Charles Stross - Halting State

“Sure.” You shrug. “I OD’d on D20s back in my teens, to tell the truth. It’s something to go back to for old times’ sake, but I don’t usually play more than the first level of a new game, just to cop a feel and eyeball the candy. Um, to see how they’ve implemented it. Zone’s full of MORGs, and it’s my job to add to them, not get lost playing them.”

You are getting a queasy feeling about this set-up: something’s not right. CapG’s client— damn them for shielding this room so you can’t Google on Dietrich-Brunner —need a game engineer. They know jack shit about game development, so they hit up their usual outsourcing agency, which turns out to be CapG. Who, what a surprise , also know jack shit about game development, so they go to AlfaGuru and Monster and all the other bottom-feeding body shops with some CV they got off the net, and you just happen to be the first person they found who matches the search criteria. Trouble is, it sounds like a complete clusterfuck waiting to happen. Neither the client nor the resourcing agency knows what the hell he’s doing. You’ll probably get there and find out they really want an airline pilot or a performing seal or something. And wouldn’t that be bloody typical?

While you are having second thoughts, Mr. Pin-Stripe seems to come to some sort of decision. And he opens his mouth:

“As you have no doubt already realized, this is an unusual contract for us. One of our clients, Dietrich-Brunner Associates, are in some distress. They are a specialist reinsurance risk analysis house; they negotiated the guarantees for a venture capital corporation that backed a very promising game industry company that went public a few weeks ago. It now appears that a complex crime has been committed inside Avalon Four, and to cut a long story short, certain parties are liable for an enormous amount of money if the details come out.” He pauses. “Have you signed our non-disclosure agreement yet?”

“You want an NDA?” You shrug: “Sure.” Everybody demands NDAs. Probably Fiona-on-the-front-desk was supposed to nail you for one on your way in the door. That’s okay, you can sort it out later.

“Good.” Mr. Pin-Stripe nods, jerkily, at which point the brilliantly photorealistic anonymizing pipeline stumbles for the first time, and his avatar falls all the way down the wrong side of uncanny valley—his neck crumples inwards disturbingly before popping back into shape. (You can fool all of the pixels some of the time, or some of the pixels all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the pixels all of the time.) “Dietrich-Brunner Associates have assembled a tiger team of auditors who are about to move in on the target corporation. Their goal is to prove criminal culpability on the part of Hayek Associates’ board, which has implications for the size of their liability—they also want to give the police any necessary assistance in bringing the criminals to justice. However, DBA are not a games company. They lack specialist expertise, and one of their analysts has asked for someone with a skill set almost identical to yours.” You sit up straight. He can’t be thinking about that, can he…? It’s not something you list on your CV, other than in the vaguest terms—some of the projects they had you working on back before you shifted sideways into STEAMING are dual-use, quite close to violating the law on hacking tools.

“If you accept this contract—which will be a strictly short-term one, billable hourly—you will be assigned to their team as a domain-specific expert to help them understand what happened. You will be working under condition of strictest secrecy, before and after the job. You started when you walked in the door of this office. Is that acceptable?”

You take a deep breath. The moment crystallizes around you—the grubby paint, the underlying sickly-sweet smell of blocked drains, the two false faces on the desktop before you—and your headache and sense of world-weary fatigue returns. The mummy lobe reminds you that you’ve got six weeks’ salary in your bank account: You don’t have a car or a girlfriend, your only real outgoing expenses are the house and the residual payments on the mortgage from Mum’s chemo, and you’ve been working so many eighty-hour weeks that you haven’t had time to spend your 60K-plus-bonuses package on anything else. You don’t need the kind of political turdball that you can see rolling down the gutter towards you on the leading wave of a flash-flood. You especially don’t need a couple of smug suits leaning on you to take it on the cheap because you’ve been unemployed for all of forty-eight hours in the middle of the biggest industry bubble since AJAX and Web 2.0. The mummy lobe is telling you to say no .

So you open your mouth and listen to yourself say, “I want eight thousand a day. Plus expenses.”

This is the polite, industry-standard way of saying “piss off, I’m not interested.” You did the math over your morning coffee: You want to earn 100K a year, what with those bonuses you’ve been pulling on top of your salary. (Besides, a euro doesn’t buy what it used to.) There are 250 working days in a year, and a contractor works for roughly 40 per cent of the time, so you need to charge yourself out at 2.5 times your payroll rate, or 1000 a day in order to meet your target. Not interested in the job? Pitch unrealistically high. You never know…

“Done,” says Mr. Pin-Stripe, staring at you expressionlessly. And it is at that point that you realize you are well and truly fucked.

It’s Monday morning, and you are semi-officially PO’d.

Thursday was bad enough—you didn’t wrap up until Liz Kavanaugh and her firm were well installed, grilling the MOPs one-on-one. Before you clocked off, Liz took you aside for a little off-line time. “Sergeant Smith? Mind if I call you Sue?”

You nodded cautiously, because you always found it hard to tell where Inspector Kavanaugh was coming from. (She looks like she’s heading for politician-land, with her law degree and tailored suits, but what she wants along the way—who knows? She’s still a bloody sharp cop.) Whatever, pissing her off was a very low priority on your check-list, and if she wanted to be friendly, that was fine.

“Nice to know.” She smiled briefly, more of a twitch than anything else. “I’m short-handed, and you were first on scene, so you’re already up to speed. I’ve got a feeling that there’s a lot more to this than meets the eye because I’m getting a ton of static already. Holyrood is really rattled, and a whole bunch of interested parties are about to descend on this bunch. And I’m going to lose Sergeant Hay and DC Parker to the Pilton murder enquiry tomorrow. So if you’ve got nothing more urgent to do”—which translates from inspector-speak into this is your number one priority as of now, sunshine —“I’m going to ask you to stick around for the time being.”

To which all you could do was shrug and say, “Could you clear it through Mac first, Inspector? He’s my skipper, an’ I wouldn’t want him to think I was deserting the ship.”

Kavanaugh nodded briskly and book-marked your request, and that was your Friday case-load blown out the water, not to mention your monthly clean-up rate: Jimmy Hastie would just have to wait until someone else could collar the little gobshite for something. But at least you wouldn’t have to tell the skipper yourself.

Friday was worse than you expected. You turned up at nine o’clock sharp, frazzled from a breakfast argument with Mary over who was going to fetch Davey after school—with the wee scally himself making a bid for beer money by offering to take himself down to Water World if only you’d give him the readies—only to find that Mac might have detached you, but he was hanging on to Bob. So you headed over to the bunkerful of crazies on your lonesome, only to find a very inspectorly Liz Kavanaugh briefing a reporter from the Herald outside the bunker doors, and a couple of suits from X Division skulking around out back for a quick fag. They were very old boy’s club, and you barely got the time of day from them: arseholes . So you went inside and buckled down to interviewing the help, except you couldn’t get a handle on whatever it was they were speaking: It sounded like English—they were all southern transplants—but the words didn’t make any sense. After the third shot at getting Sam Couper to explain how he knew the Orcs were Pakistani Orcs (and not, say, Japanese Orcs, or your more reliably radge subspecies from Dalhousie), and getting a different reply each time—culminating in your having to ask him how to spell “multiswarmcast minimum-latency routing”—you excused yourself and went to find the inspector.