Charles Stross - Halting State

“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.