Free The Restoration Game by Ken MacLeod Page A

“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