Vilka skinkor är dessa?

6

I Charlie Stross Övertid finner Bob Howard sig fast i Kontoret på julen, som "frivilligt" som Night Duty Officer. Han börjar bosätta sig i ett tråkigt par nätter, när han hittar en konstig fotokopia:

One of the copiers has a print job stacked facedown in the output tray.

(...)

I flip the first sheet over to look for the header page, and do a double take. Buttocks! Pretty damned hairy ones, at that. So someone was enjoying the party.

The next page features more buttocks, and they’re a lot less male, judging by the well-filled stockings and other identifying characteristics. I shake my head. I’m beginning to work out a response—I’m going to pin them on one of the staff notice boards, with an anonymous appeal for folks to wipe down the copier glass after each use—when I get to the third sheet.

Whoever sat on the copier lid that time didn’t have buttocks, hairy or otherwise—or any other mammalian features for that matter. What I’m holding looks to be a photocopy of the business end of a giant cockroach.

Maybe I’m not alone after all. . . .

En viss karaktär antas senare inte vara helt mänsklig:

Kringle crosses his arms affrontedly. At least, I think they’re arms—they’re skinny, and there are too many elbows, and now I notice them I realize he’s got two pairs.

Men var kopian hans? Om så är fallet, varför? Om inte, vem var det?

    
uppsättning SQB 20.08.2014 11:10

1 svar

6

Det var Kringle. Han kom tillbaka i tid (eller framåt i tiden, beroende på ditt perspektiv) och skapade fotokopierna för att göra Bob medveten om att han var i fara. Notera hänvisningen till (insektoid) dubbla armbågar tidigare i stycket liksom denna utbyte:

The spectral shade in its ragged robe bobs its head—or whatever it has in place of a head. “The Christmas incursion—” I glance at the cold furnace again, then at my watch “—would have killed you. But without Forecasting Ops to warn us about it, it’d happen anyway, wouldn’t it?” Three minutes. “So you had to maneuver someone into position to deal with it even though you don’t exist.”

I remember sitting through a bizarre and interminable lecture at the Christmas party. But who else remembers sitting through it? Andy doesn’t remember Kringle’s talk. And I bet that aside from my own memories, and a weirdly smudged photocopy—emergent outcome of some distorted electron orbitals on a samarium-coated cylinder—there’s no evidence that the ghost of Christmases rendered-fictional-by-temporal-paradox ever visited the Laundry on a wet and miserable night.

Stross också (semi-) bekräftade denna teori i en ny tweet.

    
svaret ges 07.02.2015 20:44