Halting State hs-1

by Charles Stross

  You put the anti-tank rifle down and turn around. The ghastly altar is still there. It’s made of pale granite, and it seems to throb slightly as you look at it, as if it’s on the verge of turning inside out like a Necker cube: The hieroglyphs are as alien and incomprehensible as ever, but somehow horrible, bringing to mind echoes of alien anatomy, organs ripped from the abdominal cavities of human sacrifices, and other, hidden things. “Great,” you mutter. “Attention, object able charlie sixteen. This is your creator speaking. Give me a cookie and initiate debug mode.”

  The altar flashes emerald and turns inside out, injecting the stolen hoard straight into your character’s inventory. And you’re tooled up! Now let the games begin.

  SUE: Making Plans for Nigel

  After the briefing, Liz held you back for a couple of extra minutes. “I met your nerd and librarian this morning,” she says. “You didn’t tell me they were a couple.”

  “You—” You blink. “What makes you think that?”

  “Well, Sergeant, only the fact that she’s wearing his spare trousers. And Bob Lockhart picked them both up at Mr. Reed’s address. It does tend to complicate things, doesn’t it?”

  You blink again. “Christ, skipper, that’s news to me.” You try to square the memory with how they’d acted earlier: not a sniff of any office hanky-panky, that was for sure, not that it’s any of your business what they get up to in their spare time. “I didnae get any sign of it earlier.”

  “Well, they’re working for Michaels now, I am informed. That’s where this shitstorm is blowing in from.” She gives you an odd look. “When CopSpace comes back up, call me before you look up Mr. Reed’s previous, Sue. It’s misleading.”

  Huh? “Okay.” You look around. Everyone else has already left the briefing room, off to their various tasks. “What do you want me to do now?”

  “I want you to get yourself over to the West End Malmaison hotel and find them as soon as they show up. Then stick to them like glue. That clown Michaels is up to something, and while everyone else is running around looking for terrorists under the bed, I want someone competent—you—on the spot.”

  “You think Jack and Elaine are going to piss on our patch, skipper?” You don’t bother to hide your scepticism.

  “No, Sue, I think they’re very likely the target!” And she doesn’t bother to hide her urgency either.

  “But I haven’t done the course—”

  “You think I don’t already know that? Jesus, Sue, we’re at full stretch here; do you think I’d put you on protection duty if I had someone qualified? If you need advice, call me. Now get moving.”

  You’ve never seen Liz that close to losing her rag, and it’s not a pretty sight—especially when you’re on the receiving end of it. She must be close to doing her nut. “Reet! Right! I get the picture! I’m off.”

  “Take Bob with you, he needs the education!” she calls as she strides off towards the incident control room.

  That’s you telled off. You’re about to IM Bob when you remember: TETRA’s been pwn3d. So you ask yourself, If I were Bob, where would I be right now? Ah, that’s where. And you head down to the back yard.

  Mary badgered you unconscionably until you gave up the habit a year or two ago, but Bob’s still young and unencumbered by health insurance worries. And he is indeed having a furtive fag out round the bike rack. “Bob. Got yourself a cheap mobie? Then send me your number.”

  “My number—” He twitches nervously. “Really? You want my number?”

  “Bob. Bob.” You lean closer. Technically, smoking isn’t allowed anywhere on the station, even outdoors in the car-park, but nobody in their right mind’s going to push the button that suspends half the force and leaves the other half pulling double shifts, as long as the tobacco junkies are prudent enough to keep their filthy habit out of the public gaze. “I’m your sergeant, Bob. Which means I need to be able to contact you at all times. Are you with me?”

  Bob nods reluctantly.

  “And you got the message to buy yourself a prepay mobie this morning, like everyone else. And now I want your number. Yes? So show me.”

  He glances around anxiously. “Promise you won’t tell anyone?” He stubs the fag out on the underside of his size twelve and pulls the phone out. It’s pink and has frilly unicorns frolicking on it.

  You take a moment to get your coughing fit under control. “Whae did ye get that?” you splutter.

  “It was all they had left, Sarge, honest—it was in Toys “R” Us, see? Because all the big phone shops had already sold out.” You roll your eyes: He’s right, now you think about it—it’s not going to be just the Polis who’re tooling up with prepays for today’s big switch-over. He looks mortified as he punches up his pin number and shows it to you. (The display has little explodey pink love-hearts, twinkling and falling to either side of the multi-coloured numbers.)

  “Aw, Jesus.” You haul your own playground special out—it’s a big boy’s model, black and chunky with yellow chevrons—and pair it with his. “You poor bastard.”

  “It was down to either My Little Unicorn or the Hello Kittie Ballerina Special when I got there,” he confesses.

  “Just put the bloody thing away, before anyone sees it!” He obeys with alacrity. Look on the bright side, if you get called to deal with any hypo diabetics, he’s got just the right thing. “Has Inspector Mac given you anything to be doing today? Or just the general…?”

  “Me? Nothing, Sarge. Why?”

  “Just checking. Alright, you’re assigned to me today—by Inspector Kavanaugh. Yeah, I know she’s not in your line, but you’ve met Mr. Reed and Ms. Barnaby this morning, I gather? Our job’s to stick to them like glue today. They haven’t done anything, but the skipper figures they’re trouble magnets, and with the upcoming disruption, she wants humans in contact all the way.”

  “Wow.” His eyes go wide. “I haven’t done the protection duty course, Sarge.”

  “Between you and me, neither have I,” you confide. “But we know the targets, and we’ve got our orders, so we’re going to have to wing it.” So much for ISO9000-certified policing. You head for the door to see where your driver’s gotten to. “Come on, I’ll tell you what we’re supposed to be doing on the way.”

  Traffic is heavy out on Corstorphine Road, and the van’s full of irritated constables fiddling clumsily with their unfamiliar mobies, swapping numbers and muttering voice dialling tags. Even though CopSpace is going down in a couple of hours, and they’ve been ordered in the most fearsome terms to keep their fingers out of the files, most of them are still wearing their goggles: an old protective reflex, tinted windows to keep the compromised world at bay. You’re an old enough sweat to remember a time before policing was something you did through augmented reality—a time when it wasnae just stumbling-down drunks who were dumb enough to swear at cops—and you’re not looking forward to today’s fun and games. It’ll be okay if they get CopSpace rebooted before chucking-out time, but the Council’s going through one of its usual barkingly stupid attempts to get all the pubs to close simultaneously on the stroke of half past midnight, and you’re not looking forward to Friday night once the local pissheads realize that the cops’ liferecorders aren’t running, and the cameras overhead are unmanned. It’ll be extra pepper spray and tasers all round, with double paperwork on the morrow when you go to explain the festivities to the hard-faced sheriff sitting in court: like a throwback to the nineties.

  The van pulls in opposite the hotel, and you hop out. Bob bumbles along after you like an obedient puppy. You head for the front desk, where the polished-looking receptionists are handling the morning’s fall-out of crumblies—the problem cases who’re too old to cope with the automated checkout, or whose requirements don’t fall in one of the neat boxes in the business work flow. You slide deftly round the shambling sequential headache and slot yourself in at the end of the desk. Finally, one of the receptionists finishes processing a coffin dodger and comes over to get you off her plat
e before you lower the tone of her lobby. “Can I help?”

  “Yes.” You smile politely. “I’m looking for one of your residents, a Ms. Barnaby. I believe she’s leasing an office suite from you? Dietrich-Brunner Associates?”

  She looks at you as if you’re something that’s died under her nose. “Is there a problem?”

  It’s time to tighten the smile and go a little glassy-eyed. “No problem. But I need to see Ms. Barnaby immediately. Police business.”

  The two magic words finally sink in: You can almost hear the gears and cam-shafts engage in her head. “Oh, in that case…” She bends over her terminal. “Room 402, second floor, the lifts are over to your left. She was in there a minute ago.” Then she turns to the next tourist. “Can I help you?”

  You can tell when you’re not wanted. “C’mon,” you mutter to Bob. “Let’s go upstairs.”

  It’s a plush wee hotel, to be sure; the lifts have indirect lighting and subtle forest scents, and when you go out onto the landing, you see a strip of glass running floor to ceiling embedded in one wall, overlooking the high street. Room 402 isn’t far off the landing, and you approach it cautiously. The door’s not locked, so you open it and barge on in, regardless.

  Here’s Jack! Sitting at a table, playing some kind of game. You glance over his shoulder at the big, unfolded screens of his laptop: some kind of cavern, luminous green text marching across the left-hand screen. “Mr. Reed,” you say, quite loudly, and he jumps and spins round, wincing as he nearly pulls his headphones out of their wired socket.

  “You!” he says, for all the world like one of the villains in those cheesy Saturday-morning cartoons Davey keeps downloading. For a moment you think he’s about to freak on you, but he’s looking past your shoulder, with his face slowly crinkling with worry. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing’s up—” you begin, but someone behind you is speaking: the librarian, Barnaby.

  “Someone’s been in my room,” she says, angrily. “And it wasn’t room service. They don’t make up the rooms until after checkout.”

  You turn round. She’s wearing jeans and a leather jacket and that’s an expensive kit-bag she’s got there. Something long is poking out of it, a black bin-liner wrapped around one end—a hockey stick, maybe? “Ah, Ms. Barnaby. I was looking for you both. Inspector Kavanaugh says—”

  She raises a hand. “Don’t tell me, she wants you to stick to us like glue. Right?”

  “Reet.” You stare at her hard. “You planning to be a nuisance? Or know somebody else who is?”

  She meets your eyes. “I’m planning on doing what I’ve been told to do, Sergeant.” She puts the bag down. “I haven’t been told to expect you.” She stonewalls like a defence solicitor: You snort and turn aside.

  Behind you, Bob clears his throat. “Sergeant?”

  Jack is hammering away at the keyboard, typing like a mad thing in a pop-up window while the game he’s in unrolls in real time behind it. “What is it, Bob?”

  Barnaby’s phone trills for attention: She turns away. Bob shuffles uneasily. “I think you’d better come and see for yourself, boss.”

  You follow him out onto the landing outside the room. Bob points out the strip of floor-to-ceiling window. “Look.”

  You stare out onto the high street. It’s the usual congested mess of buses and taxis queuing for Haymarket Interchange, with a couple of supertrams parked nose-to-tail and gumming everything up. Things have never been right there since they installed the light rail system, but nobody on the Council’s about to admit that they should have knocked down about a billion euros’ worth of historic listed buildings before they built the bloody tracks. It looks like pedestrian hell down there, even without the shambling crowd of people getting off the trams, moving oddly.

  “What am I meant to be looking for, Bob?” you ask, forcing yourself to be patient.

  “Zombies, skipper. What do they look like to you?”

  You stare, wishing you could use your goggles—the digital zoom would be right handy at this point. It looks like any other crowd to you, at first, so you squint and look at the edges. They’re walking funny, lurching from side to side. And why has that guy got his arms outstretched? He blunders about, colliding with a woman in a business suit that’s ripped from shoulder to sleeve, and her face—

  “Jesus, Bob.” You blink, then swallow. “There’s no such thing as zombies.” A little niggling doubt worries away at you. “But get yerself down to reception and tell them to shut the doors, just in case. I’m going to make some calls.”

  You pull your phone out and speed-dial Liz. There’s no wait, just an immediate canned message. “Hello, you are through to Detective Inspector Kavanaugh’s voice mail. Please leave a message.”

  Shit. Why’s her phone switched off? You glance out of the window again, just to confirm what you can see. “Skipper, Sue here. Ye dinna have tae take ma wuird fer it, I’ll text you a photie”—you pause, trying to get a grip on your accent, which is making a bid for freedom (as it often does in moments of stress)—“but we’re holed up in the Malmaison and there’s a bunch of zombies on the pavement outside.” You swallow. “Whit should I do?” You end the call, then take a couple of snaps of the shambling horde and send them to Liz’s mailbox. It’s probably one of those old-time flash mobs, but why here, why now, and why zombies?

  You go back into the conference room just as Elaine, nodding furiously at no one in particular, ends her call and glances at you. “Sorry I was rude earlier, Sergeant. Nobody told me to expect you.”

  “Reet.” You shake your head. “What’re you doing?”

  “Being bait.” She swings an office chair round and sits down on it, facing you. “Actually, Jack’s the bait, I’m supposed to coordinate the response.”

  Bait? Response? “Bait for who?” you ask cautiously.

  “A bunch of gamers in China.” She sniffs. “They’re all over our critical infrastructure, but they made a few mistakes, and now Jack’s wearing a false identity—Nigel MacDonald, the guy you’ve been looking for—and we”—her emphasis on the last word is extremely odd—“expect the bad guys to expose themselves, trying to locate him so they can shut him up. They don’t know MacDonald is a sock-puppet, you see.”

  “And you are…?” Scrabbling for traction, springs to mind.

  “I’m secret agent X, it seems.” She grimaces. “Thing is, we don’t know how they’re going to try to get at Jack, but he’s raising a fuss to make them pay attention—”

  “Got it,” says the man himself, still hunched over his gaming box. There’s a pause in his incessant typing.

  “Got what?” you and Elaine ask, almost simultaneously.

  “What they’re fucking doing,” says Jack, triumphantly. “At least, I think I know what they’re doing.”

  “What are they doing, Jack?” asks Elaine. She’s flexing her hands unconsciously, so that for a moment you think she’s fantasizing about strangling him.

  “They’ve set up a botnet, and now they’re controlling it through Zonespace. Zonespace runs distributed across most mobile phones—just about any multi-user game you play relies on one or another version of Zone/DB to handle transactions. They’re sending control packets disguised as flocks of birds or patterns of trees in the forests, or something, you know? Updating the database, and relying on the zombies in the botnet to pick up the changes. It’s their backdoor into the public network, by the way—they feed instructions to the zombies, and the zombies with the stolen authentication pad update the routing tables. The traffic looks like game-play to GCHQ or CESG or NSA or whoever’s sniffing packets; looking in-game for characters run by Abdullah and Salim holding private chat about blowing up the White House garden gnomes won’t get you a handle on what’s going on because they’re not using the game as a ludic universe to chat in, they’re using it as a transport layer! They’re tunnelling TCP/IP over AD#amp#D!”

  You look at Elaine. “Is he usually like this?”

  She sniffs. �
��I’m beginning to wonder.” Looking at Jack: “What can we expect?”

  “Besides the big-time griefing? Michaels figures the Guoanbu will pull Team Red off us as soon as he hands them a list of names and faces. Nigel MacDonald is there to distract their attention—they’re meant to think his oppo are just a branch of the existing security services with a super-programmer on board, sort of a Ken Thompson figure—rather than understanding what Hayek Associates and SPOOKS are really about. But I reckon Team Red are going to be reluctant to go back in their box. They’ll take advantage of whatever chaos they can create to go after MacDonald, which means me.”

  Griefing is what Davey got suspended from school for last year, not something you associate with spies and terrorists: But on the other hand…they seem to know what they’re doing, and you’ve been told to look after them, right? So you open your mouth: “I’m told there’s a blacknet operating in Edinburgh, and the inspector figures it’s possible it organized what happened to Wayne Richardson. Would this be something your bad guys might use?”

  “Fuck!” Jack jerks in his chair like you’ve brought out a car battery and clamped the shockers to his wedding tackle. “Of course it would be!” (Make it a truck battery.) “That would explain—” He turns back to his laptop and starts typing again. “Fuck, fuck…” It seems that under pressure Jack comes down with a wee dose of the Tourette’s: a good thing you aren’t logging evidence right now, isn’t it?

  “Is a blacknet what I think it is?” asks Elaine. There’s some kind of racket from outside the window: You’re thinking you ought to go and keep an eye on it.

  “Probably.” Where’s Bob? You can understand the skipper taking her time phoning you back, but Bob’s running late. “At the protocol level, it’s an anonymous peer-to-peer currency system. It asks you to do favours, it does you favours. Like, be in front of a building with a running motor at such a time with the backdoors open, and drive to an address where someone’ll be waiting for you with a wallet full of cash and another stolen car.” At least, that’s the innocent-sounding version, because, let’s face it, burglary and criminal damage go together like love and marriage, or robbery and a get-away carriage—and most of the stuff blacknets get used for starts there and gets worse real fast. None of the perps know each other, because it’s all done with zero-knowledge proofs and anonymous remixers running out of zombie servers on some poor victim’s home-entertainment system that’s downloaded one piece of X-rated malware too many. “That’s why I’m here, to make sure nobody tries to kill Nigel MacDonald.”