English language
Published May 17, 2004
(0 reviews)
'The Concrete Jungle' is set a short while after The Atrocity Archive, and integrates the backstory with a thoroughly 21st-century menace. Bob is now the guy that the higher-ups go to if they want someone to, say, count the number of concrete cows in Milton Keynes at four in the morning. This initial investigation is interspersed with a series of increasingly classified files from The Laundry's archives that describe the twentieth-century history of research into gorgonism. Sufferers of this quantum-mechanical medical condition gain the ability to turn a certain percentage of carbon atoms in anything they look at into highly electropositive slilcon ions...a process which, as you might guess, is usually terminal for the recipient of the gaze.
Unsurprisingly, gorgonism turns out to be involved in the case of the concrete cows. There's more to the situation than meets the eye, though. How exactly it becomes a national security …
'The Concrete Jungle' is set a short while after The Atrocity Archive, and integrates the backstory with a thoroughly 21st-century menace. Bob is now the guy that the higher-ups go to if they want someone to, say, count the number of concrete cows in Milton Keynes at four in the morning. This initial investigation is interspersed with a series of increasingly classified files from The Laundry's archives that describe the twentieth-century history of research into gorgonism. Sufferers of this quantum-mechanical medical condition gain the ability to turn a certain percentage of carbon atoms in anything they look at into highly electropositive slilcon ions...a process which, as you might guess, is usually terminal for the recipient of the gaze.
Unsurprisingly, gorgonism turns out to be involved in the case of the concrete cows. There's more to the situation than meets the eye, though. How exactly it becomes a national security issue is the bit that I don't want to spoil; but suffice it to say that, however unlikely this may seem up front, it involves another almost-unique aspect of Milton Keynes, as well as such concerns as the impact of networks and of non-open software standards.