Halting State hs-1

by Charles Stross

  The giggle that blasts out of Davey’s phone nearly makes you drop it in the cereal bowl. “You just noticed? How perceptive of you!” She takes a moment to collect herself. “Sorry, Sue, we’re a bit stressed around here right now. The situation is, ah, at least as serious as the possibilities I outlined to you yesterday. I have in my hand a written letter from the chief constable—typed on a manual typewriter—citing his orders from the minister of justice—which were handwritten—invoking the Civil Contingencies Act. It’s fall-out from yesterday. Have you got that? This time the shit’s really going to hit the fan…”

  At the local Tesco you find yourself in the automatic checkout aisle behind two other officers who you know by sight. Your hand-baskets are full of mobies. You all carefully avoid making eye contact with one another, but you can’t help noticing that one of them is also stocking up on water bottles.

  You’re not that slow on the uptake; before you left home you washed out your backpack hydration system, the one you use for football matches, and filled it with freshly filtered water: And you made sure to give Davey an extralarge packed lunch, and five times as much bus fare as he’s likely to need to get home. He’s wearing his good shoes and has a spare pair of socks and a dog-eared old A-Z in his pack with gran’s address and a couple of other safe houses marked in red crayon—just in case. Liz Kavanaugh seems to think it’s going to be manageable, but paper doesn’t fail when the critical infrastructure goes down. About the only reason you don’t crack and put the bairn on a train to see his uncle in Liverpool is the worry that it might break down or get lost in the middle of nowhere. Which might be worse. Wouldn’t it?

  After you drop five of the six cheap mobies off with Inspector Long, he gives you two more anonymous cereal-packet phones to carry, along with a long handwritten list of phone numbers and names. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out it’s a skeletal org chart, division heads and support units etched in hard black pencil. So you go downstairs and draw out a car—unsurprisingly, almost everything with wheels that turn is already on the road, somewhere—then head over to Meadowplace Road to find the inspector.

  What you find at the station is something like an ants’ nest that’s been doused in paraffin but not yet set alight. There’s a frazzled constable on the front desk, and he’s splitting his time between turning MOPs away—“come back tomorrow, we’re too busy to take complaints right now” (which is just not how it’s done)—and grilling every uniform who comes in late. He sees you immediately. “Sergeant Smith? You got any numbers for me, miss?”

  You plonk your ad hoc phone book on the blotter in front of him. “Is this what you’re after? I cannae let you keep it—it’s for Inspector Kavanaugh.”

  “Just give me a minute…” He goes over it with a pen, copying lines into the gaps on his own list. “We’re not to use the photocopiers, the chief said. Not till they’ve been vetted by ICE.”

  You take a deep breath. Well, if that’s how it is…“There’s a team meeting on the Hayek Associates job. You know where it is? I’m due there.”

  “Room 204.” He glances up. “I havenae seen the inspector yet, miss. You go up there, and I’ll send someone up with yer list when I’m through with it.”

  You thank him and head for the staircase. On your way through the office you notice that the monitors are all turned to face the walls and there’s an unusual clattering, thudding noise—someone’s wheeched out a metal box with a keyboard on the front of it and they’re banging the keys like they’re wee trip-hammers. There’s a sheet of paper sticking out the top, and it vibrates whenever they hit it: a typewriter? Phones are ringing everywhere, the bleeping of cheap no-name mobies, and there’s a big red plastic thing with a rotary dial on the front on the duty sergeant’s desk, like something out of an Agatha Christie video. Jesus, you think, if we’re knocked back into the twentieth century, how’re we going to know what to charge the customers with? It’s a scary thought: The succession of criminal justice acts that the old British government passed, and then the revised justice acts since independence, replaced the old catch-all offences like “breach of the peace” with a huge array of very specific charges (“being aggressive in charge of a Segway or similar scooter after midnight in a residential area”), such that you really need the expert system on your phone to figure out precisely how to throw the charge book at them. Never mind the fact that the station doesn’t have a bloody paper ledger anymore and you can’t actually book a customer into the cells without a worki…

  You slip in the back of room 204 and find it’s already crowded. You’ve seen the faces before, at last week’s video conference—this time they’re all present and correct and not wearing their goggles. Verity looks royally fucked-off about something or other, and the detective suits aren’t looking too happy either. And there are others present—what looks like the whole of the murder team from St. Leonard’s, who were working on the Pilton case, chasing Liz’s chimerical blacknet. Full house. Verity glares directly at you. “I believe you’ve got a phone for me, Sergeant?”

  “Certainly, sir.” You walk right on up to the front and hand it to him, along with its box. “The front desk is copying the phone book for you. By hand.”

  His cheek twitches as he turns the gadget over in his hands. “I see a camera.” He mimes snapping a shot as he turns to Bill the Suit. “Tell ’em to photograph the pages and text me the picture. That’ll do for now. Get the list typed up and reshoot it, then send it to one of those online OCR services.” Bill looks shocked. “Go on! If they’re Googling all the civilian traffic in Scotland, it’s too late, already.” Behind you, the door opens again; you glance round and recognize Liz Kavanaugh. “Ah, good,” rasps Verity, as Bill heads for the door to engage in his amateur photography. “I was wondering when you’d get here!”

  “Yes, well, I was regrettably delayed.” Liz looks at you pointedly. “You’ve got a phone for me?” You hand the mobie over. She takes it and goes over to the vacant chair next to Verity. “I had to stop to get eyeball confirmation of a murder victim’s ID.”

  “Another…?” Verity’s eyebrows go up. “Is it connected?”

  “Definitely.” Liz grins like a skull.

  “Well, shite. If you’ll pardon my French.” Verity doesn’t hold with bad language, which makes him something of an anomaly north of the border. “Who is it this time?”

  “Wayne Richardson, a Hayek Associates’ employee who has been helping with our investigations this past week.” She nods at you, and you tense. “He was the source of the original crime report and the first indication that, uh, Nigel MacDonald was missing. I caught up with our two external investigators, Mr. Reed and Ms. Barnaby, and they confirmed his identity.”

  “That makes it, what? Four this week?”

  “Three, sir,” Liz says firmly. “Because Nigel MacDonald doesn’t exist.”

  Verity rolls his eyes. “Explain.”

  “Sir.” Liz faces the roomful of faces. “There’s a body in Pilton. Last night, there was another body in Strathclyde—looked like a foreign-exchange student who’d gone for a midnight walk on the Clockwork Orange tracks, except his blood alcohol was zero, serum cortisol was sky-high, and there were other physical signs of stress—and, earlier in the day, he’d tried to stab a person of interest in my other case. This morning Wayne Richardson of Hayek Associates shows up dead: hit and run, apparently on his way to work, except that the hit and run in question was a taxi under remote drive authority by persons unknown.” There’s an audible wave of angry muttering from around the room. “These events are connected to an alleged kidnapping down south the day before yesterday, to yesterday’s fun and games involving Europol, a warehouse in Leith, and a bunch of very expensive servers”—you can see Verity wincing at the memory—“and this morning’s major incident alert and to the flat on the meadows with a satellite uplink on the roof we did over earlier in the week, so if anyone hasn’t got the message already, if you’ve got a PDA, or an official
phone, or a personal phone you owned more than twenty-four hours ago, switch the bloody thing off right now.”

  Verity glares at the assembled roomful of dibbles. “Do it!” There’s another wave of fidgeting and you get the feeling that most of it is make-show to clue the boss in that various folks aren’t totally fucked in the heid—Liz said Civil Contingencies Act earlier, and that’s enough to put the wind right up you because that bland-sounding piece of legislation lays out the rules for declaring a State of Emergency, and you’d bet good money that every other one of the lads and lasses here got tipped off about it before they started their shift, just like you. “Continue, Inspector.”

  “I don’t know who our Pilton body is, and I doubt we’re going to find out via the normal channels, because he wasn’t listed in the National Identity Register.” Which is a pish-poor excuse for a mess of an identity system, has been ever since the idiots who brought it in got the wind up them over the civil disobedience campaign and turned it into a dumping ground for every buggy civil service client tracking database the pre-defederalization UK owned—but still, not listed is a headache: It’s a synonym for up to no good in copspeak. “I do know that Nigel MacDonald, who we’ve pegged as missing in suspicious circumstances in the Hayek Associates investigation, is in the register but doesn’t actually exist, but I’ve been ordered not to investigate him further because it’s a matter of national security. His flat was rented by parties unknown and seems to have been being used as a remixer by the blacknet we’ve been looking for, and I suspect the late Mr. Richardson could have told us some more about that if he wasn’t currently occupying a drawer in the mortuary.”

  At that point, the muttering gets loud enough that Kavanaugh stops talking and waits for it to die down. “If you’ll permit me to continue? Yes? The third body, the exchange student, was implicated in the same business, and so are Hayek Associates, who employed the fourth, although I am assured”—at this point she stares, unreassuringly, at Verity—“that they’re on our side. This is a national-security clusterfuck rather than a police investigation, and we would be shutting it down forthwith, as soon as we’ve dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s, except for the small problem that we’ve been told by the intel community that whoever we’re up against has penetrated not only the national switched telecommunications backbone but CopSpace from top to bottom and we’re to go on standby for a major terrorist incident within the next twenty-four hours.” Liz pauses to take a deep breath, but nobody interrupts: “I don’t know where they got hold of all this, but they’re taking it seriously enough that the minister of justice has just issued an Emergency Regulations order as set out under Part 2 of the Civil Contingencies Act, while they redistribute fresh authentication keys to every telco and ISP in the country. And I believe that’s what the chief inspector is just about to tell us all about…”

  ELAINE: Gentleman and Players

  It is a hell of a shock, being expected to identify a dead body before breakfast, and you do not appreciate it—especially when you’re also trying to digest the significance of whatever happened between you and Jack last night (and won’t that suck, if Margaret or Chris or one of the other friendly piranhas at the office find out that you’ve been shagging the gamekeeper?) and you’re spending your sanity points worrying about what the hell the two of you have got yourselves into at a practical, spy-versus-spy, level. Not to mention Jack’s criminal-record equivalent of a lousy credit history with fries on top. Which is why you’re really quite relieved when the inspector has to rush off somewhere, pausing only to extract from you a promise that you’ll keep your phone switched on in case she wants to talk to you later. She witnesses for Dr. Hughes while the two of you sign a great big ledger—on real bleached wood-pulp—to agree that this day you have confirmed the identity of Richardson, Wayne, lately employed by Hayek Associates. And you’re hanging around in the lobby (waiting while Jack uses the toilet) when the doors open again and none other than Barry Michaels of Hayek Associates walks in.

  “Ah, Miss Barnaby.” He smiles, affably. “And Mr. Reed is about, I take it?” He holds up a keyfob. “Come drive with me.”

  You know an order when you hear one, but you still bridle at it: “You’ll have to do better than that!”

  “Yes.” He puts his smile back in its box. “It’s time to do breakfast. Today’s going to be a busy day.”

  “The hell it is.” Seeing Wayne laid out on the slab turned your stomach. “I didn’t sign on for this, Barry, I signed on for an artificial reality game, not Raw-head and Bloody-bones. We—I—quit.”

  He shakes his head. “I wish you could, believe me, I wish you could.”

  “Could what?” Jack chooses just this exact moment to pop out of the lavatory, shaking his head in ground-hog confusion. “What’s up?”

  “We’re doing breakfast. I was just explaining to Miss Barnaby that it’s too late to opt out.”

  “The hell it is—”

  You turn away, but he’s too fast: “They have your number, Elaine. I’d let you go—but Team Red won’t.”

  Whoops. You stop, and take a deep, angry breath. “I think you owe us an explanation.”

  “Over breakfast? I’m buying.”

  “Mm, breakfast,” says Jack, doing a convincing imitation of a dumb-ass cartoon character.

  “Fuck off…” But it’s too late, you’re outvoted, and besides, you’re wearing his trousers. What else is there to do but listen to Michaels’s pitch?

  Michaels leads you down an alley-way, across a main road, and into a gloomy-looking pub built into what looks to have been a mediaeval dungeon—all vaulted stone archways a metre and a half high, complete with blackened oak barrels wearing restaurant-drag table-tops. There are TV screens everywhere, as if trying to deny the essentially antediluvian origins of the place, but they can’t cover up the pervasive smell of rising damp. “The cooked breakfast here is really quite good,” Michaels asserts, “very twentieth-century Scottish.”

  You let yourself be steered into ordering the cooked breakfast. You’re a good girl and you take your prophylactic statins every evening religiously: Saturated fats can hold no fear for you, at least in moderation and followed by a penance of tossed green salad.

  “We should be secure in here,” Michaels explains over the top of the menu: “The walls are three feet thick and made of solid stone. People used to avoid the place—they couldn’t get a phone signal inside, and installing wifi was pointless—until a particularly bright landlord figured out she could make money by pitching it as a stuckist hangout.” And indeed when you look at your phone you see you’ve got zero bars of signal, even though you’re within sight of a window looking out onto the canyonlike depths of the Cowgate.

  “So you wanted to tenderize us before breakfast.” Jack leans back against the bare stone wall. “Was that what that little piece of Grand Guignol back at the mortuary was all about, then?”

  Michaels has the decency to look abashed. “That’s a bit unfair.”

  “Really?” You glare at him. “The police roust us out of bed to come and view a body, and you just happen to be passing? Pull the other one!”

  Michaels picks up a fork and stabs it in your direction: “Next you’ll be accusing me of murdering poor Wayne. Can you get it through your thick head that it’s not about you?”

  “If it’s not about us, then who killed Wayne?” asks Jack.

  Michaels frowns. “I wish I knew,” he mutters, shoving his unruly forelock back into place. “Oh, I mean it was clearly Team Red who did it—but the why of it is another matter.”

  Jack tenses. “I heard something,” he says, reluctantly.

  “Yes?” Michaels raises an eyebrow.

  “When I was working late. Day before yesterday.”

  You feel like shaking him. “What did you—” Michaels holds up a hand.

  “I was on my way out, about elevenish. Most of the lights were out. I heard a couple of voices arguing in one of the meeting rooms. One of them
was—I’m pretty sure of this—Wayne Richardson.” He winces. “I don’t know who the other was. Male, that’s all. I thought you might know.”

  Michaels is looking at Jack incredulously. “You don’t know who it was?”

  “No.” Jack looks frustrated. “It’s rude to listen at doors, did you know that…?”

  You bite your lower lip. It would not do to giggle at this point, they’d both get entirely the wrong idea about you, and that would be a mistake. Poor Jack: too honest for his own good. But you knew that already, didn’t you?

  “Oh Jesus fucking Christ,” Michaels says disgustedly. “You thought it was me?”

  Jack just sits there, looking defensive.

  “Well, why didn’t you say so before?” Michaels demands.

  This has gone far enough. “Stop that!” you tell him. “Jack had no good reason to trust you, yesterday.” You’re not sure he has any reason to do so today, either. You take a stab in the dark. “Why should we trust you?”

  Michaels is about to say something, but Jack beats him to it. “Someone’s penetrated your operation,” he says, remarkably calmly. “And you don’t know who. They were working with Wayne, weren’t they?”

  “Go on.” Michaels rolls with the punch.

  Jack swallows. “Let’s start with, who is Nigel MacDonald a cover for?” When Michaels doesn’t respond, he raises an eyebrow. “Well?”

  Michaels shakes his head pensively. “There used to be an old joke in role-playing circles—it isn’t funny, these days—that there were only a thousand real people in the UK—everybody else was a non-player character. Now it’s pretty much the reverse.”

  That’s worth blinking at. You can’t quite picture the urbane establishment-issue Barry Michaels as a spotty teenage D#amp#Der, but it would explain his current position, wouldn’t it? SPOOKS has got to have taken years to develop—it’s clearly a long-term project—which implies funding and pilot projects and all sorts of R#amp#D behind it.