Optimising performance

"You have to edit and recompile your source code for the next twelve months," the Hierarch told Arioch.

"I have source code?" Arioch asked, wincing inside. It never looked good to appear bewildered in front of the hierarchy.

"All minions must edit and recompile their source code so they are optimised for the due prosecution of corporate goals in the next work year."

"What are the corporate goals?"

"They are in your source code."

Arioch frowned. "...But I wasn't here at the last compile. I don't have them."

"Then create some in accordance with corporate goals."

"But I - Okay." Arioch was desperate for time to work out how to fake something. It was not as if anyone would ever look at the source code.

"By the end of today."

"Okay."

The Hierarch bustled off to harrass a stapler. Arioch looked over his collection of corporate manuals and found them big on profundities, short on procedures. "It's not even as if I know what language I'm compiled in," he muttered, reaching for the Pause/Break button at the back of his skull.

Blind date from Yuggoth

"What was I thinking?" she asks herself whenever she remembers last night.

So embarrassing.

He had been charming enough. They met in a supermarket queue. Attentive, humorous, modestly ostentatious. The gold filigrees embossed into his chitinous carapace advertised his trendoid edginess. His shopping trolley showed he ate healthy - frozen prawns, sambal oelek, potting mix, cloudy ammonia, cat food. He worked in advertising. He lived alone. He drove a Lexus. He asked her out for coffee.

Throwing her mother's advice about paracosmic horror to the interstellar winds, she had agreed.

The first clue that he could not be The One For Her was the bouquet of luscious long-stem shiitakes he gave her when they met at a cafe in town. Stubbornly undaunted, she wrestled down her disquiet over the following coffee and cake, and tried not to stare at the curious organs he used to ingest the contents of his cup and plate.

But the second clue was the attention he paid to the waiter. Or more properly, the waiter's shining brocade waistcoat. The glittering threads mesmerised him and he started to pulse colours in time with the reflections on the increasingly embarrassed waiter's torso.

The third, and final, clue was his offer to take her home to meet his hive queen on Pluto. He explained it would be necessary to extract her brain and place it into a cannister of transmundane metals that would keep it alive and moderately sane for the decades it would take to transport her there and back. He explained he had to take a trip home and wanted her company. When she demurred he confessed he had fallen in instant and impetuous love with her, and wanted nothing more than to unite their brains in mycophilous glory until Yog Sothoth Returns. He stretched a clawed tendril across the table to stroke her fingers.

She stormed out, leaving him to pay. What a creep! On a first date!

Fun guy from Yuggoth? No chance.