Deadstock

House simsense engineer at the arena. The unaudited store on the production level is a list, and the list is her.

Nadia Sarkissian: human, late thirties, Armenian-American out of East Hollywood, and the arena's house simsense engineer, fourteen years on the production level, which is longer than the current operating company has existed. She maintains the building's permanent sim wiring, runs the rig on recording nights, and keeps the store room where everything the level has ever bought, salvaged or failed to return sits on numbered steel shelving.

The trade calls her Deadstock, after the shelf. Chip shops sending people to the arena called the old blanks that first, stock that never moves, and the name slid from the crates to the woman who decides about them. She has never corrected it, because a name that says worthless old inventory keeps the shelf sounding boring, and boring is unaudited. The building knows her as Sarkissian; which name you arrive with tells her which door you came in through.

Nobody has audited that store since the operator changed hands. Nobody could: the records that would make an audit possible are the ones that changed hands badly, so the only complete account of what the arena's production level holds is in her head, and she has never written it down. That is not an oversight. An unaudited shelf is a shelf she decides about, and she knows exactly what that is worth.

The part that matters to anybody hunting simsense stock: the arena wired for sim early and bought consumables in bulk while the buying was good, and the blanks were manufactured in San Diego, which closed in 2050. Crates of old-generation blanks that no longer exist anywhere else in this city are on her shelves, dry, sealed, and listed nowhere.

What the crew knows#

• She doesn't sell. She trades, and she remembers: parts for the rig, pre-Crash electronics, a favor held open. Cash offends her slightly, because cash implies the stock was hers to sell rather than hers to lose track of.
• Ask the right chip shop for a blank of the right generation and, once they've failed to fill it, Deadstock is the name they give you.
• She checks takes; she doesn't play masters, and she'll say so unprompted. On a recording night she runs the first few seconds back to confirm the rig wrote clean, in front of whoever is paying, and stops there. A finished recording she has been handed to store goes on the shelf unplayed. Knowing what's on a chip is the thing people get hurt for, and she minds shelves rather than contents.

Contact#