It’s ten thirty and you’re glumly contemplating an early night and a seven o’clock session in the gym when your phone rings. You look at the display with a sinking feeling: It’s a particularly tedious LARP called SPOOKS, a real-time game in which you’re acting your parts in a shadowy pan-European intelligence agency locked in a struggle for global hegemony with the forces of Chinese military intelligence, the Russian FSB, and, of course, the CIA.
“Yes?” You try not to snap.
“Elaine Barnaby? This is Spooks Control. Are you busy right now?”
You glance around your beautifully decorated and utterly sterile worker celclass="underline" “Not particularly. You know I’m in Edinburgh?”
“That’s why we’re calling.” Your nameless Control sounds drily amused. “On behalf of our sponsors.” The spooks at the centre of the organization in the game you play. “Your authenticator is—” He rattles off a string of nonsense words, just to prove he’s got access to your Control file.
“I’m on business…”
“So are we. We were hoping you could do us a small favour while you’re there.”
“How small?” As usual, there’s no face to go with the call, just the eye-in-a-glass-pyramid-in-Docklands logo. If this was a video call, at least you could glare at him. “It’s half past bloody ten!”
“We need a small parcel delivering.”
“A small parcel. What’s wrong with FedEx?”
“Well, as you just pointed out, it’s half past ten at night. The parcel’s sitting downstairs in your hotel lobby. It needs delivering to—” He rattles off a set of Galileo co-ordinates. “That’s about half a kilometre away from where you’re sitting.”
“Humph.” You look at the phone speculatively. “What’s it worth?”
“To you? A twenty-minute walk before bedtime. To the recipient? Priceless.” Control sounds smug. You can picture him sitting in some bed-sit, working through his check-list of in-game tasks in order to convince himself he’s got a life.
There’s no easy way to say no without giving offence, and anyway, you were thinking about doing something before bed—“I’ll do it.”
“Thank you. I’ve been told to tell you, Agent Barnaby, that a hell of a lot depends on this package being in place before midnight local time.”
“Sure.” You hang up, pull your shoes and glasses on, grab your jacket, and go downstairs.
It’s dark outside, and there’s a single tired-looking clerk on reception. You smile at him tentatively. “I understand you’ve got a parcel for me? Barnaby, room 214.”
“I think so, let me just go and see…” He shuffles off into the back office, then returns, holding a DHL package. “If you’d sign here, please?”
“Sure.” You swipe your phone across his reader and thumbprint the signature. “Thanks.”
Outside, the evening air is cool and smells faintly of the cherry blossom that’s piling up in the gutters at the side of the pavement. You pull on a disposable plastic glove then pull the tab on the parcel. This recording will self-destruct in thirty seconds. Rumour has it that the first SPOOKS campaign got the beta-testers arrested and questioned for a week under the Terrorism Act before the police realized it was a game; that’s why you carry a special endorsement on your ID card. The parcel turns out to contain a bland-looking matte black plastic box about the size of an old-time DVD case, and some heavy-duty outdoor bonding pads. There’s also a brief, printed note on paper. “Attach to front of building above eye level facing the street. When attached, initiate pairing with your phone to ‘unnamed device 1142.’ Passcode is 46hg52Q. Once paired, dial ##*49##*, and leave the area. When home, text Control.”
Bloody typical. You pocket the bugging device, or whatever it is, key the co-ordinates into your specs, and let the overlay guide you along the pavement towards the target building. This sort of nonsense is partly why you’ve been thinking of retiring from SPOOKS; it’s almost tediously realistic. Not James Bond swigging cocktails by the pool in Grand Cayman, just “pick up package X, transport to location Y, phone number Z.”
Location Y turns out to be an impressive crescent of Georgian stone town houses. They’ve got flights of steps like stone drawbridges, jutting out over a dry stone moat with windows in the basement—and steps down to them, for these are garden flats. You hunt around for a few minutes until you find the right set of steps, then approach the door. There’s a row of ten buzzers next to the entrance, and right at the top of the row someone has chalked a blue rectangle with your SPOOKS cell warchalk sign. You take out the box and the adhesive pads, position it carefully, and jump through the digital hoops to switch the thing on. (It’s probably just a ten-euro inventory tracking phone and a camera to snap the back of another player’s head as they leave for work tomorrow: but what the hell.) You wait till you’re halfway home before you text Gareth.
You’re just keying in a brief message when your specs vibrate for attention. You glance up: The SPOOKS overlay is active, and it’s telling you TWO-PERSON TAG TEAM DETECTED.
The dictates of the game require you to take it seriously, even though you’re too tired for this shit, and you want to go to bed. Besides, SPOOKS tries to map non-player characters onto real local objects—and you can really live without two strangers trying to follow you. You speed up slightly, not glancing round—that’s your glasses’ job—and mumble quietly, calling up a course into the densely occupied area around the corner of Princes Street and Lothian Road. You change direction, darting into a side street, and behind you the blips on your head-up display turn to follow you.
This isn’t good. “Phone, get me a taxi,” you mutter, and break into a jog. The side street is almost deserted, cars parked on either side of its cobbled quaintness, but you can see lights and hear traffic ahead. There are footsteps behind you, and you accelerate, running—
And a taxi’s headlights show up, swerving in towards the kerb in front of you. “Where to, miss?” asks the driver, as you pull the door shut. “Hotel—” You try to remember. “Hotel Malmaison…”
Behind you, the tail team falls away in the darkness as the taxi carries you back to the illusion of security.
JACK: Meat Machine
It’s like that first alcoholics anonymous meeting: “Hi, my name is Jack. And I have a code problem.”
You’re a grown-up, these days. You don’t wear a kamikaze pilot’s rising sun headband and a tee-shirt that screams DEBUG THIS! and you don’t spend your weekends competing in extreme programming slams at a windy campsite near Frankfurt, but it’s generally difficult for you to use any machine that doesn’t have at least one compiler installed: In fact, you had to stick Python on your phone before you even opened its address book because not being able to brainwash it left you feeling handicapped, like you were a passenger instead of a pilot. In another age you would have been a railway mechanic or a grease monkey crawling over the spark plugs of a DC-3. This is what you are, and the sad fact is, they can put the code monkey in a suit but they can’t take the code out of the monkey.
Which is why you more or less missed out completely on a very entertaining barney between Elaine and some weedy intense-looking marketroid in casual-Friday drag and fashionable specs who seemed most upset about something. You were off in your own head, trying to figure out a strategy for reducing the Himalayan pile of junk data that your query agents are going to pull out of the Zone database, and you just wished they’d all shut up so you could go back to drawing entity-relationship diagrams on the walls in green crayon. In fact, you were so far out there that the mummy lobe forgot to threaten to set Sergeant Smith on you on account of your overdue library books. You even managed to forget about the weird phone call last night. You were, in short, coding.