Halting State

Half a dozen of the skull-helmed intruders march up out of the placid lake waters at the double, shedding their magical gills as they lower their halberds. You begin to trace a rune of protection, but you’re too late: A crossbow bolt, burning with alchemist’s fire, takes you in the back, from the trio of archers who have appeared from cover in the passageway behind you.

That pisses you off, and you’re a sufficiently powerful sorcerer that you don’t have to take that sitting: So you turn and prepare to zap a fireball at them as your magic armour comes online.

But nothing happens. You twitch. “Give me fire support!” yells Alice. “Someone heal Helmut—”

You line up another fireball and let rip. Nada. Huh? Something’s clearly wrong.

Another hostile steps out from behind the archers. This one is wearing a suit of powered battle armour and carrying a small tactical atomic grenade launcher from SPACE MARINE. Which is just not possible in Zone—it’s a tech-level transgression, not to mention a red flag to the moderators—but the last thing you see of your enemies is the red-glowing ideogram floating in the depths of his helmet face-plate as he pulls the trigger.

And brings the curtain down on Oberon the Warlock as neatly as any game you’ve ever lost.

Fucking cheats!

The next morning you awaken in a breathless near panic, one of those I’m-late-I’m-late-I’m- late tension dreams you get just before the alarm tweedles. You bounce out of bed too fast, get dizzy, stagger to the shower, begin getting dressed, and realize you only bought the one dress shirt to go with the suit. So you end up being ten minutes late out the door, unshaven and wearing a grand’s worth of pinstripes over a STEAMING tee-shirt that promises to bam yer pot, Jimmy.

You hop the bus from the high street out to Drum Brae, shifting the time with a wee dip into Ankh-Morpork. The bus trundles past ominously looming hunchbacked houses, cars replaced by noisome horse-drawn wagons, pedestrian commuters by a mixture of dwarfs, golems, werewolves, and humans from various periods of History- Land™. There are only a couple of icons spinning over players’ heads, though—Discworld™ isn’t too popular among the nine-till-five set. It’s all a bit drearily boring, so you drop out of the overlay and into your newsfeed for the rest of the trip.

The Hayek Associates’ offices—well, you’d heard about the old government nuclear command/control bunker out near Corstorphine hill, but you weren’t sure you believed in it until now. The car-park is full of Porsches and Bentleys, plus a Police van: All it needs is a bathroom with a Jacuzzi full of brightly coloured machine parts to make your day. You head for the entrance, where a big guy with a badly trimmed moustache and a suit that screams “cop” in sixteen different languages steps into your path.

“Hold on, son. What are you here for?”

You swallow. “I’m a contractor, working for Dietrich-Brunner Associates, who I’m supposed to be meeting here”—you check your glasses—“ten minutes ago.” Damn.

Mr. Moustache pulls out an ancient smartphone that bristles with keyboardy goodness. “Just a mo. Can I see your ID card?”

You resist the urge to get shirty and open your wallet. “Yup.”

“Okay.” He checks his phone. “In you go, Mr. Reed.”

“Thanks—” You pause, suddenly realizing something. “Who are you?”

“The tooth fairy, son.” His cheek twitches, then he reaches into his suit pocket and produces a warrant card. “In you go.”

“You can never be too sure,” you say, risking it, and scurry inside before the mummy lobe can scream and faint at your scandalous temerity in questioning his authority.

The bored temp on the reception desk stares at you like you’re something she trod in by accident: “You’re late,” she says. “Second level, room 110.” She points at the lift opposite, then hands you a badge. You get the message, and head straight for room six (having figured out—unlike the temp—that of course the lunatics at Hayek Associates number everything in binary).

Room six turns out to be a boardroom. The door’s open, and as you slide through it crabwise in an unconscious attempt to render yourself invisible you find Elaine, half the gang from last night, and a bunch of strangers, some of whom have that geek vibe to them. Chris, Elaine’s boss, is speaking. You sneak in and stand at the back like a naughty schoolboy while Chris rolls on in an imperious tone of voice, telling the bunch of strangers that he’s got the legal equivalent of a carrier strike group zeroed in on them, and they’d better give him access all areas, or else. Which goes down about as well as you’d expect.

“What you’re asking for is impossible,” snaps the leader of the enemy faction, a big silverback marketroid with all the charm of a Gitmo interrogator. “The audit can be arranged, if you’re willing to pay for it and contract with a mutually acceptable third party who will be bound by our standard NDAs, but the rest is right out. You’re asking for a complete copy of our database and transaction log, plus core mission-critical systems so you can perform a hostile audit while we’re trying to keep our business running in the face of an external hack attack: That’s just not practical, unless you’ve got a few hundred petabytes of storage kicking around and a data centre to run the sandbox in.”

The vaguely rat-faced guy from last night—Brendan—raises a document wallet. “This says you’re going to give us access. Why not just get it over with?”

“Give me that,” the silverback says contemptuously. He sniffs a couple of times as he reads it. Meanwhile, you fidget with your specs. There’s a new layer on the room, and a whole bunch of documents. It’s lawsuit-space: Cool! You glance at the auths and see that you’re on the Dietrich-Brunner case folder —they’ve listed you as staff, so you can edit their files. “Chris, I’d appreciate a word with you and your counsel in private with me and Phil.” He glances at a cynical thirty-something who is doodling notes with a pen on a yellow legal pad. “Just to clear the air.”

Chris turns round. “You heard him, everybody take ten.” He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. Thinking you might as well beat the rush, you slide out the door about five seconds ahead of Elaine.

“What’s going on?” you ask.

“Chris and Hackman are trying to outasshole each other.” Her lips underscore the dry disapproval of her tone. “When they finish posturing, the lawyers will broker a deal, and the winner gets to dry-hump the loser’s leg.”

You roll your eyes. It’s not exactly a novelty, but…“Why is it that the further up the greasy pole you look, the more childish the games get?”

She examines you with clinical interest, as if looking for signs of life on Mars. “Let’s go find the coffee station. I think they’ll be at it for at least half an hour. Got to make it look hard-fought.”

As it happens, Elaine is out by less than four minutes. You’re just finishing a polystyrene cup of mechaccino from the robot caffeine dispenser in the Mess Hall (that’s what it still says on the door) and you’ve just about gotten round to thinking why me? for the third time this morning when Cynical Phil sticks his head round the door. “It’s safe to come back, the shooting’s over,” he mutters, then withdraws in a hurry. Everyone puts their coffee down and troops obediently back to the boardroom, where the Chris-and-Hackman show has dropped the final curtain.

“You’ve got a week,” says Hackman. He looks like he wants to bite someone’s throat out: No wonder his lawyer didn’t want to hang around. “Your tech heads can poke around as much as they need to, and Rebecca and Mike will give them what they need.” A subtle emphasis on the last word there. “Wayne will act as gatekeeper. You want something, you ask Wayne, he’s got the authority to say yes or no. Your accounts team can dupe our personnel files and accounts and look at them off-line, subject to nondisclosure arrangements. But I don’t want you underfoot. Two bodies, one week, that’s all you get to plant down here.”

One week? Chris smiles lopsidedly and nods at Elaine. “That should be sufficient,” he says confidently. “I’ve got every faith in you, Elaine.” And that’s you, and your eight grand a day, right there.

Midafternoon finds you attending a business meeting in a dungeon under Vhrana, with a gorgon called Stheno and a dark elf archer called Venkmann. Venkmann is one of the house avatars, currently being driven by Mike Russell. He has black-enamelled armour, an elaborately engraved skull-faced helmet, a twenty-centimetre-long Fu Manchu moustache, and an evil laugh—and that’s just the visible assets. “Where do you want to start?” he asks.