The Restoration Game (2 page)

Then one of the scientists makes a mistake.

Disaster strikes. Billions die.

They die because the simulated history flips into a high clock-speed. By the time the mistake is corrected, the simulation has advanced a millennium and a half. It's now centuries ahead of the Real in time, centuries behind in civilisation. Empires have risen and fallen, wars have swept the world. The city's language has shattered into mutually incomprehensible barbaric dialects. The translation modules have barely kept pace.

You listen to the shocked reports. The only good thing you hear is that the clock-speed has been slowed again, this time to a tenth that of the Real.

“So,” you summarise to the shame-faced scientists, the Alexandrian experts, the top people in the field, “you have brought those poor creatures to the brink of disaster. Nuclear war, ecological catastrophe, and what else? Oh yes—cultural calamity, as they discover that they
are
in a simulation. How long will it take for that to dawn on them?”

“Blame the SPs for that,” says Andrea Memmius, certified sage of Alexandria. Her tone is sulky. “They used an off-the-shelf navigational package as the basis for their extrasolar astronomy simulation. Naturally it is Ptolemaic. They were not to know—”

“That their virtual creations would one day send probes to the edge of the solar system? That they might just notice that the galaxies are spinning too fast? That the underlying physics of their world are inconsistent?”

“So far,” says Caro Odoma, the other Alexandrian, “the sim-people have shown remarkable creativity in rationalising these…dark matters!” His sidelong glance shares some private joke with his colleague, to your intense irritation. “They're resilient—I wouldn't worry about cultural calamity.”

“No indeed!” you snap back. “I'd worry about their dying by the decamillion in agony!”

Hector clears his throat. “Daphne,” he says, breaking protocol but you're past caring, “there may be a way for that to resolve itself, because of something we did already….”

He outlines his schema. You listen, hoping against hope that it'll work—that millions will not perish. That somehow, this appalling history can be set back on a reasonable course.

And, of course, that you won't lose points.

1.

I was just out of Arrivals and eyeballing the Remarkables above the Queen-stown terminal roof when the PA system called my name.

“Paging Lucy Stone…Passenger Lucy Stone, just off Flight NZ03 from Auckland, please go to the Airport Information desk.”

I stopped dead. My rolling case, in accordance with Newton's first law of motion, kept rolling and collided painfully with my calf muscles. It then rebounded (third law), toppled over (second law), and made me stumble (Murphy's law). As I squatted to recover the case I wondered wildly what I'd done wrong. My passport was in date, my card hadn't coughed at the ridiculously cheap internal flight ticket, and I didn't have any drugs or weapons (apart from the Leatherman Juice ladylike, natch) or animal or plant matter. Could it have been the shower gel? New Zealand's a war-on-terror state but didn't, as far as I knew, share the British and American exploding shampoo bottle and nitroglycerine-in-the-Evian paranoia du jour.

Speaking of paranoia, it didn't so much as flit across my mind that this might have anything to do with the Other Thing. I'd put two oceans between me and the Other Thing.

There was a ball of nickel-iron bigger than the moon between me and the Other Thing. There was a whole
planet
between me and the Other Thing. No, the Other Thing was definitely partitioned off elsewhere on the hard disk of my spinning mind as I rocked the case back on its wheels and stood up.

Another name and my name sounded across the parking lot, from different loudspeakers like an echo: “Alexander Hamilton…message for Lucy Stone…Alexander Hamilton…”

I straightened, clear in a swift conviction of what was going on. Alec Hamilton. Love of my life had stood me up. So much for the hair down and the pretty skirt. I scrunchied a severe ponytail and marched, case on its leash, back through the sliding doors and over to the Information desk.

“Hi,” I said, slapping down my open passport. “Lucy Stone. There's a message for me?”

Black eyebrows arched to a black hairline; slate-grey uniform shoulders shrugged. Over the top of the desk I could see her graphite-pencil skirt. Neat, neat. Maori stewardess, cuter than me.

“Oh yay,” she said. An opal oval fingernail swivelled a scrap of paper. “Ms. Stone. For you.”

I stared down at it, read it, then picked it up, holding hard on my hand's tremor.

“Thank you,” I managed to say, from a dry mouth. She bestowed me a smile and I gave her a rictus back. I turned around and walked out again, knees shaky as a newborn lamb's. I sat down on a bench facing the parking lot and the not-Remarkable mountain straight ahead. I looked down at the paper again. NZ Airlines headed notepaper with a message in a careful hand that belied the words:

Please tell Lucy Stone that Alexander Hamilton has been unavoidably detained with friends from the East.

That, and a telephone number.

The pretty skirt's lap was vibrating like a drum. I clutched my knees. The shaking spread to my elbows. Coming here and finding Alec had been for me an idea of escape. It had been in a different world entirely from
all that other stuff.
Alec had been in a different world. He'd known nothing, nothing at all, of my other life. I'd thought I'd been shielding him from it. I had been shielding
me.
All the partitions in my mind went down. The Other Thing was not on the other side of the world. It had followed me. It was here, and it was coming for me through Alec.

2.

There is no such place as Krassnia. If you were to draw it on a map, right where the borders of Russia, Abkhazia, and Georgia meet, and then fill it in, you'd need a fifth colour. On the other hand, Krassnia is a real place. I know, because I've been there; heck, I was born there. It has an official name, for the day when everyone's embassy recognises it (they won't): the Former Soviet Autonomous Region of Krassnia. FSARK. Look familiar? It should. Walk down any high street in Europe and you'll see these letters in black lowercase:
fsark;
on red plastic shopping bags, distributed free by the million in a rare fit of marketing nous by the Popular Department Store. All that the Store (Krasnorglav) needs to do now is get people to actually put its wares in the bags; which, since its bestselling lines are pirated CDs and Chinese and Vietnamese fakes of big-name luxury brands, could prove tricky. (There's also the fact that the bags themselves were the result of an accidental five extra zeroes in an order placed with the recently privatised plastics factory, KrasNorPlasKom.)

More about Krassnia later. For now, you only need to remember two things. First, you won't find it on the map, except on very detailed old maps of the SU and maps made by the Krassnian Ministry of Information (Kraskomfakt). Second, I was there when I was very young, and I've been back. Oh yes, I've been back. But when Amanda called, I hadn't been back. Except in dreams. The dreams mattered, as it turned out.

Home, late. Me on the sofa, laptop on my knees. Thai takeaway half eaten, remainder fit only for the fridge and the microwave if tomorrow was the same as today. Cherry smoothie likewise congealing. I was test-playing the raw version of the gory first-person slicer (Dark Britannia, sword and sorcery, barbarian-Arthurian grail quest with Roman-legionary revenants and Pictish zombies) that we hoped would make our fortune, and ticking boxes and noting glitches when the Skype icon winked. The caller ID was Mom.

I saved the action midchop (blue skin splits! green blood splatters!) and opened the speaker.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Oh hello, Lucy. Everything's all right.”

(Amanda always says that. I appreciate it.)

“I'm fine too.”

“It's late where you are.”

“It was you who phoned, Mom.”

“Oh! Yes. Well.” She made one of her us-girls-together noises, which I think is achieved by a light, throaty laugh while rubbing the phone through the hair behind her ear. It's usually a bad sign. “Do you remember Krassnia?”

“Of course I do. We left when I was what? Seven?”

“Seven, yes. So it was. But do you remember the language?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Do you ever
dream
that you're there?”

I stared at the screen as if the Eye of Sauron had just opened and closed on it. “What?”

“Seriously.”

I closed my eyes, leaned back on the sofa, and thought about it. “Yes, I suppose I do.”

“What?”

I leaned closer again. “Well Mom, yeah, I don't pay much attention to dreams, but as it happens, yes, whenever my unconscious or my brain's offline processing—or whatever it's supposed to be these days—wants me to dream about dark valleys or endless mountain slopes or long corridors where something really scary and official is waiting for me and I've missed my appointment and…yes, I guess I do go back there.”

“Great!” she said. “And what language do you dream all that in?”

“I don't…Wait. Russian, I think.”

“Think harder.”

I blinked hard. Amanda not being an early adopter, of video or anything else, the gesture was of course wasted.

“It's a goddamn dialect, Mom!”

“Language!” she chided, ambiguously. “Anyway, not to worry. You'll pick it up again in no time.”

“Why,” I asked, “would I want to pick it up?”

“I want you to write—is that the word?—a game scenario in it. Written in Krassnian and based on Krassnian legends. You know, like in
The Krassniad.”

The Krassniad
is Amanda's one and only commercial success. After she'd completed her PhD (“Myth, Memory and Ideology in the Krassnian Autonomous Region: An Investigation”) and failed to get it published even as an academic book, she'd had the bright idea of doing for Krassnia what James MacPherson had done for Scotland a couple of centuries earlier with the poems of Ossian. She'd taken the raw material of her notes: snatches of poetry still mumbled from the gap-toothed gobs of mountain bards who claimed to have been born in the reign of Tsar Alexander II; such fragments of illuminated manuscript as remained in Krasnod's Museum of the Peoples and in the two Orthodox monasteries that hadn't been turned into Houses of Atheism; and in the one surviving copy of
Life and Legends of the Krasnar
, compiled in the 1920s by Krassnia's leading Bolshevik ethnologist (shot in 1937)—all that and more she'd cobbled together and “freely translated” into English as
ancient lays
, into even what you might call a
national epic
, which was instantly banned in Krassnia (even in English, even under democracy) and enjoyed a brief vogue with the Mind, Body, Spirit crowd for its ancient wisdom and shamanic spirituality and among Hell's Angels and gaming geek-boys for the sword fights and the sex bits.

“You mean that hasn't been done already?” I asked.

(Not the most cogent of questions, but the one at the top of the stack.)

“No, it
hasn't,”
said Amanda, sounding exasperated. “The book's out of print in the US, and it's still banned in Krassnia, not that that makes much difference these days…. Anyway, nobody outside of Krassnia is interested in writing a game for it—the market's too small—and nobody inside of Krassnia is interested in anything but Western and Japanese games. So whoever developed it would have that market all to themselves.”

The cat ambled in, stretched himself onto the coffee table, and nosed at the foil containers. I swatted him away. He glared at me from under the stereo.

“A market you've just said isn't big enough. The game wouldn't break even.”

“I happen to know it would,” Amanda said.

I recognised that tone. It wasn't one that expected to be questioned.

“If you say so,” I said. “But who would actually develop it?”

“That company you work for,” she said. “Digital…Fist, yeah?”

“Digital Damage Productions,” I corrected, abstractedly. “The fist is the logo.”