Overtime
Charles Stross
It is, I think, a fact surprisingly little appreciated among readers and writers of science fiction that precognition creates the same opportunities for paradox as time travel. What happens if you are told the future, and you take actions that make that future impossible? There is little formal difference between this species of paradox and killing your own grandfather. It seems strange to me that prediction paradoxes appear so little in science fiction, since they are prominent in folklore. How many stories do you know in which a prophet predicts a dire future for someone in a story, or a witch curses such a person to a disastrous future, and the cursee takes action to forestall the curse? (We all know how that works out...)
Britain's occult secret service, the Laundry, has a division called Forecasting Operations that attempts to use occult means to see the future. Well, to be strictly accurate, the Laundry sometimes has a division called Forecasting Ops. Occasionally Forecasting Ops may predict that it will cease to exist, or that it has never existed, and sometimes that comes to pass.
Overtime is a story in Charles Stross's Laundry Files series in which Bob Howard, the protagonist of the early books of the series, has an imbroglio with Forecasting Ops, over the course of the Holiday break, which he spends working (hence the title). You can read it for free in Tor's Reactor Magazine.
It's a good story, and it has been around for a while now, having been first published in time for Christmas 2009. I recently reread it because it was reissued along with A Conventional Boy, along with another even older Laundry Files story, Down on the Farm. A Conventional Boy is a novella, and I suppose that Tor bulked it out with these two old stories in an attempt to forestall readers' complaints that charging full price for so short a book was a rip-off. If that was indeed Tor's motivation, it was as successful as attempts to forestall fairy-tale curses usually are.
Overtime is actually relevant to A Conventional Boy since Derek Reilly, the protagonist of that story, predicts precisely (and also fairly accurately) events of Laundry Files stories that take place in later years. Also, we are told that at the end of A Conventional Boy that
They [the Laundry] gave him a cramped basement office with a desk in a building in London called the New Annex, where he had an actual job in Forecasting Ops, designing oblique strategies for the end of the world.