Halting State hs-1

by Charles Stross

  “Oh really?” You raise an eyebrow at her, but your authority field is down below half strength. She just looks at you icily and nods.

  “Yes. We’ve tightened up security a lot since last week.”

  Fuck. “Is Mr. Richardson in his office, then?”

  “Of course. But he won’t tell you any different.” One more sniff, and she signs you in, then stalks off in a huff. Bitch. But you’ve been here before, and you know the way. So you go and knock on Wayne’s door, and when it opens, you give him your best shit-eating grin.

  “Mr. Richardson. I was hoping to find you here!”

  Wayne gives you a rabbit-in-the-headlights look and backs into his room. “Really?” he asks cautiously.

  You follow him in. It’s a dingy little hole, lit by a strip of blue-white daylight LEDs strung around the upper edges of the walls. He’s got a bunch of tattooed sheepskins with his name on them up on the wall behind his desk, framed so you can’t really miss them (ALL-ANGLESEY MIDDLE MANAGEMENT SHEEP SHAGGING CHAMPION, 2014) and a suspiciously large monitor parked on the blotter. “Have you by any chance seen Jack Reed or Elaine Barnaby today?” you ask him. And this time you’ve got the speech-stress monitor on real time, just out of curiosity.

  “I’m sorry, I haven’t,” he says, and he’s telling the truth, dammit.

  “Do you know where they’ve gone?” you ask.

  “I’m sorry, but no. They haven’t been in all day.” He frowns pensively. “That’s odd, now you mention it.” He’s green-lit within the error bars, all the way: telling the truth again. How inconvenient. “They were running some sort of database trawl overnight, I think. They demanded access to a lot of rather sensitive data yesterday evening and left a big batch job running.”

  “What kind of data were they after?” you ask, just cross-referencing in case it spooks Wayne into putting a foot wrong.

  “A bunch of stolen magic plot coupons, described in Structured Treasure Language. I gave him read-only access to our code repository, so he could compile in some modules, and hooks into a bunch of the online auction-houses who buy and trade prestige goodies. I think that’s all, but I may be wrong—they were haggling with Sam.”

  “Sam…?”

  “Sam Couper.”

  You twitch up a mug shot you captured earlier, back when you first parachuted into their full-metal panic. “Is he in today?”

  “Sure!” Wayne looks surprised. “Third door down the hall on your left, you can’t miss it: It’s the one with the sign saying ‘Real programmers do it with a float’.”

  He’s right, you can’t really miss it. So you walk right up to the door and, hearing voices, open it.

  You are in a windowless room, with a huge, curved desk extending around three walls. The desk is covered in flat-panel displays, electronic gadgets, wires, books, print-outs, and half-eaten pizza crusts. The walls are covered with many-coloured maps gridded out with hexagonal overlays: What bare space there is is taken up by an Ansari Space Camp calendar. Three adult males sit bolt-upright in expensive wheelie chairs, facing the centre of the room, whistling a vaguely familiar melody while one of them—balding, thirtyish, red-faced—frowns furiously, concentrating as he juggles four or five small plush Cthulhu dolls. (After a moment you realize they’re all trying to whistle the Twilight Zone theme, slightly out of key.)

  It takes a moment for them to notice you: Then the whistling falters to a diminuendo, followed by a splattering of bat-winged beanie-monsters crashing to the institutional blue-green carpet. For a moment there is a guilt-stricken silence so thick you could hear a snowflake fall, then one of them finds his voice. “What do you want?” he demands. It’s Sam “traceroute is my bitch” Couper, and his associates Darren and Mike. (Darren is the juggler of eldritch horrors.)

  You smile evilly. “I want to pick your brains.”

  Darren shudders, but Sam is made of tougher stuff. “I already told you everything I know.”

  You can’t help it. Something about this room seems to exclude you. It must be all the frustrated testosterone sweated into the concrete walls over the years: But whatever it is, it gets right up your nose. “You told me everything you knew as of three days ago, Mr. Couper. I’d like to know what transpired between yourself and Jack Reed and Elaine Barnaby yesterday afternoon or evening.”

  “Huh?” Sam looks surprised. “It was Wayne. He brought them in and told me, give them what they want. They wanted a list of what we could drag out of the journal logs from the bank, right before the robbery. And the source code to some of our in-house tools so that Reed could hack on them to go search for the missing loot. That’s all, I didn’t have anything to do with them afterwards.”

  “I see.” Dammit, he’s telling the truth, too! How unhelpful. “Do you know when they left?”

  “When they…? No, I don’t. Reed was still here when I went home, around 7:00 P.M. I think he was pulling an all-nighter.”

  “Uh-huh.” Whatever else you can say about him, he sounds like a hard worker. You glance at Darren and Mike. “Do either of you know anything else? Your help would be very much appreciated.”

  “Know—” Mike stops. “Yesterday Jack saved my ass.”

  “What do you mean, he saved your ass?” you ask.

  “We were—I was being Venkmann, one of the house avatars. Your two pet auditors were messing around in Avalon, and they called me in because they’d tracked down the entry point for the Orcs. Turns out it was a hacked Iron Maiden and someone had converted it into a shredder and added a bunch of traps. We were jumped by slaadi while I was immobilized, but they got me out of it. The other end of the shredder turns out to be in Zhongguo, where we don’t have any administrative access.”

  It’s so much gibberish to you, but you pull one piece out of it as sounding like it needs further clarification. “Zhongguo?” You mangle his pronunciation. “Where’s that?”

  “It’s another Zonespace game, run by Hentai Animatics. I captured the fight, if you want I can send you an AVI of it?”

  He’s trying to be helpful, you realize with a sinking heart. That’s just what you don’t need—what you’re looking for is pushback, not volunteers. “Aye, if you could forward it to me that would maybe help,” you tell him to shut him up. “Well, I’ll be going.” You hesitate for a moment, looking at the plushies sleeping on the ocean-blue carpet. “Would you mind telling me what was all that about?” You manage to maintain an even tone of voice that would probably make Liz proud.

  “Focus break,” says Russell. “We work till it gets too much, and then…juggling elder gods just seems to help with the stress, you know?”

  “I see.” You beat a hasty retreat and manage to hold a lid on it until the door behind you is shut tight on the juggling rocket scientists and their mad ritual.

  Hentai Animatics. At least you can see if that tentacle leads somewhere interesting…

  When you step out of the lift back up to the car-park you discover that a cold drizzle is falling—and you’ve got even more voice mail to put a damper on the occasion. “Elaine from Dietrich-Brunner here—can you call me when you get this? I believe we’ve got a lead for you on the items that were stolen from Hayek Associates.” This does not improve your mood, especially when you check the time-stamp and realize it’s at least four hours old.

  You call her back, but get put straight through to her voice mail. “Ms. Barnaby? This is Sergeant Smith, returning your call. Could you, or Mr. Reed if you are with him, call me back as soon as possible, please? Thanks.”

  You’re getting a bad feeling about this. You’re supposed to be on top of things, but getting traction on this case is proving remarkably difficult—and that was before your voice mail started keeping its own counsel. Liz’s words float back to you: Whoever’s behind it has got their claws into CopSpace. Normally you wouldn’t credit such hallucinations, but Inspector Kavanaugh with her sharp suits and her degrees in criminology and social science isn’t so much climbing the greasy pole as riding up
it on a personal jet pack; not so much a straight arrow as a guided missile aimed at making chief constable. If she’s going all swivel-eyed on you and muttering about spies and cloak-and-dagger stuff, but hasn’t gone completely off the deep end (and the arrival of Kemal’s bumbling gang of Keystone Kops this morning suggests that if she is nuts, the funny farm should be expecting a bumper crop), then you bloody ought to keep your eyes peeled for secret agents doing the funny handshake two-step down by the water of Leith.

  So. What else can you do, beside waiting for the nerd and the librarian to surface? You consult your conscience and realize that: (a) you still haven’t recorded your evidence in the Hastie breaking-and-entering case, (b) you’ve been shamelessly neglecting Bob (who, despite your recent abduction to Liz’s firm, is still your responsibility), and (c) you’ve dead-ended, unless you want to put the Hentai Animatics lead into CopSpace and see where it goes. Which, now you think about it, isn’t a bad idea at all. So you wheech out your personal mobie—the one you usually use to keep tabs on Davey—and phone Bob on his, just on the off chance: And he picks up on the second ring. “Yes?”

  “Bob? Sergeant Smith here. You busy?”

  “Bus—uh, no, Sergeant! What can I do for you?” He’s like an over-eager puppy: You can see him drooling and wagging his tail while clenching a pair of size ten DMs in his mouth.

  “I’ve got a little project, Bob. When you get a chance, I want you to hop along to the nearest library and borrow one of their public terminals. Dig up everything you can find on a company called Hentai Animatics—they run games”—you take time to spell it out to him—“then text it to me. Don’t bother going through CopSpace yet. If you can get it to me by end of shift, I’ll be happy.”

  “I’ll do what I can, Sergeant.” You don’t need telepathy to sense the doubt in his voice.

  “If you think it sounds flaky, Constable, take it to Inspector Kavanaugh. She’s who I’m working for right now.”

  “Oh. Well, if you say so, ma’am! I’ll get onto it right away. Or as soon as Constable Wilson goes on his next coffee break.”

  You end the call, shaking your head slightly at the thought of Paul “two lumps” Wilson running Bob ragged: Stranger things have happened, but not recently. On the other hand, that’s your lead taken care of. Now you can piss off back to the station to finally record your statement, catch up with big Mac in case he’s forgotten you used to work for him, and sort out the paperwork that’s been building up since last Thursday. Tomorrow is another day.

  ELAINE: Morning After

  There’s a subterranean snuffling sound from somewhere under the duvet, then a sense of warmth. You freeze for a moment while the recoil-reflex dies away, then relax into it. An arm slowly reaches across you, an animal comfort—or maybe he can’t quite believe he isn’t alone (and is having second thoughts).

  This is not the first time you’ve woken up with the dawn to find yourself in a strange man’s bed. (Well, not a complete stranger—but you’ve known him for less than a week, and what’s that in real terms?) Mind you, on second thoughts, if you’re mutually attracted to someone, a week in close proximity is enough time to figure out what you’ve both got in mind: And no number of extra months will make one whit of difference if one or the other of you isn’t interested. And yesterday was more than a little crazy, which always tends to speed things up. But if you lie awake for much longer staring at the floral Rorschach patterns on the inside of the curtains—where did he get them? or, more realistically, who inflicted them on him and why did they hate him so much?—you’re going to start worrying morbidly about whether it was really a good idea, about whether it was sensible, rather than being what you both needed at the time. And if you start tugging at the loose ends of your self-doubt like that, not only will you bury the memory of comfort under a cairn of buts, you’ll stifle any prospect of continuing to explore this thorny maze of insecurity and need that hems you in…just like you did last time. Trust you to get involved with a man who’s even more insecure than you are.

  “Jack?”

  He shuffles closer, spooning up to your back. “Mm?”

  “Been awake long?”

  He pauses for a long time. “Had difficulty sleeping.”

  “Well.” You press your back against him. “We’re going to have to face the music later.”

  “If there is a later.”

  You bite the inside of your cheek. Ah well. “Isn’t there going to be one?” Please don’t tell me he’s bailing out already…

  “I’ve been working through what Michaels said—”

  You unromantic sod! you think, somewhat relieved.

  “—about the implications of a core-router exploit on a national level.”

  Oh for fuck’s sake. You resist the urge to elbow him in the ribs. “Yes? Is it bad?”

  “Very…especially the worst case. Imagine you can’t get any money out of a cashpoint, even though there’s money in your bank account. That’s annoying, right? Now imagine the entire APACS network goes down. And, oh, the contents of your bank account are randomized, along with everyone else’s. And all the supermarket stock-control databases go down, so they don’t know what’s moving and what’s on the shelves. And all their suppliers’ networks go down, so nobody knows what stock they’ve got, and where it is. And finally, all the Internet service providers and telcos and cellcos go down hard, and stay down—”

  You’re fully awake now. “Stop. You’re saying, no communications? No money? No food? What are you saying?”

  “That’s the start of it.” His tone of voice is maddeningly reasonable. “No transport, because you can’t trust the remote driver services or the online navigation systems and the road-pricing and speed-control systems are down. Medical services are knocked back to emergency-only because NHSNet is down. The police are forced back to relying on runners and whistles, and as for the fire service…better hope there aren’t any. When people start dying, you can’t even identify them, because the identity register’s been scrambled, too, so the biometrics point to the wrong personal files.”

  “That sounds more like an act of war than a hack.” You roll away from him.

  “That’s what it would be.” He sounds almost pleased with himself. You don’t see why: It’s not as if Michaels is paying him to do this kind of freelance analysis while he’s in bed, is it? “And that’s the twentieth-century model, what they used to call an electronic Pearl Harbour. Things have moved on since then. More likely, it would be a lot more subtle. Footnotes inserted in government reports feeding into World Trade Organization negotiating positions. Nothing we’d notice at first, nothing that would be obvious for a couple of years. You don’t want to halt the state in its tracks, you simply want to divert it into a siding of your choice. And if a couple of auditors die in a taxi crash, who cares?”

  “What—” You stop, feeling cold. Despite your carefully cultivated habit of keeping work and private life separate, he’s got you to put your thinking cap on. Any vague thoughts about a pre-prandial cuddle go out the window. “You’re messing with my head! I need coffee first.”

  “You want coffee at a time like this?” You can feel him shaking his head through the mattress.

  Fuck him, you think, heavy with regret. Or not, as the case may be. You lift the duvet back and sit up, shivering in the cool air. “Coffee, slave.”

  “It doesn’t have to happen,” he says hopefully. “Nobody in their right mind would do such a thing, not short of actual pre-existing hostilities. The Guoanbu for sure doesn’t want to destroy Scotland’s infrastructure—we’re part of the EU, their biggest trading partner. On the other hand, by demonstrating that they’ve got such a capability, they force us to pay attention to it…we’re into diplomacy here, aren’t we?”

  There’s doubt in his voice, and suddenly you can see what’s going through his mind: lying awake at night, next to your sleeping form, thinking morbid thoughts about the future, self-doubt gnawing at him—it’s the mirror image
of your own uncertainty, only he’s externalizing it, projecting it on the big picture rather than worrying about his own prospects. So you swallow your cutting response and instead nod at him, encouraging. Maybe you can salvage something more than memories if you help him get this out of his system first.

  “A ‘capture the flag’ exercise by a bunch of deniable hackers—well, either it works, or it doesn’t. If it works, they’ve got the kind of espionage edge that the old-time CIA or KGB would have creamed themselves over, and if it fails, they’ve learned something.” He pulls on a tee-shirt by the light of the bedside lamp and pads around to your side of the room. “Want to stay here? Or come downstairs and talk?”

  You slide out of bed and pick up his dressing-gown, from where you dropped it last night. “I’m listening.”

  “Michaels wants to use us to flush out Team Red’s resident agent so he can then back-track through their audit trail and roll up the hole Team Red came in through. Assuming we trust him when he says SPOOKS isn’t compromised, all we have to do is set up a situation where they come for Nigel MacDonald, then wrap them up…And there’s always the chance that my filter tool has caught some more stolen prestige items overnight.”

  His happy babble is slowing down, his uncertainty finally rising to the level of consciousness. “Jack. Listen.” You’re standing behind him. It’d be really easy to reach out and put your arms around his waist, if you could just break through his preoccupation. “You’re talking about people who have, at best, been involved in a criminal conspiracy to commit robbery, and at worst, have been involved in preparing the groundwork for a major act of terrorism. Who come from a country where people who do that sort of thing usually end up dead, and who know they’re expendable, and we’re sniffing around after them.” He tenses. “Remember last time? Remember your niece is still missing? And you think getting in deeper is a good idea?”

  You can see it all laid out before you. All you have to do is draft a whitewash report, nothing found, and scurry back to London with your tail between your legs before the shit hits the fan. Maggie and Chris will pat you on the head, and you can get back onto the Dietrich-Brunner promotion treadmill (even without the funny handshake, nod, and wink from Barry Michaels that says she’s one of us, look after her). And you can put Jack on a flight to Amsterdam to continue installing the hangover he was working on when this whole mad whirlwind blew out of nowhere to engulf you both. You don’t have to see each other ever again, and nobody needs to get hurt. Jack can go back to biting his belly raw over an unjust wound, and you can go back to keeping the world at bay. Chalk it up to experience and leave Michaels to swear over the wreckage of his intricately planned human-engineering hack. Jump back into your emotional coffin and slam the lid; nobody needs to get hurt. And if this wasn’t the morning after, that’s exactly what you’d do.