Halting State hs-1

by Charles Stross

  “So it’s not physically on a server?” You can see her trying to keep up. “Could someone forge the signatures?”

  “Not really.” You’re racking your brains now, because the authentication architecture of Zone isn’t something you’ve really studied, but a couple of old university courses are raising dusty echoes in the back of your head. “It’s based on the old DigiCash protocol, invented by a cryptographer called David Chaum, back in the eighties and early nineties. He figured it could replace credit cards on the Internet—it was designed to allow anonymous transactions but prevent fraud, and cryptographers had been whacking on it with clubs for twenty years before the Zone consortium picked it. The signature mechanism is very secure—you’d need to suborn the root keyservers for the entire Zone game space…”

  You trail off into silence. Whoops, you think, and kick yourself. Suddenly a grand an hour doesn’t seem like very much money at all. Ms. Barnaby is looking at you with an expression you last saw in primary third, when Mrs. Ranelagh didn’t deign to notice your wee waving hand in time to give you a toilet ticket.

  “Yes?” she asks, compressing so much data into the twenty-four-bit monosyllable that if you could patent the algorithm, you’d be set for life.

  “Well, uh, I…wow,” you manage. “Why did you want me?”

  She unwinds by a fraction of a degree. “You’ve got the same background and experience as the programmer who’s missing from Hayek Associates.” Programmer who’s—shaddup, Jack. “Everyone else is focussing on HA’s business-level organization, they dumped the gaming stuff on me, and I’m not really an expert.” She gives a little self-deprecating laugh that raises the temperature back above zero. “So I asked for a native guide.”

  Ah. That explains it. Well, no it doesn’t, you realize, but it goes at least a third of the way towards it. “What do you do?” you ask her.

  “I’m a forensic accountant.” She pulls that prim, mousy, librarian face again as she taps a bunch of papers in her folio into line.

  “Oh. Well, ever done any gaming?” There’s always a chance. Some of the deadliest GMs you ever ran into back in your table-top days were accountancy clerks by day.

  “Not that kind. Why, do you think…?”

  You glance at the blank white walls of the conference room. Perfect. “Now’s your chance. Do you have a line of expenses?”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  It’s still only a vague thought, but…“We could go have a sniff round Hayek Associates, but we’ll only get the cold shoulder, and, besides, they’ll be logging everything you do. I think we ought to go have a word with this programmer of theirs—”

  “Can’t do that, he’s missing.”

  “Missing? When?”

  “The police say he disappeared, probably over the weekend.” She makes it sound like he pulled a sickie. You shudder. There’s a lot of money in a hack on Zone’s DigiCash layer, but enough for that? “We can’t get access to HA’s offices until the police finish whatever it is they’re doing, so we’re stuck sitting on our thumbs for today, anyway.”

  “Oh. Well then.”

  “Well?” She looks at you expectantly, and you realize she can’t be all that much older than you. The librarian act is elaborate camouflage. Behind it, who is she really?

  “Well, if that’s the case, can your expense budget run to a taxi out to PC WORLD and a pair of high-end gaming boxes?”

  “Yes, I think it would,” she says slowly. “What have you got in mind?”

  “A guided tour of Avalon Four, from the inside, so you know what you’re getting yourself into. Are you game for it?”

  Limbo. In mythology, it used to be where the dead babies were stacked like cord-wood, awaiting a bureaucratic salvation. Limbo: the dusty front porch of hell. In Zone terminology, Limbo is the hat-check desk.

  You’ve configured yourselves for spatial proximity, so you step into reality next to the unformed noob. The noob’s not got as far as adopting any specific species or gender, so they’re present as a humanoid blob of mist floating above the marble floor of the temple. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes. You mean through my headset?”

  “That’s right.” You take a look around while she’s fiddling with her senses. The temple is vaguely classical, Doric columns and marble floors around a raised central area with your traditional altar, columns of flickering light rising from it towards the airy dome of the ceiling. There’s a ghostly choir improvising atmospherically in the background. “Found the controller yet?”

  “I think so—” The noob jolts violently, then sprints across the floor, slamming face-first into a pillar. “Ouch! What just happened?”

  “I think you set your acceleration too high.”

  An hour later she’s still fiddling with her hair, and you’re wondering if maybe you would have done better to give her an off-the-shelf identity: Answering occasional questions and helping the noob work out who she wants to be is intermittently amusing, but it’s not exactly getting the job done. On the other hand, you’ve got to admit that those asp-headed dreadlocks are very cool indeed, and more to the point, she’s not going to be able to do her job if she doesn’t at least have some idea of why people invest so much time and effort in their characters. “I think we should get moving,” you suggest.

  “You think?” The noob turns to look at you and, to your surprise, raises an eyebrow: Obviously she’s been exploring the somatics while your mind was wandering. “How does this look?”

  “It looks fine.” For a first attempt. The tools for creating a character in Zonespace are a lot finer and more subtle than those offered by the older MMOs, but by the same token, they’re harder to use well: Some people make a tidy real-world living just by fine-tuning other players’ avatars. What Elaine has come up with is a passable attempt at an anime medusa, with brightly textured skin like vinyl, big brilliant eyes, and colourful clothing. “Okay, to start with, you’ll need this.” You hand her a short-sword that she’s skilled up for. “And this.” A chain-mail vest, slightly rusty. “You wear them like so.” The noob nods. “And now you either need to learn how to navigate—there’s a tutorial garden outside the door over there—or I can teach you.”

  “Which do you recommend?”

  She’s either being very patient or she’s actually enjoying the novelty of it all. “I’d do both. Stick with me for now, then go online yourself tonight and mess around with the tutorial.”

  “Okay.” She sounds sceptical. You glance sidelong out of game space and see her as she is, focussed completely on the game box’s dual screens, her glasses shutting out anything that isn’t part of the reality in front of her. Totally intent, finger-joints twitching oddly as she turns the L-shaped controller around in her hands. “How long does this usually take?”

  “What? Oh, the tutorial garden outside that door over there is designed to give you the basics of how to control your body in about half an hour to an hour. Then if you pick one of the shards, there are a bunch of solo quests you can run that will train you up until you can play competitively in about a week, um, twenty to thirty hours of online time. But if all you want to do is tag along with me, then just get through the tutorial in the garden.”

  “You’ve got a whole load of kit.”

  “Yeah. I’m Theodore G. Bear. The G. stands for Grizzly, and I’m an ursus.” You rear up and look down your nose at her from your full three metres, then pull out the huge, brass-barreled blunderbuss you carry in your pack and sling it around your neck where she can see it: “I believe in the right to keep and arm bears.” It’s about the size of a five-pounder carronade off of one of Captain Kidd’s frigates, and it’s been personally blessed by the Spirit of the Age, which gives it a serious edge against superstitionists and darklings. You wait for the groan, then add, “The best way to do this is if I carry you, so I’m going to sit down now, and then I want you to try the mount command.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “No
pe.”

  She fiddles around for a minute, then suddenly she’s sitting on your pack, which has sprouted stirrups and a natty little leather saddle. “Hey! I can ride?”

  “It’s a standard skill for epic characters. Don’t try it on anyone you aren’t campaigning with, they might get pissed off. Okay, time to wander.” You stand up and head for the big double doors at the front of the temple, keeping it slow. “This is the Temple of Newborn Souls on the Island of Is, which sits in the Nether Sea just off the coast of the main continent, which is called…Hell.”

  Hell lies outside the universe, and is thus largely exempt from the laws of physics. Its geometry is a Dantesque parody, for while the Nether Sea is flat, the entirety of the continent lies below sea-level, a vast trumpet bell some thousands of leagues wide stretched out across the knife-sharp line where the sea meets the swirling vacuity that forever hides this realm from Heaven.

  How do you describe a continent of pain that has been hollowed out into a frozen whirlpool, forever held below the cliffs of roaring, glass-green waves that somehow flail at the abyss, without ever curling over and toppling over to inundate the red-glowing wilderness?

  How do you describe the turbulent flocks of the venal, swirling like starlings in the autumn air above the muddy fields of the Somme? How to picture the power-pylon ranks of impaled, damned souls marching in synchrony across the deserts of the fourth circle? The searing black-iron skyscrapers of Dis, windows glowing with diabolical light?

  It’s like something out of Hieronymus Bosch, of course. Bosch, as pastiched by a million expert systems executing code that procedurally clones and extrapolates a work of art across a cosmic canvas. Procedural Bosch, painting madly and at infinite speed to fill in the gaps in a virtual world, guarded by the titanic archangels of Alonzo Church and Alan Turing, spinning the endless tape…

  It’s funny how it takes game space to bring out the poet in you. And it’s even funnier how you’re embarrassed about letting it show.

  “That’s Hell. Don’t worry about it, it’s just a little joke that got out of hand.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Not at all!” You lumber forward onto the stony path that meanders around the temple, heading downhill towards the beach front. “What happened was, the original set-up is where you go to acquire a body; hence, Limbo. Then a couple of the procedural content guys got bored and decided to have fun with the back-drop. This was all pre-alpha, back in the pioneering days, but they’d seen the movie”—and bloody awful you thought it was, too: an aging Patrick Stewart as Satan, hamming it up for the jeezmoid market—“and somehow managed to grab a chunk of scenery rights by a backdoor licensing deal. So we’re in Limbo, on the hill overlooking a sinkhole estate. And we’re about to teleport ourselves down to Earth, just as soon as I find the, ah—”

  You find the right sacred grove, and flop down on the holy mosaic, which lights up in response: Standard Lambent Radiosity Tint #2, if you’re an accurate judge of such things.

  “But why is it still here?”

  “It’s somewhere we can banish persistent griefers.” The damned souls in this particular hell are there for violations of game law—ranging from beating up noobs and stealing to more recondite offences against virtual reality. All they can do is lie, broken and impaled upon their wheels, screaming abuse at the robot devils until their sentence is done, and they can go back to the game. “Okay, hold on. We’re going down to Vhrana.”

  The sky turns deep blue, the world freezes, and a progress bar marches slowly across it from horizon to horizon. Ethereal runes written in aurorae six hundred kilometres high scrawl across the heavens, UPDATING REALITY, and for a moment your skin crawls with superstitious dread. Someday we’re all going to get brain implants and experience this directly. Someday everyone is going to live their lives out in places like this, vacant bodies tended by machines of loving grace while their minds go on before us into strange spaces where the meat cannot follow. You can see it coming, slamming towards you out of the future, like the empty white static that is all anyone has ever heard from beyond the stars: a Final Solution to the human condition, an answer to the Fermi paradox, lights on at home and all the windows tightly shuttered. Because it’s a thing of beauty, the ability to spin the cloth of reality, and you’re a sucker for it: Isn’t story-telling what being human is all about?

  And then your claws click down on cobblestones and the horizon implodes into the uneven Tudor timber-framed frontages of the high street in Vhrana.

  Vhrana is the capital city of Cordua, in northern Breasil on the continent of Mu. It’s about two kilometres in diameter, built atop a mushroom-shaped dome of limestone that has come adrift from its foundations and floats about a kilometre up above the rain-forest-covered flanks of Mount Panesh. Enterprising adventurers have quarried out vast cellars beneath their picturesque guild-houses, and for a pittance you can descend through the endless passages until you come to a wicker platform overlooking the jungle. Then you can rent a bamboo-and-silk hang-glider and descend to the surface or, if you are Adept, levitate by the power of will alone.

  Vhrana is a mess of clashing architectural styles, but the Duke has imposed a certain uniformity over it all by restricting the supply of certain building materials—not unlike Edinburgh, come to think of it. Thus, the timber-framed Tudor look hunches cheek by jowl with lighter wood-and-wicker buildings, some of them thatched, and the odd eruption of elvish structures—tediously similar to late-mediaeval Japan, in your opinion, but at least it doesn’t clash too violently. There aren’t many people out on the streets yet, for it’s still morning in most of North America, but as you make your way towards the northern market hall, you pass a number of hawkers selling their stuff.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Voodoo board. I’m pretty sure it’s near the north end of this market. We’re in a no-PvP zone, by the way, you can hop down and explore if you want: Nobody’s going to jump you.”

  “Oh. Okay, then.” She manages to dismount without impaling herself on a street sign while you sniff around among the market stalls—a lot of their keepers are in zombie mode, crying out their sales spiel in a loop—and look for the board. Eventually you find it, tucked away between the Golden Lotus Peace and Justice Co-operative (actually the local chapter of the Assassins Guild) and the Temple of Ru’aark. You scroll through flashing names and blinking icons, looking for—

  “The missing guy. What’s his name?”

  “Nigel MacDonald, aka Nigel Reliable. Not.”

  “I meant, his Zone name. Names. Any inkling?”

  “What, you mean what his character was called?”

  “No, his true name. The one that’s attached to any character he’s playing, so his friends can find him. Like, I’m currently being Theodore G. Bear, but my Zone handle is JackReed. You’re currently being Anonymous Coward—sorry, that’s a generic, you haven’t named your noob—but when we logged you in we created an account with the Zone handle ElaineBarnaby. Yes?”

  “Oh, right. Wouldn’t he just be NigelMacDonald?”

  “Nope. For one thing, that’s a common name. I only got JackReed because I’ve been playing since the early days, and I pulled a few strings; name squatting is a national sport hereabouts. And for another, I’m thinking if we want to trace Mr. Reliable, we need to know what his handle was.” You think for a moment. “What his handles were…”

  She’s sharp. “Plural?”

  “You got it.” You stare at her noob. There’s a faint ding as a name finally appears over her asp-haired head: Stheno. Good, she’s cluing up. “Listen, it’s a quarter to five, and if we don’t get hold of his handle real soon now, we’re not going to be able to get any further today. Assuming he was hiding something, we need to know who we’re looking for. So. Got any bright ideas?”

  “Yes. Let’s run through that tutorial you told me about. We’ll worry about finding MacDonald’s name tomorrow; first I figure I need to know what I’m doing. Or
did you have other plans for the evening?”

  SUE: Victim Liaison

  Being first on scene has its little perks, and one of them is that under the Victims of Crime (Restitution) Act (2010)—a hangover from before the independence vote went through—if an offence has been committed against a designated Victim of Crime with a pecuniary value of blah or a custodial sentence of wibble, the designated VOC must be assigned a Victim Liaison Officer, to do the touchy-feely hand-wringing shit and dial the Samaritans for them. You were the first responder to Hayek Associates, you’re not part of Liz’s trained and certified gang of murder puppies, and the pecuniary value is clearly well outside the two-thousand-euro threshold, so she patted you on the head and told you to run along and be a good little VLO for Hayek Associates.

  But how the fuck do you counsel a corporation that’s been mugged?

  “Hello, I’m your Victim Liaison Officer. I understand you’re a bit upset about it—share price down in the dumps, third quarter figures looking a bit dodgy, that kind of thing—would you like to talk to someone sympathetic? A cup of tea, perhaps?”

  So you go back on site, nip down the fire stairs and through the blast doors round the back, and bang on the Great White Chief’s door.

  “Who is it?”

  You open the door. “Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Hackman, but I was wondering if you’d have the time for a wee chat.” You smile, making friendly.

  Marcus Hackman’s office is all done up in chrome and black like an eighties bachelor pad. Mary has a thing for design magazines, and you recognize the Eames chair and lounger, and you’ll swear you’ve seen that desk somewhere famous. One wall is cluttered with photographs and certificates and the sort of shit the terminally insecure use to reassure themselves that they really matter; or maybe it’s what aggressive office sociopaths use to browbeat the terminally insecure into thinking that they really matter. The shark bares his teeth at you in a not-too-cannibalistic manner. “I can spare you five minutes.”