Halting State | Charles Stross | Talks at Google

Thank you very much for introducing me and inviting me here today. It's an honor to be at Google. And yeah, my name's Charlie Stross and these days I write fiction full time. Before I wrote fiction full time, I wrote a different kind of fiction. I spent a few years as a freelance computer journalist and before that I was a monkey at a very, very different kind of dot com startup in the uk. This isn't really a semi autobiographical novel. It's a work of science fiction projecting forward about 10 or 12 years into a future in which a whole bunch of convergent technologies that we can see on the horizon or that are probably in the labs here, for all I know have emerged into the public realm. Technologies like for example, 4G telephony protocols with hundred megabits per second data direct to your mobile at all times. Technologies such as universal location services, either GPS or Galileo, or other more precise location services so that all the devices around your person know where you are or know where they are. And it's a look forward to a future where the Internet has converged with geographical space, where your location can be mapped both into virtual worlds and into the real world at the same time, and indeed where the boundaries between the Internet and the real world have begun to blur. It's also set during a heady time of an Internet bubble. In fact, the technology on everybody's lips is web 3.1415926535 and that's where my memory ends. But you can see that there's some rational exuberance here. Now it's also a novel about the future of the computer games business. Second Life, massively multiplayer online games, where's it all going? And I thought I'd take a stab at some of it. And in writing a novel, this is sort of a very traditional art form. It's one that goes back several hundred years in its present form. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is often credited as the first modern novel. And that's sort of late 17th century. So I'm sort of deploying a 250 to 300 year old art form to attack an art form that's at most 20 to 30 years old. And I decided where do they converge? And the interesting convergent point that I saw between fiction and gaming is the use of the second person narrative form in which the second person you are being spoken to and told what you're experiencing. This is not by accident the traditional narrative form we used in text adventures in the old days from Craver and Wood's colossal cave adventure in the 1970s onwards through Zork and the Infocom games. And it's a fairly powerful tool because it shows us that the storytelling has moved away from the storyteller, that is from myself to this interesting magic box in front of us. And so I decided to start by narrating a story directly to the reader in the second person. And excuse me a second, if you think for a moment you're sitting half asleep in an armchair. Well, not you personally, but the fictional you I'm talking to. Your eyes are closed and you feel very unsteady. Your head is full of a post viral haze, the cotton wool of slowed reflexes and dulled awareness in stark contrast to the normal state of affairs you can hear yourself think. There's just one little voice wobbling incessantly about from side to side of your cranial prison, which is no surprise after the amount of skunk you've smoked. In the distance there's a chiming clangor of tram bells and it sets a glorious harmony, reverberating in icy splendor across the rooftops. And you are asking yourself, like the witchy weird voice in an old Laurie Anderson video, what am I doing here? And there we see the second person, so let's restart. There's a ringing in your ears. Oops, you must have drifted off. That's the trouble with smoking weed to help yourselves forget yourselves. Well, there's you, there's Mitch, and there's Budgie. Tom couldn't come because he was busy being newly married and responsible. But between you and Mitch and Budgie, you're free of the four corners of a former social networking architecture team, and you've flown out here on a budget shuttle from Edinburgh to get falling down legless and scientifically test all that research into whether cannabis destroys short term memory because God help you, is better than thinking about how badly you've just been shafted. Which is how come you're sitting in a half collapsed armchair, stoned out of your skull on a narrow strip of flagstoned pavement alongside the Prinsengracht Canal, listening to alarm bells as you contemplate the wreckage of your career. After four years in the elite dirty trick swing of Loopusoft, working on special projects for nobbling your corporate masters rivals, and then a transfer to the relatively clean gameplay side of steaming. You've had four years of top secret death marches and psychotic deadline chases in beige walled cubicle hell. You can tell this isn't Google when you'd rather have been Sailing the wine dark seas. Four years of frenzied developer boot camps held in sinister wire fenced flood lit compounds in the Grampians. Four years of weekends spent following a football team at home and away events with a laser range finder and a Dynamics package. And wasn't it fun trying to dodge that big hooligan from Portobello who got it into his head that you're some kind of headhunter from down south who's going to gut his team and kept trying to get his posse to stomp your head in. Four years. And all the while you're living off peanut butter sandwiches and stale sushi takeaways, not like the ones at Google, while your waistline expands and your visual range contracts as you stare at a screen the size of a secondary school whiteboard all day long and half the night. There were the dying weekends too. Weekends stolen from company management by sheer bloody minded smackdowns with human resources. Stolen so you could go back to Rochdale to spend some time with your mother who was in a bad way from lung cancer, or visit Sophie and Bill and your nieces until one day Ma wasn't there anymore. And the rest of it. And that's you in the corner there. You with your 60,000 Euro salary and the legacy that went part way to a pokey wee cottage in the colonies and a mortgage you'll never pay off this side of retirement and no life whatsoever. Well, there's your knitting habit and your criminal record, but that's just fodder for your obsessive compulsive disorder. This is your life, Frank. Jack. Sorry. It's been your life since you clawed your way from CS graduate to startup seven years ago. And your so called life is such a bijou bourgeois piece of crap there's no room for anything but work in it. So you kept yourself too busy to care by immersing yourself. Until last week they cancelled steaming and told you to clear your desk at half an hour's notice. Here's your next month's pay in lieu. Now get the hell out of here, you freak. You suddenly realized that you hadn't got a life. Even though they made you learn more about Scottish Premier League football than the captain of the national squad. Bastards. Excuse me, you cannot be sleeping here. Well, the worst thing about it is that you hate football. Of course, to have admitted that you hated football while you were working on steaming would have been a bit like one of the US President's staffers confessing to thinking that what the country really needed was a short, sharp dose of communism with a side order of Islamic extremism to go. It's one of those things that you just couldn't admit at lukasoft. Not while they had the franchise rights to both Hibs and Rangers fan clubs and were trying to milk the surplus income out of all the assorted fans. Neds and Ne' er Do Wells who figured that a live action role playing game where you play at being football hooligans among consenting adults was better than the other kind where you play at football hooligans with non consenting adults like the Rocksteady Crew and Lothian and Borders Police. On the other hand, you were able to suppress or sublimate your hatred of football without too much difficulty. You're a bourgeois liberal geek who thinks team player is a term of abuse, but you believe in society, you believe in checks and balances, and you believe in getting your own back on the thick headed sports jocks who made life so excitingly unpleasant for you in school. As it happens, while you were working on Steaming, you could convince yourself that you were doing your bit. Because any job that gets the brangling thugs playing a game on their Mobies instead of lobbing tinnies and chipping innocent bystanders in the high street has got to be a good thing. Network mediated live action role playing games have been the gaming story of a decade ever since spooks came along and gave actuaries a chance to live a secret agent life on the side. Steaming was set to ring the cash register again and take the nutters off the street. And it paid the mortgage as well. At least that's how it was before the Bologna cup final disaster and the double whammy of a social psychology study in the Lancet the next week that stuck the knife in and twisted. Hard questions were asked in the lumpy looking edifice down on Holyrood Road and the ministers did wax worthy and righteous and proceeded to apply the tools of uptight in self regulation with gusto and vigor. At which point Lupisoft management revisited the risk value trade off inherent in defending their investment in a second rate virtual world football hooliganism game against a class action lawsuit. And they decided the professional thing to do was to downsize your team's sorry ass. Maybe it could have gone the other way in the boardroom, but it just so happened. This was when the police uncovered a network of Little League serial killer wannabes who were using Steaming to rehearse next Saturday's riot up on Easter Road. That was a final nail in the coffin all the suit wearing world loves a geeky skate goat and you boys were going down in flames. So there was only one thing to do. Fly out to Amsterdam and get absolutely drunk for the weekend. Not to mention so stoned you're having auditory hallucinations to the sound of the tram bells. Hallucinations like excuse me, sir, but you cannot sleep here. You open your eyes. The auditory hallucination is peering at you through her surveillance goggles as if she's never seen a stoned tourist before. She's been so polite that for a moment you feel a flash of perverse gratitude until the weed clears enough for you to realise that she's a member of the police and quite capable of summoning a van full of black clad accomplices who will whisk you off into a concrete custody cell faster than you can snap your fingers. If she chooses to officially notice that you're not terribly conscious. You try to say, please don't arrest me, I'm just a sleepy tourist, I won't be any trouble. But it all runs together at the back of your tongue and comes out of something like you tense your arms and prepare to lift yourself out of the armchair. Standing up seems like the right thing to do at this point, but that's when you realize the armchair is situated adjacent to a street sign on a pole to which your friends have kindly handcuffed your left wrist. And that goddamn ringing noise isn't stopping, you know. It's not in your ears at all, is it? You say again dully, staring past the cop in the direction of the antique shop on the other side of the pavement. There's something odd about the window, or rather the lack of it. It's broken. You realise someone has broken the antique shop window and dragged this annoyingly gazellic armchair out onto the pavement for you to sit in. Talk about game scenarios gone wrong. It's like something you might end up dumped into in stag night. The pursuit if you start griefing the bridesmaids. Does this chair belong to you, sir? Now sometimes when you laugh you come up with a burbling hiccuping sound, like a hyena choking to death on its own vomit. You can hear it right now, welling up out of your shirt pocket, tinny and repetitive. It's your custom ringtone, very annoying indeed, but you don't owe a cent of royalties to any corporate gouging bandits. Excuse me, that's my phone. Your right hand is free, so you try and insert your fingers in your shirt pocket and play Chase for Moby. But somehow in the past hour, your hand has grown cold and numb. Your digits feel like frankfurters as the handset slips past them, giggling maniacally. Pay attention, sir. Did you take that chair from a shop? Who handcuffed you to the no parking sign? I think you'd better blow into this meter, sir. She's a sight easier to understand the local Edinburgh police. Which is no bad thing, because the voice at the end of a phone is anything but Jack, Hi, it's Sophie. Are you all right? Are you busy right now? No, no, not. Not right now. Oh, that's a shame. I'm really sorry, but can you do me a favor? It's Elsie's birthday this Tuesday after next, and I was wondering. You breathe on the end of the cops torch as she holds it under your mouth, then swallow. The light on the end of it is glowing red. Your sister is tweeting on the end of a line, oblivious, and you really need to get her off the phone fast. You force unwilling lips to frame words in an alien language. Can't you email me? But it's important, Sophie insists. Are you alright, Jack? Jack? I think you'd better come with me, sir, says the cop. She has a key to the handcuffs, for which you're duly grateful, but she wants you to put your phone away and that's surprisingly difficult because Sophie keeps going on about something to do with your oldest niece's birthday and confirmation. And you keep agreeing with her because, let's face it, will you please put the phone down? A Dutch cop is trying to arrest me. Isn't a standard way to break off this kind of scenario? If only families came with safe words. Like any other kind of augmented reality game, things are stuck at this impasse for a tense few seconds as you mug furiously at the officer. Finally, she takes mercy on you and raises one index finger. She unlocks the handcuff from around the pole, twists your arm around the small of your back, weeks the phone off you and has your wrists pinioned before you can say hass to la vista. It's shaping up to be a great weekend. Make no mistake, there's always Monday to look forward to. Excuse me a second. That's what life's like at the wrong kind of dot com. So I'm going to continue a little bit more with what subsequently happens to Jack, and then branch off and read a bit from a couple of other viewpoints before I sort of start trying to preach a sermon about what the significance of this all is and what possible relevance it can have to Google other than being a fun novel. Meanwhile, you have been in police cells twice before in your life. There was the total disaster when you were 15, but going back before that, even earlier, there was the time when you were a wee thing and Gavin Nick got you to moon the Lord Mayor when he was up for opening the new drop in Centre. Gav and Nick could run faster than you. Which is why you now realise, with perfect 2020 hindsight, they suckered you into it both times. You were too young to really figure out how much trouble you were in. It's somewhat less obvious to you now how you ended up being booked into an Amsterdam cop shop at zero dark o' clock last night, largely because you were too addled on skunk and strong continental beer to know which way was up. But by morning you have made up your mind that despite their laid back reputation, Dutch police cells are no more fun than the English kind. Especially with a hangover. If you hadn't been arrested, you'd have woken up this morning and spent Friday and Saturday nights in a cramped room at the Bulldog, a hostler's inn notorious for its low prices and dubious furnishings. Instead, you spent the night in a cell with a foam mattress, a light bulb and a stainless steel sink and toilet combination by way of furniture. It's actually bigger than your room at the hostel and the stains on the mattress are probably not much worse, but there's no soap, no munchies and no Internet to distract you from obsessively worrying about your miserable fate. Because you're worried. In fact, you're certain you're doomed. This is your third time that you've been arrested and your stress levels are so high that we're a bunch of black robed inquisitors to file chanting into your cell and lead you down a stony tunnel lined with manacled skeletons to a cavern furnished with an electric chair. It would actually come as a relief. You don't have a clue what to expect. So when the door rattles and opens, you nearly jump out of your skin. Mr. Reid, please come with me. It's a different cop. This one is built like a rugby player and looks extremely bored. Um, where you must look confused. He speaks very slowly and loudly as if to a half witted foreigner. Step out of a cell and proceed to the end of a corridor until I tell you to stop. But my. You glance down at your feet, then shrug. They took your shoes, your belt, your jacket and your phone, then made you sign a form. And now some rules. Obsessed Part of your hindbrain is. Is yammering up a fuss about going out without your shoes on. It's probably the same lobe of your brain that makes sure your fly's zipped up and your nose wiped. It's the mummy lobe. Ok. You force yourself to take a slippery, sock footed step forward. Then another. Your head's throbbing in time of your heartbeat and your mouth tastes as if a rat's died. There. Now you notice it. The mummy lobe starts nattering at you about brushing your teeth. At the end of the corridor there's an office with a desk in it and a police sergeant and a bunch of indiscreet cameras in luminous yellow jackets labelled Evidence in English and Dutch. They must get a lot of tourists here. There's also a shoebox with your possessions, Mr. Reid. Sit down. You sit. Did you, on the Evening of the 20th, throw any items at the window of the antique shop at 308 Prinsengracht? You frown, trying to remember. The mummy lobe is about to say, I don't think so, but I might be wrong. But you catch it in time and what comes out is a strangled. Ahem. No. The cop nods to himself, makes a note on his tablet. Did you take the armchair that the owners of 306 Prinsengracht had set out for a municipal waste pickup and move it so it was outside the antique shop. That's an easier one. You don't remember anything about the armchair before you woke up in it? No. Another squiggle on the tablet. The sergeant frowns. Do you remember anything about last night? Anything at all? At this point, the mummy lobe makes a bid for freedom and control over your larynx. Instead of saying, where's my lawyer? You hear yourself saying, no, not until I woke up in that chair. I was in the arrant's nest earlier in the evening and we had a lot to drink, but we moved on and things got vague. Then I woke up chained to the street sign. When you say we, who were you drinking with? I was with Mitch and Budgie. Tom couldn't make it. He was on paternity leave. Alright. The cop makes another mark on his tablet, then pushes it aside and gives you a look. You quail your balls try to climb into your throat. Mr. Reid, you appear to have been the victim of a prank that got out of hand. Your DNA was not found on the stone that broke the shop window or on the window itself. Camera footage shows three other persons carrying you and the chair before handcuffing you to the street furniture. So you're not suspected of vandalism or theft. However, let me be clear with you. That level of drunkenness is a public order offence because it's a minor charge. If you agree to plead guilty to drunk and disorderly there is a fine of €250 and I can release you immediately. But if you choose to deny the offence, you have the right to a trial before the sub district court. He leans back and crosses his arms. That's pretty tough for the Amsterdam police, but you'd heard they were having a crackdown. It's just your bad luck to be caught in it. What happens if I plead guilty? You ask. As it's an administrative offence, there will be no subsequent proceedings or criminal record. It's your decision. He looks bored. The offer's a no brainer. €250 and that's the end of it. The alternative is to face the uncharted waters of finding a lawyer and going to court. But they'll probably find you guilty as charged and send the black robed chanting inquisitors to lead you down the stony tunnel lined with manacled skeletons to the cavern furnished with an electric chair just for wasting their time. And face it, the Mummy Loeb reminds you. You were drunk, weren't you? You nod, then wince as your forehead reminds you about the hangover. Do you take PayPal? Of course. The cop gestures at the box of your possessions. You'll receive an email with instructions for pleading guilty. He pauses. You should remember that failing to plead by email and not attending a court session are much more serious offences than public drunken and the Scottish police will prosecute you on our behalf. That you really don't need. Ok, I'll pay, you say hastily. This interview is over. You may leave when you are ready, says the cop, and he stands and walks out the door, leaving you staring after him with one shoe in your hand and the other on your left foot. Don't forget to tie your shoelaces, chides Mummy Loeb. Remember, it's a serious offence. Jack has a slight procedural problem of dealing with authority. He's not very good at it. However, this isn't entirely Jack's story, nor is it entirely about public drunkenness in the near future. Not all of it, anyway. There are other characters in this story, and one of them in particular, Elaine, is playing an interesting game and she's one of Jack's co workers, for when he gets back to Edinburgh he finds himself with a new contract job. Elaine is an insurance fraud investigator. She's been summoned in to look into Possible insurance implications of a bank robbery that's just taken place inside a massively multiplayer online game. The bank, the central bank for this particular game environment, is outsourced and run under contract by a strange firm called Hayek Associates, who stabilize the economies of a whole bunch of computer games. Undermining one of their games threatens to derail their secondary offering. And there's a lot of money at stake, hence the reason for the investigation. And Elaine is definitely doing the all work and no play at work. It's about 8:15 when you finally get out of Hayek Associates offices and summon a taxi to take you back to your hotel room. You are, not, to put it too pointedly, dog tired. On the plus side, at least you made some progress today. The cop, Sergeant Smith, looks like she's going to be a useful contact and Jack is paying his way. When you left him back in the bunker, he was elbow deep in whatever it is that programmers do, oblivious to everything else. Which is sort of annoying because he's the only person up here you know who isn't a co worker. And now you've got to face an evening in a strange city on your own. But what the hell, they call this place the Athens of the North. Sorry? There's got to be something you can do by yourself on a summer night, isn't there? Well, not really. Back in your room you have a quick shower, then check this eating out guide. By which time it's half past nine and you're half past hungry. You're not keen on going back to places you've been earlier, not on your own. And the room service menu looks ok, so you order up a big green salad in pennons for yesterday's business lunch. And then it's 10 and the hotel gym's closed. And where the hell did the day go? It's even worse than a working late evening in London. At least there you can break the commute home in a cocktail bar with some friends. By 10:30 you're glumly contemplating an early night and a 7 o' clock session in the gym. Then 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 playing your part in a shadowy pan European intelligence agency locked in a struggle for global hegemony with the forces of Chinese military intelligence for Russian FSB and of course, the CIA. Yes, you try not to snap. Elaine Barnaby is a spook's control. You busy right now? You glance around Your beautiful, sterile hotel room. Not really. You know I'm in Edinburgh. That's why we're calling. Your nameless. Control sounds amused. 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 favor while you're there. How small? As usual, there's no face to go with a call, just the eye in a glass pyramid in Dockland's logo. If this was a video call, at least you could glare at him. It's half past bloody 10. Yeah, but we need a small parcel. Delivering a parcel. What's wrong with that, X? Well, as you just pointed out, it's half past ten at night. Besides, the parcel is sitting downstairs in your hotel lobby. It needs delivering to and he sends you a set of Galileo coordinates. That's about half a kilometer away from where you're sitting. Humph. You look at the phone speculatively. What's it worth? You're angling shamelessly for more experience points to you. A 20 minute walk before bedtime to the recipient. Priceless. Control sounds smug. You can picture him sitting in some bedsit, grinding through his checklist of in game tasks in hope of getting to the next level, trying 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. So in the end you grudgingly say, ok, I'll do it. Thank you. By the way, 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 quite bit a grab your jacket and go downstairs. It's dark outside and there's a single tired looking clerk on reception. You smile at him. You got a parcel for me, Barnaby? Room 214. Sure, let me just go get it. He shuffles off to the back office. Sign here. Sure. You swipe your phone over his reader and thumbprint the signature. Thanks. Outside, the evening air is cool and smells faintly of cherry blossom piling up in the gutters to either side of the road. You pull on a disposable plastic glove, then pull the tab on the parcel. This recording will self destruct in 30 seconds. Not rumour has it the first Spooks campaign got the beta testers arrested and questioned for a week under the Terrorism act before the police finally realised it was a game. That's why you've got a special endorsement on your ID card. The parcel turns out to contain a bland looking black plastic box about the size of an old time DVD case and there's some heavy outdoor bonding pads. There's also a dead tree paper note on paper. Attach to front of building above eye level facing the street. When attached, pair it with your phone to unnamed device 1142. Here's your passcode. Once paired, dial this number, then leave the area. When home, text control to confirm. This is bloody typical. You pocket the bugging device or whatever it is, key the coordinates into your specs and let the overlay guide you along the pavement towards the building. This sort of nonsense is partly why you've been thinking of cancelling your Spook subscription. It's tediously realistic. There's no romance, no James Bond swigging cocktails with a pool in Grand Cayman. It's just pick up package X, transport to location Y, phone number Z. It's really tedious. Location Y in this case turns out to be an impressive crescent of Georgian stone townhouses. 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. Right at the top of the row of buzzers, someone has chalked a blue rectangle with your spook cell warchalk indicator. You take out the box and the adhesive pads, position it carefully and jump through the hoops. It's probably just a €10 inventory tracking phone and a camera to snap the back of another player's head when they leave for work tomorrow. But what the hell. You wait till you're halfway home, then you text control. You're just keying in your message though, when your specs vibrate for attention. You glance up. The spooks overlay has activated itself again and it's telling you two person tag team following you now. The dictates of the game require you to take it seriously, even though you're too tired for this nonsense, you just want to go to bed. But more importantly, Spooks tries to map non player characters onto real local objects. Objects. And you can really live without two strangers following you in a foreign city. You speed up slightly, carefully not glancing around. That's your glasses job and mumble quietly calling up a course into the densely occupied area around Princes Street. You change direction, darting into a side street and behind you the blips on your head up display, turn to follow. This does not look good. Phone. Get me a taxi. You mutter and break into a jog. The side street is almost deserted for cars park both sides of it, but you can see lights and hear traffic ahead. You hear footsteps behind you now, and you break into a run. Then the taxi's headlights show it swerves towards the curb in front of you. Where to miss? Asks the driver as you pull the door shut. You try to remember Hotel Malmaison behind you. The tail team falls away into the darkness as the taxi accelerates, carrying you back to the illusion of the real world. Some of these games may have more or less of a game to them than other players think. Now a chunk of this book did sort of emerge from my time Inside a successful.com on a small scale, a payment service provider, and before that a not terribly successful Web startup circa 1995. And one of the things I wanted to do in the book was to sort of try and convey some of the aspects of what it's like to be a developer. Unfortunately, that's sort of like nailing jelly to a tree. It's such a huge area. There's such a huge difference between grinding out COBOL and forms in a mainframe shop and hacking out Perl scripts in a hurry for small commercial customers that it's almost impossible to generalize. But I can say some things about it, and what I wanted to say I Stuck in here. It's sort of like that first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting when you first have to admit that you've got a problem. 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 T 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 mobile phone before you even opened its address book, because not being able to brainwash it left you feeling handicapped, like you're a passenger instead of a pilot. In another age, you'd have been a railway mechanic or a grease monkey crawling over the spark plugs of a DC3. This is what you are. 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 really entertaining argument, but a between Elaine and some weedy, intense looking marcatroid in Casual Friday Dragon 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 your query agents are going to pull out of a zone database, and you just wish they'd all shut up so you could go back to scribbling 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. What's up with him? You remember the cop asking Elaine? I'm not sure. If I didn't know better, I'd say he was stoned, but he keeps twitching his fingers. I think he's in keyboard withdrawal or something. You've surfaced for long enough to explain what you needed, and they got the marcatroid to tell the software librarian to log you onto the code repository and give you the authentication keys you needed. Then they find you a nice padded beige cubicle and parked units. You could design a tool for the job of trawling through several billion transactions. An indeterminate time later, an irritating voice inserted itself into your awareness. Jack? Hello. Have you got a spare minute? No. You shook yourself. Um, your bladder was threatened to go on strike, you realized your left calf was standing in for a pincushion at a convention of Belgian lace makers, and your eyeballs ached. Hang on. You checkpointed your project and pulled the glasses off, then leaned back and stretched your arms over your head. Okay, I've got a spare minute now. Elaine leaned back against the door frame. She looked tired and irritable. It's nearly 6:30. Are you getting anywhere? Give me another three hours or so and I might be ready to switch it on. I thought you said this would be fast. Give me a file of magic items and miscellaneous loot in well formed, structured treasure language, and I've got a tool that can search one or more auction houses for stuff resembling each item in it and give you a proximity metric and some information about the seller. I've got one auction house plugin nearly completed and four more to write, but they're all variations on a theme after the first. Trouble is, responses won't be in stl, so I have to run them by hand. Best thing would be if you could give me five or 10 sample items and I can leave it crunching overnight on the test data. Then if it works tomorrow, I can set the rest going. She rolled her eyes. Ok. She sounded unconvinced. That got your attention. That was the sound of a thousand euros an hour of contract work slipping away. Ever written a large spreadsheet? You asked. Yeah, and then tested it. Made sure that what comes out is what's meant to come out. Yeah, but. She stopped, looking puzzled. What I'm doing here is like working up a pivot join and then some complex statistical breakdowns on six or seven different tables, a couple of which are in different formats. If I rush it, it'll come out wrong. Worst case, it'll come out looking right, but full of garbage. If it's like writing a spreadsheet, then. She raised an eyebrow. Why do I need you? Because you don't have a couple of years to learn the zone APIs and the Python 3000 language for scripting it. How long did it take you to learn how to write that spreadsheet? Ah. You could hear the clunk of the gears engaging between her ears. Then she smiled, reassured. It's what they teach you in advanced programming. 401. Managing the managers. First of all, figure out how to tell them what you're doing in their own language. Writing a big spreadsheet with lots of macros is a bit Mickey Mouse, but you had to admit it wasn't too far removed from what you were doing. It was all data reduction, when you get down to it. Ok, I'll email you the data I've got if you can run a test tonight. When will we know? If it doesn't crash and burn first thing tomorrow, at least we'll know something, even if there's nothing but smouldering wreckage. If we're lucky, we'll hit some pay dirt overnight. If it didn't work, you'd fix it and then run it tomorrow with all the insurance data you could get. Good. I need to go get something to eat. I'm starving. She paused for a couple of seconds. Well, okay. See you tomorrow then. You smiled. See you. A minute later, you sat bolt upright in your chair and swore at yourself for missing a hidden query. But you're more at home with sequel than socialization. Innuendo isn't a language they teach in cslab. Ah, well, you thought you were just going to have to face up to another night with only a fish supper on your games console for company. It could have been worse. You might have been unemployed as well at that point. If you don't Mind, I'm going to stop reading for a little bit and then if you have any questions I'd be happy to take them. Are we a bit shy? There'll be an exam afterwards. Ah, you at the back, sir.

So you've been mentioning some of the problems of working in this. You put it in a coding environment that's not Google. What would be your tips for improving the environment other than just not doing anything? That's written in this book.

Tips for improving environments. Start by looking for an environment where people actually want to be. That's a good start. Also, I sort of subscribe to the trickle down theory of management. Shit trickles down from the top, but I wouldn't claim to be an authority on that sort of thing. Ah, more to the point, when we get down to it, any corporate environment is basically a superorganism of human beings. The actual activities the human beings are involved in are almost irrelevant. It can be sort of tightening sprockets or writing code or trying to hack on a Hollywood script. The organizational structures of a company remain the same though. It's very much associated social thing. And you can tell a lot about a company by just looking at how people in it interact. And before you join it, figure out whether it looks like it's going to be a fun place to work. The one thing I can say is working at companies that aren't fun places to work is a really bad idea. You've only got one life after all. Any more questions? Aha. Right.

So I read your blog and while you were writing this book you were talking about how difficult it was to write something set 10 or 15 years in the future that wouldn't immediately be obsolete by the time it came out. I am curious if there are any things in this book that you did not think were obsolete at the time you handed in your manuscript, but you think now are.

Things that have become obsolete since then. I don't. I don't know about obsolescence yet because this manuscript was only handed in one year ago. I picked Python 3000 as a programming language name and got it wrong. I would like if I get a chance to change that for something bit further out before the paperback ships. Call it version 1.1 with the bug fixes other stuff started coming true since what was handed in there was apparently a very elaborate bank heist come fraud in at least one MMO about three months after I handed this book in. Luckily not quite on the magnitude of what I described. And one of the features of a system I'd sort of speculated about in the book was ability to migrate avatars and character attributes between different games written on a common platform. And indeed, just this week Linden Labs and I think IBM announced they're working towards portable avatars between different virtual environments. I get slightly creeped out when too many of my predictions come true, because science fiction isn't really a predictive medium, and this book is going to be laughably past it in 10 years. At around the time of its setting. Finding bits of it coming true is a bit too close for comfort, because some of the stuff in the background of this book is not very much fun at all. I found a couple bugs in NET.

Server Generic, and I'm wondering when you're.

Going to release a new release of that. I'm looking for somebody else to take over as a maintainer. Anyway. It's going to be obsolete when Pearl 6 arrives.

Well, that may be a while too.

No tight gloves.

She says. Yeah, I read your blog too. So, Charlie, I wanted to ask you about the style of the novel. It seems to me, having read most of it at this point, that you put quite a lot of British cultural references into that, and I think you've mentioned in the past that your American audience is perhaps the largest. Was that something that was very deliberate? Did it just flip through? Was it something to give it flavor?

It was deliberate because I was seeking to sort of write a hideous collision between a Scottish police procedural novel, shades of Ian Rankin and Inspector Rebus, or maybe Christopher Brookmeyer and a SF Stroke.com thriller. I was also writing something set where I live now. Interesting thing about being British is you tend to be culturally bilingual to start some extent. There's an awful lot of American cultural imports. There's much more traffic that way than in the opposite direction. As a result, there are gaps. There are stuff that you find in the uk, but not. Well. There's stuff you find that's ubiquitous in the US but just isn't referenced or understood in the uk. But there's more of it in the opposite direction, more missing idioms from the UK and the us I decided I was basically going to write something set in the uk, and I was going to write it with the assumption the readers would be at least interested enough to try and interpolate it to some extent. I was writing an alien culture, and it's all the more alien. I mean, this is a standard trick you do in science fiction anyway, to build an alien culture. But the one I'm writing is actually a genuine one, and it's more alien than you might think at a distance. The same goes with the United States. I find it a very interestingly alien civilization to visit. It does feel like visiting a different planet.

Thank you for coming. I first read your work when you put Accelerando out and allowed it to be freely downloaded and read. And I'm curious what your experience of that has been. And also like, if you have any data or at least impressions on did you get lifts in other books and sort of what that experience has been.

Okay. Accelerando is a novel of mine that is out on the web as a Creative Commons download as well as in print to some extent. It was an experiment. Now, one of the things that you do when you write a book is you retain copyright over it, but you license certain rights to the publisher. And if you've ever seen the contract for the deed of sale for a house, the deed of sale for a book looks similar, only gnarlier, with even weirder fine print. I'm not sure which is worse, software industry lawyers or publishing industry lawyers. They're both lagging slightly behind Hollywood and the music industry, but not far. Now. One of the things that for quite a few years most publishers have been sticking on is ebook rights. They want them, they know they're going to be important, they just don't know quite how to use them. With Accelerando, I convinced my British and American publishers to agree to an experiment. Now, I think the experiment has been successful. I think it brought in new readers, but unfortunately my subsequent books have been published at different times on different sides of the Atlantic. And it's very difficult to get a publisher to let you put a novel on the Internet several months before they have a paper version to sell. So that's why it hasn't happened subsequently. I should like to talk more about the whole Creative Commons thing, but let's just say include corydoctoro H and move on.

Other questions Just following up on that. Have you several famous music acts recently have been foregoing their record companies and releasing their music directly. Have you considered doing that also?

I've considered doing that. Sorry, I've considered doing that. However, I'm still at a stage and probably will be for many years, where publishers have a lot to offer me. And one of the things they have to offer me is the ability to do all the nasty, tedious little stuff to do with putting a book into the hands of the public that authors don't normally do. We think of authors as sort of writing and creating a book, but in Reality. It's a team job. Somebody has to copy edit it and come up with all the typos. And then somebody has to typeset it and then proofread the typeset stuff with the corrected typos to make sure it's accurate. And somebody else has to go around and figure out what sort of COVID will appeal to the readers and how to go about marketing it. And then somebody has to go to the Library of Congress and acquire an ISBN and copyright registration information for it. And somebody has to go and sell it to the wholesalers and the distributors and take orders and do the accounting. Let's not forget the accountants. And, you know, I could spend my entire life selling books, but not actually writing them. So publishers actually perform some very important but invisible functions. And in addition to that, there are valuable functions they perform that are more visible. Editing. I rely on my editors to throw a brick at my head and say, oi, wake up, this isn't good enough. If I do something wrong, you know, an author is in trouble when they decide, oh, I'm good, I don't need editing anymore. This is a very bad sign. You know, they've just ditched the QA department. So one of the things that struck me about the novel was that I believe the technology predictions. I wasn't sure about the political predictions about Scotland and independence and the EU and all that stuff that came very close. We had an election in Scotland earlier this year. We now have a Scottish National Party government, but it's a minority government. Scotland currently runs on about a four and a half party system with the Conservatives in fifth place. I think they may be ahead of the Greens. The Scottish National Party is a very rare beast. It's sort of a socialist party that's also in favor of independence and is a nationalist party. And what happened was Labour had convinced the Scottish electorate that they wanted a new government, but not convinced enough of them to give the Scottish National Party an outright majority, which means the SNP have to play nice. They can't run a referendum for independence without an absolute majority and the other parties are dead set against it. But they do have to run the country. So we're into interesting times. I will lay one political hostage to fortune by saying there is one condition that I think could very well trigger Scottish independence in the next few years and that would be a British scale general election that returned a Conservative majority government to Westminster and the Houses of Parliament. Scotland is predominantly much more left leaning than England. And firstly, the Conservatives get no benefit from having Scotland in the UK and secondly, if they cast Scotland adrift, they'd have a lock on power for the next 30 years. So suddenly you'd have a political party north of. They're also hated in Scotland post Thatcher. So you'd simultaneously have increased pressure for Scottish independence north of the border and a government down south who wanted it. This is true. But they've already got the Scottish North Sea oil revenue and suffice to say, there's more of that there was of her. Anyway, enough on political speculation. This is obviously going to sound completely dumb in 10 years time, so let's move on.

The 13 year old in me wants to ask if they made Atrocity Archives into a movie. Who would play Bob Howard?

I'm the wrong person to ask this because I think I've seen two movies this year. I don't know who the actors are. Preferably somebody geeky with a slightly receding chin.

Well, I know this from having been at worldcon. Could you tell people what your reaction was was to winning the Prometheus Award for best Libertarian Science Fiction?

Well, yeah, I did win a Prometheus Award for best Libertarian Science Fiction for my novel Glass House, and my acceptance was basically I'm very proud to receive the Libertarian Futurist Society's award for the best Scottish Socialist science fiction novel of the year because Ken MacLeod can't be here to receive the award for the novel he has hasn't written this year. It is very, very strange how the libertarians keep giving Scottish Socialists awards.

Let's get back to the technology. One of the key parts, I think it's in the book and you kind of mentioned at one point with Elaine, talk about putting her glasses on, that you have these sort of virtual reality overlays that are going on specs now. How do you really feel about that in terms of a technology? I mean, it kind of comes and goes. And my sense is that even from a fashion point of view, people are not going to do that.

Even at I'm unsure. I was deliberately trying to keep it vague in the novel because you can't tell how styles in user interface are going to go 10 years ahead. But look at your mobile phone. Your mobile phone probably has roughly a 200 MHz ARM processor in it, somewhere between 16 and 80 megabytes of memory, a card slot. It's probably comparable in performance to a desktop PC of five to 10 years ago. There is one aspect of it though, which is desperately dismally inferior to that PC and that is its display. We haven't cracked the user interface problem for these very powerful portable computers we're all wearing on our belts, we haven't cracked it yet. I suspect if you think of a bandwidth available for the wireless USB technologies, that's getting to the stage where you can use it for displays. Not significantly high resolution displays, but certainly something like VGA or above should be doable over wireless usb. I'm ruling out Bluetooth for fairly obvious reasons, and ditto WI fi. So it occurred to me we're probably heading for wireless personal area network bandwidth within the next 10 years that will let us have separate wireless displays. Now, as for how much light you need, there's a whole bunch of different technologies competing for what you wear on your glasses. And you can go out today and buy something from Sharper Image or wherever that will let you watch your ipod while wearing specs. Basically a pair of quarter VGA displays in a frame. It's not terribly great for walking around in public though. But it occurs to me with a lot of computing power, you can do interesting things. These glasses, they use sort of physical refractive optics. Why don't I have a screen in front of each eye and a camera on the outside of a screen and do some fun AAA buffering? You could think in terms of a simple hardwired circuit that will map motion straight through whatever virtual field I'm looking at. So you can be looking at a wall, a static image, and be fully immersed in whatever your glasses are showing you, or you can walk in the street and stuff that is moving will appear superimposed through the street. The street, the scene you're looking at. It occurred to me that with that sort of technology probably available within a few years, again, assuming Moore's Law holds.

Up.

The attraction of actually having glasses that do stuff that dead glass can't do would begin becoming obvious. Real time image enhancement, multispectral analyzers built into your glasses, zoom lenses, and it's a desktop interface. At that point, suddenly, though slightly geeky, thick blue black frames start making a lot of sense. That was my take on it.

Okay, I think we're going to wrap up. There's another talk here too, but thank you for coming. And if anyone who got a book would like it signed, we can take a couple minutes over here at the table to do that. Thank you.