Charles Stross: Halting State

“What am I doing here?”

Restart:

There’s a ringing in your ears. Oops, must have drifted off . That’s the trouble with smoking shit to help yourselves forget—

Yourselves? Well yeah, there’s you, and there’s Mitch, and there’s Budgie. Tom couldn’t come because he was busy being newly married and responsible, but between you and Mitch and Budgie, you’re three of the four corners of the former Social Networking Architecture Team, and you’ve flown out here on a budget shuttle from Turnhouse to get falling-down legless and scientifically test all that research into whether cannabis destroys short-term memory, because god help you, it’s better than remembering how badly you’ve been shafted.

Which is how come you’re sitting in a half-collapsed armchair, stoned out of your box, on the narrow strip of flagstoned pavement alongside the Prinsengracht canal, listening to alarm bells—

And contemplating the wreckage of your career, after four years in the elite Dirty Tricks wing of LupuSoft, working on special projects for nobbling your corporate master’s rivals, then a transfer to the relatively clean game-play side of STEAMING. Four years of top-secret death marches and psychotic deadline chases in beige-walled cubicle hell (when you’d rather have been sailing the wine-dark seas); frenzied developer boot camps held in sinister wire-fenced floodlit compounds in the Grampians; weekends spent following the team at home and away events with a laser range-finder and a dynamics package (and wasn’t it fun trying to avoid that big ned from Portobello who’d got it into his head that you’re some kind of head-hunter from down south who’s gonnae gut his side, and kept trying to get his posse to stomp your head in?). And all the while you’re living off peanut-butter sandwiches and stale sushi take-aways while your waistline expands and your visual range contracts as you stare at a screen the size of a secondary-school whiteboard all day long and half of the night.

Then there were the dying weekends, weekends stolen from the company management by sheer bloody-minded smack-downs with HR so you could go back to Rochdale to spend some time with your ma, who was in a bad way from the lung cancer, or visit Sophie and Bill and the nieces. Until one day Ma wasn’t there anymore, and the rest of it, and that’s you in that corner there, you with your sixty-thousand-euro salary and your legacy that went partway to a poky wee place in the Colonies and a mortgage you won’t pay off before you retire, and no fucking life whatsoever. (Well, there’s your knitting habit and your criminal record: But that’s just fodder for your OCD.) This is your life, it’s been your life since you clawed your way from CS graduate to start-up seven years ago, and your so-called life is such a bijou bourgeois piece of shit that there’s no room for anything but work in it, so you’ve been keeping yourself too busy to care until—

Last week they cancelled STEAMING and told you to clear your desk at half an hour’s notice. Here’s your next month’s pay in lieu, now get the hell out of here, you freak! And you suddenly realise that you haven’t got a life. Even though they made you learn more about Scottish Premier League fitba than the captain of the national squad, the bastards.

“Excuse me. You cannot be sleeping here—”

Restart:

The worst thing about it all is that you hate football.

Of course, to have admitted that you hated football while you were working on STEAMING would have been a bit like one of the US president’s staffers confessing to thinking religion was overrated, abstinence didn’t work, and what the country really needed was a short sharp dose of communism with a side order of Islamic extremism to go. It’s one of those things that you just couldn’t talk about at LupuSoft, not while they had the exclusive rights to both the Hibs’ and Rangers’ fan club franchises and were trying to milk the surplus income out of all the assorted bampots, neds, and ne’er-do-wells who figured that a LARP where you get to play at football hooligans among consenting adults was better than the other kind of live-action role-playing. (In which you played at football hooligans with non -consenting adults, while the combined manpower of Lothian’s finest and the Rock Steady Crew played collar-the-radge back atcha with CS gas and tasers.) On the other hand, you were able to suppress or sublimate your hatred without too much difficulty. You’re a bourgeois liberal geek who thinks “team player” is a term of abuse, but you believe in society, you believe in checks and balances, you believe in getting your own back on the thick-headed sports jocks who made life excitingly unpleasant for you in school…and as it happens, while you were working on STEAMING you could convince yourself that you were doing your bit , because any job that gets the brangling thugs playing a game on their mobies instead of lobbing tinnies and chibbing innocent bystanders up the high street has got to be a good thing. Network-mediated LARPs have been the gaming story of the decade, ever since SPOOKS came along and gave actuaries a chance to live a secret agent life on the side; STEAMING was set to ring the cash register again and take the nutters off the street. And it paid the mortgage, besides.

At least, that’s how it had been before the Bologna cup final disaster, and the double whammy of the social psych study in The Lancet the very next week that stuck the proverbial sharpie in and twisted, hard. Questions were asked in the lumpy-looking construction site down Holyrood Road, and the ministers did wax worthy and serious and proceeded to apply the tawse of uptight self-righteousness to the rump of the dead equine of games industry self-regulation with gusto and vigour. At which point LupuSoft management revisited the risk-value trade-off inherent in defending their investment in a second-division virtual-world football-hooliganism game against a class-action lawsuit, and decided the professional thing to do was to downsize your team’s sorry ass.

Maybe it could have gone the other way in the boardroom if the Polis hadn’t uncovered a network of Little League serial killer wannabes who were using STEAMING to rehearse next Saturday’s riot over on Easter Road: But that was the final nail in the coffin. All the suit-wearing world loves a geeky scapegoat, and you boys were going down in flames. So there was only one thing to do: fly out to Amsterdam and get absolutely steaming drunk for the weekend, not to mention so stoned you’re having auditory hallucinations to the sound of the tram bells.

“Excuse me, sir, but you cannot sleep here.”

You open your eyes. The auditory hallucination is peering at you through her surveillance goggles as if she’s never seen a stoned tourist before. She’s been so polite that for a moment you feel a flash of perverse gratitude until the weed clears enough for you to realize that she is a member of the Politie and quite capable of summoning a vanful of black-clad accomplices who will vanish you into some concrete custody cell faster than you can snap your fingers if she chooses officially to notice that you are not terribly conscious.

You try to say, “Please don’t arrest me, I’m just a sleepy tourist, I won’t be any trouble,” but it all runs together at the back of your tongue and comes out as something like “nnnghk.” You tense your arms and prepare to lift yourself out of the armchair—standing up would seem like the right thing to do at that point—but that’s when you realize the armchair is situated adjacent to a street sign on a pole, to which your friends have kindly handcuffed your left wrist. And that goddamn ringing noise won’t stop—it’s not in your ears at all, is it?