Halting State

have LED daylight spots the way papes have candles. The chairs around the table are equally fancy: They look like they belong in a squadron of fighter jets, except ejector seats don’t usually come with castors and a gas strut suspension. Shame about the way their occupants are letting them down, though. There’re six of them. Two slimy wee maggots in ten-thousand-euro suits are clogging up the end of the table wi’ their status-symbol tablets: They’re the ones that were yammering at each other until they saw you. No ties; maybe it’s a dress code thing. There’s a lass in a suit, too, but she’s too young to be a decision maker. Secretarial/Admin, you guess. And then there’s the other guys who are, frankly, geeks. It’s not like they’ve got blinking red navigation lights on their heids, but two of ’em are wearing sandals and the other’s enough to make you wish your Little Database of Charges had a section on Fashion Crimes: The stripes on his shirt are interfering with your specs, and the evidence cam is picking up a nasty moire effect. “Ahem,” you repeat, as a holding action, then stare at Wayne Richardson, Marketing Director. Let him sort this out.

“Oh, excuse me.” Richardson takes his cue. “This is, uh, Sergeant Smith and Constable Lockhart. The sergeant’s here to take a statement.”

“That’s enough,” you cut in. “If you can introduce everyone? Then ye’d better show me what happened.”

“Uh, sure.” Richardson points at the suits with the slits for their owners’ dorsal fins first: “Marcus Hackman, CEO.”

Hackman gives Richardson the hairy eyeball, like he’s sizing him for a concrete overcoat, but only for a second. Then he turns the charm on you with a nod and a great white smile that reveals about two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of American dental prostheses that he probably wears because it’s the only way to stop the bairns from screaming and running away before he can eat them. Clearly by calling the Polis, Wayne has pissed in Hackman’s pint, but he’s too much of a professional to let your arrival perturb him. “We’re grateful that you could come, but really it’s not necessary—”

“And Barry Michaels, our Chief Technology Officer.” Michaels is plump and rumpled in an old-Fettes-schoolboy Boris-Johnson sort of way, with a port nose and a boyish cow-lick of black hair: You peg immediately that he’s probably as bent as a three-bob note, but unlike Hackman, he’s not some kind of toxic-waste-eating Martian invader from the planet Wall Street. He nods nervously, looking like he’s eaten something disagreeable. “This is Beccy Webster, our Market Stabilization Executive.” The twentysomething hen’s a high-flyer, then? “Mike Russell, Sam Couper, and Darren Evans”—the latter is the one with the anti-webcam shirt—“are our senior quants.”

“Excuse me?” You raise an eyebrow.

“Sorry. They’re our economics wizards, they do the market programming around here that’s the bread and butter of our business. It’s just what they’re called.”

You take a deep breath. “Right. I understand Mr. Richardson phoned in a report of a theft from your company. He tells me that you got it on video, and it’s something to do with a game. What exactly was stolen?” You take a wild guess: “Was it the source code, or something?”

“Oh dear.” Michaels emotes like a sweaty-handed old theatre queen. “Anything but!” He sits up in his ejector seat—you’re certain, now, that you’ve seen one just like it in the air museum at East Fortune—and takes a deep breath. “Did you tell her it was the source code, Wayne?”

“No, I—”

“What did you tell the police?” Michaels demands. He sounds very upset about something. Okay, pencil him in as number two on your list of folks who don’t like airing their smalls in public. (And remember for later: There’s no smoke without a source of combustion…)

“Nothing, I just called them because we’ve been robbed!”

This is getting out of hand. “What was stolen?” you ask, pitching your voice a bit louder.

“Everything in the central bank!” It’s Webster. At last, you think, someone who gives simple answers to simple questions.

“Central bank where, on the high street?” You can’t be sure while you’re off-line, but you don’t think there are any banks at this end of Drum Brae—

“Show her the video,” Hackman says wearily. “It’s the only way to explain.”

You’re looking out across a verdant green rain-forest canopy that sprawls across the foothills of a mountain range so tall that the peaks are a vulpine blue haze in the distance, biting at the smaller of the three moons that chase each other across the sky. A waterfall half a kilometre high shimmers and thunders over the edge of a cliff like molten green glass, shattering into rainbow-clouded fragments as it nears the lake beneath. Brilliantly plumed birds soar and swoop across the treetops, occasionally diving towards the waters of the river that flows from the lake. The effect is more than real: It’s as supernaturally vivid as an exotic holiday ad, banishing the rainy Edinburgh afternoon outside to the level of a dreicht grey parody of reality.

You’re about to ask what you’re meant to be seeing here—a bank robbery in a package holiday ad?—when the camera on the rain forest pans back and up, and you realize you’re not on Earth anymore.

There’s an island in the sky, a plug of rock set adrift from its mooring in the sea of reality, like a painting by Roger Dean come to life. Beneath it, ghostly violet and green lights flicker, buoying it up on a wave of magic. The camera rises like a helicopter and pans across the island. Although there are trees atop it, it’s mostly given over to buildings—constructions with uneven stone walls and steeply pitched roofs, some turreted and a few supported by classical colonnades. The ground rises near the heart of the flying island, peaking at a low hill that is surmounted by the battlements and towers of a gigantic castle. The battlements flash and glitter in the sunlight, as if they’re made of a glassy substance: Rainbows shimmer in their recesses.

“This is the Island of Valiant Dreams. It hovers above the Lake of the Lost, in the foothills of the Nether Mountains in Avalon Four. The Island is home to the city called Roche’s Retreat, and it’s supported by ancient magicks. Among other things, it is home to the central bank of Avalon Four, which we manage under contract.”

Aye, reet, you tell yourself, as the viewpoint rotates and zooms in on the island, diving towards the cobbled streets and crowded alleys that thread the city. There are a myriad of folk here, not all of them human. You weave past the heads of giants and around the sides of a palanquin borne on the back of a domesticated dinosaur led by lizard-faced men, loop around a timber-framed shop that leans alarmingly out across the road, leap a foot-bridge across a canal, then slow as you enter a huge stone-flagged city square, and dive through the doorway of a temple of Mammon that puts Parliament to shame. So this’s what the wee one thinks he’s getting for his birthday? It’s all very picturesque, but the column of exotic dancers high-kicking their way between two temples tells you that Davey’d better have another think coming.

“This is the central bank. Our task is to keep speculation down, and effectively to drain quest items and magic artefacts from the realm to prevent inflation. One way we do this is by offering safe deposit services to players: Avalon Four runs a non-persistent ownership mode so you can lose stuff if you’re killed on a quest and respawn, and the encumbrance rules are tight.”

It’s not much like your local branch of the Clydesdale. Demons and magicians and monsters, oh my!—a bizarre menagerie of unreal, superreal entities stand in small groups across the huge marble floor, bickering and haggling. Here and there, a flash of light and a puff of smoke erupt as one of the staff invokes an imp or servitor to take this or that item to the safe deposit vaults, or to check an adventurer’s possessions out of their custody and return it to their owner.

“The time is just past ten fifteen…”

Your viewpoint jerks, then slews round to face the entrance to the bank. The doors are three times as high as a tall man, carved from giant ebony beams clasped in a frame of some silvery metal: The hinges they turn on are as thick as a body-builder’s arms. But they’re not silvery now—they’re glowing dull red, then a bright, rosy pulse of heat lights them up from the outside, and the doors begin to collapse inwards on a wave of choking black smoke.

In through the smoke marches a formation of monstrous soldiers. They’re larger than life and twice as gnarly, prognathous green-skinned jaws featuring tusks capped in gold. Their uniform is a mixture of brown leather and chain-mail, and their helmet spikes bear the impaled heads of their trophies, nodding above the points of their