Although ritual magic has been around since the dawn of time (and indeed the Laundry’s antecedents go back at least as far as Sir John Dee, in service to Queen Elizabeth the First under Sir Francis Walsingham), it was first systematized and placed on a concrete theoretical footing by Alan Turing in the 1940s. There are dark rumors that his “suicide” might have been a deeply misguided attempt to shut down a perceived security risk; if so, it was the organization’s biggest mistake ever. Later on they took to recruiting anyone who rediscovered the truth by accident—which led, via the mushrooming popularity of computing during the 1980s and 1990s, to an increasingly unwieldy and overstaffed org chart full of disgruntled CS postgrad researchers and mathematicians.

I ended up in this line of work because once upon a time, my perfectly innocent master’s thesis nearly summoned up an undead alien god in Wolverhampton. (We will step swiftly past the suggestion that this could only have resulted in urban regeneration.) Luckily the Laundry caught me in time and made me a job offer I wasn’t allowed to refuse: take a nice civil service job in an obscure department where we can keep an eye on you, or be found crunchy and good with ketchup by a nightmarish monster from beyond spacetime.

That was about eleven years ago. Unfortunately, after a while I got bored with my tedious make-work job and made the cardinal mistake of volunteering for active operational duty. As a result of that error of judgment, I’ve had more encounters with nightmarish monsters from beyond spacetime than I care to think about, not to mention their deranged cultist worshippers. This doubtless sounds very exciting to you, but the committee meetings and form-filling that go with the job are a bit of a downer. And that’s saying nothing about the hoops you have to jump through to satisfy the internal auditors that you did everything by the book. Adventures are something I try to avoid these days. Unfortunately I’m not very good at it.

Final wrap-up: on top of the ploddingly mathematical side of the job, I’ve stumbled into a specialized sideline as a trainee necromancer, which isn’t a talent you’d wish on your worst enemy; and I work for an obscure boutique department called External Assets that provides—well, that would be telling.

Mo also works for the Laundry. She’s not a computer geek. She’s an academic philosopher and combat epistemologist, not to mention a talented violinist. The instrument she plays was provided by the organization and has exotic, indeed horrifying, capabilities: it’s one of a kind. (If at this point you are thinking, “occult acoustic weapons,” then pat yourself on the back.)