morning head. “I was team leader on the extreme conflict group. We were implementing a swarm-based algorithm for resolving combat between ad hoc groups with positional input from their real-world locations—” You weeble on for a minute or so, playing buzzword bingo. Mr. Grey nods like a parcel-shelf novelty, hanging on your every word. The poor bastard looks like he still harbours secret romantic ideas about the gaming biz. Trapped in an outsourcing consultancy, writing requirements documents for a living, he imagines that if things were just
Eventually, Mr. Pin-Stripe takes over. (He’s been listening, his face completely expressionless all the while.) “I’m sure you’ve memorized all the Java APIs,” he says, unintentionally dating himself in the process. “But we’ve already made enquiries with LupuSoft, about the projects you worked on.”
You rack your brains for a moment before you remember. “That’s a distributed realm running on Zone. Made by, um, Kensu? Out of Shanghai? It’s basically a fairly faithful implementation of Dungeons and Dragons, fourth edition D20 rules. Just like the old Bioware series, except it’s a Zone-based Massive.” Mr. Pin-Stripe’s face is still a rigid mask. You begin to wonder just how much image-processing horsepower is going on behind the screen—
“Have you ever played Avalon Four?” asks Mr. Pin-Stripe, his face still unreadable. You stare at the screen. There’s no sign of a pupillary reflex—in fact, his eyes are slightly fuzzy, at below-par resolution.
“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—
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.
“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
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.
SUE: Gaining Access
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
