The Restoration Game (9 page)

“Ah,” I said, delighted. “You're a fan!”

“A fan?”

“You know—science fiction.”

“Never read the stuff,” he said, in that dismissive way normal people have.

I must have looked crestfallen. “Oh.”

“I'm a zoologist,” he added, like that explained it.

“And you study kiwis,” I said, sounding knowledgeable.

“Kiwis?”

“That's what Suze said.”

“She knows perfectly well I'm doing research on sheep.”

“Sheep?” I couldn't help giggling.

He was still looking straight at me. “I've heard all the jokes.”

“Oh, I didn't mean to—but why sheep?”

“Very important animal, it's absolutely crucial to our economy.”

“Yeah, I suppose, but I mean Scotland has—”

“The
New Zealand
economy,” he said.

“Oh! You're from New Zealand! So that's what Suze meant.”

Alec closed his eyes and shook his head. “What?”

“When she said you were a Kiwi biologist.”

Alec laughed.

“Now we've got that cleared up,” he said, “what do
you
do?”

At this point what was going through my mind was the story my mother had told me when I asked how she met my father: how she'd fallen for a tall, bearded, pipe-smoking student at a party, and how after some time for some reason they had fallen out, and then a few years later the guy had done the most crazy and romantic thing imaginable: he'd turned up on her doorstep—well, in her stairwell—in Krasnod. He'd come all that way to see her. In a truck. (Amanda had never actually spelled out what had happened next, but the date was some time in late 1984 and I was born in June 1985, so it was a matter of you do the math.) And I was thinking maybe my mom and I shared the same type and that if so I wasn't going to let all the rest of that history repeat.

“Oh,” I said, “I do admin for a small start-up computer games company.”

“Which one?”

“Digital Damage.”

“Kronos!” Alec cried. “You work for the company that made Kronos?”

And that was it: after all those initialisation crashes in the conversation—Founding Father and brides' dresses and science fiction and kiwis and fucking sheep—it was up and running.

After some time we noticed our glasses were empty. Leaving Alec to occupy the corner, I headed for the kitchen, to find it crowded as before. As I filled the glasses Gail marched in and strode up to the tall bearded programmer, elbowed past the guy he was talking to, and got right in his face.

“Excuse me,” she said.

“Yes?”

“What I want to know,” she said, “is how you can justify what you're going to be doing in Saudi.”

“I don't see anything wrong with it,” he said.

“It's disgusting and it's oppressing women.”

The guy scratched the back of his head. “Aye, sure, it's a repressive regime and all that, but it's not like I'm supporting it. How's getting a contract in Saudi any worse than buying petrol?”

“But a contract to do
that!”
Gail shuddered her head and shoulders. “Teaching Unix! Ugh!”

The guy looked completely baffled now.

“What the fuck have you got against Unix?”

“I've got nothing against
them,”
said Gail. “It's the—you know, what's been done to them, and they're probably
slaves
, and the use that's made of them, keeping women under guard. How can you possibly say that's—”

She stopped and glared. “Why are you laughing?”

I left them to it.

It would have been disloyal to my flatmate to tell Alec about her contretemps. I didn't want to get back on the subject of mishearings and misunderstandings, but I was grinning all over my face when I got back to our corner. Alec must have thought I was beaming at him all the way across the room. He gave me a
very
warm smile when I handed him his drink. He might even have been blushing. Not, you know, that I minded.

“So what are you working on now?” he asked.

“Dark Britannia,” I said.

“Swords and sorcery with a smattering of Matter of Britain?”

“Got it in one,” I said. “Sort of sword in the stone and Grail quest mash-up. With zombies. And Romans.”

Alec started telling me about some recent research on Roman handheld, lead-slug-firing crossbows, and for the first time I found myself only half listening. Because when I'd mentioned Dark Britannia I'd realised that I couldn't tell Alec anything about the Krassnian version of the game. The front company, Small Worlds, had of course included a clause on commercial confidentiality in the contract. But there was more to it than that. It was personal, not professional. The feeling that had crept over me earlier that evening about the scary skein of connections I'd begun to discover, and the troubling tone of all the passing references I'd found to Krassnian affairs, the whole
Other Thing
…this was something I wanted to keep from the lads.

As I looked into Alec's bright blue eyes, and listened to the enthusiastic, innocent, fannish flow of his voice, I knew I wanted to keep the Other Thing from him too.

No, that wasn't quite right: I wanted to keep him from the Other Thing. I wanted to
protect
him from it.

In that, of course, I failed.

But later that night I wanted Alec to protect me. I had been seriously creeped out by the suspicion that the young beggar had followed me home. When I looked around and noticed that we were among the last people at the party and that Julie and Gail had long gone, I didn't want to go home on my own and I had the perfect excuse not to.

“Alec,” I said, “would you mind very much walking me home?”

“Not at all,” he said.

“It's not far, just down to Tolcross and up a bit.”

“No worries,” he said.

Outside, he paused for a moment on the porch to fill and light his pipe. Small bowl, curved stem.

“Peterson,” he said. “‘The thinking man's pipe.’”

He gave me his arm and I took it and we set off around the corner and down Home Street in good order with me misplacing my heels not too often and Alec taking these stumbles in his stride. Under a light drizzle late clubbers swayed in giggling or roaring groups: girls with bare legs and arms and lads in short-sleeved shirts.

“Funny,” I said, “how much nicer pipe smoke smells. Than cigarettes, I mean.”

“Only when it's fresh,” said Alec, through his teeth. “That's why I only smoke outside.”

“My father smoked a pipe,” I said. “Well, my mother's ex-boyfriend.”

“Hm,” said Alec, taking the pipe from his mouth this time, “you haven't told me much about yourself.”

“That's because I'm mysterious,” I said, giving his elbow a squeeze.

“Like why you don't have an American accent.”

“Oh, that's because I was”—the rest sung nasally—”bo-o-rrnn in the You Ess Ess Arrr!”

“Under a wandering star,” Alec sang back.

We laughed and scooted across at the lights.

“Seriously,” said Alec, “you were born in the Soviet Union?”

“Ay-yup,” I said. “Seven years there—well, it was called the CIS when we left—then four years in Edinburgh, ten years in New York, and two years here.”

“How did all that come about?”

“My mother's an academic, she has to move around.”

“Why d'you come back to Edinburgh?”

“Ah, shit, that's complicated.”

We'd reached the entrance to the block.

“Long story?” Alec said.

“Yes.”

Now that we'd stopped he was facing me.

“I'd like to hear it sometime,” he said.

I fumbled my keys from my shoulder bag, and let them jingle.

“Would you like to hear it tonight?”

A smile spread across his face like sunlight across a planet.

“Maybe…in the morning?” he said. I opened the door and stood aside, arm welcoming. “Well, come in,” I said. Alec stepped past me.

As I closed the door I heard the footsteps of someone who'd just walked by:
squish, squish.

I locked the door and led Alec up the stone stairs, feeling quite safe.

1.

A couple of months after I started working for Digital Damage, I played a little prank on the lads. I snatched an opportunity of everyone's being coincidentally out of the office on various brief errands to set all the desktops' Google language preferences to Klingon. One by one the lads returned from the post office or the sandwich shop or the fire escape and sat down and continued working or (it being lunchtime) doing a little recreational webbrowsing. Whether working or slacking, the lads use Google a
lot.

I sat back, like the evil H. R. cat in
Dilbert
, and waited for the cries of anguish to erupt.

Nothing happened. Work continued without interruption all afternoon. No one said anything about it. Sean sent all of us an email reminding us to lock our screens or log off every single time we left the desk, “even if it's only for a slash or a smoke.”

My respect for the team went up a level.

So when I arrived at the office before everyone else, about eight on the Monday morning after my first weekend with Alec, still breaking into a big loopy grin whenever I thought about it, which was like every five minutes or so, I was not
too
worried when I turned on the desktop computer, fired up the web browser to check the news headlines and Astronomy Picture of the Day, and found that it had been hacked.

The hack was one of those cunning social engineering jobs that look like your antivirus software has splattered a big urgent message box right across your screen to
tell
you you've been hacked. And that gives you an option to download a specialised software tool to get rid of this new and dangerous virus
right this very minute before it does any more damage!

If you're a sufficiently clueless or panicked user (and there are enough such to make this scam a good bet) what you download is, of course, a piece of software (known as malware or spyware, in the biz) that turns your computer into an engine spamming out bright flashing not-safe-for-work ads linking to porn sites (themselves often a different scam or honeytrap, but that's another story) or that just lurks in the background until it does something even more outrageous and that you might not notice at all.

The tiny flaw in the cunning plan of whoever had hacked my computer (or, more precisely, something upstream of my web browser) was that the urgent message purported to be from an antivirus package that no one in the biz bothers with anymore, configured to run on Windows Vista, which I won't say anything bad about but which was not the best cover story for getting into an office system that runs on Linux. (An operating system where viruses die like earthworms in sunlight.)

So I put down my coffee mug, laughed in the stupid message's face, and mouse-clicked it off. It bounced back up. I cursed and ran my real antimalware tool, which reported that it had got rid of an intruding.exe file.

The big urgent message box was still there. Fuck.

By the time Sean and Suresh trickled in at 8:30 I was very close to tears of frustration.

“I didn't download
anything
,” I told them. “I just clicked on my book-marks to the Beeb and APoD. And I've run the removal tool, then a full system scan, then restarted, and that fucking thing is
still there.
I can't even minimise it.”

“Just as well you can't,” Suresh chuckled. “Not the sort of thing you want to ignore.”

I glared at him. Like I would do
that.

“You clean the mess off Lucy's PC and I'll check where it came from,” said Sean.

“Sure,” said Suresh. He looked down at me. “Um, let me…”

I got up and he sat down. Meanwhile Sean had gone to his own desk.

Suresh's long brown fingers danced over my keyboard. My desktop screen disappeared and was replaced by a command line. He rattled in a string of code and hit Enter. A response came up, as incomprehensible to me as the query. Suresh frowned. Started again.
Taptaptaptap
…

“Shit!” Sean shouted. “Fucker's all over mine too. Must be on the system server. Give me a minute.”

It took an hour. Sean and Suresh toiled in the truth mines, while Matt (our best coder, like I said, but games not systems), Joe, and I kept the caffeine supplies coming and got on with whatever we could do that didn't involve using a computer. Joe doodled sketches and went back and forth to the fire escape, Matt thumbed through a manual, and I got busy with an English-Russian dictionary, a Russian-Krassnian dictionary, a Krassnian-Krassnian dictionary, and the game's dialogue script and prompts.

(Krassian-Krassnian? Outcome of a classic Soviet-1930s epic fail in linguistics policy. Y'see, Krassnian, though it's a Circassian language, used to be written in Latin script, just like English, because the Vrai originally spoke a Romance dialect, and sometime in the Dark Ages had converted from a characteristically muddled and benighted version of Gnosticism to Roman Catholicism, which consolidated their attachment to a Latin script even after the Vrai dialect had just about died out (no doubt because the Vrai had to use the Krassnar tongue to shout insults and orders to their serfs). Before the Revolution most of the population of Krassnia couldn't read—except the Vrai aristos, and they could read Krassnian and Russian, Latin and Cyrillic script with equal facility.