Halting State (13 page)

“Not far.” He gestures at another pedestrian crossing and another damned uphill road. “See?” And indeed you do: There’s a pub nestling between a news-agent and a charity shop on the other side of the crossing.

While Jack orders stuff at the bar, you pin down a bench seat at a table in one corner of a big, lino-floored room and take a look around. There’s a TV on a curious inner vestibule over the door, and lots of dark wooden panelling, but it looks less like a pub and more like a railway waiting room from a seventies historical drama. Only the huge row of whisky bottles behind the bar, and the odd, pillar-shaped dispensers suggest that someone other than British Rail does the catering here. Even the games machine is an antique, curved-glass monitor and all. The bar’s almost empty, except for a couple of dour old men hunched over one end of the bar as if they’re afraid of being recognized.

Jack appears, clutching two pint glasses. “I hope this is okay,” he says, “CAMRA rate it highly on their local wiki.”

You look around. “It’s half-empty. Isn’t that usually a bad sign?”

“The evening’s young.” He slides a glass towards you. “And it’s a Monday.”

“Don’t remind me.” God, four more days of this before you get a chance to dash home for the weekend. You’ll miss combat on Wednesday, your evening class on Thursday, and Mum phoning you on Friday to nag you about whatever comes to hand. “Maybe tomorrow we can actually make some headway…”

“Yeah, well.” He takes a mouthful of beer. “Have you thought about paying for a background search on the elusive Mr. MacDonald?”

“Office hours.” You sip your beer. It tastes light and remarkably bitter, but not in a bad way. “Do yourself a favour, don’t carry the job home with you.” You don’t know why you’re warning him off this way—maybe it’s just because he seems a little lost among the sharks—but what the hell.

He sighs. “You’re talking to the wrong guy. I’ve had three years of death marches and no life. If I switched off easily, I’d have fallen by the wayside ages ago.”

“Well. Different workplaces.” You pause, wondering what you’re doing sitting in a pub with a strange man you met this morning at work. “How did you get into it?”

“Oh, the usual. I was about eight when Dad gave me an old box and tried to teach me how to program it in BASIC. He gave up trying to keep up after I discovered assembler. I went to university in Edinburgh, ended up studying CS because it was interesting, nearly failed my course because I spent too much time playing games and working with a couple of friends on an attempted start-up that didn’t go anywhere, and had to get a job. Luckily, one of my other friends was already working for Nutshell Productions and got me an interview, and it went from there.”

All of which is factual but doesn’t tell you anything about what makes him tick. “And?”

“And then”—he looks lost for a few seconds, then blinks rapidly—“my mother got lung cancer. Looked like a treatable one at first, but turned nasty—she ended up needing bleeding-edge immune system treatments that hadn’t been approved by NICE, so I paid for them. Sophie kicked in a little as well, but she and Bill had the kids to look after. For a time it looked as if Mum was in remission, but then she caught multidrug-resistant pneumonia, and that was it.”

He shudders a little as you mentally kick yourself for being a prying bitch: It’s not the explanation you were after, but it puts things in perspective.
Change the subject, dammit.
“Writing games pays that well?”

He stares at his glass. “It pays pretty well. I should consider myself lucky, that’s what Sophie—my sister—keeps telling me. It just doesn’t seem…” He takes another mouthful of beer. “Here, look. This glass. There’s about half a pint in it, right? An optimist: It’s half-full. The pessimist: It’s half-empty. Right now, for the past year, I’ve been looking at a half-empty glass. Then last week my employers poured piss in it. This morning, the fairy godmother at AlfaGuru just handed me a shot of single malt. I’d like to apologize in advance if I look a bit green about the gills, it’s been a hell of a roller-coaster ride.”

Shit.
You choose your next words carefully: “The glass isn’t half-empty or half-full. What you’re looking at is half a pint of depreciable assets sitting in a pint of capital infrastructure that can be amortized over two accounting periods.”

Jack chuckles. “That’s the finance version, is it?”

“I think so.” You pause. “Is there an engineering one?”

“Let me see.” He stares at the glass. “Yes! It’s quite simple: That’s half a pint, all that’s wrong is the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.”

“Right.” Your own glass is going down, you notice. “The reenactor’s version: The glass should be made of pigskin and the beer’s historically inauthentic.”

“The police officer’s version—” There’s a maniacal cackling noise from Jack’s pocket. “’Scuse me.” He pulls out his phone. “Yes? Who is—hello?”
Pause
. “Hello?”
Pause.
“This isn’t funny,” he says, in an odd tone of voice. “Who are you? What do you want?”
Pause.
“Hello? Hello?”

He puts the phone down carefully, as if he’s afraid it’ll bite him.

“What was that?” You ask.

“I don’t know.” He picks up his glass and chugs half the content straight down. “Number withheld. If it happens again, I think I need to talk to the police.”

“What?” You stare at him. “Have you got a stalker, or something?”

“I don’t know.” He looks puzzled, now. “It was—it sounded like a school playground, you know? Kids shouting, for about five seconds. Then a voice said, ‘Think of her children,’ and hung up.” Puzzlement is turning into perplexity on his face. Whatever the caller might have thought, Jack clearly doesn’t know what it’s all about. And neither do you, you realize, with a hollow feeling in your guts.

“Any ex-girlfriends?” you ask, trying to keep your tone light.

“Not since Mum got sick.” He twitches and you think,
You poor bastard
: There’s a nasty little story there, of that you can be sure, but now’s not the time to go digging. “Before you ask, no, I have never been married, and I don’t know any raging bampots of the first water who hang around playgrounds recording…voices…” He trails off.

“What is it?”

“Nah, can’t be happening,” he mumbles to himself. “Nobody’d be crazy enough to try to make me drop this job by threatening Elsie and Mary, would they? Sophie’s daughters,” he adds after a second. “They’d have to be nuts, wouldn’t they?”

You’re gripping the edge of the table
way
too tight, tense with unwelcome memories that he’s just summoned like spirits from the vasty deep. “I think you’d better report this to the police,” you hear yourself telling him, as if from the other end of a dark tunnel. “Just in case.” And hope to hell that’s all it is, a wrong number, a prank call. Because the alternative isn’t something you want to think about.

You don’t want to stay in the pub after the poison voice mail and the bitter memories it dredged up, but it’s too early to go home, and you don’t much want to be on your own with nothing else to think about. Besides which, while you’ve had a bellyful of hanging out with folks from work recently, Elaine is different. She’s pretty intimidating in a work context, but right now she seems to want company. She’s an odd mixture of spiky stand-offishness and—Well, maybe she just wants company because she’s suffering from new-city syndrome, right? But you’re inclined to go along with it anyway, for your own reasons.

Before you leave the pub you nervously call the Polis—but they’re deeply uninterested in a terribly bureaucratic kind of way. They take a detailed statement, asking you to spell your name, the name of the pub you were in, the people you were with, your cat’s name, and your mother’s blood group, then they promise to email the phone company a request for their call logs: but due to some quirk of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, as Amended, even though you routinely record all your calls, they can’t actually use it as evidence of anything. “I’ve got your complaint on the system, Mr. Reed, and if it happens again, you just text us on this number, citing this case reference…”

Bastards!
Squeaks the mummy lobe, outraged at their unwillingness to enforce the full majesty of the law on your behalf. (After all, every time you’ve had a run-in with them before, they’ve had no trouble enforcing it against you, have they?)

After that, you move on by mutual consent to a less-foreboding venue, a city centre pub with
HAPPY HOUR
signs and a jukebox and loud after-office revellers getting it on. It’s not fun, exactly, but it beats the alternative. One pint is enough to calm you down again, but it also seems to be enough for Elaine, who is beginning to look twitchy. “Look, I need to be up tomorrow without a hang-over if I’m going to do the face thing with Hayek’s people. How about we call it an evening and you meet me at their offices at nine thirty sharp?” She beams you the address and you stick a push-pin in your phone’s map display.

“Okay, I’ll do that,” you say, stifling a groan at the idea of the up-with-the-larks timing. (It wasn’t like this at LupuSoft: breakfast at noon, so to speak.) “I’ll walk you back to the hotel.” You stand up and hold the door for her, and at the hotel she makes her awkward good-byes and strides through the door. Then the whole thing comes crashing down on your shoulders like a suit woven from slabs of slate.
Jesus fuck.
The panicky urge to phone Sophie is sudden and nearly irresistible—but then, what if you’re wrong? You don’t want to tear holes in the Potemkin village of her reality. So you decide to play games instead.

It’s zero dark o’clock and you’re coiled up on the futon in your living room like a basket case, goggles glued to your face by a mixture of sweat and determination. Your hands are twitching and spazzing from side to side, and you’re muttering under your breath like an old alkie communing with his invisible pink proboscidean. At least, that’s how it would look to a time-travelling intruder in your wee house who didn’t know what was actually going on—the body adrift in the grip of a weird compulsion while the mind decays inside it. A time-traveller from the 1980s or later might notice the winking LED status lights on the boxes under the flat-screen telly and guess at the significance of the glasses, and from the early nineties onwards they’d stand a good chance of understanding the muse whose arms you dance in: But to a visitor of Wellsian or earlier vintage, it would be wholly incomprehensible other than as some weird display of vile degeneracy.

(You vile degenerate, you and your hundred million cyberspatial compatriots!)

Not that you’re much given to probing the time-travelling condition when you can go rushing around bashing goblin brains with your clan buddies, which is what you’re doing right now—a bit of mindless recreational hack’n’slash to distract yourself until you’re tired enough for bed.

You’re running around as Oberon, a high-level warlock of more or less human origins who you’ve been developing for a while, out of idle curiosity—he’s well optimized for playing in a variety of fantasy zones, mostly ones that branch off the old dungeon paradigm—and you’ve hooked up with a trio of adventurers you just met in the guild-house to go and kick short green butt in a cave complex somewhere north of Castle Greyhawk and east of the rising sun. Alice (on morningstar and clerical anti-undead duty), Helmut (on war-axe and attitude) and Fantomas (lock-picking and garottes) are reasonably experienced players, for which you are grateful: So far the goblins have just been a minor nuisance, but you’ve got a feeling there’s more to this cave complex than meets the ultravision-augmented eye up to now. Which is why you’ve got half a dozen defensive spells locked and loaded, a neon-red knife missile floating above your left shoulder, and a serious case of paranoia as you tiptoe after Fantomas towards the running water you can hear ahead.

It’s a cave
complex
, of course, because you don’t generally run across anything as small as a mere cavelet in Greyhawk. There will be underground rivers, vast and wide, and huge cavernous killing zones with mist-wreathed stalagmite islands and waterfalls thundering into the subterranean depths—and stepping-stones and brokeback bridges to traverse under fire from the chittering hordes. Plus at least two side-quests to fulfil if you want to acquire the plot coupon to open the door to the money shot on the third sub-basement level guarded by the Klingon security detachment—except you made that last bit up: Whimsical, but that’s how the automatic scenario generators work, they’ve got all the subtlety of a play-by-numbers adventure book or a Hollywood motion picture.

Still, you can enjoy the art-work. Someone put a lot of effort into the music score, which is variations on a vaguely classical theme with a trance background: And the stony footing actually looks as if someone who’d been down a limestone karst or two in their day designed it, bedding planes and all. It doesn’t look like off-the-shelf tiles, and you’re almost beginning to wonder whether someone at Wizards of the Co$t has finally cracked procedural sedimentary rock formation in Zone when you run up against Alice, who has stopped and is crouched behind a boulder.

“What is it?” you ask, using your private chat channel.

“Someone else ahead. Don’t look like NPCs.” That’s Fantomas talking. He’s got a thick Yorkshire accent, which is pretty weird coming from a halfling swathed in black assassin’s silks.

“Eyeballs, oh great mage?” That’s Helmut. There’s a suspicious buzz to his voice that bespeaks either a suspiciously lossy routing or a voice remixer—the latter’s most likely, so you peg him as a transvestite, but that’s his privilege—but the sarcasm comes through undimmed.

“Certainly. Give me one second.” You hit on a spell slot and the knife missile shimmers with a shield of invisibility, then you send it forward into the dark cavern that vaults across the underground lake on whose shore you are playing hide-and-seek.

There’s a beach about fifty yards out across the expanse of black liquid, and a rickety wooden pier running out from it to a gondola-like boat that rocks slightly in an invisible breeze. You look through the missile’s eyes as it closes in on the boat, then, as if by magic (as if! In a place like this!) it pierces a shield of some description, and a small horde of bad guys appear beneath you. There are at least twelve of them, lumpen green-skinned warriors in heavy iron armour, skull-helmets and horsehair fringes nodding above beetle-browed faces: And they all bear a red ideogram on their shields. But they’re sure as hell not NPCs—you can hear a low-key conversation, the strange (to your Western ears) nasal-sounding intonation of mandarin speakers, and they’re equipped like adventurers, and that one in the sorcerer’s robe is an—

“Oh
shit
,” you manage to say, just as the enemy mage looks up expressionlessly, stabs his staff of power at your knife missile, and you lose contact. “Hostile clan, look like dark-dwellers, at least a dozen”—and then you flip back to your local context and look around and everything’s going to pieces around you. Half a dozen of the skull-helmed intruders march up out of the placid lake waters at the double, shedding their magical gills as they lower their halberds. You begin to trace a rune of protection, but you’re too late: A crossbow bolt, burning with alchemist’s fire, takes you in the back, from the trio of archers who have appeared from cover in the passageway behind you.

That pisses you off, and you’re a sufficiently powerful sorcerer that you don’t have to take that sitting: So you turn and prepare to zap a fireball at them as your magic armour comes online.

But nothing happens. You twitch. “Give me fire support!” yells Alice. “Someone heal Helmut—”

You line up another fireball and let rip.
Nada. Huh?
Something’s clearly wrong.

Another hostile steps out from behind the archers. This one is wearing a suit of powered battle armour and carrying a small tactical atomic grenade launcher from
SPACE MARINE
. Which is just
not possible
in Zone—it’s a tech-level transgression, not to mention a red flag to the moderators—but the last thing you see of your enemies is the red-glowing ideogram floating in the depths of his helmet face-plate as he pulls the trigger.

And brings the curtain down on Oberon the Warlock as neatly as any game you’ve ever lost.

Fucking cheats!

The next morning you awaken in a breathless near panic, one of those
I’m-late-I’m-late-I’m-late
tension dreams you get just before the alarm tweedles. You bounce out of bed too fast, get dizzy, stagger to the shower, begin getting dressed, and realize you only bought the one dress shirt to go with the suit. So you end up being ten minutes late out the door, unshaven and wearing a grand’s worth of pinstripes over a
STEAMING
tee-shirt that promises to bam yer pot, Jimmy.

You hop the bus from the high street out to Drum Brae, shifting the time with a wee dip into Ankh-Morpork. The bus trundles past ominously looming hunchbacked houses, cars replaced by noisome horse-drawn wagons, pedestrian commuters by a mixture of dwarfs, golems, werewolves, and humans from various periods of History-Land™. There are only a couple of icons spinning over players’ heads, though—Discworld™ isn’t too popular among the nine-till-five set. It’s all a bit drearily boring, so you drop out of the overlay and into your newsfeed for the rest of the trip.

The Hayek Associates’ offices—well, you’d heard about the old government nuclear command/control bunker out near Corstorphine hill, but you weren’t sure you believed in it until now. The car-park is full of Porsches and Bentleys, plus a Police van: All it needs is a bathroom with a Jacuzzi full of brightly coloured machine parts to make your day. You head for the entrance, where a big guy with a badly trimmed moustache and a suit that screams “cop” in sixteen different languages steps into your path.

“Hold on, son. What are you here for?”

You swallow. “I’m a contractor, working for Dietrich-Brunner Associates, who I’m supposed to be meeting here”—you check your glasses—“ten minutes ago.”
Damn.

Mr. Moustache pulls out an ancient smartphone that bristles with keyboardy goodness. “Just a mo. Can I see your ID card?”

You resist the urge to get shirty and open your wallet. “Yup.”

“Okay.” He checks his phone. “In you go, Mr. Reed.”

“Thanks—” You pause, suddenly realizing something. “Who are you?”

“The tooth fairy, son.” His cheek twitches, then he reaches into his suit pocket and produces a warrant card. “In you go.”

“You can never be too sure,” you say, risking it, and scurry inside before the mummy lobe can scream and faint at your scandalous temerity in questioning his authority.

The bored temp on the reception desk stares at you like you’re something she trod in by accident: “You’re late,” she says. “Second level, room 110.” She points at the lift opposite, then hands you a badge. You get the message, and head straight for room six (having figured out—unlike the temp—that
of course
the lunatics at Hayek Associates number everything in binary).

Room six turns out to be a boardroom. The door’s open, and as you slide through it crabwise in an unconscious attempt to render yourself invisible you find Elaine, half the gang from last night, and a bunch of strangers, some of whom have that geek vibe to them. Chris, Elaine’s boss, is speaking. You sneak in and stand at the back like a naughty schoolboy while Chris rolls on in an imperious tone of voice, telling the bunch of strangers that he’s got the legal equivalent of a carrier strike group zeroed in on them, and they’d better give him access all areas, or else. Which goes down about as well as you’d expect.

“What you’re asking for is impossible,” snaps the leader of the enemy faction, a big silverback marketroid with all the charm of a Gitmo interrogator. “The audit can be arranged, if you’re willing to pay for it and contract with a mutually acceptable third party who will be bound by our standard NDAs, but the rest is right out. You’re asking for a complete copy of our database and transaction log, plus core mission-critical systems so you can perform a hostile audit while we’re trying to keep our business running in the face of an external hack attack: That’s just not practical, unless you’ve got a few hundred petabytes of storage kicking around and a data centre to run the sandbox in.”

The vaguely rat-faced guy from last night—Brendan—raises a document wallet. “
This
says you’re going to give us access. Why not just get it over with?”

“Give me that,” the silverback says contemptuously. He sniffs a couple of times as he reads it. Meanwhile, you fidget with your specs. There’s a new layer on the room, and a whole bunch of documents.
It’s lawsuit-space: Cool!
You glance at the auths and see that you’re on the Dietrich-Brunner case folder—they’ve listed you as staff, so you can edit their files. “Chris, I’d appreciate a word with you and your counsel in private with me and Phil.” He glances at a cynical thirty-something who is doodling notes with a pen on a yellow legal pad. “Just to clear the air.”