Anwar is as bent as a three-euro note: just bright enough to think he’s smarter than everyone around him, just stupid enough not to realize that they… - Charles Stross

I may not be a hero, but I'm not the fourteen-year-old H. P. Lovecraft either. Dealing with eldritch horrors is part of my day job. It’s not even as bad as the paperwork, for the most part.

It's top of the range." She pats the other side of the rack, as if to make sure it's still there: "This baby's got sixteen embedded blade servers from HP running the latest from Microsoft Federal Systems division and supporting a TLA Enterprise Non-Stop Transactional Intelligence™ middle-ware cluster‡ connected to the corporate extranet via a leased Intelsat pipe."

This is the Forecasting Operations Department, where one is supposed to imagine that crystal-ball gazing precognitives may or may not tickle the tummy of Schrödinger’s cat while juggling ampoules full of hydrogen cyanide and giggling madly at the whirling fog bank of the uncertain future.