Halting State hs-1

by Charles Stross

  You’re hitting traffic now, surging along one of the main arteries into the western suburbs. Your driver’s still going fast, but he’s not using his siren or overtaking: He’s just relying on folks to get out of his way. Evidently you don’t rate stunt-driving. A few moments later you recognize where you’re going. The police car is taking you back to Hayek Associates’ offices: You recognize the wide, straight main road with trees to one side and a hill on the other. But before you can figure out a way to warn Jack, the car is turning right, up the hill, and into the car-park outside the bunker.

  The slippery public-schoolboy type, Barry Michaels, is bouncing up and down on his toes in the entrance like the floor’s red-hot. Which is a definite oh shit moment, because it crystallizes an uneasy nagging suspicion you couldn’t quite bring yourself to articulate earlier: If SPOOKS is for real, then why can’t there be more to Hayek Associates than meets the eye?

  “Come with me, please, Mr. Reed, Ms. Barnaby.” Barry manages to sound completely in control of the situation, and judging by the presence of the police, he’s not wrong. You manage to nod, and follow him into the lift.

  “Marcus is out of the office on business, and I sent Wayne on a wild goose chase,” Michaels confides, as the lift drops down towards the underworld. “So you don’t have to worry about the civilians getting underfoot.” As the lift stops, he jams his thumb on the close button and simultaneously pokes the call button. The lift jerks into motion again, descending. “This is the sub-basement. I’ll have to ask you to leave all your personal electronics in the basket, I’m afraid.”

  The sub-basement is walled in concrete and smells of mould and neglect. What light there is comes from a caged incandescent bulb that dates to the Cold War, or maybe the Battle of Britain.

  “What is this place?” asks Jack, sounding more than slightly dazed.

  “I told you, it’s the sub-basement.” Michaels points to a wire supermarket shopping basket. “Your gadgets, please. Now.” At first you think he’s taking the piss, but then he shoves his left shirt cuff up and unfastens a very expensive Breitling chronometer. “You can collect them again on the way out.” You obediently place your hand-bag on the counter, then put your glasses in the basket. Jack, meanwhile, is building a small pyramid: keyboard (very much the worse for wear), phone, specs, something that looks like a multifunction power pack, other less-identifiable stuff…It’s a wonder he doesn’t clank when he moves. Michaels nods approvingly, then opens the single door. It’s thin plywood, but the frame looks more like an airport metal detector. “Go on. Third door on the right.”

  There’s a short corridor. Michaels carefully shuts the door behind himself. For a moment you think about opening one of the wrong doors—but it’s very Bluebeard’s castle down here, and you know what happens to girls who open the wrong doors in that story, don’t you? The lights are all naked bulbs behind wire shields, hard-wired to switches that look like something out of the Stone Age. No electronics. Go figure.

  Finally, the three of you are alone in a whitewashed room with half a dozen battered office chairs, a wooden table, and a sideboard with a kettle sitting on it. “Sorry about the lack of amenities,” Michaels says brusquely. “Help yourself to tea or coffee, I’ll be back in a minute.” He ducks out the door before you can say anything.

  Jack looks at you. You look at Jack. He raises an eyebrow. “So what do you think?” he asks suddenly.

  “Don’t ask me, I’m in over my head.” You look around curiously. There’s no network cabling, no phone sockets, no nothing except for an old tin kettle on a camping gas-ring and a light bulb out of the last century. You’ve got a creepy feeling that if they could, they’d have rigged this bunker up for gas-light. “I think we’re under a shielded nuclear bunker, and there are no cables.” You walk round the table and light the burner. The kettle’s already full of water. “Judging from what Michaels said, we’re going to be here a while. How do you take your coffee?”

  The kettle is just about coming up to the boil when Michaels returns. He’s carrying a fat cardboard folder full of paper. “Ah, good.” He plants the folder on the desk, then he sits down limply, as if he’s been on his feet for hours. “You’re both probably looking for an explanation for what’s going on here. Unfortunately, I can’t give you one.” He glances from you to Jack and back again, and there’s very little of the bumptious ex-public-school boy left in his expression. “Not because I don’t want to, or I’m not allowed to, but because we don’t have much more than pieces of a puzzle right now.”

  Jack, who has been slumped in a chair for the past minute or so, suddenly stiffens. “What’s this shit about Elsie being kidnapped?”

  “I’m very sorry to say, we don’t have any news of her yet.” Michaels opens the folder and pulls out a stapled memo—you try to read it, but you can’t make out much more than a certain familiar coat of arms at the top of the page. “If it’s any consolation, it’s quite likely that nothing’s happened to her yet, and probably nothing will.”

  “Nothing…” Jack’s at a loss for words, grasping at straws: And that makes you quietly angry at Michaels, who should know better than to string Jack along like this. The kettle’s bumping, so you stand up and walk round the table to fill the mugs you set out earlier. Moving is easier than sitting still.

  “Are you looking for Elsie?” you ask Michaels. “Because it seems to me that this wouldn’t have happened if not for your games…”

  “We traced Jack’s calls and the photographs,” says Michaels. “There’s an ARG called SPYTRAP—you’ve heard of it? The photographs were pulled off a roadside traffic camera, the printing and envelope delivery were care of an unwitting SPYTRAP player, and the phone call…” He shrugs. “Best guess right now is that the whole thing was automatic—one of the other side’s data-mining bots determined that you were in a position to threaten their scheme and began yanking strings, starting with getting you arrested in Amsterdam.”

  “Huh?” Jack somehow manages to look endearingly stupid when he gapes like an idiot, more like a large but thick sheep-dog than a village idiot. “But it’s not—”

  “You’re flagged as a SPOOKS player.” Michaels taps the folio, then glances straight at you. “And you live within ten kilometres of a subject of interest, and have near enough exactly the same skill set. Locking you down for a couple of days while they make their move would be prudent, don’t you think?”

  Well. “Who’s the subject of interest?” you ask. It’s not as if you haven’t guessed already, but some confirmation would be nice.

  “Nigel MacDonald. Who doesn’t actually exist—Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there: He wasn’t there again today, I wish that man would go away—he’s a figment of our reality-fabrication department’s imagination.”

  “Which organization’s division?” asks Jack: “Hayek Associates, or SPOOKS, or whoever you are?”

  Michaels nods. “Jolly good question. As you’ve probably surmised, Hayek Associates are a front. It’s a real enough company and Wayne and Marcus are real enough business men, and it’s even profitable—but that’s not what it’s here for. It—I should say ‘we’—are a listening post on the virtual frontier. It’s our job to keep an eye open for certain activities that…well, for a last-decade example, do you remember the flap some years ago over terrorists holding training camps in Second Life? Not that that’s quite what was going on—they weren’t training camps, it was just a convenient place to go and swap intelligence or give orders, once the web and email and telephone networks were all being tapped—but, the thing is, for the past twenty years we’ve been trying to nail down every communications channel that the bad guys might use, and the trouble is, it doesn’t work.” He shoves his hair back with one hand, and for a moment the boyish good looks collapse in haggard disarray. “Because bandwidth expands faster than storage, and every time we think we’ve got one type of channel locked down, a new one comes along, and we can’t back-track to hunt traffic i
n a medium we didn’t know existed. And then some disruptive new technology comes down the pipeline and makes everything we’re doing obsolete in a couple of months…”

  Jack glances at you sidelong while the middle-aged spookmaster is fumbling to articulate whatever it is he’s got stuck in his mind. His expression is so dry you have to bite your lip. Dry as in tinder-dry. Jack’s finally getting angry, and you’ve got a feeling that you don’t want to be inside the blast radius when he goes off. “Jack’s niece,” you prompt Michaels. “What makes you think she’s safe?”

  “Well, for starters there’s the fact that she’s been abducted by the procedural content engine from a role-playing game, rather than a slavering paedophile. In fact, if this is the usual way these things play out, she probably doesn’t even know she’s been kidnapped as such, any more than you realized you were being taken out of circulation by a rival intelligence agency in Amsterdam. It’s all just a game to her. Look, I can promise you that we’re working on it, and I won’t be lying. But, in all honesty—we can’t just call the local police and tell them to go in with tasers drawn. Firstly, we’re not sure where she is, yet, and secondly, if the police find her too fast, it’ll tip the opposition off that we’re onto their game. That would be disastrous—it would invite escalation—”

  And then Jack blows his top.

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean? It seems to me that we’ve already been pretty fucking escalated, all the way into a gravel quarry if we hadn’t broken out! Chen was scared shitless—he thought someone was going to try to kill him—and I’ll bet you that if he shows up again, it’ll be in an organ bank. These fuckers aren’t playing games, Mister Spook, sir, in case you’ve forgotten there are several million euros missing—”

  You’ve got a very peculiar feeling that Jack is playing some kind of game with Michaels, but you haven’t got a clue what the rules are. And then Michaels shakes his head. “That’s irrelevant.”

  You can’t keep your mouth shut at that. “What do you mean, it’s irrelevant? What are we here for, then?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” Michaels breathes heavily. “Are you going to listen?”

  “Fuck no, I’m trying to tell you you’ve been—” But that’s just the tailend of Jack’s venting, and he manages to shut himself up before he really puts his foot in his mouth. He’s not stupid, is Jack; unlike some of the geeks you’ve known in your time, he can get a message if you hit him over the head with it hard enough. (He seems to be housetrained, he’s not pushy, and he doesn’t smell bad: If it wasn’t for the tee-shirts and furtive programming runs, he’d have trouble hanging on to his geek licence.) “Go on, please,” he says, with a very odd look on his face.

  “Thank you. Let me lay out a few things first, by way of establishing a context. This is about national security, and, if you’re anything like the civilians I’ve dealt with in the past, you’re about to ask what it’s got to do with you. So I’d like to nail that down first so we can skip the stupid questions later. Clear?”

  You nod, warily. National security is a weasel term that covers a multitude of sins, but you’ll let it pass for now. Whose national security? is the next question you’ve got in mind…

  “This is the twenty-first century, and we’re in the developed world. You’re probably thinking wars are something that happens in third-world shit-holes a long way away. And to a degree, you’d be right. Modern warfare is capital-intensive, and it hasn’t really been profitable for decades; it was already a marginal proposition back in 1939 when Hitler embarked on his pan-European asset-stripping spree—his government would have been bankrupt by March 1940 if he hadn’t invaded Poland and France—and it’s even worse today. When the Americans tried it in Iraq, they spent nine times the value of the country’s entire oil reserves conquering a patch of desert full of—sorry, I’m rambling. Pet hobby-horse. But anyway: Back in the eighteenth century, von Clauswitz was right about war being the continuation of diplomacy by other means. But today, in the twenty-first, the picture’s changed. It’s all about enforcing economic hegemony, which is maintained by broadcasting your vision of how the global trade system should be structured. And what we’re facing is a real headache—a three-way struggle to be the next economic hegemon.”

  Who is we? That’s the question you’re asking yourself…

  “‘We,’ for these purposes, is the intellectual property regime we live in—call it the European System. The other hegemonic candidates are the People’s Republic of China, and India. America isn’t in play—they’ve only got about three hundred and fifty million people, and once we finish setting up the convergence criteria for Russian accession to the Group of Thirty, the EU will be over seven hundred. China and India are even bigger. More to the point, the USA went post-industrial first. Their infrastructure is out-of-date and replacing it, now oil is no longer cheap, is costing them tens of trillions of euros to modernize. Plus, they’ve got all those rusty aircraft carriers to keep afloat. It’s exactly the same problem Britain faced in the 1930s, the one that ultimately bankrupted the empire. But today, our infrastructure—Europe’s—is in better shape, and the eastern states are even newer. They went post-industrial relatively recently, so their network infrastructure is almost as new as the shiny new stuff in Shanghai and New Delhi. So there’s this constant jockeying for position between three hyperpowers while the USA takes time out, and you live in one of those powers, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “I live in Scotland,” Jack points out.

  “But Scotland is part of the British Isles Derogation Zone, which in turn is part of the European Union, yes? What I’m trying to make clear here is that what’s good for the EU is good for Scotland, and England. And what’s playing out here is potentially very bad indeed, both for the country you live in, and eventually, for you.”

  If you let them badger each other indefinitely, you could be stuck in this bunker until Christmas. And that would never do: The instant coffee is bogging, and you can’t check your email. “Okay, so just what is going on?” you ask Michaels, smiling as sweetly as possible to conceal your irritation.

  “Quantum key exchange!” Michaels snaps. As far as you’re concerned, he might as well have said “abracadabra,” but the effect on Jack is electrifying.

  Michaels smiles. “Now that I’ve got your attention…”

  Jack nods like a puppet on a string.

  “Until about five years ago, progress in electronics was governed by something called Moore’s Law—are you familiar with it? Make a circuit smaller, it dissipates less heat, so it can run faster, and you can cram more components onto a chip of a given size. It began to bottom out in the oughties, when we began hitting the quantum-scale limits to conventional electronics. But at about the same time, scientists began trying to develop so-called quantum processors, and don’t tell me how they work—it’s all gibberish to me. But the long and the short of it is, a quantum processor can do certain types of calculation not simply very fast, but to all intents and purposes instantaneously. And among the classes of operations they’re good for, the foremost is code-breaking.”

  “But if you use quantum key distribution,” Jack says slowly, “that resets the balance point in the arms race. Doesn’t it?”

  This is already about two steps beyond you, but you focus on it intently: There’ll be time to do the homework once you get your mobile back.

  “Yes and no. Quantum key distribution”—Michaels looks at you—“lets you secure your regular encryption keys so that there’s no risk of anyone else getting their hands on them, which is what makes them vulnerable to quantum code-breaking. But it’s something you do strictly over secure fibre-optic cable. Our entire mobile communications infrastructure, from 3G on up through 4G and NG and 802.20, is impossible to upgrade to QKD. The next generation system will be secure—but right now, we’re wide-open to anyone with a couple of million euros and a bunch of carrier-grade fibre—and a copy of the one-time pad used to secur
e supervisor access to our core backbone routers. Which, incidentally, is why we’re sitting in a shielded bunker equipped with no communications technology invented after 1940. About the only consolation is that the opposition is also wide-open, right now, and that’s why we’re going through the biggest renaissance in HUMINT—HUMan INTelligence—since the Cold War. It’s all mediated through artificial reality and live-action role-playing games like SPOOKS, in case you hadn’t guessed: adding the power of electronic information gathering to human espionage. Would you believe it used to cost us ten thousand euros a day to put a full surveillance team on a suspect? Now we’ve got volunteers who’ll pay us to let them do our leg work!”

  You shake your head. Michaels is dropping a bunch of random jigsaw pieces on the table in front of you, all shaken up, and expecting you to put them together, and you’re not sure you’ve got the big photograph to work from yet. “What are you getting at?” you ask. “Because I don’t see what this has got to do with us.”

  “It’s a lot to take in all at once.” Michaels shrugs self-deprecatingly. Aw, shucks. “Let’s just say…I’d like you to imagine that somewhere in the bowels of a shopping mall in Beijing, some game-obsessed otaku types are really getting into a multiplayer game called, oh, something like whatever’s the Mandarin for ‘Global Conquest.’ There’s a whole bunch of them, in two gaming clans: call them Team Red and Team Blue. And somewhere in an office block, some differently game-obsessed intelligence officers working for the Guoanbu have decided that maybe, just maybe, these gaming clans are what the Soviet KGB used to call useful idiots, back in the day, and give them their head. The Chinese have a short way with hackers. Time was, they’d end up in pieces in an organ bank: These days it’s cheaper to grow organs, so they’re more likely to get twenty years’ hard labour, but it’s still not exactly something they encourage. But it’s a different matter if the hacking is directed at an enemy of the state. And so these gaming clans, these useful idiots, they’re playing out their game of ‘Global Conquest,’ and, rather than shitting on them from a great height, someone high up in the Guoanbu has given them limited access to one of the quantum processors in the basement of the State Academy of Sciences.”