I killed you! And you didn’t even notice! - Charles Stross

“Yes-yes!” Jon bounces up and down on the balls of her feet.
“How much coffee did we have this morning?” Pete asks, suspicion dawning.
“All of it!”
Brains absorbs this fact slowly. The room he and Pete shared didn’t come with a filter machine, but there was an industrial-sized one in the motel lobby. If Jon drank the entire jug—
“How many times did you refill it?” asks Pete.
“Only three times! It kept running out!”
Brains glances at the vicar. “Are we going to need a tranquilizer dart?” he murmurs.

It is a government agency. And government agencies are run as bureaucracies. There is a role for bureaucracy; it’s very useful for certain tasks. In particular, it facilitates standardization and interchangeability. Bureaucracies excel at performing tasks that must be done consistently whether the people assigned to them are brilliant performers or bumbling fools. You can’t always count on having Albert Einstein in the patent office, so you design its procedures to work even if you hire Mr. Bean by mistake.

There can be only one true religion. Are you feeling lucky, believer?
Like the majority of ordinary British citizens, I used to be a good old-fashioned atheist, secure in my conviction that folks who believed—in angels and demons, supernatural manifestations and demiurges, snake-fondling and babbling in tongues and the world being only a few thousand years old—were all superstitious idiots. It was a conviction encouraged by every crazy news item from the Middle East, every ludicrous White House prayer breakfast on the TV. But then I was recruited by the Laundry, and learned better.
I wish I could go back to the comforting certainties of atheism; it’s so much less unpleasant than the One True Religion.
The truth won’t make your Baby Jesus cry because, sad to say, there ain’t no such Son of God. Moses may have taken two tablets before breakfast, but there was nobody home to listen to the prayers of the victims of the Shoah. The guardians of the Kaaba have got the world’s best tourism racket running, the Dalai Lama isn’t anybody’s reincarnation, Zeus is out to lunch, and you really don’t want me to start on the neo-pagans.
However, there is a God out there—vast and ancient and infinitely powerful—and I know the name of this God. I know the path you have to walk down to be one with this God. I know his secret rituals and the correct form of prayer and his portents and signs. I have studied the ancient writings of his prophets and followers in person, not simply relying on the classified digests in the CODICIL BLACK SKULL files and the background briefings for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN.
I’m a believer. And like I said, I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos—in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever—was infinitely more comforting than the truth.
Because the truth is that my God is coming back.
When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun.
And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.