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When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

Reactor

We hope you enjoy this encore presentation of the 2009 Tor.com Christmas story “Overtime,” by Charles Stross, which takes place in the Laundry universe.

All bureaucracies obey certain iron laws, and one of the oldest is this: get your seasonal leave booked early, lest you be trampled in the rush.

I broke the rule this year, and now I’m paying the price. It’s not my fault I failed to book my Christmas leave in time—I was in hospital and heavily sedated. But the ruthless cut and thrust of office politics makes no allowance for those who fall in the line of battle: “You should have foreseen your hospitalization and planned around it” said the memo from HR when I complained. They’re quite right, and I’ve made a note to book in advance next time I’m about to be abducted by murderous cultists or enemy spies.

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About the Author

About Author Mobile

Charles Stross

Author

Charles Stross is a British SF writer, born in Leeds, England, and living in Edinburgh, Scotland. He has worked as a tech writer, a programmer, a journalist, and a pharmacist; he holds degrees in Pharmacy and in Computer Science. He has won two Hugo Awards for his short fiction, and his work has been extensively praised by, among others, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman.

Stross is sometimes regarded as being part of a new generation of British science fiction writers who use the devices of "space opera" and "hard SF" to innovative new ends; others of this cohort include Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod, Peter Hamilton, Liz Williams, and Richard Morgan. His inspirations and influences include Vernor Vinge, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Iain M. Banks, among other cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk writers, as well as older figures such as H. P. Lovecraft, Roger Zelazny, and Robert A. Heinlein.

Among Stross’s more recent novels are The Revolution Business and The Trade of Queens (in his “Merchant Princes” series), The Apocalypse Codex (part of the “Laundry” series of novels and stories), Rule 34, and, with Cory Doctorow, The Rapture of the Nerds.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/

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