Halting State hs-1

by Charles Stross

  “Sorry, I was just capturing the scene…”

  She slides past you, shaking her head. “Spare me.” Then she gets an eyeball of the big office desk lying on its side and the PC with its guts spilled across the floor. “Log this to evidence, don’t touch anything—”

  “Skipper?” It’s Gavaghan, calling through the hall, his voice hollow. “You’ll want to see this.”

  “What. Now?” She’s out of the living room like a cat after a moth, and you trail along in her wake, cams still chowing down on every stray photon around you.

  “Kitchen,” he calls. Flags are going up everywhere, ghostly signs tagged to doorways like BATHROOM and BEDROOM 2, and Liz dives towards KITCHEN. “Hold it!” There’s something in his voice that brings the inspector up sharply.

  “How bad is it?”

  “Need SOCO to tell us, skipper. It’s not like there’s a body or anything—”

  “Then why are you—”

  “We’re too late: It’s already been sanitized.”

  ELAINE: Being Constructive

  Saturday morning finds you rolling out of a sleeper train berth bright and early, in Edinburgh. Capital of the People’s Republic of Scotland, jewel of the north, biggest tourist trap in Europe, and a whole bunch of other things. The first not-so-subtle hint you’re not in England is the row of flags flying over the railway station concourse—pale blue background, white diagonal cross. They’re feeling their new EU-regional cojones, the Scots. It’s a puzzler, but at least they’re not insisting you clear customs and immigration: Thank Brussels for something.

  The taxi ride to your hotel rubs in the fact that you’ve come to another country. It’s the old-fashioned kind of black cab, with a real human being behind the wheel instead of a webcam and a drone jockey in a call centre. Your driver manages to detour past a weird building, all non-Euclidean swoops and curves (he proudly declares it to be a parliament, even though it looks like it just arrived from Mars, then confides that it cost a science-fictional amount, confirming the Martian origins of its budget oversight process). Then he takes a hyperspace detour round the back of a bunch of office blocks and into a rural wilderness, around the grassy flank of an extinct volcano so pristine that you half expect to see a pitched battle in progress between ghostly armies in kilts. Finally, you pop back out into a stonily pompous Victorian satellite town centre: except that back home, buildings don’t usually have battlements with cannons carved into them.

  Okay, so maybe they’re feeling their cojones because they’ve invented hyperspace travel. You ease your death grip on the black cab’s grab rail and twitch your map overlay into life. “Malmaison,” says the driver.

  “Uh…” You blink. The hotel does indeed appear to have gun turrets. And gargoyles. Then your tourist map twitches and rearranges itself in front of your eyes as the overloaded Galileo service catches up with you. “This is the, uh, Niddrie Malmaison. I wanted the West End one?”

  “Oh, reet. Ahcannaebemissingthe—” You blink at the subsequent stream of consonants interspersed with vowels that sound subtly wrong. Maybe you’d have been better off waiting for a call-centre-controlled limo. But evidently no reply is expected: The driver hits the pause button on his meter and engages the mysterious fifth wheel that allows taxis everywhere to turn on the spot. And you’re off again, into a bizarre grey maze of steep streets and steeper buildings, with or without battlements. Eventually you find yourself in front of what your map overlay insists is the right hotel, and you can relax and bill it to the company account. The frightening numbers suddenly feel a lot less threatening when you remember you’re being billed in euros, not pounds.

  This hotel also has crenulations, towers, and flagpoles, but they seem to have missed out on the more alarming architectural excursions and the lobby has a reassuringly familiar interior, furnished in international hotel-chain glass and chrome.

  Negotiating the front desk isn’t hard, and once you’ve installed the contents of your suit carrier in the bijou closet and parked your laptop on the beautifully arranged desk, you suddenly realize that it is barely nine o’clock in the morning: You’re in a foreign capital city, you don’t actually have to check your work email until tomorrow, and once you’ve showered the sleeper-induced kinks out of your neck and shoulders, you’ve got an entire day in which to do touristy things. The prospect is inexplicably frightening and alluring. So, of course, you do it.

  On Sunday you deal with a mild hangover, a business-planning facial in the conference suite that staggers on for six and a half hours, and the inexplicable realization that the previous day you purchased a five-foot-long claymore from a dodgy pawnshop on North Bridge, and you have no idea how to get the thing home through the metal detectors at Euston without being arrested for carrying an offensive weapon, viz., a two-handed sword.

  It must be something in the water.

  On Monday morning you awake with the dawn, a mild sense of dread gnawing at your stomach. It’s performance anxiety, the kind you get when you’re about to be plunged into an unpredictable situation. So you dress, grab a light breakfast in the hotel restaurant, then collect your briefcase and go down to the lobby to meet up with Chris and Brendan and the others at nine thirty sharp.

  “’Lo, ’Laine,” says Mohammed, grinning behind his glasses: He’s got them dialled all the way to opaque, and with his dark suit, he looks more like a historic mob hit-man than an accountant. “Are we ready to rock?”

  “Speak for yourself,” snorts Maggie, making him jump. “Elaine, have you heard from—”

  You spot the unopened email, hovering in your peripheral vision like a discreet butler. “Not before breakfast,” you say. Flicking a finger, you open it. It’s from CapG, and they’ve found a native guide for you. “Yes, thanks.” You skim the message. “That looks okay,” you concede.

  “He’ll be over here after lunchtime,” Maggie adds, proving she’s more networked than you are. “If I were you, I’d take him off-site for orientation before you move in.”

  “Well, yes.” Does she think you were born yesterday? Or, your sneaky bone prods you, is she trying to keep you out of the loop for some reason?

  “Mohammed, you and I are going to have a little chat with Mr. Michaels and Mr. Hackman.”

  “Have you brought your garlic and holy water?” asks Chris, kibitzing from the side-line.

  “Ha-ha, very droll.” Maggie gives him a long stare.

  “I’m not kidding. If you haven’t met Hackman…he’s like Lamb, John Lamb. From HSBC.”

  Maggie shudders. “Really.” The Silence of the Lambs is a company in-joke around the coffee station.

  “Yes.” Chris claps her on the shoulder, lightly. “If that’s our first taxi…”

  A couple of minutes later you find yourself knee to knee with Faye and Brendan in a driverless black cab, hurtling around cobblestoned mews like a one-half-scale model of Knightsbridge. It’s raining, and condensation from your breath coats the taxi window beside your head. Faye is busy with a spreadsheet, you see from her glasses and the keyboard laser-projected across the conference folder on her lap. “Have you ever been in on a search order before?” asks Brendan.

  You shake your head. “Not much to it,” he says cheerily. Tapping the side of his glasses: “We serve the court order on the defendant and go in. The law’s near enough the same, it dates to the eighties and nineties, back before the locals got uppity. If they try to stop us, we find the nearest police officer and point out that they’re disobeying a court order to prevent the destruction of evidence. A little bird tells me the cops are already camping out on the doorstep, so we won’t have far to go. Meanwhile, I’ve got a second order ready to go in on their telco—Fred’s handling it—to cut off all their communications if they don’t play ball.”

  You shake your head. “They’re a net company. That’ll leave them dead in the water.”

  “Oh yes.” He nods cheerfully: “Take them down for two working days, and they’ll probably go out of business
. They’re on the sharp end of quality of service guarantees with teeth. It’s our nuclear option.” From the way he’s stroking his briefcase you have an uncomfortable feeling that he hopes he’s going to get to push the button.

  “Brendan—” Faye warns, fingers tap-tapping at her lap.

  “Sorry.” He doesn’t sound it. You smear the condensation with your sleeve and look out at the traffic. Four euros a litre for diesel up here, and the road’s still jammed.

  An uncomfortable minute of stop-go traffic later, the taxi takes an abrupt left, then left again, and grinds to a halt. All you can see out of the window is a muddy car-park surrounded by dripping trees, but when you call up your overlay, you see that this is it: Unless the address is wrong, you’re in the right place. Brendan waves his company card at the scanner, the doors spring open, and you immediately put both your feet in an ankle-deep icy puddle. “Shit.” You bite back on your anger as you hop forwards, hoping your shoes aren’t ruined.

  Louder swearing from the other side of the taxi tells you that the whole car-park is a mud-bath. You reach dry land and see a building ahead, two police cars drawn up in front of it—that’s the offices of Hayek Associates? It looks more like a brightly coloured garden shed. Raised voices: “I’m sorry, sir, but you can’t come in unless the inspector says—”

  There’s a thicket of twirling tags above the entrance: Chris, Maggie, Mohammed, and a blue diamond marker blinking blues and twos. Your heart sinks as you hurry towards the shed, hoping to get out of the rain. Inside the entrance you find a strange little scene. The shed is tricked out like the lobby of a corporate office, but there’s no office building attached, just a bank of lifts. Which are being guarded by a very bored-looking policeman, who is giving Chris and Mo the I’m-sorry-sir-you’ll-have-to-come-back-another-day story while scanning your face with his evidence-locked life recorder’s camera.

  “We’ve got a court order,” says Chris. “Mr. Kadir, if you’d care to show the gentleman…” He’s using the stilted, formal language smart people use when talking to police with evidence cams.

  “Sure.” Mohammed opens his conference folder and pulls out a document. “This is a compulsory search order, served by—”

  “I’m sure it is, sir, but you’ll have to stop right there.” The cop looks flustered. “This is a criminal investigation. I’ll call the inspector immediately, and she’ll sort you out as soon as—” He stops, then fidgets with his earpiece. “Oh.” He nods to himself. “Uh, Sarge? If I can…? I’ve got a group of visitors here with a solicitor and a compulsory search order demanding immediate access. What should I…okay, I see, right, I’ll do that…It’s what? Aw, no! Right, right. I’ll do that, sir.” Behind the CopSpace glasses and the flickering pixelated reflections off his eyelids, his face tells its own story. Grim news. He shakes his head and takes the court order from Mohammed. “I’m sorry to break it to you gentlefolk, but I’m going to have to take your identity cards. Then you can go in an’ do what you must, but before you leave the site, I must take DNA samples and verify your identity.”

  “DNA what?” Maggie squawks indignantly, and you are inclined to agree: Being photographed and fingerprinted for the ID card is all very well, but this isn’t normal.

  The cop sighs. “Orders,” he says. “So we can exclude you from our enquiries.”

  “But it’s a fraud case. What use is DNA evidence?”

  “Not those enquiries.” He furrows his brows at Harrison. “The missing person investigation.”

  JACK: In Hell

  The Martians from CapG are not wholly inhumane: The clock starts ticking when the one o’clock gun sounds from the castle battlements. You take yourself off to the designer shops on George Street to do something about your wardrobe—for eight thousand a day it’d be stupid not to—and by the time you hear the distant thud, you’ve acquired a new suit, some lunch, and a precarious determination to bluff your way through to the bitter end. You’ve even bought a tie, soup stains optional.

  When Mr. PinStripe texts you, you’re dodging through the lunchtime crowds on your way towards the West End: GO TO [LOCATOR: SEE ATTACHMENT]. ELAINE BARNABY WILL MEET YOU IN THE LOBBY.

  Oh great, you think: Who the hell is she? Then you glance at the locator. Some hotel or other. Wonderful. You’re still shaking your head as you hail a taxi—CapG are paying, you remind yourself—and tell the driver where to go.

  The hotel is a modern conversion. Edinburgh’s planning laws are strictly dedicated to keeping the capital looking like a time warp from the eighteenth century, so the developers bought an old stone warehouse and gutted it, erecting a glassy cube of modernity inside the hollow shell. You wander into the lobby and glance around. Who am I looking for? vies with What am I doing here? There are skinny people with very expensive glasses and/or very thin laptops sitting on non-Euclidean sofas under tastefully arranged halogen spotlights, but no way of knowing which one of them is your contact. Which is annoying. So you stand around aimlessly for a minute, then put your brain into gear and walk over to the reception desk. “Hi. Is there an, um, Elaine Barnaby staying here?”

  The receptionist fakes a smile. “I’m sorry, but we don’t disclose guests’ names—”

  “Could be,” a woman’s voice says from behind your shoulder. You begin to turn. “Did CapG services send you?”

  “Uh, yeah,” you say, finishing the turn—

  “Oh I’m sorry,” apologizes the receptionist—

  “Well, you’re late.” She looks like a librarian. Mousy hair, black plastic spectacle frames, and a sternly disapproving expression. “Like the rest of this circus,” she adds, taking some of the sting out of the words. “Come on.” She turns and stalks towards the lobby staircase, not bothering to wait for you.

  Ah, fuck it. She can bitch all she wants for a thousand an hour. A thousand an hour! Jesus, they’re paying me a thousand an hour for this? You follow her in a hurry.

  She pauses at the top of the stairs, on the mezzanine that looks out across the city towards the international conference centre from behind the cunningly designed false frontage. “By the way, what’s your name?”

  “Jack. Jack Reed. And you are Elaine Barnaby? From, uh, Dietrich-Brunner Associates?” Who are you and what do you do?

  “Two out of two.” Her smile is less insincere than the receptionist’s, but you can tell it’s concealing the core message: Who is this slob, and is there some kind of mistake? “You’re not like the normal run of consultants CapG send us.”

  You shrug. “That’s because I’m not one of their normal consultants.” She starts moving again, up the staircase towards the first floor like she’s got chromed pistons inside those trousers instead of legs. She probably cycles everywhere. You manage to keep up, but you’re breathing heavily by the time she barges through the fire doors and into a corridor on the second floor. “Much farther?”

  “Just in here.” She waves you towards an office door, which unlocks with a clunk as she approaches. “Sit down. I want to get some things straight.”

  Ah, right. This is where your thousand-euros-an-hour mirage evaporates on contact with the white heat of reality. Well, it was nice while it lasted. “Yeah, well, this job smelled funny from the first. I mean, CapG isn’t a game-development consultancy, so I was wondering why they were looking for someone with my skills. So I guess the disconnect was with the requirements you sent out?”

  Barnaby shakes her head, then pushes a stray lock back behind her ear. You notice that she’s got very fine, fly-away hair. “One moment.” She flexes her hands, airboarding—there are subdermal chips in each of her finger joints, she can probably type two hundred words per minute without RSI. It’s an office world input method, not a gamer interface, but…“Let’s see. You’re a senior developer, formerly employed by LupuSoft, working on games that run on Zone-Phones. Right?”

  Ding! You nod, still having trouble believing in it.

  “Cool!” she says, a big fat grin spreading across her face lik
e sunrise in the arctic spring. It’s a happy smile, too wide for that narrow face, and it makes her look unexpectedly attractive. “I wasn’t sure they’d find one in time.”

  “But.”

  “I need a Zone programmer,” she explains, “because I’ve got to audit a bank that’s located inside Avalon Four.”

  “Audit a bank?” You know that’s got to be what Mr. PinStripe was talking about, but it didn’t quite register at the time. “Inside a game?”

  “Yes.” She picks up a leather conference folio that was sitting on the table and opens it. “It’s been robbed.”

  “The bank. Robbed…?” All of a sudden the solid ground under your mental feet has turned into a solipsistic ice-sheet. “Hang on, that’s impossible. I think.”

  “Right.” She nods, vigorously. “That’s what everyone I spoke to at Hayek Associates said. But they would say that, wouldn’t they?”

  “Let me get this straight. Hayek Associates are a stabilization house, aren’t they? And they’ve been stabilizing Avalon Four—”

  “A stabilization house would be a company that manages the in-game economy, wouldn’t it?” She’s making odd gestures with her hands, and for a moment they distract you because it looks like knitting, only nobody would use a two-hundred-millimetre needle.

  “I think we’re using divergent terminology, but yes. I say ‘second-tier industry subcontractor,’ you say ‘bank.’ But the thing is, if it’s properly designed, robbing the bank should be impossible.”

  “Why? It’s a database server, isn’t it? Someone grabbed a bunch of entries from a table and deleted—”

  “Not exactly.” This is giving you a headache. “Zone games don’t run on a central server, they run on distributed-processing nodes using a shared network file system. To stop people meddling with the contents, everything is locked using a cryptographic authorization system. If you ‘own’ an item in the game, what it really means is that nobody else can update its location or ownership attributes without you using your digital signature to approve the transaction—and a co-signature signed by a cluster of servers all spying on each other to make sure they haven’t been suborned.”