Halting State hs-1

by Charles Stross

  There’s a roar from outside, the sound of a crowd yelling a single word over and over again.

  “What’s that?” asks Elaine.

  “Sounds like”—shit, where’s Bob?—“brains,” you say faintly.

  Outside the window, the zombies are holding a pavement sit-in. “What do we want? Brains! When do we want them? Nowwwww…”

  “I’d better go sort this out, before they try to storm the hotel.”

  ELAINE: Zombie Mush

  “What am I looking at?” you ask.

  “A map of Zonespace, with shard frontiers and zombies.”

  “What kind of zombies?”

  “In this context, gamers who’ve been subverted. See them over there? The blue dots are your tribe, SPOOKS players who’re also Zone gamers.” There are surprisingly few of them on the map. “The distortion—that’s latency time. Things are really fucked up, I can’t see any websites outside…shit. I think the bad guys must have decided to make happy with all the backbone bandwidth in Scotland. They’ve gotten the authentication keys, so they can mess with the routers in SCOLocate, and the main telcos—there are only a couple of dozen who own their own fibre.”

  You grapple with the magnitude of the problem. “I don’t understand why I’m looking at this, Jack.”

  “The question isn’t where Team Red got the keys to the realm from: Hayek Associates have a copy of the one-time pad, because they’re sniffing on everything. The question is, Who inside Hayek Associates leaked the pad, via the blacknet? Barry’s gotten through to the disaster planning people. They’ve generated fresh master pads, and they’re pushing copies out to the main switches by courier—they’re implementing the national zero-day exploit plan. The goal is to throw the switch at noon, at which point all Team Red’s careful work goes down the toilet. Then they’ll reboot CopSpace completely and load freshly signed certificates for the dot-sco domain by hand on the root servers, and a bunch more fiddly stuff. But the main thing is, once they change the one-time pads for admin access to the national backbone routers, Team Red will be unable to tap traffic at will. Zonespace will go down at noon, too, and that won’t be coming back up for a wee while: When it does, they’ll be frozen out. Our problem is to locate Team Red’s avatars and kill them repeatedly until they stay dead—that should tie them up in PvP until it’s too late, and sends them the message: We know who they are, and if they fuck with us, we’ll take them down. And whoever their inside man or woman at Hayek Associates is, will probably bolt…So get coordinating, okay?”

  “Right.” You shuftie over to your own laptop and blink at the screens until you stop feeling cross-eyed. “Don’t you have macros for this?”

  Jack gives you a toothy grin. “Macros for combat would be a breach of the T#amp#Cs, wouldn’t they?”

  “I knew you were going to say something about that.” Grind, grind, grind your foes…Something about this whole set-up doesn’t add up, but you can’t quite put your finger on what feels wrong.

  “That’s what I was digging out of Lovecraftland.” He pulls his phone out and sets it on the desk next to his laptop. “It’s a stress-testing framework I wrote, ages back. Give it a bunch of Zone character accounts, and it’ll run them as a swarm, targeting whatever you put in their path.” He rolls his eyes.

  “That doesn’t sound right.” You stare at him.

  “Dead right it’s not.” He stares right back. “That’s why I buried a backup copy out in the boonies: insurance.”

  “Insurance—”

  “It’s the flip side of a coyote tunnel they wanted installing. You find a bunch of gamers who’re not having any fun, and you lure them to your new setting, see? Come play with us, we’re more fun. Give us your account, and we’ll migrate your players into our new game and give you three months extra time, free. Which is where the stress tester comes in. Because if you give it a bunch of moribund characters in the old game, you can, uh, stress-test it. Just to make it even less fun for the stay-behinds.”

  “You wrote that?” The more you think about it, the less you like the sound of it.

  “Yup. On instructions from management at LupuSoft.” He grins humourlessly. “For stress-testing our own products, honest. This sort of thing happens all the time in a mature market—it’s all about ensuring your customers have fun, and the other side don’t. It’s all okay, as long as you don’t actually use it for immoral, illegal, or fattening purposes: It has entirely legitimate applications. And it’s not the sort of thing you can easily explain not wanting to write in front of an employment tribunal. So there I was, thinking there was some mistake about Dietrich-Brunner Associates needing my particular skill set after all.” He clicks on a button, and another window opens, more text scrolling. “Look in your controls, under DM, options, stress.”

  You bring up the pie menu and see it at once. “Now, let me just load the bunch of accounts that Barry beamed at my phone this morning…”

  His phone is blinking its wee sapphire light for attention. Transfer in progress. A whole bunch of blue dots are showing up on the map of Zonespace, like a toxic rash infecting it from Jack’s mobie. You move your cursor towards them—it’s got a funny lasso icon now—and herd them all together. This is a god mode—you can drop in behind their eyes and drive them, one-on-one, or you can string a whole bundle of them together in a mob and tell them to follow the leader. Who can be another zombie, with an assigned target, or you can run them yourself. It’s a deeply ugly trick, a custom-built griefing tool, but it’s just what you need right now and you have to ask yourself, How much of this did Barry Michaels expect?

  You drop into Stheno’s eyes. It comes easily. You’re standing in the middle of a dirt track, woods to one side and a mountain range just visible in the distance across a field of maize to the other. You look round and see the most bizarre assortment of thuggish allies you can imagine. Orcs, humans, dwarfs, ice elves, a couple of giants, and a solitary dalek: They’re milling around like a flock of sheep. “Listen up!” you yell, trusting the rudimentary speech-to-text capabilities of the mobies they’re running on. “Follow me! Kill anything that’s wearing this!” You hold up the scroll Jack hands you and show them the design inscribed on it in blood, an ideogram of chaos. “Get moving!” And then you hit the GM menu and drop god-level privileges on every last one of Jack’s zombie horde.

  It’s Zonespace, and there’s a city here, a city built on the glacier-rasped basalt plug of an extinct volcano. Huge lumps of steep granite rear from the pine-forested flanks of a huge loch, and the swampy slopes down to a rough timber-crafted coastal harbour in which galleons and triremes swing at anchor. Someone’s obviously been having fun with a bunch of historical maps, because you recognize bits of it from context—a huge castle looming from the top of a basalt spine, a proud royal palace sprawling at the opposite end of the Royal Mile—but you’re pretty certain the real Dunedin never had a mangrove swamp where now the railway station sits, nor was there a rain forest in Leith or an Aztec step-pyramid out by the Gyle.

  But that’s all by the by. You’ve got an army of hundreds and a sword in your hand (not to mention snakes in your hair) and a job to do of killing every Orc you can see, repeatedly, until they stop coming back from the dead. Maybe it’s going to work out, you think. Now all I need to do is figure out how to run god mode in SPOOKS and establish a perimeter. And so you flip back to the desktop and log in to the call-centre application Michaels gave you, just as the office door opens.

  JACK: In the Box

  You’re watching over Elaine’s shoulder to see if she’s got the hang of riding the horde of zombie griefers you’ve just unleashed, which is why you’re puzzled in the extreme when she zips out of the game interface and flips over to the laptop’s other screen to start messing with some other application. “What are you—” doing? you begin to say, as the door opens and you look round expecting to see Sergeant Smith or her big goon of a trainee, and instead find yourself looking at Marcus Hackman, who is staring at you wit
h an expression of concentrated loathing that is rendered even more frightening by what he’s pointing at you: an extremely illegal black-market automatic pistol.

  “Don’t move,” he says. “Keep your hands where I can see them. Both of you,” he adds, as Elaine begins to turn round to see what’s going on—her back is to the door. He steps sideways, out of the doorway, and kicks it shut, keeping his back to the wall.

  What the fuck? you think, a sick, sinking sensation loosening your guts. A lot of things come into abrupt focus. Hackman is wearing his usual expensive suit, but he hasn’t shaved recently, and his normally lacquered hair-style is giving way to minor chaos, strands and tufts out of place. His left shoe, highly polished, has a scuff mark on its toe. And the gun, a Yarygin PYa if you’re any judge of such things (and you swallowed the Zone Weapons Bible whole during your probationary period, lo those many years ago, as young men are wont to do) has seen better days since it fell off the back of a Russian army lorry and into the hands of some blacknet-connected mafiya scumbag.

  “Mr. Reed. If you don’t do exactly as I say, I shall shoot Ms. Barnaby. Ms. Barnaby, if you disobey an instruction, I shall shoot Mr. Reed. If you understand what I’m saying, you may nod.”

  You swallow and make like a parcel-shelf ornament. After a momentary hesitation, Elaine does likewise. The small of your back is chilly with perspiration.

  “Very good,” says Hackman, as if he’s speaking to a small child. “Where’s your phone, Ms. Barnaby? Quickly.”

  “In my hip pocket,” she says, again hesitating slightly.

  “Good. Ms. Barnaby, when I finish talking, I want you to take Mr. Reed’s phone—there on the desk—and without standing up I want you to drop it in the trash can.” The bin is under the desk, between your right leg and her left. “Do it.”

  Shit. You watch as she reaches across you with her left arm and takes your mobie from where it’s sitting next to the laptop and slowly moves it over the bin. Double shit. Of course it can’t recognize her, so she can’t speed-dial the distress number even if CopSpace was working—

  Clonk.

  “Good. Now, Mr. Reed, when I finish talking, you will reach over and take Ms. Barnaby’s phone from her pocket and put it in the bin. Without standing up.”

  “But it’s—”

  “Shut up,” he snarls, and you put a sock in it fast. “Ms. Barnaby may rise slightly to give you access. She will keep both hands on the table as she does so. If she takes either hand off the table or moves either foot while she is standing, I will shoot you. If you understand, nod.”

  You feel yourself nodding. This can’t be happening, can it? He’s about three metres away, too damn far to try and get to him—he’d shoot one of you first. If it was just you, you might try something (poor impulse control said Miss Fuller in elementary fourth, a damning diagnosis of potential heroism), but he’s aiming at Elaine, and just the thought of him putting a bullet in her makes your heart hammer and turns your vision grey at the edges.

  “Do it,” he says. “Ms. Barnaby first.”

  Elaine puts her hands on the table and tenses, rising out of her chair slowly. She’s got her head cranked round, looking over her shoulder with an expression of profound apprehension (or is it calculation?) on her face. You reach out and slowly slide your fingers into her pocket, finger the warm soap-bar shape of her mobile, and retract. “In the bin, Mr. Reed. Now.”

  Clonk. And a faint sigh as the gas strut under the chair takes Elaine’s weight again.

  “Take your glasses off and put them in the bin. Then put your hands behind your neck. Stay away from the keyboards.” Hackman is stripping you naked—not of clothing, but in a more significant way: stripping you of the right to volitional speech, stripping you of the ability to communicate, stripping you of identity. But he hasn’t reached your skin yet—if Sergeant Smith comes back…“Now turn round to face the door. Slowly.”

  “What do you want?” Elaine asks, getting the words out in a hurry.

  Hackman twitches. “Shut up.” He glances at you. “If I don’t call a certain number in sixteen minutes, your niece dies. Do you understand?”

  You nod, your heart in your mouth. You understand all too well: Hackman’s got hold of Barry’s crock of shit about Elsie, and now you know he’s lying. But he probably doesn’t know he’s lying, not if he’s going through Team Red—there’s no reason for any of them to know the truth about your family. Or for Elaine to know, for that matter. Which puts an uncomfortable complexion on things. Because if Sue Smith isn’t coming back, if Hackman’s used Team Red’s favours to lure her away, thinking Elsie is at risk from his friends could stop Elaine getting away. Inconvenient, and then some. You’re going to have to bite a bullet, if not take one for a team you never asked to join.

  “Why?” you croak.

  “Shut up. I’ve got a car downstairs, round the back. Autodrive. We’re going for a little ride into the borders, then you’re going to spend an uncomfortable twenty-eight…no, twenty-seven…hours locked in a cellar. Then I’ll be in the clear, and you’ll be free. Do you understand?”

  Elaine is shaking her head. “Why?”

  “Follow the money, stupid.” He looks angry, and a bit bewildered now. “It was working fine until you showed up.” If it wasn’t for you pesky interfering kids, I’d have gotten away with it…

  “How much money?” Maybe, you think, you can convince him that you’re venal enough to switch sides to an obvious liar.

  “Twenty million in put options hedged against Hayek going down the tubes within two months of IPO, bought through a blind trust.” His cheek twitches. “I’m into covering my bets. Barry and Wayne were just way too confident. The writing’s been on the walls for months.”

  You realize your jaw’s gaping wide open. “You’ve been betting on your own company failing?”

  “You youngsters.” His expression is coolly cynical: “You were still in short pants during the first dot-com bubble, weren’t you? Fucking amateur get-rich-quick schemes. I made my first fortune and lost it before you were even out of school. I know the signs.” He twitches the gun barrel towards you, then back to Elaine. “Seen it before, twice over. But this time I was ready. All it takes is a couple of million and the right suit, and you can buy in, and be out before the starry-eyed optimists notice what’s going on.”

  “But you can’t…be…” Elaine is almost stuttering with surprise. And you can tell what’s going through her head. You were onto a winner! Chief executive of a Potemkin corporation, backed by the security services! Just lie back and let the money roll in! “I don’t believe it.”

  “Is that your bag?” Hackman asks, deceptively casual, with a nod towards the duffel bag and its cylindrical protuberance, where it sits beside the window.

  “Yes.” Elaine nods.

  “Stand up, slowly. Slowly now, go and stand beside it. You’ll notice I’m pointing my gun at Ms. Barnaby, Mr. Reed, so don’t do anything silly, or I shall have to shoot her.”

  Realizations crystallize in parallel as you see Elaine slide sideways towards the bag. Like: Hackman is a fruitcake. And: He doesn’t know you know about Wayne. And: Wayne’s dead, and who the hell do you think killed him? “Are you working for Team Red?” you ask.

  “Shut up. I’m working for myself.” So he’s been going through the blacknet, not knowing who’s on the other side of it, also tapping it for what it can give them. And he’s still pointing the gun at Elaine. Oh shit. Elaine is tense: She glances at you wide-eyed, like a woman about to stick her head in a hangman’s noose. You can read her expression, clear as day—I’m doing this for Elsie. And that’s what triggers the honesty attack as the mummy lobe, hitherto catatonic with fright, finally takes over your tongue:

  “Elsie died six years ago, Hackman. Your blacknet friends are lying to you.”

  And it’s true, and the confession rips you back to that horrible morning in the mortuary down south where they showed you the photographs, then waited while you got a grip on
yourself and blew your nose and wiped your eyes—you didn’t throw up until later, after the sixth pint of the evening—and were very sorry, sir, to put you through this, but we need to know, we need to know who was in the car because after it came out from underneath the articulated lorry you had no family at all, you had no life, and that was when you began paying the Absent Friends subscription, because even the simulacrum of your sister and nieces gives you something to talk about, it’s better than nothing at all. People instinctively know when a member of the herd is the last of their kind, and you can’t live with the sympathetic glances, and you can’t live with the isolation, either, and how were you to know? It’s just your reality, these days, an embarrassing ghost you’ve dragged around with you ever since the accident. A bodyguard of ghosts.

  The ghosts surround you as you stand up and take a step away from Elaine, away from the desk where the zombie-haunted laptop is coordinating the automatic mop-up operation to a war Hackman doesn’t even know is happening, a second step to widen the gap and close with Marcus as the gun barrel turns to track you and shoots.

  BANG.

  You didn’t know it could be that loud: It’s not just a noise, like in the games, it’s a solid force hammering on your eardrums and punching at you. But you take another step and reach for the gun.