Halting State hs-1

by Charles Stross

  Elaine lets go of your hand. A moment later you feel her hand on your shoulder, pulling you close. “That wasn’t a bad choice.”

  “Believe me, I know all about bad choices.” You’re conflicted. You crave her touch, but feeling her hand on your shoulder, in front of all the cameras…in the end, you don’t shake it off. “Real life isn’t a game, there’s no undo, no reload. I’ve played too many games: Real life scares me.”

  “Is it much farther?”

  “We’re nearly halfway.” Which is a little white lie, but with her phone turned off, she’s capable of being deceived—she’d actually be lost, without your local knowledge. And hopefully so will be anyone who’s tracking her location, or your location. You can discount face recognition, despite all those cameras surreptitiously filing away your misdemeanours for later (like back when you were fifteen and stupid) because it’s CPU-intensive as hell, but your mobie is a tracking device par excellence, and you’ve got to assume that Team Red know who you both are, by now. “Let’s stay off-line until we get to the hotel.” By which point, Team Red won’t have a fucking clue where you are, which is exactly how you want things to be.

  “I hate being lost,” she mutters.

  “Really?” You’re taken aback. “It used to be normal.”

  “Lots of things used to be normal. No indoor plumbing and dying in child-birth used to be normal. Where are we?”

  “We’re on, um, the road that leads from the Grassmarket to Lothian Road, dammit. I can’t remember.” It’s an itch you can’t scratch, like not being able to check a watch or pull up the news headlines. “Just think, it used to be like this for everybody, just twenty years ago!”

  “I suppose.”

  “Imagine you were a time-traveller from the 1980s, say 1984, and you stepped out of your TARDIS right here, outside, uh, West Port Books.” (Which tells you where you are.) “Looking around, what would you see that tells you you’re not in Thatcherland anymore?”

  “You’re playing a game, right?”

  “If you want it to be a game, it’s a game.” Actually it’s not a game, it’s a stratagem, but let’s hope she doesn’t spot it.

  “Okay.” She points at the office building opposite. “But that…okay, the lights are modern, and there are the flat screens inside the window. Does that help?”

  “A little.” Traffic lights change: Cars drive past. “Look at the cars. They’re a little bit different, more melted-looking, and some of them don’t have drivers. But most of the buildings—they’re the same as they’ve ever been. The people, they’re the same. Okay, so fashions change a little. But how’d you tell you weren’t in 1988? As opposed to ’98? Or ’08? Or today?”

  “I don’t—” She blinks rapidly, then something clicks: “The mobile phones! Everyone’s got them, and they’re a lot smaller, right?”

  “I picked 1984 for a reason. They didn’t have mobies then—they were just coming in. No Internet, except a few university research departments. No cable TV, no laptops, no websites, no games—”

  “Didn’t they have Space Invaders?”

  You feel like kicking yourself. “I guess. But apart from that…everything out here on the street looks the same, near enough, but it doesn’t work the same. They had pocket calculators back then, and I remember my dad showing me what they used before that—books of tables, and a thing like a ruler with a log scale on it, a slide-rule. Do you have a pocket calculator? Do you use one to do your job, your old job?”

  “No, of course I—” She waves at the book-shop opposite. “I’m a forensic accountant! What use is a pocket calculator?”

  “Well, that’s my point in a nutshell. We used to have slide-rules and log tables, then calculators made them obsolete. Even though old folks can still do division and multiplication in their heads, we don’t use that. We used to have maps, on paper. But these are all small things.” The traffic lights sense your presence and trigger the pedestrian crossing: You pause while she catches up with you. “The city looks the same, but underneath its stony hide, nothing is quite the way it used to be. Somewhere along the line we ripped its nervous systems and muscles out and replaced them with a different architecture. In a few years it’ll all run on quantum key-exchange magic, and everything will have changed again. But our time-traveller—they won’t know that. It looks like the twentieth century.” (Bits of it look like the eighteenth century, for that matter: This is Edinburgh, and you’re deep in the World Heritage Conservation Zone.) “Nothing works the way it used to, exactly. And knowing how it works now is the edge we’ve got over Michaels.”

  You lead her up through the pubic triangle (which is not a patch on Amsterdam’s famous red light district, but sleazy enough for a cheap shiver if you’re so inclined) and onto Lothian Road (tame by daylight, wild West End by night). “We can catch a bus from here,” you suggest, and she looks slightly pained, but nods. And so you do, taking the hit for paying cash: And ten minutes later you step off the bus nearly opposite the West End Malmaison hotel. “Do you know where you are now?” you ask her, trying not to pay too much attention to the police vans parked outside.

  “How the hell should I—” She catches your expression. “Oh. Right.”

  “They don’t know either, because we’ve been off-line for over an hour,” you point out. “So let’s grab the laptops and go to work where they won’t be expecting us!”

  “Do you have somewhere in mind?” She raises an eyebrow.

  And now you feel yourself smiling. “Right here. Why do you think we’ve been off-line for half an hour?”

  The hotel is surrounded by cops. It’s not an obvious cordon, there are no crowds of uniforms with riot shields drawn up—but as you cross the road you notice a couple of police motor-bikes drawn up outside the power tool emporium opposite the hotel car-park. And there’s a van parked up a side street. A couple of officers are standing at the corner by the hotel entrance, looking around, their eyes invisible behind heavy goggles and their jaws working as they subvocalize. If you weren’t actively looking, you might not notice more than a couple at any one time, but when you add it all up, there’s a heavy presence on the street. You squirm as you open the heavy glass door for Elaine: It’s the same reflex you get when walking past guard dogs—they’re unpredictable, capable of attacking. You can cope with them in ones or twos—a homeopathic dose of policing, so to speak—but this heavy cordon sanitaire is awakening the old phobia, even before you take into account your current state of unease.

  “Come on!” Elaine nudges you impatiently. “What are you waiting for?” She heads towards the lifts.

  “A pony.” You follow her—this is her territory, you don’t generally do plush hotels—up to the second floor, then into a conference room that opens to her thumbprint. “Laptops?” You raise an eyebrow.

  “Go on.” At least they’re still here, and so are the cheap backpacks you stuck on top of the purchase nearly three infinite days ago. “Where are we going to go?”

  “Nowhere, yet.” You sit down at the desk and unfold your machine’s display. It’s chunky and old-fashioned but vastly faster than your phone and glasses: You log on to the hotel’s network, bounce into Zonespace using the passwords Russell gave you, and proceed to take your bear for a romp around the tourist sites. “I suggest…go get your stuff from your room, anything you may want later, as if you’re checking out: I’m going to make damn sure Team Red know where I am. Alright?”

  “Got it.” She studies your screen, which is repeating the display on your glasses. “That’s not Avalon Four. Where are you?”

  “On the high plateau of Leng. That’s where the Pabodie expedition came adrift: There should be some Old Ones hereabouts if the rampaging hordes of Antarctic explorers haven’t been through since they last reset the shard. They’re guarding some loot I need to get my hands on.” About a quarter of a million lines of source code, squirreled away among the skeletons and treasures guarded by a fearsomely large shoggoth; if you want to keep some d
ata secure, there’s nothing quite like sticking it in a record in a holographic distributed database that’s guarded by Lovecraftian horrors. And it’s not as if you took the intellectual property with you when you left LupuSoft, is it? This is just a backup copy, buried in one of their own databases. One that it’s just possible for a random stranger to get his hands on if he knows exactly where the body’s buried and the correct ritual for digging it up.

  “Riiiight.” She sounds sceptical. “So, let’s see. You’re deliberately drawing attention to yourself, and getting your hands on something you stashed earlier. And you want me to grab my bags. What exactly are you planning on doing?”

  You stretch your arms above your head, lace your fingers together, and yawn widely. “I want to look like I’m the bait in Barry’s trap that he asked for. Do you trust the police?”

  “I trust Inspector Kavanaugh to find your niece, that’s about it.” You give her a long look. Should have expected her to say something like that. Lowering your arms: “Why?”

  “Just asking. Barry wants us to flush someone out of the woodwork. A distraction, probably—some nuisance to attract the cops’ attention, something they can’t ignore. When that happens, we can expect things to get hot. Question is, do we duck and run when that happens? Or do we stay here?”

  “It depends. What do you mean by hot?” The ferret is back: She’s not taken in by the line you fed Michaels. Well, you figure she’s in this with you, and she deserves to know.

  “Barry’s wrong.”

  “Wrong about…?”

  “He thinks this is a game of spooks, that he’s up against the Guoanbu, who are professionals. He figures that when he rolls up their network and serves the ASBO, they’ll just pack up their kit and go home.” (The hoard is just around the corner of this icicle-lined tunnel into hell, once you sweet-talk its guardian into going to sleep and letting you through. So you hit the PAUSE key.) “He’s as wrong as a very wrong noob can be. We’re not playing against the Guoanbu, we’re playing against Team Red. They’re a gaming clan, and by all the evidence a fucking hot one, and they’ve got the technical backup from hell. The Chinese gamers, they’re vicious. I’ve gone up against those fluffy bunnies before, and they play for keeps and they coordinate really well. And they, they don’t really believe we exist. We’re pale ghosts, trapped on the other side of a screen for their amusement. They’re going to grief us hard, and if they’ve got access to the sort of kit Barry’s talking about, they could have done all sorts of…stuff.”

  It’s more than a decade since a bunch of crackers—who nobody ever identified—managed to sneak password and credit card sniffers onto the core Cisco routers at MAE-East; things have gotten far worse since then, in the covert war of sysadmin on hacker that the public don’t get to hear about. Entire telco companies have been compromised with no one the wiser until months afterwards. The public, with their wee fingerprint-authorized smart cards to supply them with the response to their e-commerce challenges, don’t really have a clue what’s going on. And there are much worse things a black hat troupe on a capture-the-flag rampage can do these days than just grabbing passwords and borking hospital networks. Lots of critical engineering systems rely on encrypted tunnels running over the Internet, lots of SCADA systems and worse—remote medical telemetry (“but you said you wanted your blood test results analysing as fast as possible!”), stock-market transactions, civil airliner flight plans, and exercise program updates to coffin dodgers’ programmable pace-makers. The spooks in Guoanbu probably are professional, they wouldn’t mess with the European SCADA infrastructure short of an outright shooting war…but are they likely to realize that they’ve almost certainly been pwn3d by their own pet griefer clan, and all their electronic armoured divisions are in the hands of a dozen Asperger’s cases with attention-deficit disorder and a quantum magic wand?

  It’s not a risk you can take. And it’s not a risk you can explain to Barry Michaels, because you know his type, and after seventy years of data processing, they still think that coders can be hired and fired; that the engineers who ripped out the muscles and nerves of the modern world and replaced it with something entirely alien under the skin are still little artisans who will put their tools down and go home if you tell them to leave the job half-done.

  You’re half-worried that Elaine will make a big deal of it, but instead she nods quickly, walks up behind your chair, and pecks you on top of the head. “Don’t go ’way,” she says, then backs out of the room in a hurry. You find yourself staring after her with a warm interior glow of confusion to keep you company: The idea that you might go away while she’s counting on you being here is just plain bizarre.

  You dive back into the tunnel into the mountains of madness. It’s icy cold and very dark except where your head-mounted lamp is pointing, and the walls are covered with intricate hieroglyphs beneath their thin layer of rime. The floor is uneven and worn, and you shuffle forward slowly, sniffing suspiciously. The Guardian of the Depths lives hereabouts, but frequently sorties from its chamber of horrors to patrol the upper levels. You can’t hear the faint leathery susurration of its progress as it worms its way around the Antarctic catacombs like a vast, malignant slug, but that doesn’t mean you’re safe: It’s smart enough to lurk in ambush if it hears an unwary human or ursinoid.

  In this Zone shard, you’ve tooled up to the tech limit—the blunderbuss has given way to a monstrous Steyr IWS-2000, and you’ve got an RPG-30 slung over your shoulder in case the Anti-Materiel Rifle fails to dent the Guardian’s hide—but you’re unlikely to triumph by force of arms in Lovecraftland. In fact, just tiptoeing around here on your own would be suicidally foolhardy if you didn’t have a couple of very unfair safewords up your sleeve.

  You shuffle along the passageway. A T-junction looms out of the gloom in front of you, empty twin dark tunnels mocking you like vacant eye-sockets. You grunt and shine your torch down the left-hand branch, consulting the map you summoned from the vasty deeps of your phone’s memory earlier (carefully misspelled and misfiled to throw the inevitable googlebots off, lest some gameco crawler stumble across it in the public search indices and flag this complex as spoilered). There should be a landmark around here—

  Aha! Landmark 192 humps up out of the frosty trail on the floor. The unfortunate explorer is curled foetally in his sealskin parka, facing the wall as if in his last moments he imagined that hiding his face from the crawling horror might save him. Which means you’re about ten metres away from the oubliette. You rise to your knees and lope forward until the darkness gives back a greater shadow, the round mouth of the Guardian’s cavern.

  Summoning your words of power—and shouldering the IWS-2000—you step in front of the black pit of despair. The Guardian, as your torch beam rapidly informs you, is OUT: Therefore you get to play another day. (There are two ways around the Guardian: admin mode, or a ten-kiloton tacnuke. And unfortunately Lovecraftland is owned by your former employers and they didn’t give you either of the magic keys when they showed you the door.) So you step down the weirdly reticulated snail’s-tongue slope that leads into the conical pit, paying no attention to the eldritch bioluminescent glow from the ceiling or the piles of bones and other debris that line the floor of the huge space, and lope across to the irregular, pentagonal altar at the far side of the dungeon. Ten more seconds, and you’ll have your buried loot—

  Bamf.

  Oh bugger, you think, as no less than four glowing indigo holes appear in the air, occupying an arc between you and the altar. Someone got creative…

  You flick the safety off and shoulder the AMR, aiming at the first eerie shape as it begins to take on humanoid form. In the real world, only a complete lunatic would fire the IWS-2000 from the shoulder or in a confined space—it’s a crew-served weapon—but when you’re a quarter-ton bull ursus, reality gets to take a back seat; besides, you’ve got the musculature and bone structure to take the recoil at least once.

  Darkness grins at you and takes a step for
ward as you squeeze the trigger.

  Things get a little confusing at this point, because you’ve run up against one of the limits of Zonespace: the lack of haptic feedback. But when the view stops jittering and clipping, you realize that the recoil has flung you all the way back to the altar, and the thing you shot at isn’t there anymore—spooks and shades may be nasty enough for normal adventurers, but they’re not up to stopping twenty grams of armour-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot love missile when it comes knocking at fifteen hundred metres per second. You track on the second shade as it raises its arms and does the zombie-lurch towards you, and pull the trigger again. This time you see what happens as the hypersonic shock wave turns the bogeyman into a humanoid smokering, but your vision flickers red, and you notice that you’re down 30 per cent on your stamina. Which is not good at all as bogey three looms closer, baring teeth that stretch and waver like a mirage—

  Another round, and another palpable hit. But your vision’s reddening, now and you see you’re down to 50 per cent: What the fuck? You think, then blink up the medical chart and realize to your horror that it’s the AMR: You’re turning your own shoulder into ground hamburger with the recoil. Which is pants—in the real world the AMR just has a kick like a mule, that’s what the shock absorbers and the muzzle brake are for—but the Zone weapons committee clearly got it wrong, and you’re stuck taking damage from your own gun like you’re a seventy-kilo noob or something.

  There’s no time to switch to a different weapon—bogey four is crouching in readiness for a cavern-crossing leap, its claws and fangs lengthening—so you grit your teeth and aim, squeezing off another shot. The magazine’s down to one round, but bogey four disintegrates in mid-air. There’s a crash and a cloud of dust and icy gravel showers down from the roof, almost blocking the doorway, and your stamina read-out begins to flash: At 20 per cent you’re in big trouble, medevac territory in a guild scenario, but there are no healers around right now. Never mind…