Free Halting State by Charles Stross Page A

of thing. And while all this is going on, we have to keep an eye on how the customers are enjoying their market experience. If people start grumbling, we’ve got a problem.
    “My job—well. I commission in-game campaigns to track customer satisfaction, establish hedonic goal posts, and set targets so our programmers and quants know which way to drive things to maximize fiscal stability. It’s like being chancellor of the exchequer, except you can substitute ‘fun’ for ‘profits’—up to a point, until interdomain currency conversion and hedge funds come into the picture. In monkeyspace—sorry, I mean, outside the games—I’m also in charge of marketing and sales liaison with our corporate clients. We each wear three different hats here at Hayek Associates. Making a single sale, even to a tier-three game, is potentially a multi-million euro contract for us, so a lot of work goes into it…what? Yes, I work with Marcus on closing new accounts. Yes, he’s senior to me…I suppose you could say that [he’s in charge]. No, I’m the Marketing Director. I’m only worth .5 per cent of the company’s market cap. I’m insignificant, obviously beneath your notice…
    “Okay, yes, I understand that. Sorry. No more sarcasm.
    “Let me see…at about a quarter past ten this morning, I was in a meeting with Marcus and…why the hell am I repeating this? You’ve seen the stream. I’ve seen the stream…No, I can’t swear that it really happened because it’s something I saw on a screen. What I thought I was seeing was a bunch, thirty, maybe forty, Orcs—they’re a character race in Avalon Four—march into the central bank. It’s in a magic castle carved out of a diamond the size of a hill, in a city floating on a mauve cloud near the Spinward Mountains, and the bank vaults are—look, they’re not a real physical vault, it’s just a database table that stores a bunch of cryptographic hashes on objects that are registered as being lodged in the bank, okay? The objects are stored in a holographic database on the players’ smartphones and the game engine keeps track of them for us. No, I can’t tell you whose phone stores a given item. They move around a lot, and there are usually copies on three or more phones at the same time. The bank is a different matter, the root authentication keys are locked down and stored in a trusted database on a server…yes, where else would you put a bank? That’s why we’re based in a nuclear bunker. It’s good public relations. Yes, the root keys are signed by the Bank of Scotland in monkeyspace. The real security is all in the firewalls, and the data integrity schemas. Nobody ever imagined a band of Orcs would steal a database table…”

    END RAW TRANSCRIPT

ELAINE: A Catastrophic Loss of Goodwill
    You enjoy facials about as much as you enjoy visits to the dentist. One of these years, when you’re really rich, you plan to set aside a week and turn yourself over to a dental surgeon who will put you under general anaesthetic, yank out all your pearlies, and install ceramic-andtitanium memory-metal implants socketed into your jawbones. Once you get over the hang-over you’ll be able to say good-bye to fillings, secure in the knowledge that you’re going to go to your coffin wearing an enigmatic diamond smile. And won’t that fuck with the archaeologists’ heads?
    Unfortunately, there’s no such easy cure for facials, but you’ve acquired various coping strategies over the past four years in DBA: a ristretto and a trip to the bathroom first, so you’re awake and comfortable; a copy of the agenda and a full battery charge on your old-fashioned folio, so you can scribble notes on it and do what-if modelling on the fly; and a chunk of time allocated ahead of schedule so you know what the hell you’re meant to be talking about.
    But sometimes they call the meeting at short notice, and there’s no agenda on the server, and your folio’s fuel tank is half-empty. So then you