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opto-isolated geometry engines and invocation clusters here? Do
we, fuck: we're stuck with Dr. Volt and his thuggish friend Mr. Amp,
and pray we don't get a stray ground loop while the summoning core is
present and active.
    "Anyway, it's time to break for coffee. After we
come back in about fifteen minutes, I'm going to move along a bit; it's
time to demonstrate the basics of a constraint invocation. Then this
afternoon we'll discuss the consequences of an uncontrolled
summoning."
(Uncontrolled summonings are Bad—at best you'll end up with someone
going flatline, their brain squatted by an alien entity, and at worst
you'll end up with a physical portal leading somewhere else. So don't
do that, m'yeah?)
    Teacher claps his hands together, brushing
invisible chalk dust from them, and I stand up and stretch—then
remember to close my file. The one big difference between this training
course and a particularly boring stretch at university is that
everything we learn here is classified under Section Three; the penalty
for letting someone peek in your notebook can be draconian.
    There's a waiting room outside, halfway between
the lecture theatres, painted institutional cabbage with frumpy modular
seating in a particularly violent shade of
burnt orange that instantly makes me think of the 1970s. The vending
machine belongs in an antique shop; it appears to run on clockwork. We
queue up obediently, and there's a shuffle to produce the obligatory
twenty-pence pieces. A yellowing dog-eared poster on the wall reminds
us that CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES —it
might be indicative of a sardonic institutional sense of humour but I
wouldn't bet on it. (Berwick-upon-Tweed was at war with the Tsar's
empire until 1992, and it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to
discover that one of the more obscure Whitehall departments—say, the
Ministry of Transport's Department of long-reach electric forklift
vehicle Maintenance Inspectorate, Tires Desk—is still locked in a
struggle to the death with the Third Reich.)
    It is quite in keeping with the character of the
Laundry to be aware of the most peculiar anomalies in our diplomatic
heritage—the walking ghosts of conflicts past, as it were—and be
ready
to reactivate them at a moment's notice. That which never lived sleeps
on until awakened, and it's not just us citizens of old-fashioned
Einsteinian spacetime who make treaties, right?
    A fellow trainee shuffles up to me and grins
cadaverously. I glance at him and force myself to resist the urge to
sidle away: it's Fred from Accounting, the pest who's always breaking
his computer and expects me to fix it for him. About fifty-something,
with papery dry skin that looks as if a giant spider has sucked all the
juice out of him, he's still wearing a suit and tie on the second day
of a five-day course—like he's wandered out of the wrong decade. And
it
looks slept in, if not lived in to the point of being halfway through a
second mortgage and a course of damp-proofing. "Dr. Vohlman seems to
have it in for you, eh?"
    I sniff, and decide to stop resisting the urge
to sidle away. "Metaphorically or sexually?"
    An expression of deep puzzlement flits across
Fred's face. "What's that? Metawatchically? Nah. He's a bad-tempered
old bastard, that's all." He leans closer,
conspiratorially: "This is all beyond me, you know? Dunno why I'm on
this junket, our training budget is just way over the top. Got to use
the course credits or we lose them next year. Irene's off studying
Eunuch device drivers, whatever they are, and I got posted here. Luck
of the draw. But it doesn't mean anything to me, if you know what I
mean. You look like one of those intellectual types, though. You
probably know what's going on. You can tell me … "
    "Eh?" I try to hide behind my coffee cup and
manage to burn my fingers. While I'm cursing, Fred somehow ends up
standing behind my left shoulder.
    "See, Torsun in HR told me he was sending me
here, to learn to be the departmental system