Halting State
( Halting State - 1 )
Charles Stross
In the year 2018, Sergeant Sue Smith of the Edinburgh constabulary is called in on a special case. A daring bank robbery has taken place at Hayek Associates, a dot-com startup company that’s just been floated on the London stock exchange. The suspects are a band of marauding orcs, with a dragon in tow for fire support, and the bank is located within the virtual reality land of Avalon Four. For Smith, the investigation seems pointless. But she soon realizes that the virtual world may have a devastating effect in the real one-and that someone is about to launch an attack upon both…
Charles Stross
Halting State
In memory of Datacash Ltd. and all who sailed in her, 1997–2000.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Books do not get written in majestic isolation, and this one is no exception. Certainly it wouldn’t exist in its current form without valuable feedback from a host of readers. I’d particularly like to single out for thanks Vernor Vinge, Hugh Hancock, Greg Costikyan, Ron Avitzur, Eric Raymond, Tony Quirke, Robert Sneddon, Paul Friday, Dave Bush, Alexander Chane Austin, Larry Colen, Harry Payne, Trey Palmer, Dave Clements, Andrew Veitch, Hannu Rajaniemi, Soon Lee, and Jarrod Russell. I’d also like to thank my other test readers, too numerous to name today. Finally, thanks to the publishing folks without whom the book wouldn’t have been written: my agent, Caitlin Blasdell, my editor at Ace, Ginjer Buchanan, and my copyeditors, Bob and Sara Schwager.
PROLOGUE: We Know Where You Live, We Know Where Your Dog Goes to School
Mail-Allegedly-From:recruitment@DO_NOT_REPLY.round-peg-round-hole.com
Subject: Attn Nigel—job offer
Auto-Summary: A job offer, vaguely menacing.
Spam-Weighting: 70% probable, but worth a look.
Hello. We’re Round Peg/Round Hole Recruitment. We want to offer you a job on behalf of one of our clients.
You didn’t send us a résumé? Of course you didn’t—that’s our job! We know all about you, Nigel. You are an underpaid 29-year-old Maths and CS graduate from Edinburgh University. You’ve been employed by SprocketSource for one year and four months, and you’re three months overdue for a pay review. Your programming skills in Zone/Python 3000 and your expertise in distributed combat systems have generated an impressively high domain-specific reputation on WorldDEV Forums and HackSlashBurn, but does your line manager care? No. Bill does not care. He does not adequately appreciate you. And there’s a reason for this.
Here at Round Peg/Round Hole, we don’t just passively trawl a boring old database full of CVs for matches against our client’s boilerplate job descriptions. We install a Google box on their corporate network, build a Google Directed Semantic Map™ of their internal dialogue, then use our revolutionary new JobInformant™ distributed-agent technology to search the web for potential conscripts. And when we’ve found them we work out how to motivate them. Like this:
You’ve been wondering why your boss isn’t paying attention to you, and you’ve probably noticed your colleague, Sonia Grissom, putting in unusually long hours recently. She’s being a little bit distant towards you, too. And there’s a hiring freeze.
What you don’t know—because you don’t have access to our JobInformant™ distributed-agent technology—is that your lying shit of a boss is sleeping with his junior combat programmer, and he’s looking for an excuse to fire you and promote her into your shoes. Sonia is a workplace player, and you are not. You have no employment tenure because you have been in the job for less than two years, and nobody hires grunts who get themselves remaindered. You’ll be industry road-kill.
You might as well face it: You have no future with your current employer.
But there is an alternative.
You, my friend, are the exact person our client, a prestigious international gaming consultancy, has been looking for. (And if you’re not, we’ll pay you 2000 to spend a day with us helping us understand where our data analysis went wrong.)
Your obsession with reward feedback loop modulation and fractional reserve magic banking—which Bill does not understand—is music to our client’s ears. The rest of your skill portfolio is attractive, too. Our JobInformant™ SatisFactor™ package predicts a 72% probability that you will synergize effectively with their coevolutionary operations group, rising to 89% if you are allowed to indulge your preference for working from home and using an avatar for customer-facing situations. That’s cool with them, and on that basis they have authorized us to offer you a 25% pay rise, and a generous stock-option package. Not to mention the opportunity to stick it to Bill so hard he’ll be picking pieces out of his back teeth for years to come.
To claim your new job, or book your 2000 one-day head-hunting research consultancy, reply to this email…
SUE: Grand Theft Automatic
It’s a grade four, dammit. Maybe it should have been a three, but the dispatcher bumped it way down the greasy pole because it was phoned in as a one and the MOP who’d reported the offence had sounded either demented, or on drugs, or something—but definitely not one hundred per cent in touch with reality. So they’d dropped it from a three (“officers will be on scene of crime as soon as possible”) to a four (“someone will drop by to take a statement within four hours if we’ve got nothing better to do”), with a cryptic annotation (“MOP raving about Orcs and dragons. Off his meds? But MOP 2 agreed. Both off their meds?”).
But then some bright spark in the control room looked at the SOC location in CopSpace and twigged that they’d been phoning from a former nuclear bunker in Corstorphine that was flagged as a Place of Interest by someone or other in national security.
Which jangled Inspector McGregor’s bell and completely ruined your slow Thursday afternoon.
You’re four hours into your shift, decompressing from two weeks of working nights supervising clean-up after drunken fights on Lothian Road and domestics in Craiglockhart. Daylight work on the other side of the capital city comes as a big relief, bringing with it business of a different, and mostly less violent, sort. This morning you dealt with: two shoplifting call-outs, getting your team to chase up a bunch of littering offences, a couple of community liaison visits, and you’re due down the station in two hours to record your testimony for the plead-by-email hearing on a serial B#amp#E case you’ve been working on. You’re also baby-sitting Bob—probationary constable Robert Lockhart—who is ever so slightly fresh out of police college and about as probationary as a very probationary thing indeed. So it’s not like you’re not busy or anything, but at least it’s low-stress stuff for the most part.
When Mac IMs you, you’ve just spent half an hour catching up on your paperwork in the Starbucks on Corstorphine High Street, with the aid of a tall latte and a furtive ring Danish. Mary’s been nagging you about your heart ever since that stupid DNA check you both took last year (“so the wee wun kens his maws ur both gawn tae be aboot fer a whiule”), and the way she goes on, you’d think refined sugar was laced with prussic acid. But you can’t afford to be twitchy from low blood sugar if you get a call, and besides, the bloody things taste so much better when they’re not allowed. So you’re stuffing your cheeks like a demented hamster and scribbling in the air with the tip of a sticky finger when a window pops open in front of the espresso machine.
SUE. MAC HERE.
He’s using an evidence-logged CopSpace channel, which means it’s business. Blow me, you think, as you save the incident form you’re halfway through filling in and swap windows.
SUE HERE. GO AHEAD.
With a sinking feeling, you look at your half-finished latte, then glance sideways at Bob. Bob raises an eyebrow at you.
GOT A 4 4U. SMELLS FUNNY. CHECK SOONES
T.
You swallow convulsively and take a swig of too-hot coffee, burning the roof of your mouth. It stings like crazy, and you just know the skin’s going to be peeling by evening when you rub it with your tongue.
MAIL ME THE TROUBLE TICKET.
There’s a musical ding from over by the doorway, and a mail icon appears on your desktop.
ON DUTY, you send, giving the latte a final wistful look. “Bob? We’ve got a call.”
“Eh, boss…?” Bob lifts his cup and hides whatever he’s been working on—probably Solitaire.
“Bring it along, it’s nae the blues.”
You file the email as you leave the coffee shop. Bob trails after you. The destination shows up, as a twirling diamond just visible over the buildings on the far side of the road as you get in the car.
It’s a short drive from Corstorphine to the incident site, but it’s up the steep slope of Drum Brae, hemmed in by shoe-box houses at the bottom of the hill and the whirring prayer wheels of the wind farm at the top. By the time you’re heading downhill again, you’re worrying that the map is confused: “Turn right in one hundred metres” it tells you, but all you can see is an urban biodiversity coppice. “What’s the scene?” asks Bob.
“I dinna ken. The skipper says it’s a weird one.” You feel a flash of irritation—but your shift is a car short today, which makes it a stupid time for a prank—and right then you spot an open driveway leading into the trees, and your specs are flashing green. “Eh, look at that lot, will you?”
There are a bunch of cars parked at the end of the drive, and as the Forestry Commission doesn’t hand out Bentleys and Maseratis, it’s a fair bet that you’re in the right place. But the building they’re parked outside of is a raw contrast to the posh wheels: It’s more like a 1950s public toilet than a corporate office, just four concrete walls propping up a flat slab of characterless roof that seems to scream Asbestos! with all the force its wheezing, mesothelioma-ridden lungs can muster. Maybe it’s some kind of up-market cottaging club for the tech startup crowd? You shake your head and climb out of the car, tapping your earpiece to tell your phone to listen up: “Arriving on SOC, time-stamp now. Start evidence log.” It’s logging anyway—everything you see on duty goes into the black box—but the voice marker is searchable. It saves the event from getting lost in your lifelog. Bob trails along like an eager puppy. Eight weeks out of police college, so help you. At least he’s house-broken.
The door to the premises is a retrofitted slab of glossy green plastic that slides open automatically as you approach, revealing a reception room that’s very far from being a public toilet. So much for the cottage scene. The lighting is tasteful, the bleached pine impeccably renewable, and the vacant reception desk supports a screen the size of Texas that’s showing a dizzying motion-picture tour of an online game space, overlaid by the words HAYEK ASSOCIATES PLC. It stands sentry before a raw, steel-fronted lift door with a fingerprint reader. Naturally. But at least now you know this isnae going to turn into another bleeding community relations call. You’ve had more than a bellyful of them, what with being one of the few overtly heterosexually challenged sergeants in C Division.
“Anyone here?” you call, bouncing on your heels with impatience.
The lift door whispers open and a Member of Public rushes out, gushing at you and wringing his hands: “It’s terrible, officers! What took you so long? It’s all a terrible mess!”
“Slow down.” You point your specs at him in full-capture mode. Your specs log: one Member of Public, Male, Caucasian, 185 high, 80 heavy, short hair, expensive-looking suit and open-collared shirt, agitated but sober. He’s in that hard-to-guess age range between twenty-five and forty-five, used to being in control, but right now you’re the nearest authority figure and he’s reverting to the hapless dependency of a ten-year-old. (Either that, or he’s afraid you’re gonnae arrest him for emoting in public without a dramatic license.) He’s clearly not used to dealing with the police, which gives you something to play on. “May I see your ID card, sir?”
“My card? It’s, uh, downstairs in my office, uh, I guess I can show you…” His hands flutter aimlessly in search of a missing keyboard. “I’m Wayne, by the way, Wayne Richardson, Marketing Director.” Wayne Richardson, Marketing Director, is clearly unused to not being in control of situations. His expression’s priceless, like you’ve pointed out his fly’s undone and his cock ring is showing. “Ever-everybody’s in the boardroom; we’ve been waiting for you. I can, uh, take you there, Constable…?”
You give him a not terribly warm smile. “Sergeant Smith, Meadowplace Road Station. This is Constable Lockhart.” Richardson has the decency to look embarrassed. “Someone here reported a theft, but I’m a bit unclear as to what was stolen.” You blink up the trouble ticket again: Yes, this guy was one of the two names the dispatcher logged. Something about a safety deposit box. Boxes. “Who noticed the item was missing? Was it yourself?”
“Uh, no, it was the entire security trading team!” He looks at you with wide-open eyes, as if he thinks you’re about to call him a liar or something. “It was on all the screens, they couldn’t miss it—there must have been thousands of witnesses all over the shard!” He waves in the general direction of the lift. “There’s a crisis meeting in the boardroom right now. We captured the intrusion on-screen so you can see for yourself.”
They watched it happen on video instead of trying to intervene? You shake your head. Some people will do anything to avoid a liability lawsuit, as if the thief tripping on a rug and sticking their heid in the microwave is more of a problem than being burgled. Or maybe the dispatcher was right? Off their meds an’ off their heids. “Show me the boardroom.” You nod at Bob, who does a slow scan of the lobby before trailing after you.
Richardson walks over to the lift, and you note there’s a thumbprint scanner in the call button. Whoever stole the whatever, there’ll be a logfile somewhere with their thumbprints on file. (Which from your point of view is good because it makes detection and wrap-up a whole lot easier. The warm glow of a case clean-up beckons.) As the doors open, you ask, “What exactly happened? From the beginning, please. In your own time.”
“I’d just come out of the post-IPO debrief meeting with Marcus and Barry, they’re our CEO and CTO. We were in a three-way conference call with our VC’s investment liaison team and our counsel down south when Linda called me out—she’s in derivatives and border controls—because there was something flaky going down in one of the realms we manage for Kensu International. It’s in the prestige-level central bank for Avalon Four. There was a guild of Orcs—in a no-PvP area—and a goddamn dragon, and they cleaned out the bank. So we figured we’d call you.”
The lift stops, and you stare at Wayne Richardson, Marketing Director, in mild disbelief. The jargon can wait for later, that’s what your interview log is for: But one name in particular rings a bell because Mary says Davey’s been pestering her for an account. “Avalon Four? Isnae that a game?”
He swallows and nods. “It’s our main cash cow.” The doors slide open on an underground corridor. The roof is ribbed with huge concrete beams painted in thick splashes of institutional cream, and it’s startlingly cold. There are bleached-pine doors on either side, a cable duct winding overhead, and posters on the walls that say LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS. For a moment you wonder if you’ve blundered into some kind of live-action role-playing thing, a cold-war reenactment maybe: but just then your phone chimes at you that it’s gone off-line.
“Uh, Sarge?” asks Bob.
“I know,” you mutter. You must be too far underground, or they’re not carrying public bandwidth, or something. You force yourself to take it easy. “The signal in here’s poor: I’ll probably end up having to use a pen,” you warn Richardson, pulling out your official evidence phone. “So I may havtae back up or slow down a wee bit. Begin statement. On scene”—you rattle off the reference in the corner of your eye—“attending to Wayne Richardson, Marketing Director.”
There’s a fancy table in the middle of the room, made of a transparent plastic that refracts the light passing through it into a myriad of clashing rainbows, and there’s a lot of light—it may be a cave down here, but these yins have LED daylight spots the way papes have candles. The chairs around the table are equally fancy: They look like they belong in a squadron of fighter jets, except ejector seats don’t usually come with castors and a gas strut suspension. Shame about the way their occupants are letting them down, though. There’re six of them. Two slimy wee maggots in ten-thousand-euro suits are clogging up the end of the table wi’ their status-symbol tablets: They’re the ones that were yammering at each other until they saw you. No ties; maybe it’s a dress code thing. There’s a lass in a suit, too, but she’s too young to be a decision maker. Secretarial/Admin, you guess. And then there’s the other guys who are, frankly, geeks. It’s not like they’ve got blinking red navigation lights on their heids, but two of ’em are wearing sandals and the other’s enough to make you wish your Little Database of Charges had a section on Fashion Crimes: The stripes on his shirt are interfering with your specs, and the evidence cam is picking up a nasty moire effect. “Ahem,” you repeat, as a holding action, then stare at Wayne Richardson, Marketing Director. Let him sort this out.
“Oh, excuse me.” Richardson takes his cue. “This is, uh, Sergeant Smith and Constable Lockhart. The sergeant’s here to take a statement.”
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