The Restoration Game (22 page)

“Well,” I began, “why not make it have lots of players, each of whom starts off in the attacking horde—or the defending guard, if they want—and make it so the defenders have powers that get transferred to an attacker who kills them, and make it endlessly replayable by—”

“You mean make it an MMORPG?”

I had no idea what this meant, so I nodded firmly. “Yeah, and make it sort of cycle because when you get to the top of the game you have to turn around and defend yourself from the horde, which is of course all the new players—”

“Genius!”
Sean shouted. “Joe, what d'you think?”

Joe looked at Sean then at me and blinked very rapidly.

“I'll have to go out and think about it over a smoke,” he said.

“Code's doable,” said Matt, the curly-haired cute one. “Lotta work though. I wouldn't have time for all the admin.”

“Admin?” I said.

“Matt's the prettiest so we made him the secretary,” Sean explained. (Janine jabbed a needle in his thigh.)

“Like, spreadsheets?” I persisted. (Excel being the one office skill I'd mastered.)

“You looking for a job, American lady?” Sean said, with a fake accent and a real leer.

“You bet I am, mister,” I shot back.

“Can you handle Open Office?”

I thought he meant, you know,
an open-plan office
, so I said yes. After I'd worked my notice at Starbucks and started at Digital Damage I learned better, but the guys were kind about that.

The memory of that first evening at the Auld Hoose stayed in my mind after I said goodbye to Ross and Yuri. As I walked briskly along one side of St. Andrew's Square and down West Register Street and across Princes Street and up the bridges and down West Crosscauseway and around the corner and through the cloud of smokers around the entrance and into the Auld Hoose where Alec leaned at the bar with a hand on his pint and an eye on the door and a big range-finding rangy smile for me as I walked in I was thinking about that first time I'd been in that pub and had met the guys and that nagging half-caught memory of some word I had been reminded of by hearing Sean say salarium and that had slipped away like a fish through my fingers got…

—hooked, as Alec gave me a hug and whiskery kiss and set me back on my feet—

—and I smiled back and remembered where I'd seen that word and how its half-recollection had brought the Krassnian template for the new game from my childhood memories—

—because I had seen it in the Vrai glossary at the back of Avram Arbatov's book in Eugenie's apartment in Boston.

I stood grinning at Alec and I heard myself say, in a puzzled tone, “SIMULACRUM.”

“What?” said Alec.

“Nothing,” I said.

1.

The stretch limo was the exact shade of lilac made by black-currant juice dripped into melting vanilla ice cream, and so was my dress. I stepped out of the one, hitched up the skirt of the other, and ducked under an upraised golf umbrella through a skirl of bagpipes and a smirr of rain into the doorway of the Orroco Pier hotel. As I clicked my high-heeled way across the wet pavement I distinctly heard a hard-bitten old woman's voice say, “Aye, yon's another poor soul getting married.”

The wedding had been in the local Episcopal church, down by the shore of the Firth of Forth. A blink of sun had arrived just in time for the photos on the step and the later photos on the Binks—a grassy bank with a granite monument to Queen Margaret of Scotland—and on the quays of Queensferry Harbour. For both photo-ops we'd practically had to form an orderly queue, what with all the other bridal parties posing against the backdrop of the Forth Bridge and making the whole foreshore a fashion-shoot for kilts and satin meringues.

Most of the guests walked around the corner to the hotel, and I was quite willing to risk my heels on the cobblestones, but Suze insisted on squeezing every full contractual drop of juice out of the limos and dragged her groom, her parents, and me and the other bridesmaid back to the parking lot at the Binks. Just as well, because that was when the drizzle started. So, after a journey of one hundred yards and (no doubt) a mile-long contribution to the carbon footprint, here we all were.

And among the people who'd been invited for the reception but not the ceremony was Alec. I could see him, awkward in a suit, at the far side of the hotel lounge, beyond the dresses and hats and handshakes, smiling at me over all the headgear foliage with a look of surprise and delight, catching my eye.

I smiled back across ten metres of crowded room and dreaded speaking to him.

Two days earlier, my future had been bright and shiny and happy. I had been really looking forward to seeing Alec at Suze's wedding, on Saturday, August 9.

I sat curled up on the sofa in front of the television, watching the Olympic opening ceremony. Julie sat at the opposite end and Gail leaned against the middle on an arrangement of cushions.

All of us had reached the comfortable stage of having recovered enough from the previous night's hangover to be ready for a small G&T or glass of wine before bedtime. It was the night of Thursday, August 7. On Wednesday evening we'd all been out for a post-hen-party (Suze's, the previous weekend) getting-straight-back-in-the-saddle-after-a-fall-sort-of-thing session in the Brauhaus next door, and had slightly—well, to be honest, greatly—underestimated the potency of a succession of Belgian beers, particularly as chased by an interesting experimental range of special-offer brandies made from fruits other than grape.

Gail yawned. “Time for bed.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

Julie, currently in charge of the zapper, flicked to text and brought up the news headlines. All Olympics, Beijing, fireworks, local news, and—

Georgia enclave town under fire.

“Hey!” I said. “Go to 116.”

Heavy shelling and rocket fire is reported from the town of Tskhinvali, capital of the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia.
…

“Uh-oh,” I said. Or maybe: “Shit!”

Gail and Julie looked at me curiously. “What?”

“This is
huge,”
I said.

“Why should—oh, is that the place where you were born?”

“It's close,” I said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

Facepalm.

“You're really upset about this,” Julie said. “Uh—do you still have people there?”

I looked at my flatmates' concerned, puzzled faces and felt a bit bad that

I couldn't tell them the real reasons why I was worried, or indeed just how I knew that this was big news.

“No, no, nothing like that,” I hastened to assure the girls. “It's just—I mean I do feel for the people there, even if they're…”

I stopped, confused: I'd been about to say “even if they're Ossetes.” You can take the girl out of Krassnia but…

“Uh, I mean, even if there's fault on both sides, you know? But what I'm actually worried about is that this means that
right now
there's Russian and American troops on opposite sides of a
shooting war.”

“Americans?” Gail looked even more confused.

“Advisers in the Georgian army,” I told her. “And of course the Russians have soldiers in South Ossetia.”

“Oh, don't worry about that,” said Julie. “Bush and…the Russian guy will sort it all out at the Olympics.”

And with that we all wandered off to our beds. I sat up for a while looking at news on my laptop. Updates came in with frustrating slowness, even on the Russian TV online services. My last thought before I went to sleep was
I have a bad feeling about this.

Not bad enough, as it turned out.

Up until that night in August, everything had gone quite smoothly. We'd finished the Krassnian version of Dark Britannia in the second week in June, bang on schedule. It was very much a beta release, lacking some of the finer points and details that we were rushing to include in the official version, but it was robust and playable. We had an automatic system set up to send updates and bug fixes to anyone who had the game on their system. Small Worlds had taken delivery of a set of master disks; Ross Stewart, in the only communication I'd had with him since that evening in Harvey Nick's (other than emailing him an account of the scariest day of my life), had sent me a secure email of thanks for unspecified services; Amanda had called to tell me she was pleased with how well I was doing these days; £50,000 had been deposited in Digital Damage's bank account; and we'd all had a £500 bonus and a meal in the Kampong Ah Lee Malaysian Delight; and the morning after that, Sean had cracked the whip over us about how much harder we were all going to have to work to meet Dark Britannia's release date in September.

Well, the lads all had to work harder, but (despite Sean's “Everybody drops! Everybody fights!”) I didn't. I'd taken to going online to check out news from the Caucasus on sources like
Antiwar.com
and
the eXile
(and after that site got shut down in June,
the eXiled
) and Radio Free Europe and
Pravda.ru.
Krassnia came up rarely—a small demo here, an arrest there, the occasional word of concern about the fairness of the upcoming elections from Human Rights Watch or the International Crisis Group or the OSCE—but the escalating exchanges of fire between Georgian and South Ossetian forces had pushed their way far enough up the news agenda (of the sites I was following, I mean, not of the BBC, ITV, or CNN) for me not to be surprised this Thursday night, but not far enough for most people in the UK to have so much as heard of Ossetia.

Looking out for advance tremors of Krassnia's coming colour revolution was nowhere near the top of my agenda. I'd firewalled the Other Thing. The mysterious “Krassnian truth” intrigued rather than obsessed me—it was something I'd find out more about in due course, or that I'd someday have to regretfully file under “Forget.” The same was true of finding out which (if either) of the two men I'd met in April was my real father. Neither of them had shown any interest in having a closer relationship with me, or indeed in finding out himself what that relationship was.

No, what I was interested in that summer was Alec. Alec, and the build-up to Suze's wedding.

Alec first. He and I had fallen for each other, and that was that. We no longer spent every minute of every weekend together, but that was because we didn't have to. And although the research grant for Alec's project was about to run out, he was seriously considering staying on in Scotland for at least another year rather than go back to New Zealand. Secretly, I was considering going to New Zealand—two of the girls I'd met at Starbucks and whose Facebook pages I still followed had gone out there (one of them returning home, the other checking out the place to see if she liked it enough to emigrate) and both of them wrote glowingly of the country and of how easy it was to find work, what with Australia's open-cast mining boom luring people out of middle-class jobs and into driving hundred-ton dump trucks and the like, thus creating vacancies for Kiwis, whose flight across the Tasman Sea to fill the missing places in nursing and teaching and programming and office admin in turn created vacancies for incomers to NZ.

Alec had introduced me to hill-walking, in the Pentlands—the hills south of Edinburgh, and not too challenging, but he'd insisted that I bought proper hill-walking boots, trousers, fleece, and waterproof jacket in Tiso's on Rose Street, and that I got the hang of using a Silva compass and an Ordnance Survey map. It was a better way to spend the out-of-bed parts of week-ends than in shops and pubs, and it gave me a whole third circle of friends to add to the other two, of normal people and SF/F fans. And, by way of return, it had made sure Alec got included in these two circles.

I'd even managed to wangle Alec an invite to Suze's wedding reception. He was pleased. Without either of us saying anything, we both knew—well,
I
knew and I assumed Alec did—that one or other of us would announce some kind of decision about the next step of our future at this auspicious occasion.

Thursday, August 7, the morning after the bombardment of Tskhinvali, the front pages were all fireworks and acrobats.