Halting State

3000 and execute them on a Zone VM? She wants you to drop in on an office in Charlotte Square for an interview with the primary contractors, CapG Financial Services Consulting. If you get the job, AlfaGuru pockets 15 per cent from the customer for resourcing you. The more you think about it, the more likely it seems that Mandy has made a mistake. (“Games developer, accountant, what’s the difference?”) Unfortunately, she didn’t actually say who the ultimate client was, so you can’t Google them to be sure. Chalk it up to practice for the real job interviews you’ll be doing in a week or two. Why not play along? The worst they can do is tell you your suit sucks, and you knew that already.

Meanwhile, in other local footnote news (digested from the dailies by your agents, after they prioritize the important stuff about industry mergers, devkit point releases, and new game announcements): The ongoing squabble between Holyrood and Westminster over who pays for counter-terrorism operations is threatening to turn nasty (because nobody north of the border really believes that Scotland is some kind of terrorism magnet, whatever the bampots in London think). The first minister is making some kind of high-profile announcement about reintroducing free schooling to encourage the birth rate. And a Russian illegal immigrant has been necklaced down in Pilton, the victim of a suspected blacknet gangland slaying. It’s your usual Embra Monday morning rubbish, aside from the Brookmyre special.

The bus snakes up the road in due course, flanks rippling with Hollywood explosions advertising Vin Diesel’s latest attempt to revive his ancient and cobwebby career. You climb in and grab the overhead rail, another anonymous traveller among the late flexitime commuters, the young ned females with baby buggies and streaked ponytails, and the buttoned-up Romanian grannies with shapeless wheelie-bags. At least there’s nobody on the bus with an ASBO warning flag twirling above their head.

Charlotte Square marks the West End of the New Town (so-called because it was new when it was built in the 1760s: Edinburgh has history the way cats have bad breath). One side of it is linked to Princes Street and George Street by the short umbilical of South Charlotte Street. The central grassy square and man-on-a-pillar memorial is surrounded on all sides by looming grey town houses infused with the solidity of the Scottish Enlightenment and the gravitas of their seven-digit price-tags and Adam fireplaces. Nobody actually lives in these houses; they’ve long since been turned into very expensive offices, roosts for firms of solicitors and professional bodies and head-hunters: like CapG Consulting, to whose hallowed meeting facilitation centre you have been summoned.

“Good morning, Mr. Reed!” chirps Fiona-on-the-front-desk, discreetly arphing your details from your ID card. “Are we here for our interview?” She addresses you with the chirpy condescension of a dentist’s receptionist talking to a sullen three-year-old.

You briefly weigh the pleasure of making her cry against the potential damage to your credit rating and bite your tongue. “I guess I am.”

“Let me just see where you need to go…” She has a traditional terminal on her desk, and makes a big show of tippy-tapping the keys and clicking the mouse. “Ooh, that’s interesting. The client is Dietrich-Brunner Associates, and according to AlfaGuru you’re an exact match for the skill set they’re looking for! Isn’t that exciting?”

“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