Halting State

by Charles Stross

  The fragile porcelain of your newly cast plan shatters into a myriad of pieces as you remember the phone conversation with Sophie. Something about a party for Elsie? You’re supposed to send her a birthday pressie? Forget about sticking your head in the litter tray, it wouldn’t do to go birthday-shopping for your eleven-year-old niece while smelling of ammonia. Dammit, home you will go, and knowing your luck, you’ll have a job in a bank lined up by next week, fixing broken spreadsheets while wearing a suit with one of those strangulation devices, what do they call them…?

  Clean up first. Okay? At least it went a hell of a lot better than the last time, when you and Amanda Parker got yourselves into trouble at school.

  Amsterdam doesn’t do mornings, especially at weekends. You pull your glasses on, tell your phone to show you the road to perdition, and stumble dizzily past shuttered boutiques and sleeping cheese shops, across cobbled streets empty of traffic, towards a tram stop, where you wait for ten minutes until a rattletrap streetcar squeals to a halt beside you. A quick web search shows you that one of the bargain-basement budget airlines has seats home for just 200, one way, plus carbon duty and airport tax. The sea-cat ferry from Rotterdam to Edinburgh is a whole lot cheaper, but you have a sudden queasy vision: This is your stomach, and this is your stomach on the ocean wave.

  The Bulldog is open, so you sneak up the claustrophobically tight staircase to the floor with your room. You’ve only brought an overnight bag, and you barely bothered unpacking. Minutes later you’re out of the backpacker zone and onto the street, heading for the Centraal Station and a fast train to the airport.

  Amsterdam may not do mornings, but the Centraal Station never sleeps. You find yourself standing in the plaza in front of the station with your eyeballs burning from the reflected sunlight jangling off the canal. Motor-scooters and kamikaze cyclists keep trying to kill you, and the place is full of menacing junkies and beggars trying to bum a note off the tourists. The square smells of stale beer and dog turds and hot metal overlaid by the fart-laden exhaust fumes of bike engines. The tram bells in the background set off a cacophonic echo in your head, and birds flock overhead, hunting for victims to dive-bomb. You’re still busy trying to buy your flight home, and your glasses can’t keep up with the flashy graphical interface the airline uses: Cookies keep timing out and your session resets itself. The bandwidth is crap here, and the whole scene has turned out to be one gigantic bummer. You want home, and you’re dying for that train back to Schiphol: You’d hoped to get away from the whole STEAMING mess once and for all, but the dying snake of a crashed and burned game plan has trapped you in its coils, and it feels like it’s choking the life out of you. You really need to go home and get a job interview nailed down.

  You wonder who your next corporate master is going to be.

  SUE: Wayne’s World

  STATEMENT BY MR. W. RICHARDSON, MARCH 20, 2016 (RAW TRANSCRIPT):

  “We’re Hayek Associates. We were founded three…no, four years ago. Just over four years ago. We’re a diversified economics consultancy and market-maker. We run virtual central banks for ORGs [massively multiplayer online role-playing games]. We stabilize the economies of seventeen imaginary realms with a combined VM2—that’s, uh, a measure of the total virtual money supply—about the same size as Japan’s. We’re primary contractors for a tier-one game, VIRTUOUS GOLD, that has almost 12 million players, paying 120 a year for access and averaging another 260 on extras. We’re primary contractors for three tier-two games in the one-to-five-million-player range, including Avalon Four: also for four tier-three games, a bunch of small fry, and a couple of big development projects I can’t talk about right now without violating commercial confidentiality. What it boils down to is, we’re responsible for ensuring that 20 million players who spend roughly 6 billion a year to participate in our clients’ games don’t see their virtual stake-holdings vanish into mid-air.

  “I joined Hayek about eighteen months ago when Barry and Bo Pierson—Bo founded the company, he sold his shares to Marcus last year for a couple of million just before I arrived—figured they needed someone to re-engineer their in-game vision. In my last job I was senior market intelligence officer for Kensu International’s Scottish distributor. I used to work for Disney Corporation’s intelligence unit before that. Marketing and intelligence analysis are closely related anyway, and Hayek needed both. Marcus was on the phone a lot because he was just setting up our working arrangements with Kensu, and we got talking and I did some freelance campaign development work for him, and one thing led to another. Working in this industry is a bit like Desperate Housewives, all looking for the right start-up who’s going to marry you and make you a millionaire…that’s the IPO, I guess. Or am I thinking of the unapproved options scheme? No, the IPO is like pregnancy, the options are the…hell, it’s Barry’s metaphor, he can explain it to you.

  “You asked about the business? We manage economies in order to maximize player draw—to make it a compelling experience that sucks players in. Imaginary worlds with millions of players don’t obey quite the same economic rules as the real world—or I guess they obey them differently, because rather than running on money, games run on fun. I mean, if the players aren’t having fun, they’ll leave, and then what’ll we eat? We plug into Maslow’s hierarchy of needs at a different level from a traditional economic system, but a lot of the principles are the same. Money and treasure is always flowing into the game space because you need to reward the users for playing—complete a quest, pick up the treasure. Do you play any games…? No? Just CopSpace? That’s not a game, that’s a metaverse like Real World or Second Life…Sorry, I’ll get to the point, I’m just trying to explain what we do, like you asked. Modern games are infinitely scalable in size and number of players. When a customer clicks through the license conditions to play the game, they’re agreeing to add their phone as a node in a distributed server. More players equal more servers—not for themselves, I might add, we never run a server node for any given game on the same host as a client for that game, that would be asking for trouble—but at the back end, we’re in the processor arbitrage market. The game programmers’ biggest problems are maintaining causality and object coherency while minimizing network latency—sorry, I’m just telling you what our clients obsess over. Necessary background, okay?

  “Anyway. One problem with using users’ machines as distributed-processing nodes is that they always try to hack the service. No need to be shocked, it’s just a fact of life. They’re always trying to get into someone else’s gaming pants, and not even running the distributed-processing nodes in a separate VM will stop them. So, to prevent fraud, every item in a distributed game space has to be digitally signed and every significant event in the local game is voted on by at least three peers, and we rely heavily on the phone’s trusted processing infrastructure. Incidentally, this means we’re into the same authorization and authentication business as your credit card company. Because if somebody finds a way to change stuff without our authorization, they can create value from nothing, then sell the results on IGE or eBay. Which is ultimately deflationary, not to mention being a howling whirlwind of No Fun At All for everybody who’s trying to play the game by the rules.

  “That’s one way of looking at the picture. Not only is there this whole raft of mind-numbing automated administrative stuff that goes on every time you add a player—which is what the game developers worry about—there’s inflation. Inflation happens when money and loot flow into the game. But to keep the customers happy you have to keep rewarding them. Playing the game is inflationary because they keep burgling the tombs of dead gods, breaking into the governor of Jamaica’s dungeon vaults, colonizing the Andromeda galaxy, and so on. And you know, you can’t tax them or make the money decay, because that would be No Fun, and if the game stops being Fun, why play? That’s the difference between in-game economics and the National Bank—the bank doesn’t have to worry about whether we’re enjoying ourselves. So we have to control this tend
ency towards galloping stagflation, and we typically do this by offering short deposit accounts for star-ship captains, controlling the after-market in magic wands, providing mortgages for prestige-rank necromancers wanting to build their own crypts, and all that sort of thing.

  “Then there’s immigration and border controls. Most modern multiplayer games run on a couple of distributed-processing platforms—Zone runs on Symbian/GDF and Microsoft Arena runs on .NETSpace—and they’ve standardized on a common client engine so they can focus on developing new content. Competition is fierce. They’ve all got scrapers and immigration incentives to persuade customers to migrate from one game to another, taking their characters and loot with them. It’s against the terms of service, but no game vendor is willing to cut their own throat by enforcing it—that’d piss off the customers. So, you’ve got out-of-band merchant sites like IGE and eBay’s Gameboard, and a whole bunch of coyotes who make their living by providing tools to migrate avatars from one environment to another, using the exit game assets as arbitrage against a position in the entry game. Which in turn means there are exchange rates between games—and not just game-to-game, I’m talking game-to-euro rates, game-to-yuan, game-to-rupee. All the strong currencies, you name it, even US dollars. So there’s currency speculation and an external market in gaming currency hedge funds, not to mention the Magic bugs who believe in keeping their loot in the most powerful magic items they can buy, like the guys who keep their savings account in a roll of gold coins under the bed. There’s dirty stuff, too, dirty tricks some of the game companies play on each other, hostile speculation and attempts to dislodge or recruit each other’s customer bases, but we don’t do any of that stuff at Hayek Associates. We play strictly by the rules.

  “One way we take currency out of circulation is to sell imaginary real estate. Another is to provide safety deposit services so that players can stash their gold or loot with us for a fee—this works in game spaces with encumbrance rules. If we spot a deflationary sump, we have to create liquidity until we can plug the gap—this is something a real bank can’t do—so we can start offering interest on deposits, handing out free resurrections, that kind of thing. And while all this is going on, we have to keep an eye on how the customers are enjoying their market experience. If people start grumbling, we’ve got a problem.

  “My job—well. I commission in-game campaigns to track customer satisfaction, establish hedonic goal posts, and set targets so our programmers and quants know which way to drive things to maximize fiscal stability. It’s like being chancellor of the exchequer, except you can substitute ‘fun’ for ‘profits’—up to a point, until interdomain currency conversion and hedge funds come into the picture. In monkeyspace—sorry, I mean, outside the games—I’m also in charge of marketing and sales liaison with our corporate clients. We each wear three different hats here at Hayek Associates. Making a single sale, even to a tier-three game, is potentially a multi-million euro contract for us, so a lot of work goes into it…what? Yes, I work with Marcus on closing new accounts. Yes, he’s senior to me…I suppose you could say that [he’s in charge]. No, I’m the Marketing Director. I’m only worth .5 per cent of the company’s market cap. I’m insignificant, obviously beneath your notice…

  “Okay, yes, I understand that. Sorry. No more sarcasm.

  “Let me see…at about a quarter past ten this morning, I was in a meeting with Marcus and…why the hell am I repeating this? You’ve seen the stream. I’ve seen the stream…No, I can’t swear that it really happened because it’s something I saw on a screen. What I thought I was seeing was a bunch, thirty, maybe forty, Orcs—they’re a character race in Avalon Four—march into the central bank. It’s in a magic castle carved out of a diamond the size of a hill, in a city floating on a mauve cloud near the Spinward Mountains, and the bank vaults are—look, they’re not a real physical vault, it’s just a database table that stores a bunch of cryptographic hashes on objects that are registered as being lodged in the bank, okay? The objects are stored in a holographic database on the players’ smartphones and the game engine keeps track of them for us. No, I can’t tell you whose phone stores a given item. They move around a lot, and there are usually copies on three or more phones at the same time. The bank is a different matter, the root authentication keys are locked down and stored in a trusted database on a server…yes, where else would you put a bank? That’s why we’re based in a nuclear bunker. It’s good public relations. Yes, the root keys are signed by the Bank of Scotland in monkeyspace. The real security is all in the firewalls, and the data integrity schemas. Nobody ever imagined a band of Orcs would steal a database table…”

  END RAW TRANSCRIPT

  ELAINE: A Catastrophic Loss of Goodwill

  You enjoy facials about as much as you enjoy visits to the dentist. One of these years, when you’re really rich, you plan to set aside a week and turn yourself over to a dental surgeon who will put you under general anaesthetic, yank out all your pearlies, and install ceramic-andtitanium memory-metal implants socketed into your jawbones. Once you get over the hang-over you’ll be able to say good-bye to fillings, secure in the knowledge that you’re going to go to your coffin wearing an enigmatic diamond smile. And won’t that fuck with the archaeologists’ heads?

  Unfortunately, there’s no such easy cure for facials, but you’ve acquired various coping strategies over the past four years in DBA: a ristretto and a trip to the bathroom first, so you’re awake and comfortable; a copy of the agenda and a full battery charge on your old-fashioned folio, so you can scribble notes on it and do what-if modelling on the fly; and a chunk of time allocated ahead of schedule so you know what the hell you’re meant to be talking about.

  But sometimes they call the meeting at short notice, and there’s no agenda on the server, and your folio’s fuel tank is half-empty. So then you have to tough it out, like having a cavity drilled out without local anaesthetic. It’s all part of being constructive.

  The sudden-death summons to an agenda-less face-to-face meeting about the Tiger Investments account does, it must be admitted, suggest something interesting is afoot. Chris handles their business, and while you haven’t had anything to do with it before, you sort of knew what it was about. TI is an angel specializing in high-tech start-ups, your typical Web 3.1415 outfits, and TI contracted DBA—in the person of Chris Morgan, full partner (and Director of Risk Management)—to produce full pre-IPO investment reports on their clients. Now one of them appears to have gone spectacularly pear-shaped.

  “I got a call from TI yesterday evening,” Chris explains. He’s got that post-augmented crash look, as if he’s been burning bandwidth all night. He’s in his midfifties, with heavy black eyebrows and a perpetual worried expression behind his thick-rimmed glasses, as if he’s certain he’s forgotten something important. “Their latest clients have had a catastrophic intrusion. More to the point, their lead programmer is missing, and they’re screaming about an inside job. I don’t have the full picture yet, but it appears someone called in the police, and I understand the local force are escalating it to SOCA. TI have mostly cashed out, and obviously they’ll be under suspicion of ramping. Our direct liability is capped at five million, but the implication that we missed something is clearly there.” He pushes his specs up his nose. (He may be one of the last generation who grew up with PCs with glass tubes, but he’s kept abreast of the times: those high-resolution Armani displays conceal lasik-enhanced eyeballs.)

  Brendan clears his throat. “What’s the plan?” he asks mildly.

  “You’re the plan: all of you.” He grins quickly. You glance around the table, seeing surprised faces: Faye, Mohammed, Fred, Brendan. The only person who’s nodding is Margaret, an indicator that speaks volumes. “We’re going up there tonight on the sleeper train. Jessica’s booking rooms and a secure conference suite for us in the West End Malmaison. I expect we’ll be there for about a week, so pack your bags accordingly. I’ve taken the liberty of clearing your schedules as this is now ou
r number one priority.” He looks directly at you, and you raise an eyebrow. “Yes, Elaine, you’re off the Croatia job. Any questions?”

  Mohammed, diffidently: “It’s Friday…”

  “I know.” Chris looks as if he’s bitten a lemon. “But the police are already in attendance. We can’t barge in and expect anyone to give us the time of day right now. Monday is another matter, so we’re going up there tonight. You’ve got Saturday to decompress, and Sunday we’ll hold a planning session so that when we go in mob-handed on Monday morning, we’ve got some idea what we’re doing.” He pauses. “By the way, you’re all free to go home after this meeting. You’ll be needing time to make appropriate arrangements.”

  “What are we going up there for?” you ask. “I mean, what can’t we do from down here?”

  “She’s right,” Mohammed agrees. He glances at you nervously.

  “I don’t see why you need me,” Brendan adds waspishly. “Scotland’s got a different legal system. I’m not qualified to practice up there.”

  “Hayek Associates are incorporated in London, under English law,” says Faye. “Isn’t that right?” She looks unnaturally pleased with herself.

  “That’s right,” says Chris. To Mohammed, with a shy grin: “There’s no escape!”