Charles Stross - Halting State

“As this is an administrative offence, there will be no subsequent proceedings or criminal record if you agree to the fine.” He looks bored. “It’s your decision.”

The offer, it’s a no-brainer. Pay 250 and that’s the end of it—it’s not as if they’re going to put you on a sex offender’s register or send you to prison or something. The alternative is to face the uncharted waters of finding a lawyer and going to court, where they’ll probably find you guilty as charged and send the black-robed chanting inquisitors to lead you down a stony tunnel lined with manacled skeletons to a cavern furnished with an electric chair, just for wasting their time. “And face it,” the mummy lobe reminds you, “you were drunk, weren’t you?”

You nod, then wince as your forehead reminds you about the hangover. “Do you take PayPal?”

“Of course.” The cop gestures at the box on the table. “You will receive an email with instructions for pleading guilty.” He pauses. “You should remember that failing to plead by email and not attending a court session are much more serious offences than public drunkenness, and the Scottish police will prosecute you on our behalf.”

That you don’t need. “Okay. I’ll pay the fine,” you say hastily.

“That concludes this interview. You may leave when you are ready,” says the cop—and he stands and walks out the door, leaving you staring after him with one shoe in your hand and the other on your left foot.

“Don’t forget to tie your shoelaces,” chides the mummy lobe. “Remember, it’s a serious offence!”

You emerge from the Politie station blinking robotically, like an animatronic ground-hog with a short circuit. The hang-over has intensified so much that you’re trying not to move your head in case it falls off. Waves of pain throb in stereo from either temple, and your skin feels two degrees too hot and two sizes too small. It’s a bright Saturday morning, and the light isn’t making your eyes hurt so much as giving them the chien andalou treatment, slashing razor blades of pain through the puffy red-rimmed windows of your soul. It cools down a little once you get your glasses on and the overlays up, but all of this is as nothing compared to the my-fly’s-undone sensation you get when you carefully look over your shoulder at the front of the station. It is to angst as déjà vu is to memory. If you’d only not let Mitch and Budgie—

Do what?

You shake your head and whimper quietly, then cast around for a tram stop. A plan is hatching. You’re going to sneak into your room, sink a couple of ibuprofen and a can of Red Bull as you throw your shit in your bag, then you’re going to tiptoe out and hot-foot it all the way to Schiphol and throw yourself aboard the first flight home. Damn the expense. Your phone’s already trawling the travel sites for bargains: Once home, you will break into your neighbours’ house while they’re at work, find their cat, and somehow persuade the beast to bury your head in its litter tray. That should cure the hang-over, or at least put it in perspective: and then—

The fragile porcelain of your newly cast plan shatters into a myriad of pieces as you remember the phone conversation with Sophie. Something about a party for Elsie? You’re supposed to send her a birthday pressie? Forget about sticking your head in the litter tray, it wouldn’t do to go birthday-shopping for your eleven-year-old niece while smelling of ammonia. Dammit, home you will go, and knowing your luck, you’ll have a job in a bank lined up by next week, fixing broken spreadsheets while wearing a suit with one of those strangulation devices, what do they call them…?

Clean up first. Okay? At least it went a hell of a lot better than the last time, when you and Amanda Parker got yourselves into trouble at school.

Amsterdam doesn’t do mornings, especially at weekends. You pull your glasses on, tell your phone to show you the road to perdition, and stumble dizzily past shuttered boutiques and sleeping cheese shops, across cobbled streets empty of traffic, towards a tram stop, where you wait for ten minutes until a rattletrap streetcar squeals to a halt beside you. A quick web search shows you that one of the bargain-basement budget airlines has seats home for just 200, one way, plus carbon duty and airport tax. The sea-cat ferry from Rotterdam to Edinburgh is a whole lot cheaper, but you have a sudden queasy vision: This is your stomach, and this is your stomach on the ocean wave.

The Bulldog is open, so you sneak up the claustrophobically tight staircase to the floor with your room. You’ve only brought an overnight bag, and you barely bothered unpacking. Minutes later you’re out of the backpacker zone and onto the street, heading for the Centraal Station and a fast train to the airport.

Amsterdam may not do mornings, but the Centraal Station never sleeps. You find yourself standing in the plaza in front of the station with your eyeballs burning from the reflected sunlight jangling off the canal. Motor-scooters and kamikaze cyclists keep trying to kill you, and the place is full of menacing junkies and beggars trying to bum a note off the tourists. The square smells of stale beer and dog turds and hot metal overlaid by the fart-laden exhaust fumes of bike engines. The tram bells in the background set off a cacophonic echo in your head, and birds flock overhead, hunting for victims to dive-bomb. You’re still busy trying to buy your flight home, and your glasses can’t keep up with the flashy graphical interface the airline uses: Cookies keep timing out and your session resets itself. The bandwidth is crap here, and the whole scene has turned out to be one gigantic bummer. You want home, and you’re dying for that train back to Schiphol: You’d hoped to get away from the whole STEAMING mess once and for all, but the dying snake of a crashed and burned game plan has trapped you in its coils, and it feels like it’s choking the life out of you. You really need to go home and get a job interview nailed down.

You wonder who your next corporate master is going to be.

STATEMENT BY MR. W. RICHARDSON, MARCH 20, 2016 (RAW TRANSCRIPT) :

“We’re Hayek Associates. We were founded three…no, four years ago. Just over four years ago. We’re a diversified economics consultancy and market-maker. We run virtual central banks for ORGs [massively multiplayer online role-playing games]. We stabilize the economies of seventeen imaginary realms with a combined VM2—that’s, uh, a measure of the total virtual money supply—about the same size as Japan’s. We’re primary contractors for a tier-one game, VIRTUOUS GOLD, that has almost 12 million players, paying 120 a year for access and averaging another 260 on extras. We’re primary contractors for three tier-two games in the one-to-five-million-player range, including Avalon Four: also for four tier-three games, a bunch of small fry, and a couple of big development projects I can’t talk about right now without violating commercial confidentiality. What it boils down to is, we’re responsible for ensuring that 20 million players who spend roughly 6 billion a year to participate in our clients’ games don’t see their virtual stake-holdings vanish into mid-air.

“I joined Hayek about eighteen months ago when Barry and Bo Pierson—Bo founded the company, he sold his shares to Marcus last year for a couple of million just before I arrived—figured they needed someone to re-engineer their in-game vision. In my last job I was senior market intelligence officer for Kensu International’s Scottish distributor. I used to work for Disney Corporation’s intelligence unit before that. Marketing and intelligence analysis are closely related anyway, and Hayek needed both. Marcus was on the phone a lot because he was just setting up our working arrangements with Kensu, and we got talking and I did some freelance campaign development work for him, and one thing led to another. Working in this industry is a bit like Desperate Housewives , all looking for the right start-up who’s going to marry you and make you a millionaire…that’s the IPO, I guess. Or am I thinking of the unapproved options scheme? No, the IPO is like pregnancy, the options are the…hell, it’s Barry’s metaphor, he can explain it to you.