The receptionist fakes a smile. “I’m sorry, but we don’t disclose guests’ names—”
“Could be,” a woman’s voice says from behind your shoulder. You begin to turn. “Did CapG services send you?”
“Uh, yeah,” you say, finishing the turn—
“Oh I’m sorry,” apologizes the receptionist—
“Well, you’re late.” She looks like a librarian. Mousy hair, black plastic spectacle frames, and a sternly disapproving expression. “Like the rest of this circus,” she adds, taking some of the sting out of the words. “Come on.” She turns and stalks towards the lobby staircase, not bothering to wait for you.
Ah, fuck it. She can bitch all she wants for a thousand an hour. A thousand an hour! Jesus, they’re paying me a thousand an hour for this? You follow her in a hurry.
She pauses at the top of the stairs, on the mezzanine that looks out across the city towards the international conference centre from behind the cunningly designed false frontage. “By the way, what’s your name?”
“Jack. Jack Reed. And you are Elaine Barnaby? From, uh, Dietrich-Brunner Associates?” Who are you and what do you do?
“Two out of two.” Her smile is less insincere than the receptionist’s, but you can tell it’s concealing the core message: Who is this slob, and is there some kind of mistake? “You’re not like the normal run of consultants CapG send us.”
You shrug. “That’s because I’m not one of their normal consultants.” She starts moving again, up the staircase towards the first floor like she’s got chromed pistons inside those trousers instead of legs. She probably cycles everywhere. You manage to keep up, but you’re breathing heavily by the time she barges through the fire doors and into a corridor on the second floor. “Much farther?”
“Just in here.” She waves you towards an office door, which unlocks with a clunk as she approaches. “Sit down. I want to get some things straight.”
Ah, right. This is where your thousand-euros-an-hour mirage evaporates on contact with the white heat of reality. Well, it was nice while it lasted. “Yeah, well, this job smelled funny from the first. I mean, CapG isn’t a game-development consultancy, so I was wondering why they were looking for someone with my skills. So I guess the disconnect was with the requirements you sent out?”
Barnaby shakes her head, then pushes a stray lock back behind her ear. You notice that she’s got very fine, fly-away hair. “One moment.” She flexes her hands, airboarding—there are subdermal chips in each of her finger joints, she can probably type two hundred words per minute without RSI. It’s an office world input method, not a gamer interface, but…“Let’s see. You’re a senior developer, formerly employed by LupuSoft, working on games that run on Zone-Phones. Right?”
Ding! You nod, still having trouble believing in it.
“Cool!” she says, a big fat grin spreading across her face like sunrise in the arctic spring. It’s a happy smile, too wide for that narrow face, and it makes her look unexpectedly attractive. “I wasn’t sure they’d find one in time.”
“But.”
“I need a Zone programmer,” she explains, “because I’ve got to audit a bank that’s located inside Avalon Four.”
“Audit a bank?” You know that’s got to be what Mr. Pin-Stripe was talking about, but it didn’t quite register at the time. “Inside a game?”
“Yes.” She picks up a leather conference folio that was sitting on the table and opens it. “It’s been robbed.”
“The bank. Robbed…?” All of a sudden the solid ground under your mental feet has turned into a solipsistic ice-sheet. “Hang on, that’s impossible. I think.”
“Right.” She nods, vigorously. “That’s what everyone I spoke to at Hayek Associates said. But they would say that, wouldn’t they?”
“Let me get this straight. Hayek Associates are a stabilization house, aren’t they? And they’ve been stabilizing Avalon Four—”
“A stabilization house would be a company that manages the in-game economy, wouldn’t it?” She’s making odd gestures with her hands, and for a moment they distract you because it looks like knitting, only nobody would use a two-hundred-millimetre needle.
“I think we’re using divergent terminology, but yes. I say ‘second-tier industry subcontractor,’ you say ‘bank.’ But the thing is, if it’s properly designed, robbing the bank should be impossible.”
“Why? It’s a database server, isn’t it? Someone grabbed a bunch of entries from a table and deleted—”
“Not exactly.” This is giving you a headache. “Zone games don’t run on a central server, they run on distributed-processing nodes using a shared network file system. To stop people meddling with the contents, everything is locked using a cryptographic authorization system. If you ‘own’ an item in the game, what it really means is that nobody else can update its location or ownership attributes without you using your digital signature to approve the transaction—and a co-signature signed by a cluster of servers all spying on each other to make sure they haven’t been suborned.”
“So it’s not physically on a server?” You can see her trying to keep up. “Could someone forge the signatures?”
“Not really.” You’re racking your brains now, because the authentication architecture of Zone isn’t something you’ve really studied, but a couple of old university courses are raising dusty echoes in the back of your head. “It’s based on the old DigiCash protocol, invented by a cryptographer called David Chaum, back in the eighties and early nineties. He figured it could replace credit cards on the Internet—it was designed to allow anonymous transactions but prevent fraud, and cryptographers had been whacking on it with clubs for twenty years before the Zone consortium picked it. The signature mechanism is very secure—you’d need to suborn the root keyservers for the entire Zone game space…”
You trail off into silence. Whoops, you think, and kick yourself. Suddenly a grand an hour doesn’t seem like very much money at all. Ms. Barnaby is looking at you with an expression you last saw in primary third, when Mrs. Ranelagh didn’t deign to notice your wee waving hand in time to give you a toilet ticket.
“Yes?” she asks, compressing so much data into the twenty-four-bit monosyllable that if you could patent the algorithm, you’d be set for life.
“Well, uh, I…wow,” you manage. “Why did you want me?”
She unwinds by a fraction of a degree. “You’ve got the same background and experience as the programmer who’s missing from Hayek Associates.” Programmer who’s—shaddup, Jack. “Everyone else is focussing on HA’s business-level organization, they dumped the gaming stuff on me, and I’m not really an expert.” She gives a little self-deprecating laugh that raises the temperature back above zero. “So I asked for a native guide.”
Ah. That explains it. Well, no it doesn’t, you realize, but it goes at least a third of the way towards it. “What do you do?” you ask her.
“I’m a forensic accountant.” She pulls that prim, mousy, librarian face again as she taps a bunch of papers in her folio into line.
“Oh. Well, ever done any gaming?” There’s always a chance. Some of the deadliest GMs you ever ran into back in your table-top days were accountancy clerks by day.