Halting State (6 page)

You have been in police cells precisely twice in your life—there was that total disaster when you were fifteen, then going back even earlier there was that time when you were a wee thing and Gav and Nick got you to moon the Lord Mayor when he was up for opening the new drop-in centre. Gav and Nick could run faster than you, which is why—you now realize, with perfect twenty/twenty hindsight—they suckered you in. Both times you were too young to really figure out how bad the situation was. It’s somewhat less obvious to you how you ended up being booked into an Amsterdam cop shop at zero dark o’clock last night, largely because you were too addled on skunk and strong Continental beer to know which way was up—but by morning you have made up your mind that despite their laid-back reputation, Dutch police cells are no more fun than English ones. Especially with a hang-over.

If you hadn’t been arrested, you’d have ended up spending Friday and Saturday nights in a cramped room at the Bulldog—a hosteller’s inn notorious for its remarkably low prices and dubious furnishings. Instead, you spend the night in a cell with a foam mattress, a light bulb, and a stainless steel sink-and-toilet combination by way of furniture. It’s actually bigger than the room at the Bulldog, and the stains on the mattress are probably not much worse, but there’s no soap, no Internet, and no munchies to distract you from obsessively worrying about your miserable fate. Because, you know, you’re doomed. This is the second time you’ve been arrested in your entire life, and your stress levels are so high that were a bunch of black-robed inquisitors to file chanting into your cell and lead you down a stony tunnel lined with manacled skeletons to a cavern furnished with an electric chair, it would come as a relief. You don’t have a clue what to expect, so when the door rattles and opens, you nearly jump out of your skin.

“Mr. Reed. Please come with me.” It’s a different cop, built like a rugby jock, and looking extremely bored.

“Um, where?”

You must look confused, because he speaks very slowly and loudly, as if to a half-witted foreigner: “Step out of the cell and proceed to the end of the corridor, until I tell you to stop.”

“But my—” You glance down at your feet, then shrug. They took your shoes, your belt, your jacket, and your mobie, then made you sign a form: And now some rules-obsessed part of your hindbrain is yammering up a fuss about going out without your shoes on. It’s probably the same lobe of your brain that makes sure your fly’s zipped up and your nose wiped—the mummy lobe. “Okay.” You force yourself to take a slippery sock-footed step forward, then another. Your head throbs in time to your heartbeat, and your mouth tastes of dead rodents. Now you notice it, the mummy lobe is nattering at you about brushing your teeth…

There’s an office room with a desk in it, and a Politie sergeant, and a bunch of indiscreet cameras in luminous yellow enclosures labelled
EVIDENCE
in English and Dutch. (They must get a lot of tourists here.) Not to mention a shoe-box containing your mobile, your jacket, your belt, and your shoes. “Mr. Reed. Please sit down.”

You sit.

“Did you, on the evening of the twentieth, throw any items at the window of the antique shop at 308 Prinsengracht?”

You frown, trying to remember. The mummy lobe is about to say “I don’t think so, but I might be wrong” but you catch it in time, and what comes out is a strangled “No!”

The cop nods to himself and makes a note on his tablet. “Did you take the armchair that the owners of 306 Prinsengracht had placed by the side of the road for a municipal waste pick-up and move it so that it was outside the antique shop at 308 Prinsengracht?”

That’s an easier one. You don’t remember anything about the armchair before you woke up in it. “No.”

Another squiggle on the tablet. The cop frowns. “Do you remember anything about last night? Anything at all?”

At this point the mummy lobe makes a bid for freedom and control over your larynx, and instead of saying “Where’s my lawyer?” you hear yourself saying, “No, not until I woke up in that chair. I was in the Arendsnest earlier in the evening and we had a bit to drink, then we moved on, and things got vague. Then I woke up chained to the street sign.”

“When you say ‘we,’ who were you drinking with?”

“I was with Mitch and Budgie. Tom couldn’t make it, he was on paternity leave—”

“Alright.” The cop makes another mark on his tablet, then pushes it aside and gives you a Look. You quail: Your balls try to climb into your throat. “Mr. Reed. You appear to have been the victim of a prank that got out of hand. Your DNA was not found on the stone that broke the shop window, or on the window itself, and camera footage shows three other persons carrying you and the chair before handcuffing you to the street furniture. So you are not suspected of vandalism or theft. However, let me be clear with you: That level of drunkenness is a public order offence, and I believe we have sufficient evidence to obtain a conviction. Because it’s a minor charge and you are a non-resident EU citizen, if you agree to plead guilty to
‘Dronken orde/veiligheid verstoren op openbare weg,’
a drunk and disorderly public order offence on the public highway, for which there is a fine of two hundred and fifty euros, I can release you immediately. If you choose to deny the offence you have the right to a trial before the sub-district court.” He leans back and crosses his arms.

That’s pretty harsh for the Amsterdam Politie, but you’d heard they were having a crack-down: just your bad luck to be caught in it. “What are the consequences if I plead guilty?” you ask.

“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.

“You asked about the business? We manage economies in order to maximize player draw—to make it a compelling experience that sucks players in. Imaginary worlds with millions of players don’t obey quite the same economic rules as the real world—or I guess they obey them differently, because rather than running on money, games run on fun. I mean, if the players aren’t having fun, they’ll leave, and then what’ll we eat? We plug into Maslow’s hierarchy of needs at a different level from a traditional economic system, but a lot of the principles are the same. Money and treasure is always flowing into the game space because you need to reward the users for playing—complete a quest, pick up the treasure. Do you play any games…? No? Just CopSpace? That’s not a game, that’s a metaverse like Real World or Second Life…Sorry, I’ll get to the point, I’m just trying to explain what we do, like you asked. Modern games are infinitely scalable in size and number of players. When a customer clicks through the license conditions to play the game, they’re agreeing to add their phone as a node in a distributed server. More players equal more servers—not for themselves, I might add, we
never
run a server node for any given game on the same host as a client for that game, that would be asking for trouble—but at the back end, we’re in the processor arbitrage market. The game programmers’ biggest problems are maintaining causality and object coherency while minimizing network latency—sorry, I’m just telling you what our clients obsess over. Necessary background, okay?

“Anyway. One problem with using users’ machines as distributed-processing nodes is that they always try to hack the service. No need to be shocked, it’s just a fact of life. They’re always trying to get into someone else’s gaming pants, and not even running the distributed-processing nodes in a separate VM will stop them. So, to prevent fraud, every item in a distributed game space has to be digitally signed and every significant event in the local game is voted on by at least three peers, and we rely heavily on the phone’s trusted processing infrastructure. Incidentally, this means we’re into the same authorization and authentication business as your credit card company. Because if somebody finds a way to change stuff without our authorization, they can create value from nothing, then sell the results on IGE or eBay. Which is ultimately deflationary, not to mention being a howling whirlwind of No Fun At All for everybody who’s trying to play the game by the rules.

“That’s one way of looking at the picture. Not only is there this whole raft of mind-numbing automated administrative stuff that goes on every time you add a player—which is what the game developers worry about—there’s
inflation
. Inflation happens when money and loot flow into the game. But to keep the customers happy you have to keep rewarding them. Playing the game is inflationary because they keep burgling the tombs of dead gods, breaking into the governor of Jamaica’s dungeon vaults, colonizing the Andromeda galaxy, and so on. And you know, you can’t tax them or make the money decay, because that would be No Fun, and if the game stops being Fun, why play? That’s the difference between in-game economics and the National Bank—the bank doesn’t have to worry about whether we’re enjoying ourselves. So we have to control this tendency towards galloping stagflation, and we typically do this by offering short deposit accounts for star-ship captains, controlling the after-market in magic wands, providing mortgages for prestige-rank necromancers wanting to build their own crypts, and all that sort of thing.

“Then there’s immigration and border controls. Most modern multiplayer games run on a couple of distributed-processing platforms—Zone runs on Symbian/GDF and Microsoft Arena runs on .NETSpace—and they’ve standardized on a common client engine so they can focus on developing new content. Competition is fierce. They’ve all got scrapers and immigration incentives to persuade customers to migrate from one game to another, taking their characters and loot with them. It’s against the terms of service, but no game vendor is willing to cut their own throat by enforcing it—that’d piss off the customers. So, you’ve got out-of-band merchant sites like IGE and eBay’s Gameboard, and a whole bunch of coyotes who make their living by providing tools to migrate avatars from one environment to another, using the exit game assets as arbitrage against a position in the entry game. Which in turn means there are exchange rates between games—and not just game-to-game, I’m talking game-to-euro rates, game-to-yuan, game-to-rupee. All the strong currencies, you name it, even US dollars. So there’s currency speculation and an external market in gaming currency hedge funds, not to mention the Magic bugs who believe in keeping their loot in the most powerful magic items they can buy, like the guys who keep their savings account in a roll of gold coins under the bed. There’s dirty stuff, too, dirty tricks some of the game companies play on each other, hostile speculation and attempts to dislodge or recruit each other’s customer bases, but we don’t do any of that stuff at Hayek Associates. We play strictly by the rules.

“One way we take currency out of circulation is to sell imaginary real estate. Another is to provide safety deposit services so that players can stash their gold or loot with us for a fee—this works in game spaces with encumbrance rules. If we spot a deflationary sump, we have to create liquidity until we can plug the gap—this is something a real bank can’t do—so we can start offering interest on deposits, handing out free resurrections, that kind of thing. And while all this is going on, we have to keep an eye on how the customers are enjoying their market experience. If people start grumbling, we’ve got a problem.

“My job—well. I commission in-game campaigns to track customer satisfaction, establish hedonic goal posts, and set targets so our programmers and quants know which way to drive things to maximize fiscal stability. It’s like being chancellor of the exchequer, except you can substitute ‘fun’ for ‘profits’—up to a point, until interdomain currency conversion and hedge funds come into the picture. In monkeyspace—sorry, I mean, outside the games—I’m also in charge of marketing and sales liaison with our corporate clients. We each wear three different hats here at Hayek Associates. Making a single sale, even to a tier-three game, is potentially a multi-million euro contract for us, so a lot of work goes into it…what? Yes, I work with Marcus on closing new accounts. Yes, he’s senior to me…I suppose you could say that [he’s in charge]. No, I’m the Marketing Director. I’m only worth .5 per cent of the company’s market cap. I’m insignificant, obviously beneath your notice…

“Okay, yes, I understand that. Sorry. No more sarcasm.

“Let me see…at about a quarter past ten this morning, I was in a meeting with Marcus and…why the hell am I repeating this? You’ve seen the stream. I’ve seen the stream…No, I can’t swear that it really happened because it’s something I saw on a screen. What I
thought
I was seeing was a bunch, thirty, maybe forty, Orcs—they’re a character race in Avalon Four—march into the central bank. It’s in a magic castle carved out of a diamond the size of a hill, in a city floating on a mauve cloud near the Spinward Mountains, and the bank vaults are—look, they’re not a real physical vault, it’s just a database table that stores a bunch of cryptographic hashes on objects that are registered as being lodged in the bank, okay? The objects are stored in a holographic database on the players’ smartphones and the game engine keeps track of them for us. No, I can’t tell you whose phone stores a given item. They move around a lot, and there are usually copies on three or more phones at the same time. The bank is a different matter, the root authentication keys are locked down and stored in a trusted database on a server…yes, where else would you put a bank?
That’s
why we’re based in a nuclear bunker. It’s good public relations. Yes, the root keys are signed by the Bank of Scotland in monkeyspace. The real security is all in the firewalls, and the data integrity schemas. Nobody ever imagined a band of Orcs would steal a database table…”

END RAW TRANSCRIPT