The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross Read Free Book Online Page A

right, and I think you've just demonstrated
the capability. To the extent that it's my call, you've got it"—he
stands up—"if you want it."
    I stand up too. "I'll think about it," I say,
and I walk out the door before I start mouthing obscenities, because I
can't get Fred's expression out of my head. I've never seen someone die
before. Funny, isn't it? Most of us go through life and never really
see someone die, much less die violently. I should be on a high,
knowing that I'm going to qualify for field ops, and if this interview
had happened yesterday I would be. But now I just want to throw up in a
corner.
     
    Brains is in the kitchen when I get home, attempting to cook an
omelette without breaking the eggshell.
    It's raining, and my jacket is drenched from the
short run between the tube station and the front door; give thanks once
more to the invisible boon of contact lenses, without which I would be
staring at the world through streak-befuddled spectacles. "Hi," says
Brains. "Can you hold this for me?"
    He hands me an egg. I stare.
    The normally not-so-clean kitchen worktop is
gleaming and sterile, as if in preparation for a particularly fussy
surgeon. At one side of it sits a syringe and needle
preloaded with a grey, opaque liquid—essence of concrete. At the other
side of it sits a food processor, its safety shutoff hacked and
something that looks worryingly like half an electric motor bolted to
the drive shaft that normally turns its blades. I stand there dripping
and staring: even for Brains's projects, this is distinctly abnormal.
    I hand the egg back. "I'm not in the mood."
    "C'mon. Just hold it?"
    "I mean it. I've just been suspended, pending an
enquiry." I unzip my jacket and let it tumble to the floor. "Game
over,
priority interrupt, segmentation fault."
    Brains cocks his head toward one side and stares
at me with big bright eyes, like a slightly demented owl. "Seriously?"
    "Yeah." I hunt around for the coffee jar and
begin ladling scoopfuls into the cafetiére. "Water in the
kettle?"
    "Suspended? On pay? Why?"
    In goes the coffee. "Yes, on pay. I saved six
people's lives, plus my own. But I lost the seventh, so there's going
to be an enquiry. They say it's a formality, but—" Click, the
kettle is now on, heating up to a steam explosion.
    "Something to do with that training course?"
    "Yeah. Fred from Accounting. He grounded a
summoning grid—"
    "Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now!"
    "It's not funny."
    He looks at me again and loses his levity. "No,
Bob, it's not funny. I'm sorry." He offers me the egg. "Here, hold
this, I implore you."
    I take it and nearly drop it; it's hot, and
feels slightly greasy. There's also a faint stench of brimstone. "What
the hell—"
    "Just for a moment, I promise you." He pulls out
a roughly made copper coil, the wire wrapped around a plastic pie
cutter and hooked up to some gadget or other, and gingerly threads it
over the egg, around my wrist and back again. "There. The egg should
now be degaussed." He puts the coil down and
takes the egg from my nerveless hand. "Observe! The first prototype of
the ultimate integral ovine omelette." He cracks it on the side of the
worktop and a yellow, leathery curdled sponge flops out. The smell of
brimstone is now pronounced, tickling at my nostrils like the
aftereffect of a fireworks show. "It's still at the development
stage—I
had to use a syringe on it, but next on the checklist is gel-diffusion
electrophoresis using flocculated hemoglobin agglutinates pending
in-ovo polymerisation of the rotor elements—so how did your pet luser
autodarwinate?"
    I pull up a trash can and sit down. Maybe Brains
isn't as monumentally self-obsessed as he looks? At least he slipped
the question in painlessly enough.
    "You know how there's always someone who ends up
in the wrong course? It was that dumb accounts clerk I'm always
bitching about. He got in the Intro to Occult Computing course by
mistake. I shouldn't have been there, anyway, but Harriet