The Restoration Game (4 page)

Considering that my lunch had been three bait-sized mouthfuls of Tesco sushi and a dab of wasabi, this wasn't fair. It must have been the rice.

The guys, of course, had all had Cuppa Soups with Subway sandwiches as long and thick as their forearms, or something equally heavy like a good old Scotch meat pie, and were all rattling out code or documents on their keyboards and talking across each other.

They were talking so loud that Sean Garrett (the aforementioned PTB) almost didn't hear the phone. I barely heard it myself, until an escalating irritation drove it to the top of the stack.

“Somebody answer the fucking phone!” I yelled.

That was clearly not specific enough.

“Sean, answer the fucking phone!”

Sean looked away from the screen, looked at the phone on his desk as if noticing it for the first time (which it could well have been, given that we did everything by mobile and hardly anyone had ever rung us on the official office phone, which wasn't even on my desk and I was the actual admin person), and picked up the receiver.

“Sean—uh, Digital Damage Productions,” he said. He waved a hand behind his back, and the volume of conversation dropped. For a couple of minutes he was all “Uh-uh” and “Yes” and “Hmm.” Then he swivelled his chair and looked at the rest of us.

“Lucy, is Krassnia that godforsaken place you were dragged up in?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Can you speak the language?”

“More or less,” I said. “Bit rusty, but I could get up to speed, I guess. Why?”

“Tell you in a minute. And is it true that your mum wrote the fucking book on Krassnian mythology?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I have a copy.”

“Brilliant!” said Sean. He returned to his phone conversation. After about five minutes he put the phone down, and spun the chair around again. This time he waved his fists in the air.

“Wah-hoo!” he said. “I've just had a fucking amazing offer.”

…Which he then proceeded to outline, much along the lines of what Amanda had said to me. The ostensible client—the cut-out, as I thought of it—was itself a start-up, a Brussels-based company called Small Worlds that aimed to pitch adapted games to the niche market of small language groups. Whoever was on the other side of the phone hadn't tried to make it all seem like a fantastic coincidence—they'd claimed to have actually found me by trawling the agencies and Googling for anybody in the biz whose online CV showed a Krassnian connection, and to have known that I was the daughter of
The Krassniad
author Amanda Stone—all easily accessible knowledge—which was why they'd tried Digital Damage first.

Even so, the guys were all giving me looks that mingled congratulation with puzzlement.

“Kind of a funny thing to be marketing,” said Matt, our best coder, looking away from a screen on which he'd just Googled. “Krassnia's population is less than half a million.”

“That's Small Worlds’ problem,” said Sean. “They'll know what they're doing.”

“All the same,” said Matt. “Sounds a bit dodgy.”

“Probably a CIA plot,” I said, in my best stab at an American accent. (Which sounds at best Irish. My normal accent is Scottish with a Russian—or is it Krassnian?—with Scottish and NYC overlays, which leaves people guessing which tiny Inner Hebridean island I come from.) The guys all laughed, and that particular question dropped off the agenda, unanswered.

The guys—let me introduce you to the guys. Sean, you've met. Stocky and chunky with a greasy sheen on his face and his long, lank black hair. He's the entrepreneur, the man with the business plan. The business plan was complicated but the big idea, the Unique Selling Point, was very simple: online multiplayer games that would run fast on slow computers.

Suresh was Sean's first partner. A slim, quiet Bengali guy with a heavy Glasgow accent. It was Suresh who came up with the algorithm that made Sean's idea work. What it does is ruthlessly prioritise the use of the machine's resources: it'll sacrifice colour, rendering, detail, sound to keep the game running fast, and it does it seamlessly. In principle you could drop all the way back to stick figures with captions and word balloons, and the action would be just as fast as it is on the latest and shiniest game-optimised PC.

Joe's the high-level design guy, and the low-level art guy. He came up with DD's first game, Kronos. (That's the one set in a space station abandoned by some Elder Race and full of rich pickings and nasty surprises.) He also came up with the second game, Olympus, the one that was getting really bogged down until I met Joe and Sean in the Auld Hoose (Edinburgh geek and goth hangout) and suggested they change it from astronauts-and-AIs to swords and sorcery. Which is why the physics engine of Dark Britannia is still called mars.exe. Joe tries to keep his blond hair and his stubble the same length, with indifferent results. He smokes on the fire escape a lot.

And Matt, like I said, is the best coder. (All of the above are coders as well as all the other things I've said they do. Even I can be called on to code if necessary—though my actual work is all admin, in principle I'm just the worst coder, not a noncoder. That everyone should be a coder is a key component of Sean's business plan. He took it from
Starship Troopers
: “Everybody drops! Everybody fights!” One of his annoying little mantras.) Matt's the only one of the guys who's a real cutie. Tall, thin, with long fingers and short curly black hair. Very much attached, but we flirt. (Well, we used to, but you know what I mean.)

Joe was frowning.

“This won't work,” he said. He waved a hand at the schedule highlighted on the calendar tacked to the office wall. “September release. Not enough time to run a sideline release in parallel.”

“Yes, there is,” said Suresh. “It's a bodge job, come on. Lucy just has to crack her mam's book and give you a few tips and tweaks.”

“And translate the dialogue and internal prompts,” I added.

“And do all the voices too?” Joe said.

“No, no,” Sean said. “That's covered. Small Worlds has some contacts who'll take care of the voice acting. We send them the script, they can turn around the sound files within the week.”

“What about the landscape?”

This was dangerous territory, for reasons I'll explain in a minute. I jumped in quickly.

“Not a problem, Krassnia's landscape is sort of uneven plain with a mountain range anyway. I'd just have to plug in place-names, maybe make some up. There might be one or two features that need changing, but nothing we can't finesse.”

Joe shook his head. “I don't like it. We've got no slack as it is. Even if it was just the coding, there aren't enough hours in the day for us to do it.”

“With twenty-five K in the bank,” Sean said, “we can either all find some more hours and pay ourselves for them, or we can hire another coder.” He shrugged. “Your call, folks.”

I could see calculations going on behind people's eyes.

“And presumably we can all get a fat bonus out of the fifty thousand quid at the end,” I said.

“I'll think about that,” said Sean. “It would sure come in handy for our next project. But, well, maybe we could pay ourselves a bit of it. I'll have to see.”

“We could think of the Krassnian version as a beta release,” I added. “Middle of June gives us time to iron out any bugs before we ship in September.”

Joe looked twitchy. A quick trip to the fire escape was in his near future. “Look,” he said, “if Lucy can come back to me, ASA fucking P, with a schema that looks feasible…”

“We need to get back with an answer sooner than ASAP,” Sean said.

“How soon?” Joe asked.

“Day after tomorrow.”

They were all looking at me again.

“I'll have a schema on Joe's desktop, day after tomorrow, first thing,” I said.

They didn't believe me. I reminded them I'd come up with the idea for the game in the first place, that I'd written the original outline, that I'd spent a lot of evenings walking through the game, and that I knew it backwards and forwards. And that I'd read the book years ago and would only need a short time to brush up on the details.

They still looked sceptical, as well they might. What I hadn't told them was that I'd read the book not years but days ago, and that I had a very good reason for thinking that adapting the game to the book would be a doddle. I had a very good reason for not telling them that.

They agreed there was nothing to lose by trying. I should have felt elated. To my surprise, I felt scared.

Because from here on in, it wasn't just speculative. I was involved. We all were. More to the point, I had involved my colleagues in the affairs of Krassnia and the intrigues of the CIA.

And it was because of what I'd found in the pages of the book, and what had fallen out from between those pages.

6.

What had fallen out of the book, when I leafed through it the night after the night Amanda called, was a photograph. A faded colour photograph, taken in early September 1990 and—by virtue of its subject—looking a lot older than that. It showed a little girl clutching a big bouquet. The girl was wearing a brown dress with a white bib apron with shoulder frills, and on top of her head a big white multiple bow, like an origami lily in organza. Cute and sweet: the sort of look some Japanese girls pay good money for these days.

I was the little girl. The outfit was my Soviet school uniform. The bouquet was to be presented to my teacher on the first day of school. I was smiling in the photograph, but that was taken just before I'd burst into tears. I don't remember how my mother had cheered me up. I don't know either how my mother was able to get me into school two years younger than all the others. The next memory that comes to mind is of sitting in the front passenger seat of her old Moskvitch, trying to click the retrofitted seat belt while holding the oversized bouquet. My mother leaned over and helped. Then bumping along the unmetalled, potholed road from the apartment blocks to the primary school.

It was the playground, I think, that cheered me up. As I joined the queue of neatly uniformed seven-year-olds in front of the main entrance I eyed the slides and swings. They were painted pink and green and purple, and made of the kind of pipes you saw outside apartment blocks and factories, combined with painted carved log sculptures of the ugliest characters from my picture books.

Handing the bouquet to the teacher. Taking my place among the rows of wooden desks under a framed portrait of Lenin. The smells of carbolic and wee, of chalk dust and pencil sharpenings.

All my good memories of that classroom are overshadowed by the memory of the first really frightening day of my life. That came almost exactly a year later.

As for what I found
in
the pages of the book…

The evening after Amanda's call I got back to the flat about nine. My flatmates, Julie and Gail, had been and gone. They work nine to five, not eight to eight. I dumped the Tesco bag on the kitchen table, stabbed the plastic film over the Healthy Eating Mushroom Tagliatelli with a fork a few more times than I had to, and stuck the meal in the microwave. While waiting for the ping I ambled through to the living room and took
The Krassniad
down again from the shelf. Back in the kitchen, I put the book down on the table and set up a wine glass and wine box.

Ping.

I ate with the book in one hand and a fork or glass in the other, slugging Namaqua between bites. After I'd finished eating I skooshed a refill and kept on skimming the book.

Here's what I found.

Skip the begats and cut to the chase.

There's this guy, see, name of Duram. Strapping, handsome lad, in his teens when the story starts. Works the fields, minds the kine and swine, but he's not a serf. Oh no. Eldest son of a free farmer, Mordan, a respected local strong man, whose words carry weight at the moot. The Krassnar are typical barbarians: in other words, civilised. They settled like sediment out of a big current of migration that, centuries ago, helped to bring down the Roman Empire. They farm the plains. The fields of the free farmers are worked by their own families, as well as a variable number of churls, thralls, and serfs. The free farmers are exploiters all right, but they aren't the ruling class. Oh no.

Above the plains looms a mountain range, and in fastnesses of that range dwell the lords of the land, the Vrai, who take little interest in the Krassnar other than to exact tribute. The lordly mountain clans claim to be descendants of the Roman garrison. More probably, they are descended from some breakaway of the migration that slew the garrison, and acquired a little culture from its widows. They have just enough Roman blood to be arrogant, enough Roman learning to be decadent, enough Christianity to be intolerant, enough heathenry to conjure demons. They claim to hold the land of the Krassnar on behalf of Byzantium. Byzantium knows little of them, and cares less. An annual tribute of precious stones and metals—partly obtained by robbery of other tribute caravans, partly by mining in the mountains—trickles to Constantinople.

Duram grows up taking all this for granted until a Vrai lordling rides into the village with his retinue, carries off half the crop, and rapes Duram's sister, who later dies giving birth to the lordling's bastard. Duram, by this time, has worked himself up to swearing vengeance and gathering a gang of young ruffians around him, much to the dismay of his father. At his sister's death, Duram and his band set off for the mountains. Along the way they intend to recruit any malcontent and fight any Vrai they meet.

Cue a series of adventures and exploits which you'll know the general drift of from the tales of Samson, David, Arthur, William Wallace, and Robin Hood. I'm not sure how many of these parallels were in the original fragments, or whether my mother made them up. Anyway, after dealing by force and trickery with all kinds of opposition, treachery, magic, femmes fatale, spectral legions, Vrai spies, and all the rest, Duram and his by now much more formidable band march out across the plain just beneath the mountains to challenge the Vrai direct.

The Vrai ride out to meet them….

It was when I'd reached this point in the story that the light came on.