I opened a tiny drawer. Ah yes, this is where he kept things that were brass, cylindrical, and slightly ridged. I closed the drawer, my task complete.

On his desk, though, I saw something I did recognise. Something I knew it would be my responsibility to adopt, decipher, and operate. I don’t know if he ever gave it a name, so I will now: it’s the Egg Controller.

–

Dad was an inventor. That’s the verdict. When you’re alive, people don’t often summarise you – I suppose it would be rude. I used to tell people he was an electrical engineer, a rather dry job description, but it didn’t sound wrong because I wasn’t trying to summarise him.

Once you die, though, everyone’s required to boil you down to a few words. And I think dad’s come out of that rather well. He was an inventor, and everyone seems to have known it. His creations have been impressing people from the garden shed of his childhood home in Woking, to the mayor of Frome, to a chicken farmer in France, to me, just outside this office, watching him barbecue.

–

To understand the Egg Controller, you must first understand the Egg. The Egg is the Big Green Egg, an enclosed barbecue that’s very good for slow-cooking and smoking things. Dad didn’t invent the Big Green Egg, but he did love to use it. He loved to cook, he loved science, and he loved to be able to provide people with something that was unusually good. Almost anything cooked in the Big Green Egg has a nice smoky flavour to it, and almost anyone who ate something he cooked in the Big Green Egg would remark, “Ooh, it’s got a nice smoky flavour to it!” I think he got a lot of pleasure out of that.

He even cooked our Christmas turkey in the Big Green Egg every year – every year except one. About three years ago, he was ill, and the task fell to me. And this is when I discovered what an enormous pain the arse it is to use.

In theory, it can keep its temperature perfectly stable for hours on end. In practice, you open the vents a bit to get the temperature up, then close them a bit, and it keeps going up. So you close them more, and now it’s going down. So you open them more, and now it’s going up. Leaving it in either state for six hours would result in either cold turkey or festive ash, so you end up having to check on it every fifteen minutes, for six hours.

This bothered me because it was exhausting, it was boring, and it was Christmas. Dad was a lot more devoted to creating good food than me, so I don’t think he minded that. But I think it bothered him for a different reason: it was solvable. This business of making small adjustments, observing their effect, and reacting accordingly was something computers are perfectly capable of. So he set about building one to do it.

–

I’ve inherited this gene, I think. I can’t build gadgets like dad could, so the set of problems I see as solvable is different, but if I feel a solution should exist I will bloody-mindedly create it.

At one point I wanted to get business cards made that would each have a free copy of my game on them. That meant each card needed a different code printed on it. I had 200 codes, and one image with a blank space for the code to be written. The card company would happily take 200 different images, but they couldn’t combine the images and text for me – I had to do that. A solution for this should exist.

It does, actually, there are dozens. But all of them would require me to learn some new scripting language or tool that was far more complex than what I needed. This was a programming problem, and the only programming language I knew was the one I made the game in: it’s called Game Maker.

So, technically, I made a game. It’s a game where the only level is a giant room that looks like my business card, the menu system writes a giant code across it, then it takes a screenshot. Thirty times a second. You win the game by waiting for 7 seconds. Then when you quit, you have a folder full of 200 images, each with a different code on them, which you can send straight to the printers.

This took about three hours to make. How long would it have taken to manually put 200 codes on 200 cards? Look, I’m not on trial here, this is about dad, let’s get back to that.

What dad built, in basic terms, was a tiny computer, programmed with custom software he wrote, hooked up to a thermometer and a fan. The computer gets the temperature from the thermometer, and turns the fan on or off to control the flow of air into the barbecue.

What dad built, in even more basic terms, was two green boxes with buttons and screens on, a black box with a light on it, a metal plate with another black thing in it that could be a fan, two wires that end in crocodile clips, and two wires that end in long metal spikes.

I understood the principles well, but I had a crucial question about the device itself. How do I turn it on?

The crocodile clips are attached to wires which are attached to a briefcase-sized device that I think is called an oscilloscope. I didn’t know much about it, but I was fairly sure you don’t bring an oscilloscope to a barbecue. They must attach to some other power source, but what?

–

As someone with a lot of experience with technology, I usually approach every technical challenge with a healthy acceptance that I may be completely unable to solve it. But the stakes felt higher for this. My last visit before he died, dad had wanted to give me a lesson in this, but we didn’t get to it. Should I have made sure it happened before I left?

He also hadn’t had much time to use this gadget before he died. If I couldn’t figure it out, it would be like all his hard work on this brilliant device was wasted, all because I couldn’t even take that trivial last step of figuring out how to work it. He wouldn’t have been disappointed in me, he never made me feel that was ever a possibility. But I’d be disappointed in myself.

I got excited when I found a likely-looking battery pack nearby, and hooked the clips onto it, but the screens stayed dark. Normal batteries were out – there’s nothing to clip on to. I looked around the room of a thousand unidentified objects, and didn’t like my chances of finding the right one.

Then I remembered – 9 volt batteries do have something to clip onto – those weird little cup things that tingle if you put your tongue on them. Not that I’ve tried that, I’m not on trial here, let’s get back to dad.

I dug one out and hooked it up. The screens… stayed dark.

Then I tried the clips the other way around. Brilliant green letters appeared on the screen. The Egg Controller worked.

I remember a car journey with dad, maybe two years ago, when he was working on the Egg Controller and I was working on my space game, Heat Signature. I was telling him about a programming problem I was having: I was trying to get my spaceships to slow down just in time to stop at a particular point in space, but they kept overshooting or falling short. Something was making the maths trickier than it should have been, so I was telling him how I planned to fix it. I was going to teach my spaceships to pay attention to what affect their brakes were having in practice, and ease off or brake harder based on that.

As it happened, dad had recently solved basically the same problem for the Egg Controller. If you just program it to turn the fan on when the temperature is too low, and off when it’s too high, it will endlessly overcompensate. It takes a while for the effect of its actions to be reflected in the temperature it reads from the thermometer, so it needs an intelligent system to know what kind of change to expect, and when.

He told me this is called a Proportional-Integral-Derivative Controller. It’s how cruise control in your car manages to keep a steady speed when the slope of the road changes. I wanted a spaceship to stop exactly at a space station. He wanted a turkey to stop at exactly 72 degrees celsius. The principle is the same.

–

We didn’t have a funeral for dad, we had a memorial lunch instead. Ten meat eaters were coming, and I was tasked with using the Egg Controller to slow-cook a shoulder of pork for them. It was a fitting use for his brilliant gadget, and for all the same reasons it was fitting, it would be an especially crushing, deeply personal disaster if anything went wrong. On the plus side, I had managed to turn the thing on.

I decided I’d need a practice run. Just a couple of chicken breasts, only one guest. I figured out how to fit the Egg Controller’s fan into the bottom of the barbecue, rigged up both the thermometers, lit the barbecue and examined the screen. It has three columns: Time, Oven and Meat – the three certainties in life. You can set a desired value for each of these, and below it the actual value is reported.

My best guess at how it worked was this: it’ll keep heating up the barbecue until its internal temperature hits what you set under ‘Oven’, then keep it there until the thermometer you put in the meat reaches the tempereature you set under ‘Meat’. And you don’t touch the Time dial because you don’t know what it does.

I set Oven to 180 and Meat to 75. The Egg Controller told me the Big Green Egg was currently only 50 odd, so it had a way to go. Sure enough, the fan it was wired to was blowing away quietly to stoke the fires.

80 degrees.
120.
150.
180. Good!
190. Hmm. The fan’s still going.
195. Fan still going.
200. Fan still going. This doesn’t seem right.
210. OK, this is just never going to stop.

Maybe it just keeps going full blast until the meat gets up to temperature? I tried turning that number down to lower than the meat already was. Fan still going.

Maybe it’s because I didn’t set a time? Was zero time the same as saying ‘never stop’? I tried setting a short time, and waited until it expired. It beeped, but the fan kept going.

240 degrees now, and for the chicken’s sake it was time to intervene. I unhooked the Egg Controller’s fan and finished it off the old fashioned way, endlessly adjusting the vents. We ate the admittedly delicious chicken – it had this nice smoky taste – and I despondently accepted I could not decipher dad’s design.

–

I didn’t want to believe the interface was bad, and I didn’t want to believe I wasn’t clever enough to figure out a good one. I especially didn’t want to believe it was just broken. But there didn’t seem to be any other explanations.

Silly as it sounds, not being able to figure this out made dad feel more distant. I had thought of us as like minds, and it made the loss easier to accept. His brain wasn’t entirely gone, I still have a partial version of it in my own head. But either this gadget did nothing intelligent at all, which couldn’t be true, or he and I thought so differently that even with unlimited tries, I couldn’t deduce how his interface was ever supposed to work. It was an upsetting thought.

“I’d just like to see it ever stop, under any conditions.” I remember griping as I fiddled with the now un-Egged Controller after dinner, still vaguely hoping to find a trick to it. Fan still going.

That was when I saw the red light. I’d been looking at the screens, and the fans, and the thermometers, all of which seemed to be doing their jobs. But there’s one other component – just before the fan, there’s a black box. The black box had a bright red light on it. Aren’t red lights usually bad? I flicked a switch on the box. The light went blue. The fan stopped.

The fan stopped!

I tried turning the desired temperature up again. The fan started!

Near as I can tell, the black box is some kind of controller or regulator that cuts power to the fan when the computer tells it to. When it’s off, instead of cutting power to the fan, it never interrupts it. That’s why I’d never looked for another switch to turn on – if anything, it was too on.

The whole thing worked exactly as I’d first assumed, you just have to flick the mysterious switch on the black box first. Dad and I do think alike. Except on the subject of black boxes and what should happen when they’re off.

On the morning of the memorial lunch, I was up in good time and had the barbecue lit, the Egg Controller hooked up, and the pork on by 9am. I had Oven set to 110, Meat set to 87, and I didn’t touch Time because I didn’t want to jinx things, but I was allowing four hours til lunch.

50 degrees.
80.
100. Fan still going.
110. Fan still going. Come on…
111. Fan stopped!
110.
109. Fan starts!
110.
110.
110.

The spaceship has stopped at the station. The car is successfully cruising. The Egg has been Controlled.

It worked perfectly. The little fan would spin up and wind down every now and then, and the temperature was dead on nearly 100% of the time, only dipping or rising 1 degree for a moment now and then. Dad would have been proud. He might have even said it was “Quite neat, actually” – his strongest possible praise for a gadget.

I had half-hoped to do pulled pork, time permitting, but I’m new to the world of slow-cooking and it turns out 4 hours is rushing it. I had to cook it a little faster to make sure it was ready in time, but with the Egg Controller that was a simple turn of a dial, and the computer handled the rest.

The Egg Controller draws a graph of the meat’s internal temperature over time – of course it does, dad made it – and this rose from a gentle slope to the side of a mountain. The meat reached 87 degrees right before 1pm, the Egg Controller gave a satisfied beep, and I hauled the impressive-looking joint out to carve it up.

It needed slicing rather than pulling, but it was devoured in short order, and more than one person said “Ooh it has a nice smoky flavour!”

I think dad would have got a lot of pleasure out of that.

–

Part 1: The Fight

Almost immediately, they run into our first ever Sectopod – a giant, insanely tough walker. Everyone focused on it, and we got it down low.

It was near a Purifier, but no-one had an attack that would hit both.

The Purifier was behind a truck. Nathan could throw a grenade that would hit the Sectopod and the truck. So he did.

The grenade blew up the truck. The grenade blew up the Sectopod. The Sectopod blew up. The Sectopod blew up a different truck. The truck blew up Nathan.

The Purifier is scratched. Nathan is dead.

Chris and Pip were hiding nearby. The Purifier set fire to them both. A Priest mind-controlled Chris.

Pip couldn’t kill the Priest because she was on fire, so she spent her turn running as far from Chris as she could get.

Chris spent his turn running straight to her and stabbing her with a sword.

Meanwhile, the Purifier set fire to the van the VIP was in. It blew up, but the VIP survived!

The Priest shot him.

Mind Control wears off. Chris triumphantly sprints across the map to slash the 1-health Priest who enslaved him. He misses.

Asher does it for him.

The VIP is dead and the mission is lost, but we spend a turn cleaning up the enemies before Evacuating.

Except: I can’t place the Evac zone. The button’s not working.

You can’t place the Evac on VIP extractions. It’s pre-set. It’s miles away. And the ship leaves in 2 turns.

–

Part 2: The Escape

Everyone runs – ignoring cover, ignoring the risk of triggering enemies.

We make it to the base of the building. The evac zone is on the roof. We can’t see any route to the roof. No-one can path there.

Asher’s snake suit has a grappling hook, and he uses it to pull himself up to the evac zone. Instead of evacuating, he runs to the far side.

He can see two drainpipes back there, so everyone spents their moves getting to the back of the building. Asher returns to the evac zone.

Final turn. Anyone not in the evac zone at the end of this is lost. Asher’s already there, so I cycle through the rest of the team.

This is how far Pip can move:

This is how far Chris can move:

This is how far Peter can move:

This is how far Rosa can move:

Before I go any further, I should tell you that three people make it out of this mission – and Asher isn’t one of them.

–

Part 3: The Betrayal

Rosa has the plasma crossbow. We CANNOT lose the plasma crossbow.

Asher has the snake suit. We CANNOT lose the snake suit, but that’s fine, he’s already in the zone. Asher can get out, the question is, can anyone come with him?

No, right? No-one has actions to give, no-one else has grapples or extra moves. No sensible plan works here, so all that’s left are the crazy options.

Rosa can get NEXT TO the evac zone. And Asher can get to the edge of it. They can be adjacent.

You can’t pull another soldier. But you can pick them up. They just have to be dead.

I’m not trying to save Rosa, I’m trying to save her Crossbow. She can’t hand it over, but if she’s dead it’ll be on her body. So we’re going to kill her.

You can’t shoot your own troops, but explosions can damage them. Chris and Peter both have grenades, and between them they do more damage than Rosa has health.

I move Rosa to just outside the evac zone, and have Chris throw a grenade at her. It takes off half her health, but it also destroys the roof, and she goes plummeting to the ground.

I thought this might happen, but I have two possible ways to deal with it:

Firstly, we could kill her on the ground. Asher could hop down, pick her up, and hop back up. Sounds ridiculous, but I think picking up is free, and you actually move just as far carrying someone as unburdened.

I save and try this. I allow myself to save and load any time I want to check ‘how does X work?’ or ‘if I was there, could I do Y?’, but not to undo bad luck.

It doesn’t quite work – Asher can get down and pick her up with 1 move left, but it’s not enough to get up the drainpipe to the roof again.

So option 2: if I do this again and this time blow up part of the evac zone as well, Asher could drop down, pick her up, and technically still be IN the evac zone. If there’s no roof above his head, I reason, he should be able to extract.

I go back and redo Chris throwing the grenade at Rosa, one square further in, and what happens changes everything.

–

Part 4: The Turnaround

This is why I like my ‘load saves to test rules’ system – it might be less hardcore, but it lets you explore more of the possibility space and discover the craziest tricks.

The grenade goes off, Rosa is hit, the roof collapses and she drops to the ground as before. But then we get a radio call: “The evac zone is compromised, get to the new one!”

THE EVAC ZONE… MOVED.

THE NEW ONE IS RIGHT NEXT TO CHRIS.

Cancel Operation Kill Rosa, blowing up the evac zone is our new objective.

I reload – this is a Did Not Know How The Rule Works situation if ever there was one.

This time Chris throws his grenade to exactly the same place, but I don’t move Rosa there first. The evac zone moves again and to roughly the same spot, right next to Chris.

This is no fucking use to Chris, because he used his turn throwing a grenade.

But it’s great news for Pip, it’s great news for Peter, and it’s great news for Rosa – who’s an especially big fan of this plan of not murdering her. They can all make it now.

It’s pretty devastating for Asher, who is now standing uselessly on the roof that used to be the evac zone, in the rain, in his big blue snake suit, watching everyone else escape. It’s too far for him.

We will lose the snake suit. But this saves three lives instead of one, and most importantly of all, it saves a crossbow that fires plasma.

Our ride takes off, and Chris and Asher are left behind to be captured by Advent. We may get the chance to rescue them later – and if we do, I know exactly who to send.

Tag yourself I’m gravely wounded

The other day I really wanted something to do that would give my eyes a break from focusing on things right in front of them. So I looked for audiobooks, and remembered that I’d been planning to read The Martian – mostly because of this comic and its hover-text:

Particularly interesting because that’s XKCD, by Randall Munroe, who used to work at NASA.

Anyway, it’s great. Can’t think of another book that has hooked me so utterly in one, brief opening chapter. Not through any unconventional literary trick, it’s just a quick summary of the narrator’s predicament: stuck on Mars, presumed dead, probably will be.

The Martian does three things I really, really like:

• Get to the fucking point: I don’t need to know what Mark Watney looks like, I don’t need a scene-setting prologue of what his daily life was like before this, I don’t need to be shown how much he loves his wife and kids in order to see him as human. If this book is about an interesting situation, get to the interesting situation. The Martian starts there.

• Explain the mechanics: if this is a problem, why is it a problem? If the obvious solution won’t work, why won’t it work? If Watney thinks X is the best plan, why is it the best? What’s wrong with Y? Could X go wrong? What’s his plan if it does? The Martian goes into rigorous detail on all of this – figures, equations, scientific principles – probably too much for some people, but it’s catnip for me.

  One of the reasons I love games more than other media is that the best ones have consistent rules, so extraordinary feats or miraculous triumphs actually mean something. Watney’s solutions to his endless problems feel clever because the problems are presented within a set of rules we understand, and the solution is one we didn’t see. I have no idea if they’re realistic, but all I need is that they’re understandable and internally consistent.

• Have a likeable character: The Martian’s not really about character – Watney is just smart and resourceful to ridiculous extremes, and the book is more interested in what he can do with that than in examining his flaws and complexities as a person. But Watney’s also the narrator, so it matters a lot that you like him. His tone is most of what sold me in that opening chapter: he describes his uniquely dire situation in brief, clear and relatable terms, then jokes about how dead he is. That’s more or less the tone throughout – occasionally he finds it a little harder to joke about, but not for long.

  In another predicament, this chipperness might undermine the stakes, but being stranded on Mars sort of takes care of that by itself. The utter isolation, the impossible distance, the brutal hostility of the planet, all come with a strong emotional payload. Whenever there was a twist in his fate, I found it surprisingly affecting just because of the dizzying magnitude of the problems involved. Jesus, imagine being that far from earth and losing your only source of X. I don’t need Watney to mope about it to feel the scale of the problem. The facts alone send a shiver down my spine.

The book does have a few problems:

• A few times, Watney says something sexist or homophobic, usually in his jokey messages back home. Yes, it’s the character and not necessarily the author, but they’re usually in the context of jokes and there isn’t really any reason the author would want to put you off Watney, as above. It sticks out because he’s otherwise very decent – it reads more like adopted bad language that’s gone unquestioned. If he’d been stuck on Mars since 1950, it’d make a lot of sense.
• The book doesn’t stick with Watney on Mars, and it’s a lot weaker when it cuts back to Earth. Sometimes it’s interesting to know the mechanics of what NASA is trying, but the characters there are mostly flimsy stereotypes.

The audiobook also has a lot of audiobook-specific problems – I’d advise going with the text version if you have the choice:

• Narrator R C Bray has a good Watney voice, and a good narrator voice, but he also does accents for all the other characters, and a truly toe-curling ‘woman voice’ for all the female characters. It operates on the bizarre notion that all women sound breathy and meek, including a) the commander of the most expensive and advanced space expedition in history, b) a foul-mouthed bulldog of a press officer, and c) a primetime news show host.
• Many sections of the book involve long series of characters and numbers that the eye would skim over on the page, and these are hilariously unsuited to being read aloud. This edition makes absolutely no concession to these – at one point he’s just reading out letters, symbols and numbers for about 5 minutes straight. It’s close to parody.
• He mispronounces ‘sysop’ every time, even when it’s being said by the sysop, and this is agony without equal.

Apparently it’s £3 on Kindle? On the one hand, wow, I really profoundly got the wrong edition here, but on the other, it’s two days later and I’ve listened to the whole thing, because I could do it while I cook, cycle, exercise, shower or anything else. Audiobooks are great. People should definitely stop reading them like idiots.

Co-star of Spaced and Shaun of the Dead talks to Marc Maron about what he was doing before all of that, the nature of which you would probably never guess. On the party where he first met Simon Pegg:

“I was nervous to meet him. He was this stand-up comedian, and I was the funniest waiter at Chiquitos. We circled each other all night, until finally we were outside on a roof together, and we just did impressions at each other, for hours. It was like the duelling banjos.”

Edit: as with any interview podcast, skip the intro until you hear the guest. It’s like 14 fucking minutes here.

Office, day

NEEDLESSLY DICKISH BUSINESSMAN:
Your company is garbage, Desperate! Once I buy it despite hating it, I will change everything you like about it!

DESPERATE BUSINESSMAN:
Go to hell, Needlessly! The merger’s off!

NEEDLESSLY DICKISH BUSINESSMAN:
Without me your company is nothing (but I still want to acquire it)!

DESPERATE BUSINESSMAN:
That’s for me to tearfully acknowledge later and for you to shut up!

NEEDLESSLY DICKISH BUSINESSMAN:
I’m a jerk in my personal life too! (Leaves)

Office, day

REASONABLE SUBORDINATE:
Dammit Desperate, we need this merger or we’re done for!

DESPERATE BUSINESSMAN:
Shut up, closest friend with my best interests at heart! Besides, soon we won’t need Needlessly Dickish OR his money.

REASONABLE SUBORDINATE:
Dammit Desperate, don’t do anything desperate!

DESPERATE BUSINESSMAN:
I don’t have a CHOICE except the one you just mentioned!!

Car, day

JESSICA:
I’m so glad you invited me to Place Where You Live.

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
It’s so lovely to see you Jessica! How’s your book tour going?

JESSICA:
Very well, thank you. I am a literary titan known to most of humanity and my work is to everyone’s taste.

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
That’s great. I just hope you don’t get wrapped up in the FLASHPOINT OF LOCAL TENSIONS going on while you’re here.

JESSICA:
(Raises quizzical eyebrow)

Apartment, day

HANDSOME YOUNG MAN WHO WORKS FOR SOMEONE BUT IS OTHERWISE NOT REALLY INVOLVED:
I love you PRETTY YOUNG WOMAN WHO IS RELATED TO SOMEONE.

PRETTY YOUNG WOMAN WHO IS RELATED TO SOMEONE BUT OTHERWISE NOT REALLY INVOLVED:
Oh, but it’s no use HANDSOME YOUNG MAN WHO WORKS FOR SOMEONE! In some obtuse way this business merger makes our love impossible!

HANDSOME YOUNG MAN WHO WORKS FOR SOMEONE BUT IS OTHERWISE NOT REALLY INVOLVED:
Ugh, you’re right somehow!

Docks, night

SHADY CONTACT:
I got the stuff, where’s the money?

DESPERATE BUSINESSMAN:
I didn’t think this through.

SHADY CONTACT:
Hey, you’d BETTER have my money!

DESPERATE BUSINESSMAN:
I didn’t think this through.

SHADY CONTACT:
You messed with the wrong Shady Contact, Desperate! I will definitely and literally kill you! Not a figure of speech! If you’re murdered soon, it was me! You hear that, witnesses who heard the victim arguing with someone around this time?

Docks, day

POLICE IDIOT stands over DESPERATE BUSINESSMAN’S BODY. JESSICA arrives immediately somehow.

POLICE IDIOT:
Looks like an open-and-shut case, Mrs F. Witnesses heard Shady Contact threatening to kill him, and as a police officer I don’t like to look for further evidence or consider any other possibilities.

JESSICA:
I’m not so sure, Idiot! Can you get me his phone records?

POLICE IDIOT:
OK, for some reason it’s fine for me to share that private data. But I’m telling you Mrs F, this time you’re wrong. I know I have a 0% success rate and you solve all of the 22 murders that happen near you every year, but

Office, day

NEEDLESSLY DICKISH BUSINESSMAN:
With Desperate out of the way, this merger will definitely go through! Yes, I had a motive to kill him alright.

IRRELEVANT CHARACTER WHO LOOKS CONFUSINGLY FAMILIAR:
I reply, but say nothing of substance and never become relevant to the plot, although I look enough like someone who is that you’re no longer completely sure of what’s happening.

Lovely house, day

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
What’s that?

JESSICA:
Hm? Oh, just Desperate’s phone records from the night he died. Do you know, he didn’t make a single call to his wife that night? Don’t you think that’s odd?

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
I like you but no.

JESSICA:
All the same, I’m going to keep looking through these records.

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
Well, this isn’t at all the right context for this phrase, but a rolling stone gathers no moss.

JESSICA:
Moss… that’s it!

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
That’s what?

JESSICA:
The missing piece of the puzzle!

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
What puzzle?

JESSICA:
The puzzle of who killed Desperate Businessman!

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
Please just say out loud the thing you’ve realised.

JESSICA:
I have to get to the police station immediately! (leaves)

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
For fuck’s sake, Jessica!

Docks, night

SOMEONE’S WIFE, YOU FORGET WHOSE is rummaging through a bin at the crime scene.

JESSICA:
Looking for this? (She holds up an earring)

SOMEONE’S WIFE, YOU FORGET WHOSE:
Jessica! No, I was just… I thought I heard a dog, in the bin.

JESSICA:
I’m afraid it’s over, Someone’s Wife. You killed Desperate for basically the same mundane, practical reason as one of the male suspects, but you didn’t get much screen time so it still seems like a surprise. I found your earring at the crime scene, and when I give it to the police I’m sure they’ll prove it was yours.

SOMEONE’S WIFE, YOU FORGET WHOSE:
Not if I happen to have a gun on me and draw it now, honestly planning to kill an old lady over some fairly flimsy evidence but for some reason wanting to warn her first!

POLICE IDIOT:
(Emerging from the shadows) Drop it, Someone’s Wife!

SOMEONE’S WIFE, YOU FORGET WHOSE:
Oh for God’s sake. Why do you let her do these things as a weird piece of theatre?

POLICE IDIOT:
Her chain of evidence is always hopelessly weak, so we just have to hope you’ll either kill her or confess.

JESSICA:
It’s true. I have no reason to mention this beyond simple smarm now, but I never found any earring.

SOMEONE’S WIFE, YOU FORGET WHOSE:
Then how?!

JESSICA:
Oh, it was quite simple, really. The moss. When I saw you at the funeral earlier, the camera focused weirdly on a piece of moss on your shoe. I happened to remember that this moss only grows in one place in the world, the crime scene, and it only sticks to murderers.

But I had to wait for someone to mention the word ‘moss’ in a different context before I made this trivial extra step as if it was a moment of serendipitous inspiration, which for some reason is how we want crimes to be solved.

SOMEONE’S WIFE, YOU FORGET WHOSE:
Well I’d do it again! In moss-proof shoes, and undroppable earrings!

JESSICA:
Again, I never found an earring.

Always an elevator for some reason, day

HANDSOME YOUNG MAN WHO WORKS FOR SOMEONE:
Jessica, we wanted you to be the first to know: we’ve set a date!

JESSICA:
Oh, that’s wonderful!

PRETTY YOUNG WOMAN WHO IS RELATED TO SOMEONE:
I hope you’ll come to the ceremony!

JESSICA:
Oh, I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Just so long as you don’t expect ALL of your guests to survive!

(All laugh)

JESSICA:
Hundreds of people have died around me.

(Freeze frame)

–

Clack. “I love you. Everything’s OK. I’m coming back.” Clack.

I don’t know what this place is. Everyone here looks so lost. They just sit there, in wheelchairs, looking lost. No-one’s helping them, and it’s heartbreaking, but I don’t know what I can do.

I wish I knew where Chris was. The bathroom? I want to ask him what we’re doing here, when we can leave.

It smells of, I don’t know, ointment. I don’t know which ointment, but it feels like it would be an ointment. I feel like the people here need a lot of ointment.

He’s taking a long time. I don’t know how long now. I have this after-image of him in that armchair, like he just got up for a second, but maybe he’s been gone a long time.

I’m worried now. I’m worried about me. I feel like this isn’t normal, not to know these things. I feel like I’m in a dream. I feel lost.

I suddenly realise there’s something in my hand. I don’t recognise it. It’s boxy and smooth and grey. My hands know it but I don’t know why and I’m scared and sick at how lost I am now.

I think Chris has gone. I think he’s just gone, and I’ll never know why or what I did wrong or what this place is.

My thumb is on a button and it wants to push it.

Clack. “I love you. Everything’s OK. I’m coming back to pick you up at six, same as always.”

But! Editor David Malki is also Kickstarting a card game based on the same concept, and since it’s blown its funding goal by over 1000%, they’re releasing a few stories from the anthology to say thanks.

One of them is mine! You can read it now! Here it is!

It’s about a supervillain’s henchman tasked with the job of having their enemies killed in a way that doesn’t contradict their predicted deaths. It is called: LAZARUS REACTOR FISSION SEQUENCE!

If you can’t read it, go here.

The break-in is said to have occured when Francis attempted to enter the building, which is also his house, and found one of its two locks unresponsive to key-based opening techniques. No local locksmiths were available, so an emergency meeting of the board of director was held.

By a unanimous vote of one to no-one else was there, the board elected to not be outside anymore. The board then climbed a nearby railing to achieve the necessary height to strike at the non-functioning lock, and extended its foot with force. The lock, which was not available for comment, detached from the internal door frame after six strikes.

“Fuck,” the board announced.

The developer’s headquarters are now secured with the remaining functional lock. The board then poured itself a glass of wine and fell asleep watching Justified.

Two weeks before the return flight: four or five bad seats. I don’t book any of them.

One week before departure: three or four bad seats. Not booking.

Eighteen hours before departure: one bad seat. Oh come on! Fine, as an act of protest, I’m not even going to book the only seat available to me. I’m going to leave you guys in the dark as to which of these one seats I’m going to take.

Four hours before departure: one bad seat. The same bad seat. My system has failed. You know what, assholes? Fine. I’m…. I’m not even going to check in online. Deal with that.

Three hours before departure, check-in desk: “Hmm, let’s see if we can get you a better seat.”
“Oh, that’d be great.”
“Okay, you’re going from gate S10, everything’s running on time, here’s your boarding pass.”

I look at the boarding pass: it’s the same seat. It’s from that special stripe down the middle of the plane where seats just aren’t anything. They’re not aisle (easy to get up), they’re not window (no ass in face when other people get up), they’re not front of block (infinite leg room) and they’re not back of block (guilt-free reclining). They’re just seats, reasonably comfortable seats, on a plane, that is going to fly through the goddamn air until you’re in another country, serving you free drinks as it goes.

Fine.

This is a cinnamon apple pie with maple ice cream I had shortly before my flight home. After I’d finished, the waitress noticed I was not dead and commented that “You’ve done well.” No I have not, kindly waitress. No I have not.

Waiting at the gate, the staff keep putting out announcements for British Airways passengers who’ve checked in online, and haven’t seen a BA rep at the airport yet. I sit back and smile at their misfortune. Wrong choice, suckers! You should have randomly not checked in online this time, like I randomly didn’t.

They form a queue, then everyone sees the queue and thinks we’re boarding, forming a bigger queue, which makes everyone sure we’re boarding, then they have to put out another announcement telling everyone to sit back down.

When we finally board, the lady in front of me gets an angry red beep when her boarding pass is scanned.
“Oh dear. You didn’t see a British Airways representative, did you?”
“Yes, I saw you, at this desk.”
We share a very British everyone-is-incompetent look while the rep goes off to check something. She comes back. It’s fine.

I have my passport open to the photo page with the boarding pass tucked inside – I have decided this will be one of my life skills. She scans it, it beeps red.
“Did you-”
“Yes.”
I’ll be damned if I’m going to be penalised for checking in online the one time I didn’t.
She goes off to check something, and comes back. I’m just about to explain – in what I plan to be a slightly snippy tone – exactly who I saw and where, when she leans forwards and whispers guiltily:
“You’ve been upgraded to Club.”

Jesus, now people are just going to hate me.

My first thought on the plane was “Oh man, Club Class on this flight looks just like the lowly World Traveller Plus.” Then, “Oh, that was World Traveller Plus. This is Club Class.”

Not really seats, even, but pods. Each faces the opposite way to its neighbour, so you’re left staring a stranger in the face. That’s okay, though, because a frosted glass barrier can be electricly erected between you, shooting up in nested layers like spacecraft armour. I worried a while about how to do this politely, until the person opposite did it impolitely.

FINE. Didn’t want to look at YOUR stupid face EITHER. This is how Club Class people behave: I’d only been a Club Class person for a few hours, and I’d already been planning to do the same.

The barrier seemed less like a useful feature and more like a diabolical social experiment. Take two strangers who have no reason to look at each other, sit them so they’re looking at each other, then wait to see who presses the button first. Neither of you mind, really, but unless you live to see the great cyber shunning of 2073, it’s about the only time in your life a perfect stranger will tell a robot that they don’t want to look at your face anymore.

This photo is annotated, but I can’t find a good way of embedding annotations. Click it instead.

The legroom is so preposterous that once you’ve done up your seatbelt, trying to retrieve your Highlife magazine from the seatback pocket in front of you looks like a baby straining at his pram buckle for some unreachable sweet. And it isn’t a seatback pocket so much as a fold-down footrest that completes your full length bed when you fully recline. For this reason your tray folds down from the side on an adjustable rail, running from directly in front of you to the position Club Class people refer to as “the fuck out of my way”.

The only apparent drawback was that I couldn’t put anything under my seat, because the reclining mechanism took up all the space, and I couldn’t put anything under the seat in front of me, because there wasn’t one in walking distance. I’d have to board a much smaller plane and fly there to deposit it.

The drawback was solved by an actual drawer. I had a drawer. I wasn’t just sitting there, I was moving in.

It was one of those ten hour flights that just flew by. You know – the ones that never happen. Apart from a very Club Class incident in which I managed to restrain myself from shouting “WELL IF YOU DON’T HAVE THE FUCKING POUILLY-FUME, WHY THE FUCK IS IT ON THIS FUCKING WINE LIST? HALF THIS SHIT IS SAUVIGNON, AND YOU’RE TELLING ME ALL YOU’VE GOT IS FUCKING GRIGIO? I WANT THE DELICATE FUCKING HONEYSUCKLE AROMAS GODDAMMIT.” I barely noticed the time.

And oddly, the things that really help don’t seem like they need to be expensive. All you need for an awesome flight is to be drunk, lying down, and watching a bad romantic comedy that is for some reason affecting you more than it should.

Booze and entertainment are free even in Economy, and I just don’t think people take up any more space when they’re lying down. You could have a double-bunk economy class that would be perfectly pleasant to sleep in, and if you staggered the bunks they could even sit up.

Which I guess is why they don’t do it. It’d be perfectly fine. There’d be no reason to pay two or three times a sane air fare to fly in comfort. The airline’s only economically viable option is to cause intentional discomfort to their poorest customers, and I’m not even sure it’s wrong. If they didn’t, base costs would rise and fewer people could afford to fly at all.

It’s a weird and slightly annoying piece of knowledge that’s going to make it even harder to enjoy the actually extremely nice World Traveller Plus class I’m booked on on the way back.

Next: the way back.

Club World isn’t first class, but it makes it hard to imagine what is. Do their seats go beyond horizontal, into back-breaking reflex angles? Do they face out into the open air, to guarantee three miles of leg room? After the champagne, three course meal and brandy you get in Club World, is there a heroin course?

At the airport, a thought occured: I wonder if this gets me into the lounge? I’ve travelled with people who have lounge access before, and it’s a mystical experience. It’s like being given a gigantic apartment, stocked with well prepared food, good espresso machines, a great wine rack, and a full selection of classy whiskeys, cognac, gin and cocktail ingredients. There are no staff, no prices, no explicit rules – you just help yourself.

Directions pointed to the ‘BA Conchord Lounge’, which led me to a fat man by the only door no-one in the airport was heading to. I wasn’t really sure how to say “Does my undeserved, unpaid for, random upgrade ticket get me in here?” with any degree of class, so I just showed him my boarding pass.

I noticed they’d written ‘BLUE’ on it, to make sure no British Airways staff mistook me for a Silver, Gold, Platinum, Sapphire, Diamond, Uranium or worthwhile member. I’m only a BLUE member because BA’s Executive Club is the worst RPG in the world. Every year, they steal all your experience. It’s not if you haven’t used it in a while, and it’s not because you’re not close to levelling up. I was a few points off Silver Membership, I’d used it a month or so back, and was about to use it again when BAM. Zero XP.

Blue does not get you into the BA Lounge, but Club World, I reckoned, would. The fat man, in one of the most expertly polite and helpful rejections I’ve received, explained that the Club Lounge was downstairs, then ‘back on yourself’. I pointed beneath us to confirm. He nodded.

When I actually got there, I realised it wasn’t just below where we’d been standing, it was actually in the same building. He’d made me walk two hundred metres just to avoid using the entrance reserved for Conchord members.

It was a sort of multi-story complex of lounges, and every path you takes leads you quickly and easily to the Conchord Lounge you’re not allowed into, unless you’re constructed from over 70% gold.

Luckily, a well-dressed man ahead of me helpfully blundered into every false turn towards the Conchord Lounge before realising, and redirecting himself towards the lowly Club one he and I were only good enough for. I tailed him at a safe distance to avoid each mistake.

Pretty soon, it became clear that the Club Lounge was actually above the Conchord one, making the fat man’s misdirection all the more cruel and bizarre. This general lobby area is open to everyone, only the 2D plane dividing it from the main concourse is exclusive to Conchorders.

The Club World one, marked by a life-size statue of a horse with a lampshade on its head, was just as I remembered it. And just like the Conchord Lounge, which we’d passed on the way up. Leather chairs, low coffee tables, free internet, huge sofas, wine, whiskey, brandy, gin, vodka, cognac, armagnac, chilled beer, and two hundred meters of buffet: crusty rolls, brie, pastrami, pasta salad. Other, more pungent pastas and other, more confusing rolls.

I was doing calculations in my head as to the order and quantities in which I could eat and drink these things without being ill. I’d need to avoid caffeine, since I planned to pass out on the plane, but I formulated a way to cram in pastrami and brie rolls, hot chocolate, fusilli and feta salad, gin and tonic, and the most expensive whiskey I could find that I hadn’t tried. Something old and tasting deliciously of oppression.

By the time I saw the signs, it was too late. The signs said “Ice-cream”. They signpost their ice-cream. But I was already out of both time and capacity, and slightly drunk.

At the gate, there was a ‘fast track’ queue for boarding, and my heart sunk when I saw that yes, it was for Club World passengers. I’d have to use it, it’d be ridiculous not to, but I’d also have to endure the “Asshole.” stares of everyone waiting.

In fact, though, with only one boarding pass scanner, the fast-track queue ended up moving slower than the public one. I was relieved, then, after a while, actually a little indignant.

The guy in front of me started bitching about it loudly to the person ahead.

“Asshole,” I thought.

Next: I actually fly.

I get to travel for work sometimes, and it’s made me a little demented about checking in.

The first few times you get babied, or bathroomed, or fatmanned, you accept it. But after that, you start to scheme. Getting a good seat isn’t a hope for me, any more, it’s the objective of a five-part campaign. I’ve given miniature lectures to friends on the virtues of aisle versus window, and the risk/reward mathematics of the front row – where there’s legroom aplenty, but the cots may hide a grim payload.

So I check in as close to 24 hours ahead as humanly possible. I even rush the process, when I do it, as if other people are clicking through the wizard faster than me, swiftly dragging their round-headed icons to the precious blue seats I’m trying to secure myself.

If you’re anything like this, you’ll have discovered what I have: it doesn’t work.

You get to seat selection and there are precisely three left, sprinkled amid daunting blocks of what can only be families with children, drunk rugby players, or worst of all: people with something interesting to say. To each other.

And when you walk to this seat, twenty four hours later, you’ll have noticed the ninety year old, noticed the ball of knotted grey hair that might once have been a hippy, and the man whose vestments seem to mark him out as the pope of some unrecognisable religion – all in seats that were gone when you booked. And you’ll have thought this:

Really?

All of you? All of you checked in before me? You checked in twenty-three hours, fifty nine minutes and fifty nine seconds before departure? You there, dipping your dentures in the complimentary tonic water, what browser do you use? Which e-mail address did you have them send the booking code to? Tell me how you got that seat before me, you cheating slimy fuck! Stop crying and talk!

Perhaps you’re not like this.

The whole process makes no sense to me anymore. I thought the reason you had to check in for a flight, when you don’t for a bus, is that it’s important you show up. They’ll wait for you. So they’d appreciate it if you let them know an hour or two beforehand that you’re at the airport and ready to go.

Then they started letting you do it online.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the convenience. But what does checking in online actually tell you, beyond the fact that I still physically exist the day before I fly? That doesn’t seem to offer any greater assurance that I’ll actually show up for the flight in time than when I paid you crazy money for it in the first place. It just reduces the whole thing to a frantic and brutal seat race, one that has frankly cost me a chunk of my already fractured humanity.

Now I’ve learnt something even worse. The seats change. Book one 24 hours early, then try again five hours before departure. A paradise unfolds; a land of empty aisle seats, vacant blocks, even the front rows with infinite legroom. They exist, no-one’s reserved them, and they open up.

I don’t know when or by what dark magic, but it happens. Those people who couldn’t possibly have booked them before you? They didn’t. They just checked in after all the fake, placeholder people checked out.

So this time, I checked in three times.

Once way ahead of time: two seats available, both shit. Same for my return flight, almost a week later.

Then again, twenty four hours before. Nope: different seats are free, but nothing better. I can’t print my boarding pass at home anyway, though, so I just left it.

Then, the morning of departure, I check in online again. Three or four seats. In fucking Club World.

They’re even aisle seats, and why not? Club World is 50% aisle. You can’t move without bumping into an aisle, which is to say you can move without bumping into anything at all, because of all the aisles. There are seats in Club World that are both window and aisle at the same time – something modern science previously thought impossible. I took one by the lake, overlooking the valley, and confirmed.

Next: The Lounge.

It’s a moronic undertaking, of course, because the real one will be humiliatingly superior. He’s an easy target, because he’s basically made of dramatic irony – but that also leaves a minefield of awful clichés to step around. Anything that involves someone we believe not to be a Spy turning out to be a Spy is automatically dross.

I love the bit in Meet The Sniper when our man wonders aloud whether he’s been spotted – and is then copiously shot at. Acknowledging the concerns that go through your head playing as him felt truer and funnier than these scenes where the starring class automatically wins against all-comers.

So this script is mostly focused around the characteristic moments of playing a Spy. I reject the perception that he is unwaveringly aloof: aloof, sure, but he’s all about the wavering. No other class experiences more moment-to-moment panic or humiliation.

A warning, though: it’s long.

1. INT — BRIEFING ROOM — DAY — PRESENT

The title card vanishes to reveal the edge of a table. With a sudden bang, a blue briefcase is slammed down onto it, then clicked open by two gloved hands.

SPYIntelligence, gentlemen. There are those who have it, the conoscenti (gesturing to himself faux-modestly, head bowed) – and those who do not. The – ahem – imbeciles.

Zoom out to reveal a Red Team SPY as he slouches down into a chair, Blue Team corpses of various classes strewn around the briefing room. He takes a wad of papers from the briefcase, licks a gloved fingertip for purchase, and leafs through them uninterestedly. As usual, his accent takes a drunken tour of Western Europe as he speaks.

SPYIn my profession, one is lamentably dependent on the latter.

He rips the topsheet from a dossier, draws his cigarette case, opens a small compartment containing tobacco and, in a deft yet impossible to animate movement, rolls it into a smokeable.

SPYWhen a leopard preys on impala in sub-Saharan Africa, he does not attempt to slaughter the entire herd.

He reaches down and lifts the nozzle of a dead Pyro’s Backburner and lights his intelligence roll-up on the pilot light. He takes a few puffs, then points it at us.

SPYNo! He isolates the slowest of the pack, and eliminates the beast alone. (Shrugging:) It is the same in my line of work, but it is those lacking in mental agility on whom I prey.

With a black loafer, he gently kicks the cranium of a dead Heavy at his feet. A lump of part-chewed Sandvich drops from his slack craw and his tongue lolls out.

SPYOf course, some are slow in both senses of the word.

2. EXT — DUSTBOWL, TUNNEL — DAY — PAST

Our red Spy, running along a tunnel, cloaks. We can still see him as a red silhouette.

Blues pour in: a HEAVY, SCOUT, PYRO, DEMOMAN. The Spy has to flatten himself utterly against the wall to avoid brushing the Heavy, dash to the other side to avoid the Scout, dive clean over the Pyro just as he blasts a gout of spychecking flame, land into a forwards roll, and stand up face to face with the obviously intoxicated Demoman, who chooses that moment to stop dead and take a swig of his bottle.

The silhouette tries to go round him to the left, but the Demoman staggers in that direction as he drinks. He tries the right, with the same result. He gives up and stands impatiently as the Demoman glugs, and glugs, and glugs. The silhouette looks at its watch, taps its foot. At last the Demoman advances, veering drunkenly into one wall then the other, and the silhouette tiptoes carefully around him.

And slams into an identical blue silhouette, shimmering in and out of visibility.

SPY (VO)A hunter, of course, must be cognisant of other predators.

Both step back in apparent shock, draw their revolvers, then cautiously circle one another until they have switched. Then, without taking their eyes off each other, they walk backwards in their original direction, and eventually turn to run full-speed.

SPY (VO)They may not be your primary target…

The blue silhouette ducks round the corner and decloaks – a fully visible BLUE SPY, smirking. Simultaneously our man exits the tunnel…

3. EXT — DUSTBOWL, CAP 3 — DAY — PAST

…and slips away to the side, decloaks and straps on a paper mask with a Spy’s face on it.

SPY (VO)But it is idiocy to assume you are not theirs.

He waits until the Blue Spy also exits the tunnel in search of him, and gives chase just inches behind. As he does so, a blue MEDIC spots them and gives chase. The three run to:

4. EXT – DUSTBOWL, APPROACH TO CAP 4 — DAY — PAST

MEDICSpy! Spy!

BLUE SPY(Glancing over his left shoulder, just as our man darts right:) Please, doktor, endeavour not to tell everyone.

MEDICNein! Spy is Spy!

BLUE SPY(Muttering:) That is self-evident.

Meanwhile our man is swishing and thrusting his knife just centimeters from the enemy’s back, and finally he cuts a corner that his target does not. The knife sinks in, our man’s mask drops to the floor, the real blue Spy’s eyes widen, and he drops to his knees.

BLUE SPY(Dribbling blood, twisting his head to look back:) You might… have been… more specific…

MEDICIdiote!

Our man leaves his knife in his victim’s back, and instead pries the Blue Spy’s knife from his hand before he collapses.

SPYThat will do nicely.

We dolly with the Medic as he arrives on the scene, just in time to see the Spy take a different corridor back to Cap 3. We lose sight of the Spy just before arriving back at:

5. EXT — DUSTBOWL, CAP 3 — DAY — PAST

We cut to a close-up of his narrowed eyes as they scan his team for suspicious activity, then pan across the team itself:

A SNIPER squats on the control point on the far right, peering down his scope. A SOLDIER trundles forth from the trench in the center. On the left, an ENGINEER and a Spy wearing an unconvincing Engineer mask stand either side of a level three SENTRY, facing away from it in opposite directions. The Medic’s gaze pauses on them, then pans slowly back to the Soldier, none the wiser.

Before the Engineer leaves the frame, he turns and notices the Spy standing next to him. He reacts and thumps his wrench menacingly into his open palm. The oblivious Spy, without looking round, reaches back and slaps an Electro-Sapper onto the Sentry. We pan away before we see the Engy’s reaction, as the Medic suspiciously watches the Soldier rocket-jump over his head, but we hear:

ENGYBoys, we got a Spy!

And the sounds of vigorous Sentry-wrenching and sapper-fritzing.

MEDICVerdammen! It iz hopeless!

He turns and leaves for the front line.

6. INT — BRIEFING ROOM — DAY — PRESENT

The Spy is lounging in the same seat where we left him, makeshift cigarette halfburnt and forgotten in his right hand, twirling an Engineer’s hardhat on his left. He contemplates the hat.

SPY(Absently:) One breed of impala wear ridiculous yellow hats, and construct robotic impala to compensate for their shortcomings as male impala – all the hurtful things the female impala said to them in impala college.

The hardhat slips from his finger and clatters to the briefing-room floor behind him. The sound snaps him out of his reverie and he sits up straight.

SPY(Reflecting:) At this point, I confess, the analogy falters.

7. EXT — DUSTBOWL, CAP 3 — DAY — PAST

The Engy chases the disguised Spy around the Sentry, the Spy slapping Sappers on the device, the Engy knocking them off with his wrench. By now they’re wading noisily through a heap of thirty bashed-in sappers on the ground. The Engy suddenly reverses direction to catch the Spy, but the Spy doubles back just in time to stay out of range.

ENGYDarnit! Where in tarnation are you keepin’ these motherlovin’ things?

SPYYour tiny mind…

He jumps to slap a sapper on top of the Sentry.

SPY…couldn’t possibly…

He ducks to affix one underneath it.

SPY…comprehend.

As the Engy pauses to reach each one with his Wrench, the Spy catches up behind him and shivs him in the spine. At the precise moment of impact, his mask drops to the floor.

ENGY(Whispering, face-first in the dirt:) Now how in all heck is that any kinda fair?

His eyes close. The Spy begins to brush dust from his suit and opens his mouth to speak, then…

SENTRYBEEPBEEPBEEP!

…his eyes widen in alarm, and he dives into the nearby hut under a hail of fire.

We cut to a Sentry’s-eye view: a green nightvision-style view of the scene with an overlayed wireframe. A box around the entrance to the hut is labelled:

SENTRY (TEXT)LAST KNOWN LOCATION OF ELECTRO-SAPPER DELIVERY MEATBAG

After lingering on it for a moment, it pans abruptly to the corpse of the Engineer, draws a box around it, and adds the tag:

SENTRY (TEXT)FATHER. STATUS: DECEASED
…
NOOOOOO.

The view pans back to the hut, and our Spy is now standing exactly in the “MEATBAG” box wearing the Engineer mask again. The view zooms in on the mask and clarifies the resolution, then a box pops up labelled:

SENTRY (TEXT)SEARCHING FACIAL RECOGNITION DATABASE.

We see gurning mugshots of each of the nine classes flicker past, the Pyro in a party hat, the Demoman holding up an identity plate at a police station, the Scout in the Heavy’s headlock, until it settles on the Engineer, which is labelled “FATHER”. A new line prints below this:

SENTRY (TEXT)DOES NOT COMPUTE.
…
…
UNCLE?

As it writes, the Spy approaches and withdraws another Sapper. This is highlighted in a box labelled:

SENTRY (TEXT)BIRTHDAY GIFT?
…
REMEMBERED THIS YEAR?
…
CONTENTS: LUGNUTS?
…
OH BOY

The Spy slaps a sapper directly over our view, turning everything black except the text.

SENTRY (TEXT)!
…
SO COLD
…
SLEEP MODE

8. INT — BRIEFING ROOM — DAY — PRESENT

Our man has his feet up on the table, tapping ash into a Soldier’s upturned helmet on the desk.

SPY
Sometimes, to move among the impala, the leopard must become one. He must dress up in their skin, (gesturing:) become fat, oafish… (beat, then with a visible shudder:) Russian.

9. INT — DUSTBOWL, TUNNEL — DAY — PAST

Our Spy is trundling along in a theatrical imitation of the Heavy’s gun-burdened waddle, clutching his tiny revolver in both hands as if it is enormously heavy, wearing a Heavy mask and bellowing for a Medic in a pitch-perfect Heavy voice. Soon the Medic returns from the frontline and latches on to him.

MEDICI am here, kamerad!

The Spy takes a moment to strap on a new Heavy mask that bears a broad grin.

SPY AS HEAVYTHANK YOU DOCTOR!

Soon they reach the four attackers the Spy passed on his way in. As our Spy approaches, we see a close-up of his grinning Heavy mask, and we move into slow-mo as he pointlessly slaps a baleful one on top of it.

His balisong rises gradually in his hand until it is poised to strike, then the three Heavy masks fall from his face in rapid succession: angry, happy, grim, then his real expression: a contorted rictus of fury and dark anticipatory delight. His knife curves slowly downwards, but before it hits we cut to:

10. INT — BRIEFING ROOM — DAY — PRESENT

The Spy swings his legs down off the table and leans towards us, eyes narrowed, intense.

SPYThere are occasions, of course, which do not call for such restraint. When a leopard’s characteristic savoir faire is simply inappropriate. Situations that need no subtlety, subterfuge or deception.

He draws his balisong from his blazer pocket and raises it for emphasis.

SPY

Situations, gentlemen, that demand (stabbing the air with each word for emphasis:) swift! Decisive! Action! In which the only possible course of action is a furious (swish!) blitzkrieg (swish!) of steel (swish!) and viscous spurts of hot (he stabs the table) red (he stabs again) blood!

With the final word he brings his knife down a third time, but an instant before we would see it hit, we cut back to:
 

11. INT — DUSTBOWL, TUNNEL — DAY — PAST

Close up on the Medic’s face – a vision of dismay. There’s the characteristic critical-hit backstab boom! and:

SCOUT
My scapula!

We see flecks of blood splatter the Medic’s face, causing his horrified expression to flinch. Another critical-stab sound:

DEMOMAN
Me lumbar!

Another stab, another splash of blood, another flinch:

PYRO
Mh mhmphmuh!

Stab, splat, flinch:

HEAVY
My braiaaaahahaaaaghahahaaaa! -ain.

The Medic’s face is now glistening with blood. His eyes narrow, he grits his teeth, spits a gob of swallowed blood to the floor, and we pull back to see him draw his Ubersaw.

Dolly with the Medic as he pursues the fleeing Spy. As they exit the tunnel towards Cap 4, we cut to the chase from the side: the Doc is clearly gaining. But when the Spy reaches the large rock near the cap, he suddenly trots to a halt, spins around and calmly draws his cigarette case. The Medic is an inch from him when he comes into view of a level three red Sentry on his right, which-

Sentry GunBEEPBEEPBEEP DAKADAKADAKADAKA!

-pummels him gracelessly into a rock.

The spy brushes at a speck of blood on his suit, and begins:

SpyYou’ve got blood on my-

Sentry GunDAKADAKADAKADAKA!

Hot spurts of blood geyser horrifically from the Medic’s gibbering corpse, splattering the Spy. The Spy irritably wipes his face with a gloved hand and starts again.

SpyI’ve made quite a-

Sentry GunDAKADAKADAKADAKA!

The spy glares at it, soaked in blood.

SpyI-

Sentry GunDAKADAKA!

SpyDo not make me silence your infernal machine, labourer!

Cut to:

12. TEAM FORTRESS 2 LINE-UP SPLASH

The usual suspects, the usual tune. Zoomed, of course, to our man.

Beat.

Sentry Gun (VO)… … DAKA!

Spy (VO)Very well.

13. INT — BRIEFING ROOM — DAY — PRESENT

The Spy is still stabbing the table in a frenzy, woodchips and spittle flinging in all directions, when finally he senses us and looks up, suddenly aware of what he’s doing. His stabbing hand slows until the knife-tip is just tapping gently on the table’s lacquered surface, then he composes himself, flips the knife’s blade back into its housing in a complicated twirl and tucks it back into his jacket pocket.

SpyAh, yes, of course…

He tosses a dossier back into the briefcase, clicks it shut, takes it by the handle and stands up.

SpyIntelligence.

He tosses his lit cigarette over his shoulder as he leaves, igniting the Medic’s coat. He straightens his tie before approaching the camera. We zoom out to reveal:

14. INT — 2FORT, BLU INTELLIGENCE ROOM — DAY — PRESENT

The Spy steps through a perfectly Spy-shaped hole already cut in the glass wall between the briefing room and the intel chamber. A Spy-shaped piece of glass is propped against the desk outside. A Soldier, Demoman and Heavy guard the two corridors leading in, all facing away from the Spy, and he mimes an eenie-meanie-miny-moe game to decide who to stab first.

He’s interrupted by a sudden pop! as the now huge briefing room fire reaches the Heavy’s ammo belt. All three Blues freeze, and the Spy winces as a rapid series of small explosions causes everyone to spin round and glare at him. Finally, the Pyro’s propane tank blows the entire glass wall out.

The Spy stands frozen, mid-flinch, shoulders hunched, face screwed up, as the last fragments of glass tinkle to the floor and the three stare expectantly.

SpyFiglio di puttana.

15. END TITLES W/BOX ART

Team Fortress 2, available now, buy it I guess, yada yada.

A prompt two years after it was originally published, my story about the Guiding Hand Social Club assassins is finally (legally) online. At the time a lot of bad J-PEGs of it cropped up online, and since we didn’t actually have a website of our own then, we tolerated the ones that actually bothered to note the piece came from PC Gamer. But now it’s in actual html and – in a column of that width – about as good as I can humanly make it look.

My favourite bit of it, inevitably, is the bit I didn’t write: the responses to the heist from the Intergalactic Summit. Eve players reacted to the hit with genuine disgust or admiration, but also stayed in-character. So their comments are coloured with wonderful subtexts drawn from Eve’s backstory about the slavery of the Minmatar, and subsequent rebellion.

Coupled with Eve’s extraordinarily evocative character portraits, it gives each commentator such a strong and believable personality that, reading it, I find I can imagine exactly what kind of voice each of these people would have, how they would deliver their judgements.

Look at Zhou Yu! He looks like Jesus. Of course he’s appalled. He’d talk like Neil from the Young Ones, by the way.

Look at Nanus Parkite! He’s wearing aviator shades – of course he’s unimpressed. And if you look closely at the full-size version of his portrait, you can actually see his eyes behind the lenses: they’re keen and angry, matching his Godwin-fulfilling disdain for the Guiding Hand.

Look at Zaridin! That smarmy, crisp-lipped villain. Of course he loves it, and of course he’s reserved and eloquent in his praise.

And man, look at Eddie Gordo. Can’t you just hear his thick, exotic accent? He speaks in simple, black-and-white truths, with the weight of suffering behind them. He’s the only one who doesn’t see this as a discussion of methods: he doesn’t care how it was achieved, only that the people who enslaved his race suffered.

In fact, check out Istvaan Shogaatsu, leader of the most vicious band of contract killers in the universe:

It kind of shows, right?

It’s baffling to me that a five-year-old space game still lets you create the most human and distinctive player-designed artificial faces. Why can’t we make faces like this in games where we actually have a body and face rather than a spaceship, where we can walk around and see other people’s? Instead, three years later, we get a blockbuster character-driven RPG in which the emperor of the world looks like this:

Anyway, that other site I’m working on – this one. It’s coming. It’s remarkable just how much progress you can make, and how quickly, without even coming close to finishing. I’d add that I am close to finishing now, except that I have felt close to finishing for around three weeks. It seemed nearly done half-an-hour into the process. I suddenly have a newfound sympathy for games that miss their release dates.

My first thought was that it had broken. I was going to spend a lot of time, over the next five years, wishing that I’d been right about that.

He burst into the room, crunching the door hinges and smacking the handle deep into the plaster. He nearly fell over trying to stop. I didn’t say anything, just stared.
“391! He was on the train this morning! He was one of the victims!” He stared too. We just stared. “Look it up!”
I didn’t have to. I didn’t have all our test cases memorised yet, but 391 I did know: EXPLODED. He was one of the reasons I didn’t believe it was working, EXPLODED was a joke. He saw I wasn’t looking it up, saw me looking at him, and knew I knew, but said it all the same:
“It fucking works.”

–

We were eating.
“Okay, well, it’s on now.” I munched a chip.
“Yeah.”
“I mean, it’s on.” I pointed a chip at him for emphasis.
“Yeah.”
“I’m just-“
“I get that it is on.”
“Okay.” I put my chips down.
I fixed myself a drink.

–

He came into my office again, calmly this time, through the fucked door. My office, his house. We left all the doors open that afternoon, and just walked around doing small, unimportant things, occasionally meeting in the corridors of his big, dusty old house and swapping new thoughts.

“What’s the latest count? How many others died?”
“They’re saying two-hundred now.” I told him, underplaying it a little. “Some places are saying three.” They were all saying three.
“Christ. From one bomb?”
“Well, it was on the subway, so…”
“Yeah. Christ.” He slouched against the wall and looked up at the cracked ceiling. “This isn’t quite how I imagined it working.”
“You know we still have to publish, right? I mean, that was the point of no return, right there.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s just-” He looked at me. “It’s going to look like we’re profiting off of this.”
I laughed, then met his eyes. “It’s going to look like we’re profiting from it? Pete, it’s going to look like we did it. You don’t seem to realise how sceptical people are going to be about something like this. You’re the only person in the world who has any idea how this box works, and to the rest of us it looks a hell of a lot like a hoax. And when some small-minded prick with a pound of C4 decided commuters were responsible for all the world’s problems this morning, it became the most vicious hoax in history. We’re going to have protesters on your lawn around the clock, we’re going to get ripped to shreds in the press, we’re going to be hounded by cameras. We’re going to get mail bombs, Pete.” I sat down, and lowered my voice. “They’re gonna try and kill us. Nobody knows yet, but I promise you that at some point in the next eighteen hours, someone, somewhere, is going to check our predictions list against the victims list and our lives as they stand will be over.” I was realising most of this as I said it. I felt sick. We were fucked.
“We’re fucked, aren’t we?”
“We’re not fucked.” I thought about it. We were definitely fucked. “No, we’re not fucked.”
He shook his head. “We’re so fucked.”
I sighed. We were so, so fucked.

This is the first few chunks of my short story for the Machine of Death challenge, which was great fun to write. I gave it a go because I thought it would be a good test of whether I can enjoy writing to someone else’s spec, and it turns out I much prefer it to writing my own ideas. There was something breezy about this whole process – it’s a short piece to begin with, but also not having the burden of responsibility for the concept makes it even easier to jump in.

Update: My story got in!

Update: The collection is out!

Update: We’re the best selling book on Amazon!

Update: Now my story is a podcast!

Update: They’re doing another collection!

Update: I wrote a story for it!

Update: It also got in!

Update: These updates make it seem like things happened quickly but actually it took 5 years.

They replaced the usernames with numbers, but some people might have refrained from searching for their own name – and then ‘preteen lolitas naked’ – if they’d known their ISP planned to release their searches to the public. So far pretty much everyone who’s expressed disgust at this shocking a breach of privacy has also linked to mirrors of the data set or the searchable databases of it people have already put up.

But the privacy issue is far from the most interesting thing about the release of this data. That honour goes to User 711391. Every night for the three month period, when her husband’s snoring kept her awake (the very first entries set the scene), she searched for anything and everything that was on her mind. The four-thousand things she typed into that little white box over that period tell the story of her life in mercilessly candid detail, from the hard white pimple on her face she can’t seem to get rid of, to the extra-marital affair she has with a man she met online.

2006-03-04 how many online romances lead to sex in person

Like the huge majority of users, she has virtually no idea how to use a search engine, and ends up talking to it like a close friend or – more accurately – God. She never searches for terms that are likely to come up in the piece of information she’s looking for, she simply types her opinion or situation in. A huge proportion of them start with “is it ok to” – although sometimes she knows it isn’t, and just wants to know to what extent. As with God, we don’t get to see much of what the internet has to say back to her (the data names the domains of any sites she clicks on, but not the specific page she visited), but often her next search tells us what result her last one produced:

2006-03-26 can i wear makeup after cryosurgery
2006-03-26 best makeup remover

She’s religious, but frequently has trouble working out how the Bible relates to her life. She has children, and is worried Pop Rocks might be dangerous for them. A few times a week she has lesbian fantasies, always focused on cunnilingus. The male celebrities she’s most attracted to are all camp, gay, or in the case of Jake Gyllenhaal, play a gay character in a movie she loved but found unsettling and haunting. I’m not embellishing, she simply types everything she thinks or feels into that search box.

2006-03-01 how to kill annoying birds in your yards

2006-05-09 god cares for the sparrows

She agreed to meet a man she’d become friends with online. She was nervous about meeting him in person, and tried to obtain anxiety medicine to calm herself. She also feared that if she got her hair cut just before she met him, the haircut might go wrong, but she wanted to make it look fuller. They arranged to go to a concert together – she’d never been to one before, and didn’t know how long they usually lasted. They had sex. She was disappointed by how quickly he came, and he acted disgusted with her afterwards. She half-hoped he might have climaxed quickly because he found her very attractive, but he broke it off and she decided he used her solely for sex. The affair left her feeling incredibly empty.

2006-05-08 i met my cyber lover and the sex was not good
2006-05-08 online friend is horrible in person

2006-05-09 will ex lover contact me again
2006-05-09 i thought i could handle an affair but i couldn’t
2006-05-09 why would a man feel disgust with a woman after sex
2006-05-09 god can heal affairs

2006-05-12 i feel so damaged inside from an affair i had
2006-05-12 he used me for sex

Throughout this, the subplot of the pimple on her face obsesses her more than any of the sad drama of her love life. Every night she searches ten times or more for firstly what it is; then how to remove it; then how long the cryosurgery scar will take to heal; then whether her pores should be enlarged around it; then whether she can put make-up over it; and then – as you saw – how to remove the makeup it turns out she’d already put over it, since it now seems stuck on.

2006-05-15 how can you tell if your spouse put spyware on your computer

The weighted balance between this cosmetic concern, her infidelity, her children, and her fascination with female celebrities (she loves Neriah Davis but hates Brooke Burke, and cannot understand how they became friends) paints a painfully human picture of her neurotic, insecure, quiet, sad, desperate and probably entirely typical life. The irony is that she’s one of the users who never searches for her own name (unless she’s Hilary Swank, in which case she really has the hots for herself). I know more about her from the twenty minutes I spent invading her privacy before breakfast this morning than I think I have ever known about another human being, but I still don’t know who she is.

2006-05-16 so mad at myself for falling in love with someone and becoming so attached to them
2006-05-16 i got caught having an affair and the guy i got caught with is ignoring me now
2006-05-16 if he’s not contacting you he doesn’t want you in his life
2006-05-16 how to get him back

User 711391’s search history is funny, beautiful and intensely tragic, and the most incredible collection of words I’ve read in years. I’m hosting it here.

Okay, so it was also about getting to go to Moscow. And since I can’t talk about the game here anyway, except to reassure you that I was indeed qualified to be told about it and play it a bit, I will talk instead about Moscow. Which looks like ‘Mockba’ when you write it down in Russian, and as far as I can tell should be pronounced ‘Moscvaa’.

I took my German army coat, since it’s my warmest coat, and Moscow is said in fable and legend to be coldish. It didn’t occur to me until we got there that the only thing German army coats are famous for is being inadequate against Russian winters. In fact, making people in German army coats cold is one of the main things Russian winters are famous for. The other is being cold.

I actually liked the weather. Mike, the developer’s Business Manager, does too – he’s American but has been living in Moscow for years. He says “It’s Christmas six months of the year, it’s great.” I’m sure I’d get sick of it, but for the days we were there, I enjoyed having a cold face and well-cocooned body. The coat was actually fine.

Mike’s best friend runs a historical restaurant on Red Square, in the same building as the State Museum. They sometimes recreate specific meals that Russian authors had, but the one we had was I think just generally old fashioned – a five-course banquet of quintessentially Russian and frequently enigmatic food- and drink-stuffs.

The red stuff in the big jug was some kind of cranberry drink – not juice, since it was both sweeter and weaker somehow. There was another of a black liquid, which Mike calls the Russian coke. It’s really a kind of beer – although it does indeed taste like coke – made from the malty, sour black bread on the plate above. It’s surprisingly nice. We also had small glasses of a pale brown liquor, which I thought tasted like a dry sherry but is apparently some form of vodka distilled from baked pine nuts. As you’ll deduce if you mentally compare the alcohol percentages of those two, it’s much stronger than it tastes – a rare and wonderful quality in a spirit. It also meant that, with the red wine that came later, we had beer, wine and spirits simultaneously. I didn’t experience any ill effects, but I’m suspiciously resilient to the normal consequences of drunkeness anyway.

I think I probably enjoyed the endless bizarre courses, powerful concoction of drinks and ridiculous fussing of the waiters (who insisted on doing the serving even from the plates on the table, and would offer everything three times if you refused) more than the others, perhaps because I was in museum/culture mode rather than the Must Eat Now one. It’s nice to have weird stuff forced on you, I think, because you won’t choose it if it’s not, and won’t experience anything new if you don’t. To that end, I tried some caviar. It was mostly tasteless with a deeply unpleasant texture, but at least now I’ve tried caviar.

Moscow itself is stunning, ugly, proud, cold, sunny and sad. My guidebook was pretty light on where anything was or how to get there, but it did have a timeline of the city’s history, and if you remember the time-lapse scene in the very first episode of Futurama, where civilisation is repeatedly built up and then destroyed by aliens, you’ve got the basic gist. Usually I don’t really care to know the history of a place, but in this case it put a lot of that sadness, and scaffolding, in context. We found the people themselves to be very warm and kind when they understood us, which was understandably rare since we didn’t speak a word of Russian (except a few of the German journalists (who were big fans of my coat) and I who had learnt spaseeba (thank you), and were damned if we’d let a conversation pass in which we didn’t use it), but each of the ubiquitous uniformed officials looked like they wouldn’t know a smile if they shot it, which seems increasingly likely each time you try one.

Almost as intimidating as the guns and uniforms is something that, by contrast, doesn’t actually represent any hostility or mistrust: you can’t read anything. Technically I can’t read anything in any foreign countries, but somehow when it’s the letters you can’t read, not just the words, it’s a whole new level of not being able to read anything. This became particularly apparent on the Metro when, as Rick observed, “We don’t know where we are or where we’re going and we can’t read any signs that would tell us either.” After discovering that the colour-coded lines could change colour depending on the artist’s mood, and that numbered lines were either working in base nineteen or simply false, I decided we would actually be fine if we just went by the place names, which we merely couldn’t read. At least they weren’t actually lying to us.

This actually did work, thanks in part to my maths degree having involved a lot of Greek letters, which constitute most if not all of the non-Roman characters is the Cyrillic alphabet. That’s not the whole story, since half of the apparently familiar characters are phonetically completely different to their counterparts in other European languages, but it does mean I could recognise place names by their first three letters if I saw them again. Naturally this appeared to be some form of black magic to the casual observer, and led to James comparing me to Locke. I choose to believe he was referring to Locke’s comfort in new and alien surroundings, rather than his sad existence before the crash.

This cryptography and navigation eventually got us to the station where a very helpful waitress had assured us there was a cheaper version of the great-looking market featured in my guidebook. It seems there may have been a misunderstanding of the word ‘market’, though, since this was actually a supermarket. Cheap, sure, but not quite the cultural experience we’d envisaged. In fact, though, once the angry officials had sealed our bags in cellophane so we couldn’t slip anything into them while browsing, it was a kind of cultural experience. Usually as a tourist you only get to see historical things that aren’t an important part of people’s lives anymore. We went to Asda, or nearest equivalent. And bought vodka, which at £5 a bottle was one of the most expensive types they had.

We split up in the afternoon and I went on a mission to see some good underground stations. The Russian metro was built to be a network of underground palaces, and so far the ones we’d seen had been undergound stations that looked like they might once have been underground palaces. The one at Victory Park, though, was rebuilt recently, to the 1930s spec. Sure enough, it’s a gleaming wonder in marble, with huge murals and elegant statues. Victory Park itself is impressive, too. The epic monument at the far end is 10cm tall for every day Russia was at war, and you don’t have to spend a lot of time there to find the place itself has nothing to do with the jubilant spirit of the name. It’s not a monument to victory, and it’s not even a monument to how long they were at war, it’s a monument to national pain. It says, to me at least, feeling rather self-conscious with a German flag on my shoulder, “Every day of war is a tragedy. Every day of war means something. It’s another great slab of marble on this pointless needle of suffering.” And, with the station below it, it’s virtually the only thing I saw in Moscow that looked proud, defiant, finished. Pain they can do.

That night we were accosted by a group of school-age girls hanging around a brightly coloured cow. They collared James and managed to convey that their enterprise had something to with dreams and money. Usually when people stop you on the street it’s to extract money from you, so I was dubious, but James merrily filled his dreams (“I dream of an age when man flies in the sky in giant metal machines”) on a pink card, added his details and dropped it in the cow. I managed to stay out of it while this was going on, but once they’d roped Roxy in too, they activated that special kind of pleading that somehow generates an atmosphere in which negative responses lose all force, and the only way out is a reluctant “Okay”. The deal seemed to be that if your dream was later selected as the best, you’d recieve the aforementioned money. Mine (“My very own walrus!”) is sure to win, but they may have trouble reaching me on the number I gave.

We were leaving the next day, and the Kremlin had been closed until then, so I set out early to see as much of it as I could before our flight. I couldn’t stomach the hotel breakfast (cauliflower, meatballs in sauce, diluted orange juice and DIY instant coffee from ageing sachets) so I headed to a café I’d liked the look of the previous day. It was an Italian café, in Russia, and I was an Englishman wearing a German flag on my coat, and when I walked in the waitress said “Bonjour!” It was a freezing and dazzling jour, and the coffee, orange juice and giant chocolate pear gateaux were all excellent, so I decided it probably was fairly bon, and tipped accordingly. It took a turn for the malheureux when I actually got to the Kremlin, though, since they won’t let you in with a bag. Nor will they take your bag, except at the special bag tower, which was not where it was supposed to be or indeed anywhere at all as far as I could tell. It was a tight thing anyway, and with the strongest and strangest bag restriction yet, it wasn’t long before I realised there was no way to get inside and out again and still catch a plane. If you ever go to Moscow, don’t go on a Thursday, and find a way to not have a bag.

I did something I’d also wanted to do before I left, instead – sat in a freezing park and read a book. Cold weather always seems to be ushering you indoors, so I wanted to hang around outside intentionally to show it who I felt was the boss around here. It took gloves, a scarf, and some occasional bench-switching to stay in the rapidly ascending sun, but it was actually a profoundly peaceful experience. Coldness has a special silence to it, free of birds or people enjoying themselves. Everyone shuts up and tries to get out of it, which makes it a uniquely nice place to be. Then a guy came over and sat down next to me instead of any of the five other benches. I thought he might be expecting me to say a code-phrase and switch bags with him, but then I noticed that he, like all Russians, didn’t have a bag.