The Restoration Game (3 page)

Then I caught up with myself. “But we're just starting! Why not—?”

“Go to one of the big-name companies? You know why not.”

I did, too. “OK,” I said. “I can see that. But—”

“Look, Lucy, give me a minute to explain how this is gonna work. You told me ages ago that Digital…whatever was working on some kind of dark fantasy fighting game, yeah? Heroes with swords, craggy landscape, gloomy ruins, spectres and slime, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Dark Britannia.”

“Right!” she said. “All you'd have to do is change the landscape map, tweak the costumes, plug in Krassnian dialogue and prompts, rename and rejig your demons and dwarfs and so forth, and there you have it, tah-dah!—Dark Krassnia!”

Now this was actually not a bad idea, and one very much along the lines that Sean Garrett, the PTB (Pony-Tailed Boss), founder and genius and hard taskmaster of DDP, had been thinking aloud about for months. Aloud is more or less how he does all his thinking, and you can occasionally interrupt this stream or rather torrent of consciousness and break it up into something that could from a distance be mistaken for a conversation (another word for which—here's a clue, Sean—is dialogue) and one component of such sequences that you could have drag-and-dropped into more or less any of his recent rants and rambles was:
You know, when this thing takes off we can franchise it out for local adaptation in every fucking country in the world that has a Dark Age heroic mythology and you know what countries that leaves out? Only the ones that are still in the fucking Dark Ages! Ha ha ha!

“That's by no means all,” I said. “And I don't see us doing it while we still don't have Dark Britannia done and dusted. When do you need it?”

“Middle of June,” she said.

“Four months? No way!”

“It can be as quick and dirty as you like,” Amanda said. “We're not talking a flagship release here. Digital could even claim it had been pirated. Come to think of it, that's probably…hmm…”

“The money would have to be good,” I said. “If I'm going to pitch it to the lads.”

“Fifty thousand on agreement, hundred thousand on delivery.”

“Pounds? Euros?”

“Dollars.”

Oh well. Still in not-to-be-sneezed-at territory, for a company as small as ours.

“I think I can make that fly,” I said.

“Oh, don't
you
try selling this to the team,” said Amanda. “
My
people will talk to
your
people, OK?”

A couple of questions will have occurred to you. One: how is this lady professor of cultural anthropology or whatever going to come up with a hundred and fifty thousand dollars? Two: what does she want with a multiplayer online role-playing game in Krassnian in the first place?

They occur to you, but they didn't occur to me.

The only question that occurred to me was: hmm, so what's behind the CIA's sudden interest in Krassnia?

I already knew the answers to the other two, because I already knew my mother was a spook.

3.

Not that it hadn't been a bit traumatic finding out, at the age of thirteen, right in the middle of my rebellious, weed-smoking, body-piercing, diary-keeping, two-fingers-down-the-throat puking, hormone-churned huff at the world. If this scene was in a movie they'd need to cast a different actress, who'd be in the credits as Teenage Lucy, and rummage up a roomful of late-nineties kipple. So you imagine me sitting on my bed, chin on knees poking through the cultivated distress of my jeans, leaning on a big batik cushion and facing a Kurt Cobain poster on the wall opposite. The Cranberries are messing with my head through earphones the size of earmuffs. I'm reading a thick Guy Gavriel Kay paperback. Scene set? Good. Enter Amanda, after a token knock.

I scowled at her and saw her lips move. I stuck a thumb in the book and reached around the back of my head and prised away Dolores's dolorous lyrics.

“What?”

“There's something I've been meaning to tell you,” Amanda said, looking awkward.

“I know,” I said. “Don't smoke. Do my homework. Use a condom. Eric isn't my father.”

Wow, that one worked. I could see her flinch. I almost felt sorry for her. Almost. But I was cruel then.

“That isn't…” she said.

“That wasn't…” she added.

“How do you know?” she got her act together enough to ask.

“Mom, I'm not
stupid
,” I said.

She didn't inquire further on that point. She came and sat down on the only other seating in the room, an old beanbag opposite the bed, sinking so far that I had to lean forward to see her face.

“What I've been meaning to tell you,” she said, “is, um…it's about Krassnia. We had some good times there, didn't we?”

“Yes, Mom, I had a very happy childhood there. Until you took us away from it.”

She winced again. “It wasn't my choice. The place looked like it was about to blow. All US citizens were advised to leave.”

“And nothing happened.”

(Apart from the scariest day of my life, which rather undercut my point, but Amanda ignored that opening.)

“We didn't know that then,” she said. “Anyway”—she chopped with her hand, looking impatient—”that's all beside the point. I'm not going to let you rake all that up again. This is about something that really does concern you. It's about what I was doing in Krassnia in the first place.”

She leaned back farther into the beanbag, as if to make sure that if I were to make some sudden movement, she would be out of range.

“Your research?”

“Kind of,” she said. “Um, well. My research wasn't just for my thesis, and it wasn't just about, you know, all that ancient stuff. I was sending a lot of it to, well, someone at the US embassy in Moscow. Someone who sent it all back to, um, to Langley, Virginia.”

“You were a
CIA agent?”
I shrieked.

“The correct term is ‘asset,’” she quibbled. “But, yes, that's about the size of it.”

The implications weren't really sinking in yet.

“Why are you telling me now?” I asked.

“I've been exposed,” she said. “A guy at Langley has been arrested for working for the Russians, and for the Soviets before that, and he's confessed. He gave the Agency a list of the people he exposed.”

“And your name's on the list?”

Amanda nodded. “Uh-uh. None of this is public, OK?”

“So why are you telling me?” I demanded. “Am
I
on it? Are you in danger?”

“No,” she said. “People I worked with, yeah…” She chewed her lip, looking up to a corner of the ceiling, and sighed. “Some of them have been arrested already.”

“But Krassnia broke away, didn't it? Why should they care about anyone's spying on the Soviet Union?”

“Hah!” said Amanda. “It broke away, sure, but it huddled close to Russia. And the local secret police are still the old Soviet secret police, just with new initials.”

“Why do I have to know this?” I was really pissed with my mom for laying this on me.

“Because,” she said, “you might get approached, sometime. Leaned on, I don't know, pressured in some way. Maybe asked to do something a little bit illegal, then blackmailed into doing something
really
bad, and then…”

She waved her hands about, frowning.

This all struck me as suspiciously vague.

“This isn't just a way to stop me smoking blow, is it?”

“No, Lucy, it's not!” She looked thoughtful. “But that would help. Anyway, tell me if anything unusual happens in your life—anything at all.”

How was I supposed to know what was unusual? I glowered for a bit, then a line of attack came to mind.

“Why did you work for the CIA anyway?” I asked. “They were killing and torturing people back then, in Salvador and shit. I've read all about it.”

“I'm sure you have,” she said. “The Russians were doing worse, in Afghanistan and shit.”

“I've read about that too,” I said. “It's no excuse.”

“Look, Lucy,” Amanda said. “I'm—I was just doing what any good American would—should—have done. I was letting my government know about important developments, matters they really needed to know about to keep America safe. And, I might add, to help people in Krassnia who were suffering under the Soviets, and who might have suffered even more in the aftermath if we hadn't—if our government hadn't had a good idea of what was going on, among the mountain peoples, the ethnics, and so forth. You can see what's going on in Yugoslavia, in Chechnya, and places like that. None of that's happening in Krassnia, and I think the work I did had something to do with that. What the Agency may or may not have done or condoned in other parts of the world has nothing to do with me. So my conscience is clear.”

She didn't quite add, “young lady!” but I could hear it in her tone. With the result that I argued right back, and we both ended up yelling at each other. This was fairly typical of how we got along then.

So after the inevitable door-slam I got on the phone to vent my annoyance into my favourite sympathetic—if slightly deaf—adult ear, that of my great-grandmother, Eugenie. (My grandmother, Gillian, was and is the most conventional whitebread housewife I've ever met. Totally different from her daughter and from her mother. You'd almost think there's some kind of generational rebellion thing going on.)

“Mom just told me—”

“Stop!” Great-Grandma Eugenie cried.

“What?” I said. “I just wanted to—”

Great-Grandma Eugenie said: “I
know
what you want to talk about, Lucy dear. Please don't! It's not really a suitable subject for you and I to discuss. Now, tell me how you're doing at school.”

I did, with ill grace. After clicking her tongue at my grades and chuckling sympathetically at my surly remarks about certain girls who were, like, totally making my life a misery, Eugenie said quite casually: “Oh, Lucy dear, wouldn't you just love to come up to see me? Just name a day and I'll pay for your Greyhound tickets.”

A couple of weekends later I made that trip. Up Saturday, back Sunday.

Eugenie told me some things about
her
visit to Krassnia, back in the 1930s, along with quite a few little details of her life story that she'd never told Amanda.

(Oh yes. My great-grandmother was in Krassnia too. And it's not a coincidence that my mother followed in her footsteps, kind of, in more ways than one. But we'll come to that later.)

Over the next few weeks, I kept a close eye and ear on everyone I knew at school. In my diary I noted every clique rumour or slighting remark, and every week went through them and added them to a table I drew up at the back of the book.

Nothing would have pleased me more than to be able to stand up and open my mouth like what's-her-name at the end of the
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
remake and scream that one of my class enemies (so to speak) was an FSB agent. Sadly for me, the opportunity never came up. A month or two of this and it got boring, even for me. I found another hobby: role-playing games. In those days we played them around a table, with rule-books and score-sheets made from paper. (You don't believe me? Check Wikipedia.) I once honestly thought that the whole idea of Dark Britannia had come from a sort of mental mash-up of all the games I played back in my dice-rolling days.

4.

You're an orc
[strike that, we can't call them ores. Keep those serial numbers filed off!].
You're a breath-chokingly ugly, squat, heavyset, lightly armed barbarian warrior. Looking around, you see that you are in the front rank of a horde of likes-of-you, on a darkling plain. Shuddering at the sight of your comrades-in-arms, you turn away.

Facing you, across the darkling plain, is another ignorant army, but this one is made up of tall, flame-haired, handsome people whom we might as well call elves.

In the far distance, looming above the darkling plain, is a range of mountains. And looming above the range is a central peak, about whose summit a weird glow flickers. You don't have time to think about this, because you and the rest of your ugly ignorant army is striding forward, rank upon rank, then breaking into a charge, and within seconds you are mixing it with the beautiful people.

You manage to hack down an elf. You grab his glittering sword, so much better than yours, just in time to wield it against the next elf, who is bigger, faster, and angrier than the one you've just dispatched.

And whose sword is longer, sharper, and much more magical than the one you've just snatched up.

These things are sent to try you. It
builds character.
Character points give you a better start in your next life.

If you make it through this first battle (and in your first few lives, you probably won't, but you'll learn) you and the much-thinned but betterarmed and somewhat less-repulsivelooking ranks of your comrades discover the darkling plain is on closer inspection a richly varied landscape thickly bestrewn with forts, inns, ruins, towns, gullies, forests, marshes, cliffs; and inhabited by mysterious strangers, alluring wenches, rich merchants, false prophets; and absolutely swarming with Pictish [
strike
] tribal zombies and Roman [
strike
] [
stet
] Roman legionary revenants; all of whom provide obstacles and opportunities on the way to the central peak with the weird glow.

Along the way, your weapons, skills, magical abilities, and physical appearance improve with each success, until eventually you (or more likely, one of your so-called comrades and companions who has stolen a march on you) struggle to the summit of the central peak and plunge into the weird glow. Within it, there's a text floating in glowing magical letters, a whole goddamn grimoire of spells that you can use to confer power on you and your weapons. Brandishing a now even more magical sword, you (or your rival) emerge as the new king of the hill.

You turn and look back the way you have come.

Far away across the darkling plain, a vast horde of hideous barbarians is advancing like an incoming tide.

You and your companions march out to meet them.

5.

I had my elbows on the desk, my fingertips pushing up the skin between my orbits and my eyebrows (thus propping my eyelids open without smudging my eye shadow) and a coffee mug cooling to drinkability a little way to the right of the stack of pieces of paper I was busy putting off starting to work through. At 2 p.m. in the afternoon, a week or so after Amanda's late-night phone call from NYC, my lunch was trying to make me snooze.