Charles Stross - Halting State

“Um,” you say, hoping to buy time. You can already feel an imaginary tie—you’re not wearing your beer-enhanced relic—squeezing your carotid artery shut. CapG is one of the really big outsourcing/rightsizing/bullshitting groups. They don’t employ game developers, they employ Excel macro monkeys and very expensive systems-management consultants. And whoever these Dietrich-Brunner people are, they don’t ring any bells from the gaming end of the industry. They sound more like a firm of up-market cat burglars, or maybe venture capitalists. “What exactly are they asking for?”

There’s obviously been some kind of mistake. Maybe Fiona-on-the-front-desk is looking at someone else’s records.

“Let’s see.” She squints at the screen and traces one finger down it, moving her lips. “CS degree, upper second honours or better. Lots of Python 3000 and also Zone administration on Symbian/GDF or.NETSpace. In your personal interests you’re down as a keen gamer—is that right?”

You stare at her, open-mouthed, while she stares back at you as if she’s wondering if you need a nappy change. “That’s me,” you admit. “Are you sure you got the company right? They don’t sound like a gaming development house to me.”

More clickey. “No, there’s no mistake, Mr. Reed. They’re insurance fraud investigators. I’ve got a couple of senior placement executives who’re dying to talk to you about the client’s requirements.” She puts her professional smile back in place: “According to your NI records, you’re resting between contracts right now. Would you like me to put your interview down against your Jobseeker’s Activity for this week?”

You boggle for a moment. CapG are plugged into the social security database? The Jobseeker’s Activity requirement—the number of interviews you do per week—is one of the mandatory hurdles they put in your way before coughing up unemployment benefit. “I, uh, suppose so. So, there’s an interview?”

“Yes, they’ll be with you in a few minutes if you just take a seat in interview room five?” She clearly can’t wait to get you out of her nice clean reception area. She’s probably afraid a real customer will walk through the door any moment now and mistake you for someone who actually works here.

Room 101 is on the first floor, opposite the lavvy. You trudge up the stairs with a sinking feeling. It’s about the size of a toilet cubicle and there’s a smell of leaky drains to underscore the resemblance. Inside, you find the usual: multifunction printer, thin terminal, speakerphone, and a desk they probably stole from an old primary school while it was being demolished. The only windows are the ones on the antiquated screen. All in all, it’s a typical agency teleconferencing suite. You settle down in the chair and wait for your call, wishing the cheap bastards could stretch to a coffee robot.

You’d do some digging for background on Dietrich-Brunner, but there’s an unaccountable lack of signal in this room: You’re completely off-line. Nice. You’re remembering why you don’t like temp work. CapG’s paranoia about—horrors!—their contractors actually talking to their clients without them being able to eavesdrop (“heaven knows what’ll happen, maybe the client will offer them a job without giving us our cut?”) turns these interviews into a bad time-travel trip: You’ve heard that this is what it used to be like for everybody back in the twentieth century, tied down by fixed land-lines and corporate firewalls.

The screen rings, saving you from your Dilbert re-enactment experience. “Yes?” you ask, sitting up and centring your head in the mirror window.

“Jack Reed?”

The caller window expands to show you a much larger room and a couple of Suits. They’re sitting side by side behind a polished conference-table: call them Mr. Grey and Mr. Pin-Stripe for now, using the cut of their cloth as a reference point.

“Yeah, that’s me.” You force yourself to smile. There’s a bit of echo in the pipe, so clearly CapG are trying to anonymize the routing. Either that, or they’re trying to convince you they’re a bunch of spooks trying to look like a body shop. Willy-warmers. “You’re looking for someone to do a number on a client called, um, Dietrich-Brunner Associates?”

“Yes.” Mr. Pin-Stripe looks down his nose at you. “We understand you’ve worked on short-term trouble-shooting contracts before?” He’s about forty, immaculately turned out, greying at the temples, and to say he sounds dubious is an understatement.

“Yeah. Before LupuSoft I did some temping.” Which is a polite euphemism for university vacation work and desperation stuff between real jobs, but with any luck they won’t ask for the gory details. ’Fes-sing up to three months on a front-line tech support desk might not be too convincing. “I prefer longer-term commitments.” Which is true enough, and it implies loyalty, you hope.

Mr. Grey is about ten years younger, has blond fly-away hair, and is just as frozen-faced as Mr. Pin-Stripe. He cuts in rapidly.

“It says on your CV that you’ve got a high reputation score on WorldDEV, is that right? And you spent the past nine months engineering an agile swarming combat model for a commercial product—STEAMING , is that the name? Is that right? At LupuSoft?” His voice is almost supine with a boredom completely at odds with his words: They’re obviously using an emo-filter on the voice stream. “I used to play PREMIERSHITS. They make really good games.”

You nod, wearily. Echoes of your Sunday hangover chase the cobwebs and tumbleweed around your Monday morning head. “I was team leader on the extreme conflict group. We were implementing a swarm-based algorithm for resolving combat between ad hoc groups with positional input from their real-world locations—” You weeble on for a minute or so, playing buzzword bingo. Mr. Grey nods like a parcel-shelf novelty, hanging on your every word. The poor bastard looks like he still harbours secret romantic ideas about the gaming biz. Trapped in an outsourcing consultancy, writing requirements documents for a living, he imagines that if things were just slightly different, he could be cutting loose and hanging tough in some laid-back-but-dynamic programming nirvana. Little does he suspect…

Eventually, Mr. Pin-Stripe takes over. (He’s been listening, his face completely expressionless all the while.) “I’m sure you’ve memorized all the Java APIs,” he says, unintentionally dating himself in the process. “But we’ve already made enquiries with LupuSoft, about the projects you worked on.” Oh shit. Does that include the special stuff we don’t talk about? you wonder. But he moves swiftly on. “What do you know about Avalon Four?”

You rack your brains for a moment before you remember. “That’s a distributed realm running on Zone. Made by, um, Kensu? Out of Shanghai? It’s basically a fairly faithful implementation of Dungeons and Dragons, fourth edition D20 rules. Just like the old Bioware series, except it’s a Zone-based Massive.” Mr. Pin-Stripe’s face is still a rigid mask. You begin to wonder just how much image-processing horsepower is going on behind the screen— his voice is slightly fuzzed, too. Maybe they think you’ve got a speech-stress analyzer concealed in your belly-button? “With modern rules updates, of course. They had to ditch a lot of the Cthulhu stuff after Chaosium was acquired by Microsoft, but the world doesn’t really need another squid-shagger MORG…there’s money in AD#amp#D, it’s a reliable cash cow, and that’s what Avalon Four is supposed to be.”

“Have you ever played Avalon Four?” asks Mr. Pin-Stripe, his face still unreadable. You stare at the screen. There’s no sign of a pupillary reflex—in fact, his eyes are slightly fuzzy, at below-par resolution. Yup , what you see is definitely not what you get. For all you can tell, on the other side of that fat rendering pipeline Mr. Grey and Mr. Pin-Stripe could be naked, middle-aged, Korean housewives.