death of the diarist, namely yours truly. I’m not sure how useful this is in practical terms: I do so much codeword clearance work that I’m pretty sure nobody short of a Senior Auditor is cleared to read this. Hell, I’m not sure I’m cleared to read it.

  (Anyway, dying in the line of duty has only happened to me a couple of times, and it didn’t stick. But I suppose it’s more fun than dreaming up new and creative ways to lie on my time sheet, so here we are.)

  Let me start with a word about my agency. We are—or were—Q-Division SOE (nicknamed the Laundry, because during the war we worked out of offices above a Chinese laundry in Soho). We are Her Majesty’s Occult Security Service, and we’ve been grappling for some years with a contingency codenamed CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN.

  So. Here’s what you need to know about magic: feel free to skip ahead if you’ve heard it all before.

  Magic is a side effect of computational processes that you can perform using your brain, a computer, a pocket calculator, or even a Magic: The Gathering card deck. (MTG is Turing-complete: its rules are sufficiently rich and complex to emulate any other abstract computing system.) The paradox of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is that the more magic there is, the easier it becomes to do magic. More brains? More sorcerers. More computers? More thaumaturgic processes. It’s a doom loop, and it’s been getting doomier and loopier ever since microprocessors showed up in the early 1970s.

  This century, there are more than ninety microprocessors for every human being on the planet, with billions more manufactured every month. The effect on magic snowballs, so much that superhumanly powerful and inhumanly malevolent entities—let’s call them Gods—have been trying to move in and squat the collective subconscious, because they find brains and computers tasty to snack upon. We’ve beaten some of them back, but our luck ran out eighteen months ago in the worst disaster the UK has suffered since the Second World War: the elven invasion of West Yorkshire. With the walls between the worlds thinning, a sorcerous combined arms brigade retreating from a magical world war in another universe popped out of the dream roads in Malham. And then they attacked Leeds.1

  You can’t cover up a five-digit death toll in the third most populous city in England. King Arthur was supposed to come back and save the Britons in their hour of greatest need—there’s a frankly bizarre contingency plan called FORLORN AVALON that I read a year or two ago—but Art isn’t answering the red telephone these days. So who’re you going to call next?

  With the agency in disgrace, a deadly dangerous religious cult called the Golden Promise Ministries got far too cozy with the government. We—what was left of the Laundry, after the then Prime Minister shut us down—were on the ropes: so in order to keep fighting, our high-ups struck a Faustian bargain. Instead of letting the cult sacrifice us all to their alien god, we invited in one of its rivals: Fabian Everyman, political supervillain and living avatar of His Dread Majesty N’yar Lat-Hotep, the Black Pharaoh.

  After neatly cleaning the clock of his rival cultists, Mr. Everyman stormed to victory in a surprise by-election, was elected leader of the Ruling Party by unanimous acclaim, threw a snap general election, wiped out the opposition completely, and established himself as the head of a government called the New Management. All in three months flat. Oops.

  In the aftermath of the first conquering army to rampage on English soil since 1688, and the subsequent brain-worming of the British government by minions of the Sleeper in the Pyramid, petitioning a greater power to tidy up our toy chest seemed like a proportionate and reasonable response. But once Nanny gets her feet under the table it’s not up to the children to dictate when she leaves: and this particular nanny, better known as N’yar Lat-Hotep, the Black Pharaoh, was now the Prime Minister.

  So we went from being an organization dedicated to keeping the eldritch horrors out, to being an organization dedicated to serving one.

  Instant existential crisis, right?

  * * *

  Here is a necessarily incomplete list of important points that didn’t occur to our departmental executive until it was much too late:

  An avatar of an Elder God manifesting in the person of a politician might possibly have an agenda of his own and might be sufficiently competent at finding allies, or at least adoring cult members, to win the largest general election landslide victory since 1945.

  The UK, as Lord Hailsham famously remarked in 1975, is an elective dictatorship.

  Consequently, such a politician might be a bit harder to control than a merely human Prime Minister.

  One of the most fundamental rules of Applied Computational Demonology is “do not summon up anything you can’t put down in a hurry”; the avatar of an Elder God is pretty clearly something along those lines.

  This particular avatar of an Elder God turned out to be immune to: bell, book, and candle; bullets; blackmail; botulinum toxin; bribery; bombs; back-bench plots; banishment; and (worst of all) bureaucracy.

  Not only are we unable to banish the Prime Minister, every entity we are aware of who might be able to do so is even worse.

  * * *

  It turns out that when an organization like the Laundry accidentally finds itself doing the exact opposite of what it’s supposed to do, its members can respond in at least three different ways. The psychology of how human beings behave during a crisis sheds some light on this: sinking ships, house fires, plane crashes, alien invasions, that sort of thing.

  In general, during an acute emergency, only about 10 to 25 percent of people will react appropriately—that is, by taking effective action.

  Humans are social animals, and they take their behavioral cues from the other people around them. They know how they’re supposed to behave on a ship or airliner, or in a shopping mall, so that’s what most people do—even when things are going sideways around them. They pay no attention to the flames or the waves lapping at the upper deck windows or the gunshots in the concourse. They just sit tight and assume that somebody will sort it out.

  Uncertain and confused people hesitate, and that’s how they turn from potential victims of disaster into actual victims. Hesitancy afflicts 60 to 80 percent of people in an emergency, and accounts for most of the deaths.

  Which brings me to the final 10 to 15 percent, who realize something bad is happening but who drive right past the turn-off to Safety City and floor the accelerator all the way to Panic Attack, where they then increase the death toll by adding themselves to a fiery multi-metaphor pile-up.

  What has happened to the Laundry since the New Management came in isn’t an acute crisis but an ongoing state of emergency. And we’ve all been flailing around in it for months now. I’d like to be able to tell you that highly experienced civil servants who have spent their entire careers facing down tentacle monsters can handle themselves better than civilians in a crisis, but I’d be lying.

  The organization is still here, and is back in roughly the same shape it was before the previous government dissolved it. We’re the same people, doing the same jobs in some of the same offices. Same paperwork, same pay grades, same beige paint on the walls, same dire coffee.

  But about 75 percent of our staff are in complete denial. Eating, sleeping, writing reports, dealing with minor diabolic infestations, attending meetings—it’s the same job, right? They’re still shopping at IKEA and Tes
co, picking up the kids after school, budgeting for a family package holiday over the school vac.

  They pay no attention to the chrome and steel gibbets at Marble Arch, rattling with the skeletonizing corpses of priests who sold their souls to the wrong god. They block out the blood-robed hierophants of the Black Pharaoh, droning their imprecatory prayers at the enemies of the Prime Minister. They refuse to see the sullen coffles of sacrificial victims winding their way toward the altar in Westminster Abbey, where they will be beheaded with Excalibur reforged.2 And they pay as little attention as possible to the horrors in the background on the Nine O’clock News.

  Sociologists call this normalization of deviance: deviation from correct or proper behavior becomes normalized if it’s allowed to persist. And the vast majority of our staff don’t notice anymore.

  (Another 5 to 10 percent are on long-term sick leave, huddling under the duvet and gobbling prescription meds with both hands. I can’t say I blame them: even if their reaction is less than helpful, at least they recognize the severity of the situation.)

  And that leaves just 10 to 15 percent of us who recognize that the plane is on fire, the ship is sinking, the Joker’s minions are out of the Asylum and sweeping the mall with automatic gunfire, and it’s up to us to save the day.

  And despite knowing all this, I’m still not sure which category I’m in …

  * * *

  Mo is reading over my shoulder, and she thinks I’ve taken it for granted that you know about magic—about what we do at the agency, not card tricks and stage magic—so I’m going to backtrack a bit.

  I usually cover this stuff in my Applied Computational Demonology: 101 introductory lecture, but this isn’t a classroom and there’s no exam, so you can skip to the end of this chapter if you already read about this stuff in New Scientist. (Go on, I dare you.)

  We live in a multiverse. There is a transfinite number of parallel universes, created and destroyed by merger whenever quantum indeterminacy brooks multiple outcomes. Mathematics—in the most abstract sense—underpins the quantum multiverse we experience. There’s a deterministic substrate below the Planck scale: the reality we experience appears to be a buggy full stack simulation. Because we’ve learned how to exploit some of the bugs in reality, acts of symbolic logic manipulation allow us to pass messages to localized entropy-reversing entities in other domains of the multiverse: for convenience we will call these entities “demons.” We can ask them to do things, and they respond reasonably predictably, that is, almost invariably deterministically. We call this process “magic.”

  Of course, when doing deals with demons you want to use the simplest possible constructions, to minimize the risk of a sorcerer’s apprentice scenario (or, as we in the comp. sci. sector call it, an unterminated loop). And you hope like hell that you never attract the interested attention of a greater demon—one with a mind of its own—because they don’t necessarily stick to your instructions.

  Now, I’d like you to imagine you’re trying to design the simplest possible program for an extradimensional entity. You’re writing code for a very stupid imp—on the order of Maxwell’s Demon—that can read an instruction from an input, write an output, and execute a very limited number of tasks (“put this electron into an excited state,” “pause,” “resume,” “halt and catch fire”…) with extreme rapidity and absolutely no discretion. It’s not exactly Microsoft Excel, so how much can you do with this?

  Everything, as it turns out: the basic abstract model of all computers everywhere, a Universal Turing Machine, only needs four basic instructions and a unidimensional storage tape of infinite length to carry out any computable process. The full set of opcodes for our physical reality is only a bit more complicated than Intel’s 64-bit instruction set. But—and here’s the catch—just as it takes a lot of steps to write a PC operating system, it’s the same with magic.

  If you want to do spells, you’re going to have to start by obtaining a degree in computer science. Then you need to forget everything you’ve learned about how actual computers work and start over again with a wildly different abstract machine architecture. Then you need to learn how the whole rigmarole of software engineering methodologies, test harnesses, and teamwork apply to demonology before you write your first “hello, imp” invocation. And that’s the safe way to do magic.

  Of course, there’s an unsafe way to do magic. Nervous systems like brains are also computational substrates, and it turns out there are thoughts you can think—unnatural, spiky thoughts that make your eyeballs catch fire if you get them wrong—that get the attention of some of those extradimensional listeners. If you manage to get a handle on how to do this without emulsifying your brain or transmuting 1 percent of the carbon nuclei in your body into silicon (which, believe me, is an explosively bad idea), then you can get the demons to obey you just by thinking. You don’t even have to draw diagrams in blood and annotate them in abstract syntax notation! It’s wins all round! Except that doing magic in your head can attract several types of microscopic parasites from the dungeon dimensions—variously called eaters or feeders in the night or V-symbionts—which bite microscopic chunks out of your gray matter because they find human sorcerers tasty.

  Being brain damaged by alien parasites causes a condition called Krantzberg syndrome, alternatively Metahuman-Associated Dementia, which is the leading cause of death or early retirement among ritual magicians. (It also accounts for the tendency of every computer running Windows to blue-screen at the most inconvenient time—if you wondered if they could sense your desperation and choose the worst possible moment to crash? You were right.)

  Some mages avoid succumbing to cortical bit-rot, but that’s not great either. I mentioned V-symbionts: they’re magical parasites that confer handy benefits on the human mage who hosts them, in return for the host helpfully introducing them to other victims, who eventually die of cortical bit-rot by proxy. We have a special term for these mages: we call them “vampires” (or, in bureaucratese, PHANGs).3

  Not everyone who thinks spiky thoughts realizes they’re doing magic. You might have noticed the headlines about so-called superheroes and supervillains? These are autodidact magic users who grew up on a diet of Marvel and DC comics and are acting out their adolescent power fantasies while the parasites drive them insane. (Or worse, they’re autodidact magic users who are copying the comic fans inaccurately—which makes them dangerously unpredictable.)

  It’s possible to design a ward—a protective shielding amulet—that keeps the eaters out of your head. Again, the agency provides these to approved government-licensed superheroes, field agents, and practitioners. It’s rumored that they even leaked a flawed version of the schemata on the darknet, “Anarchist’s Cookbook” style, so that would-be supervillains would create wards for themselves that signal FREE ALL-YOU-CAN-EAT BUFFET HERE rather than saying NO EATERS ALLOWED.

  Now, as to the reason for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN: it turns out that reality exhibits subtle caching behavior so that, as magic becomes more prevalent, it increasingly enables algorithmic processes to proceed to completion in linear time. The more computers there are, and the more brains there are carrying out computational processes, the easier it gets to repeat a set process. It’s not something that our classical computers can take advantage of, but it’s a force multiplier for quantum computers—and also for mages and monsters and things that go bump in the night. We are hurtling toward a sorcerous singularity: and if you’ve been wondering why we’re suddenly drowning in Elder Gods and Lovecraft’s nightmares, this would be why.

  And all this is by way of leading up to an explanation of what I do for the government.

  * * *

  Now, some more about me: I’m Bob Howard, and I’m a specialist.

  I started out as an ordinary computational practitioner—doing sorcery by means of software. But two years into my deployment on Active Operations, I got cross-wired with an entity known as the Eater of Souls. It was an example of what used to be called demonic possession: a group of incompetent cultists tried to sacrifice me in order to control the Eater, not realizing that he was already incarnate. Upshot is, I carry the Eater of Souls around in my head but I’m still Bob … I think.