Halting State

“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.

JACK: Designs on Your Dungeon

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.

Before you leave the pub you nervously call the Polis—but they’re deeply uninterested in a terribly bureaucratic kind of way. They take a detailed statement, asking you to spell your name, the name of the pub you were in, the people you were with, your cat’s name, and your mother’s blood group, then they promise to email the phone company a request for their call logs: but due to some quirk of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, as Amended, even though you routinely record all your calls, they can’t actually use it as evidence of anything. “I’ve got your complaint on the system, Mr. Reed, and if it happens again, you just text us on this number, citing this case reference…”

Bastards! Squeaks the mummy lobe, outraged at their unwillingness to enforce the full majesty of the law on your behalf. (After all, every time you’ve had a run-in with them before, they’ve had no trouble enforcing it against you, have they?)

After that, you move on by mutual consent to a less-foreboding venue, a city centre pub with HAPPY HOUR signs and a jukebox and loud after-office revellers getting it on. It’s not fun, exactly, but it beats the alternative. One pint is enough to calm you down again, but it also seems to be enough for Elaine, who is beginning to look twitchy. “Look, I need to be up tomorrow without a hang-over if I’m going to do the face thing with Hayek’s people. How about we call it an evening and you meet me at their offices at nine thirty sharp?” She beams you the address and you stick a push-pin in your phone’s map display.

“Okay, I’ll do that,” you say, stifling a groan at the idea of the up-with-the-larks timing. (It wasn’t like this at LupuSoft: breakfast at noon, so to speak.) “I’ll walk you back to the hotel.” You stand up and hold the door for her, and at the hotel she makes her awkward good-byes and strides through the door. Then the whole thing comes crashing down on your shoulders like a suit woven from slabs of slate. Jesus fuck. The panicky urge to phone Sophie is sudden and nearly irresistible—but then, what if you’re wrong? You don’t want to tear holes in the Potemkin village of her reality. So you decide to play games instead.

It’s zero dark o’clock and you’re coiled up on the futon in your living room like a basket case, goggles glued to your face by a mixture of sweat and determination. Your hands are twitching and spazzing from side to side, and you’re muttering under your breath like an old alkie communing with his invisible pink proboscidean. At least, that’s how it would look to a time-travelling intruder in your wee house who didn’t know what was actually going on—the body adrift in the grip of a weird compulsion while the mind decays inside it. A time-traveller from the 1980s or later might notice the winking LED status lights on the boxes under the flat-screen telly and guess at the significance of the glasses, and from the early nineties onwards they’d stand a good chance of understanding the muse whose arms you dance in: But to a visitor of Wellsian or earlier vintage, it would be wholly incomprehensible other than as some weird display of vile degeneracy.

(You vile degenerate, you and your hundred million cyberspatial compatriots!)

Not that you’re much given to probing the time-travelling condition when you can go rushing around bashing goblin brains with your clan buddies, which is what you’re doing right now—a bit of mindless recreational hack’n’slash to distract yourself until you’re tired enough for bed.

You’re running around as Oberon, a high-level warlock of more or less human origins who you’ve been developing for a while, out of idle curiosity—he’s well optimized for playing in a variety of fantasy zones, mostly ones that branch off the old dungeon paradigm—and you’ve hooked up with a trio of adventurers you just met in the guild-house to go and kick short green butt in a cave complex somewhere north of Castle Greyhawk and east of the rising sun. Alice (on morningstar and clerical anti-undead duty), Helmut (on war-axe and attitude) and Fantomas (lock-picking and garottes) are reasonably experienced players, for which you are grateful: So far the goblins have just been a minor nuisance, but you’ve got a feeling there’s more to this cave complex than meets the ultravision- augmented eye up to now. Which is why you’ve got half a dozen defensive spells locked and loaded, a neon-red knife missile floating above your left shoulder, and a serious case of paranoia as you tiptoe after Fantomas towards the running water you can hear ahead.

It’s a cave complex, of course, because you don’t generally run across anything as small as a mere cavelet in Greyhawk. There will be underground rivers, vast and wide, and huge cavernous killing zones with mist-wreathed stalagmite islands and waterfalls thundering into the subterranean depths—and stepping-stones and brokeback bridges to traverse under fire from the chittering hordes. Plus at least two side- quests to fulfil if you want to acquire the plot coupon to open the door to the money shot on the third sub-basement level guarded by the Klingon security detachment—except you made that last bit up: Whimsical, but that’s how the automatic scenario generators work, they’ve got all the subtlety of a play-by-numbers adventure book or a Hollywood motion picture.

Still, you can enjoy the art-work. Someone put a lot of effort into the music score, which is variations on a vaguely classical theme with a trance background: And the stony footing actually looks as if someone who’d been down a limestone karst or two in their day designed it, bedding planes and all. It doesn’t look like off-the-shelf tiles, and you’re almost beginning to wonder whether someone at Wizards of the Co$t has finally cracked procedural sedimentary rock formation in Zone when you run up against Alice, who has stopped and is crouched behind a boulder.

“What is it?” you ask, using your private chat channel.

“Someone else ahead. Don’t look like NPCs.” That’s Fantomas talking. He’s got a thick Yorkshire accent, which is pretty weird coming from a halfling swathed in black assassin’s silks.

“Eyeballs, oh great mage?” That’s Helmut. There’s a suspicious buzz to his voice that bespeaks either a suspiciously lossy routing or a voice remixer—the latter’s most likely, so you peg him as a transvestite, but that’s his privilege—but the sarcasm comes through undimmed.

“Certainly. Give me one second.” You hit on a spell slot and the knife missile shimmers with a shield of invisibility, then you send it forward into the dark cavern that vaults across the underground lake on whose shore you are playing hide-and-seek.

There’s a beach about fifty yards out across the expanse of black liquid, and a rickety wooden pier running out from it to a gondola-like boat that rocks slightly in an invisible breeze. You look through the missile’s eyes as it closes in on the boat, then, as if by magic (as if! In a place like this!) it pierces a shield of some description, and a small horde of bad guys appear beneath you. There are at least twelve of them, lumpen green-skinned warriors in heavy iron armour, skull-helmets and horsehair fringes nodding above beetle-browed faces: And they all bear a red ideogram on their shields. But they’re sure as hell not NPCs—you can hear a low-key conversation, the strange (to your Western ears) nasal-sounding intonation of mandarin speakers, and they’re equipped like adventurers, and that one in the sorcerer’s robe is an—

“Oh shit,” you manage to say, just as the enemy mage looks up expressionlessly, stabs his staff of power at your knife missile, and you lose contact. “Hostile clan, look like dark-dwellers, at least a dozen”—and then you flip back to your local context and look around and everything’s going to pieces around you.