Halting State hs-1

by Charles Stross

  “Nigel MacDonald was a useful sock-puppet for the SPOOKS development group at CESG,” he says slowly. “He was there so they could interact with the staff quants without tipping them off that they were actually talking to various people inside the Doughnut.”

  “The Doughnut?”

  “Cheltenham.” He frowns. “So we had this telecommuter on the payroll. Wayne tapped me on the shoulder about him a year ago when he realized Nigel didn’t actually live anywhere—he figured there was a payroll scam going on. So I rolled out the cover story and told Wayne to play along.”

  Jack nods thoughtfully. “What’s the cover?” He sounds resigned, almost as if he can guess what’s coming.

  “Hayek Associates play by the rules—officially.” Michaels bares his teeth, briefly. “We don’t have a dirty-tricks department, officially.”

  “Ah.” Jack looks satisfied, but you’re anything but. “What kind of dirty tricks?” you demand.

  “The industry—the games biz—has a habit of playing dirty. Keeping players happy is all about fun, isn’t it?” says Michaels. “So by extension, a tool that can tweak how much fun you’re having in a given game can also…”

  “He’s talking about sabotage tools,” Jack cuts in. He gives Michaels a hard look. “That was your story for Wayne?”

  Michaels nods. “Yes, basically. If we ever had to do anything deniable, we wanted a scapegoat to pin it on.”

  “What did Wayne do after you told him that?” Jacks asks.

  “He played along.” Michaels looks thoughtful. “He suggested we flesh out the role, actually. Rent a flat, pay the bills, work up a credit history, so we’d have something to look shocked about if anyone ever started digging.” He looks straight at you: “When the police broke down the MacDonald residence door and found a blacknet node, that was a shock. But by that point the cover story was out, so it could have been anyone at Hayek Associates, really. But that”—he nods at Jack, with an expression something like respect—“is when we realized we had a real problem. Now we know that part of the problem was Wayne. The question is, who else is involved?”

  You swallow. It’s time to lay some cards of your own on the table. “I don’t like this game, Barry. I came up here to audit a bank, not identify murder victims.” (Or be abducted by kamikaze taxis, or conscripted by the secret service.) “I’m not cut out for this, and neither is Jack.”

  “Really? I’d never have guessed,” he snarks at you. “Before you get on your high horse, I’d like to say that you’re absolutely wrong about that last bit. You’re here because you’re both graduates of an extensive training course. Only you didn’t see it as training, you paid to subscribe to it; it’s the difference between work and play, nothing more. You’re complaining now because something you used to do for fun turns out to be a paying career—”

  “Paying?” Jack asks sharply.

  “Who the hell do you think is footing the bill for the contract you gouged out of CapG?” Michaels raises an eyebrow. “It wasn’t just the stuff you listed on your CV, Jack. We know about the other. The tools. You’ve got exactly what we need for this job.” Then he turns to you: “You also, even though three-quarters of what we’re paying for your services is going into Dietrich-Brunner’s coffers—you’d do better to go freelance.” While you’re gasping indignantly, he adds, “I’m not going to make the mistake of appealing to your patriotism: It’s a deflating currency these days, and an ambiguous one. But I would like to put a word in for ethics, fair play, and enlightened self-interest. It’s not good for any of us to let Team Red run around hijacking certain, ah, critical systems—and killing people.” (He’s clearly got something in mind other than Avalon Four or the Zonespace game platform, and you find his fastidious reluctance to name things extremely disturbing.) “This isn’t the Great Game as it was played in the 1870s, in the high plateaus of central Asia; it’s the extension of diplomacy by other means into the medium of virtual worlds. It wouldn’t be necessary if those virtual worlds didn’t have entry points back into the net at large, or if we used virtual realms only for gaming—but you get the picture.”

  And indeed you do. It’s a heady mixture of blackmail, flattery, appeals to your idealism, and a play for your self-interest, all rolled into one. You’d resent it even more if you weren’t compelled to sit back and admire the sheer brass-necked cheek of his approach. “You forgot to mention the kitten,” you say.

  “The kitten?” Michaels looks nonplussed.

  “If we don’t help you, you’ll have to drown the cute widdle kitten, and it’ll all be our fault.” You glare at him, but it just glances off the glacis of his self-confidence. Michaels’s confidence is disturbing, almost religious in its unshakable faith. Never trust a man who thinks his religion gives him all the answers. “Never mind. What are you trying so hard to get us to do?”

  “What you’ve already been doing. You’ve already spooked one of our security problems into running and given us a handle on another.” He contrives to look innocent as one of the bar staff slopes by and deposits a bowl stuffed with small condiment sachets on your barrel top.

  “But you’ve been penetrated—”

  “Not just us, the entire country. Which is why there’s a very quiet panic going on today as the police go onto a civil contingencies footing and couriers distribute new one-time pads to all the telcos. Once that’s done, we can re-authenticate the entire backbone, and at that point we’ll have locked out Team Red. The trouble is, someone on the inside—and I doubt it was Wayne, he wasn’t clueful enough to pull a stunt like that—sold them a copy of the old pad via the blacknet, and I want to know who. If we don’t identify them, the whole operation’s a waste of time. But I think there’s a very good chance that if you just keep doing what you’ve been doing, you’ll make them break cover.”

  The waiter is back, with two portions of coronary artery disease and a heart attack on the side. Michaels waits while he slides the traditional Scottish cuisine under your respective noses, then clears his throat. “Someone inside Hayek Associates used the Nigel MacDonald sock-puppet as a safe house for a criminal blacknet, then sold the crown jewels.” He bares his teeth as he hacks away at something that looks like a square of deep-fried sausage meat with his steak knife. “None of us is safe until they’re out of the way.”

  Jack glances at you and silently shakes his head. There’s something speared on his fork, waiting in front of his open mouth—the naked cooked Scottish breakfast. You don’t want to look at it.

  “Why?” you persist.

  “Because…” Michaels looks confused.

  “Why us? As opposed to any other specialists you might have on tap, already working in your department?”

  “Oh.” His face clears. “Because you’re not part of the core intelligence group—sorry, but that’s the fact of it. You don’t know enough about us to give anything significant away: You’re outsiders. Skilled, highly trained outsiders. Just like Team Red, actually. Nobody sends real spies these days; everything’s very hands-off. Anyway, once the mole is out of the way and the backbone is secure, their controls will realize that Team Red are blown, and they’ll withdraw. We want to send them a message—don’t mess around on our patch.”

  It sounds superficially plausible, but you’ve got a feeling that things are never simple where Michaels is concerned. The strange cross-linkage between Jack’s ID and the non-existent Nigel MacDonald tells you there’s more to this than meets the eye, as does the business in the taxi, and Chen’s terror. Not to mention Jack’s Elsie. “You expect me to swallow that whole?” you ask, holding up a forkful of slowly congealing baked beans.

  “Of course I don’t!” Michaels carves away at an egg that appears to have been fried in sump oil and lard. “But I can’t tell you everything. It’d be a hideous security breach for starters, despite the variable EULA you signed…What I can assure you is that your role is significant, your co-operation is highly desirable, and if you do what we want, you will be rewarded,
both financially and with the knowledge that you’ve helped secure your country’s borders against a probe by an unfriendly foreign agency.”

  “Which country?” Jack asks helpfully: “Scotland, England, the British Isles Derogation Zone, or the EU?”

  “All of the above.” Barry taps his fork on the side of his plate, as if it’s a gavel. “Do you want fries with that?”

  You put your knife down carefully. “What if I just say ‘no’?”

  Michaels looks at you with jailhouse eyes. “You can’t. So I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”

  You’re getting really fucking sick of slick public-school boys telling you what you do or do not want to do, and saluting the flag and being constructive is nearing the point of diminishing returns; but you get the message. Chris and Maggie and Brendan and the gang can just fire your ass and make sure you never work in the forensic accounting field again, but Michaels can really screw you if he puts his mind to it: He can screw you as thoroughly as only a vindictive civil servant can. On the other hand…“On the other hand, you can’t get my willing co-operation if you twist my arm. If you want that, you’re going to have to pay.” You pick up the coffee cup that came with your breakfast. “Like this: I quit Dietrich-Brunner Associates. Retroactively, with effect from yesterday morning at 9:00 A.M. And you hire me on a freelance basis and pay me the same rate you’re giving Jack. Also retroactive, with effect from yesterday morning at 9:00 A.M.”

  Michaels picks up his coffee cup. “You enjoy living dangerously, do you?”

  “You need her, don’t you? You need her as much as you need me.” Jack flashes a worried look at you from behind Michaels’s shoulder.

  Your mouth is dry. You take a sip of coffee to moisten it, as you realize what you’re gambling for. “Do you want me motivated, Mr. Michaels?” (You’ve just demanded two months’ pay, minimum. Your instincts are yelling don’t give up the day job!—but logic tells you that if he agrees to pay you this once, he’ll pay and pay again for what you can do for him. You and Jack, if you’re sensible about it. Because the agency behind Hayek Associates clearly need you far more badly than Dietrich-Brunner ever did. If only you knew why!) “You know what I can do for you, that’s why I’m here.”

  Michaels grunts as if someone kicked his ankle, then looks away. “That falls within my discretionary allowance.” He puts his empty coffee cup down and winces. “But don’t push your luck.”

  “And I want you to do something about Elsie,” says Jack. His guarded expression promises many more words for you, when Michaels isn’t around to hear them.

  “Right,” you agree. “Or we go to the police.”

  “Really?” Michaels gives you a very odd look. Jack is frantically trying to tell you something without moving his face or his lips, but it’ll just have to wait. “I said we were making enquiries, yesterday. I can ask our SOCA liaison how things are going, but they don’t appreciate having their elbows jogged.”

  He might as well be wearing an LED signboard flashing PHONY, but there’s nothing more you can demand right now—and Jack looks as if he’s about to explode, which would be bad, so you nod and finish your coffee, then smile. “So that’s everything settled,” you say. “So how about we go someplace where there’s some signal and place some calls?”

  JACK: Schrödinger’s Girl

  You emerge from the depths of Bannerman’s blinking like a hung-over bat, and glance up and down the canyonlike length of the Cowgate. Someplace where there’s some signal indeed: The stone tenements to either side are nine stories high, and they predate lifts and indoor plumbing. Michaels spots an oncoming taxi (subtype: one with a human driver) and flags it down without waiting for you, so you glance over your shoulder at Elaine, who is glaring at her mobile and fuming. “Come on, let’s take a walk,” you propose.

  “We’ve got work to be doing,” she points out.

  “Well, the hotel is about a mile and a half that way”—you point along the canyon towards the Grassmarket and beyond, in the direction of Tollcross or maybe the West End—“and we need to talk. Might be a good idea to take the battery out of your phone first.”

  “Right, right.” She fiddles intently with the plastic case of the gizmo, then shoves it in a back pocket. “What now?”

  You begin walking towards the looming arch where North Bridge vaults across the Cowgate, perpetually confusing tourists who think that if two roads intersect on their moving map it should be possible to cross between them without abseiling. “What did you pick up there?”

  “He’s scared, very scared. And he knows more about your Elsie than he’s letting on.”

  You keep going, legs pumping, arms swinging, even though you want to stop and have a good scream at the underside of the stone bridge. That’s what you’d concluded, too—but grabbing Michaels and trying to throttle the truth out of him seemed inadvisable. And besides, you have three different hypotheses—and only the sheer terror of finding out that they’re all wrong keeps you from making the final phone call. That, and the little problem that you’re in too deep and you’d have to tell Elaine about—no, let’s not go there now. There’ll be plenty of time later.

  You fumble around for a conversational token. “Were you serious about quitting your job?”

  “Are you kidding?” She catches up beside you as you sidle past the puddles under the bridge, the loading bay for the night-club ahead on the left. “Look, Barry’s desperate. And…long-term, his operation needs us. What does that suggest to you?”

  “I really don’t know where you’re going there.” You shake your head.

  Small fingers force their way into your hand. After a moment you relax your fist and try to slow down to her pace. “There’s the cover story, and there’s the truth. Everybody here’s playing games, Jack, everyone but you—the game developer.”

  “Huh? How do you figure that?” She’s wrong, as it happens, but it’s an interesting mistake. The buildings are opening out ahead, towards the homeless shelter and the weird little shops that cluster on the edge of the Grassmarket.

  “Michaels—I’m pretty sure he’s responsible—made damn sure I stayed up here after Maggie and Chris and the rest of the home team scuttled back to London with their tails between their legs. He wanted an auditor present, someone to act as a disruptive influence—but not to keep the place crawling with strangers. I was containable. So I have to ask, why me?”

  You can play this game straight, and that seems to be what she wants, so: “Why you?”

  “Nobody else at Dietrich-Brunner plays games. No RPGs, no LARPs, no reenactment, no ARGs. Doesn’t that strike you as slightly strange, in this day and age?”

  “Strange?” It’s downright freakish, but you decide to play it straight. “Wow. What were you doing there?”

  “I’m not sure. But now I think about it, I wonder if the real reason I was there wasn’t the reason I thought I was there at all.”

  “Try me. Why did you think you were there?”

  “Why the hell do you work anywhere? I was sending out job applications, and they offered me a job, straight out of university with a golden handshake to cover my tuition fees and professional registration. The only question is whether that’s all there ever was to it. I don’t know…I’ve got a feeling I was set up. Maybe it was a long-term thing: If SPOOKS is a pilot project, maybe they figured that if they went into widespread deployment, they’d eventually need a way of guaranteeing their own transactional integrity? Wanted: one forensic accountant, trained in HUMINT field-work, with gaming experience and security clearance, for counter-penetration duties. They don’t exactly grow on trees, do they?”

  “So what am I doing here?” You look around, then cross the road quickly. There’s a shop selling beautifully unearthed fossils opposite the site of the old gallows, then a straight uphill march past the most dangerous run of second-hand book-shops in town.

  “That’s obvious: You were being groomed to join the SPOOKS dev team. Or SPOOKS 2.0. Then the shit h
it the fan, and Michaels decided to use you as bait in his little trap instead.”

  How reassuring, you tell yourself. “So we’re lost in a maze of shiny little mirrors, all alike, spies to the left of us, spooks to the right. And you quit your day job?”

  “Tripling my pay, and…Michaels is scared, Jack. So am I, to be perfectly truthful—what happened to Wayne is no joke. The sooner we call time on the bastards, the safer I’ll feel.”

  “Oh yes?” You slow down to a dawdle and look sidelong at her focussed expression. When you first met her, you thought: librarian on crystal meth. Now you think: ferret. Then she breaks the effect by smiling hesitantly at you, and it messes with your head because there’s no way a mustelid could make you feel warm and fuzzily protective like that.

  “There’s what Barry wants us to know, and there’s what the situation really is as Barry and his core intelligence group understand it, and there’s the truth. I’d draw you a Venn diagram, but it’s more like peeling a hyperdimensional onion—not all the layers that look like they’re concentric spheres actually enclose one another. We can peel it ourselves and risk uncovering something that’ll make us cry…or we can play by his rules. And he’s rigged the game to keep us in it—you with Elsie, and by the way, have you called your sister to check that it’s not just a crock of lies he’s feeding you?—and me with—” She stops. “You haven’t called your sister. Why not? Is it just your…record?”

  You really don’t want to have to explain the truth about Elsie, and your sister, and the rest of your non-standard family arrangements, so you endeavour to tiptoe around the elephant in the living room without actually making eye contact with the pachyderm. “You know about Schrödinger’s cat? The superposition of quantum states? Michaels has put my niece in a box, and I’d rather not know for the time being who’s more ruthless—the other side, or the bastards we’re working for.” Because Team Red might have done something, like Barry says, or Barry’s cell might be running a really nasty Augmented Reality game against you to secure your co-operation. And neither possibility is pleasant to contemplate. “I pointed Inspector Kavanaugh at it. Hopefully, she’ll tell me to stop wasting police time.” Or maybe she’ll find out who’s pushing your buttons—whether it’s Team Red or Michaels.