Halting State

by Charles Stross

  Your phone butts in: “Mr. Richardson is holding. Do you want to talk to him?”

  “Yeah, put him through.”

  “What do you want now?” he begins. “Because I’m in a meeting—”

  “We’ve got a lead on the stolen goods,” you tell him before he can wind up to hang up on you. “I need to pull the registration details of a user called KingHorror9, their true name and street address and so on. If you can you do that, we can go and pay them a visit right now.”

  “Oh, let me just open a new stickie…”

  Suddenly Wayne turns helpful. A minute later you’re off the phone with the distinct feeling that Progress is being Made, or at least an order has gone in to the production department, who are thinking about setting a delivery date sometime next week. A minor miracle…

  The door opens as you get to the bottom of your coffee cup. It’s Jack. He’s remembered to shave, but his tee-shirt is even more faded than yesterday’s. “Morning.” He plants himself in the other office chair and turns the laptop sitting on his side of the desk to face you. “You might find this interesting.”

  “Uh, what?” He’s grinning.

  “I logged in before I got here.” He points to a big aerial photograph of a city, something like a spy satellite image. “While I was stuck on the bus, I wrote a plug-in to map the IP addresses of the auction site users into an overlay for Google Earth. I figured that being able to visualize where they were would be…well. It’s not guaranteed accurate—they could be tunnelling in from elsewhere, or covering their trail in some other way—but what I found was interesting.” He flicks a couple of commands at the air, and the pointer tracks across the screen as the image zooms in until you’re looking at a gleaming metal building that looks like a gigantic wood-louse. “Glasgow SECC—the conference centre.” A bunch of green triangles appear, clustered heavily around one end of the building. “That’s where the local hot spot is. There’s another stash here”—he zooms out, dizzyingly, the city dwindling to a pimple on the side of Scotland, then the entire British Isles receding towards the horizon of a curved sphere, spinning round and zooming in again somewhere near the northern end of the Bay of Bengal—“but I figure Glasgow’s easier for us to get to than Dhaka.”

  “Glasgow? You sure about that?” It doesn’t entirely make sense to you.

  “Yeah.” He twitches over to another window. “The hot spot of auction offers is hanging off the centre’s local switch. That’s where they’re selling their loot. There’s a lot of game activity there, looks like”—he’s blinking and twitching behind his glasses—“there’s a gaming con there. It’s a bank holiday on Friday, isn’t it? But midweek, that doesn’t make sense unless…”

  “What’s the con-convention?” you ask, trying to sound only appropriately interested. Not that you know much about such things—you’ve done a few re-enactment events, but hotels and hucksters and hordes of socially inept fanboys don’t tempt you.

  “Let’s see.” He Googles for a minute. “Oh, right—yup, it’s a business convention. Sponsored by blah, foo, and Kensu International, oh what a surprise. Hmm. Today’s a public day. Tickets are fifty euros.”

  Your mailbox whistles for attention: A note from Wayne has just come in. “First things first. Phone, get me Sergeant Smith.” You wait expectantly for a few seconds, but it dumps you into a voice mailbox. “Oh. Hello, Sergeant. Elaine from Dietrich-Brunner here—can you call me when you get this? I believe we’ve got a lead for you on the items that were stolen from Hayek Associates. Bye.” You disconnect, then turn back to Jack. “Alright. You’re the local—how do we get to Glasgow from here?”

  Glasgow turns out to be a fifty-minute train ride away from Edinburgh. Worse, the SECC isn’t next door to the station—it’s a trek out of the centre, several stops away on the toytown model underground system. So after spending a futile ten minutes trying to scrape various badly designed railway company websites, Jack suggests taking the first available connection, then catching a taxi at the other end if necessary. The train turns out to be your usual tired old nag of a commuter service (the shiny new maglev doesn’t open for another two years), and by the time you’re halfway there—staring out of the windows at an implausibly damp landscape outside Falkirk—you’re beginning to wish you’d simply flashed the company Amex and hired a helicopter.

  Jack, for his part, sits head down in the seat opposite, rattling his fingertips on a virtual keyboard, so oblivious to the real world that you have to poke him on the shoulder when you want to ask what he’s doing. “Adding another plug-in for Sativa,” he says, as if that’s an explanation. So you go back to skimming the dump of Hayek’s monthly statements that Chris and the gang dug out of them before the incursion, looking for suggestive anomalies. Of which there are many, especially in the petty cash—what on earth is an economics consultancy buying voodoo dolls for? Or paintball guns?—but they’re not the right kind of suggestive to ding your bell.

  Eventually the train rolls through a grim landscape of warehouses and high-rise apartments, before diving into some kind of tunnel and surfacing in a huge, vaulted Victorian station. You find yourself in a strange concourse, facing a curved wall that seems to be carved out of a cliff of red sandstone; there are inward-looking windows set in it, and gargoyles about to take flight hunch their wings beneath the cast-iron buttresses that support the arching roof. For some reason there’s a small gingerbread town perched on the platform, entire buildings complete with roofs and gutters untouched by rain. “What the hell is that?” you ask in disbelief.

  “Glasgow Central.” Jack positively beams. “Let’s get a taxi!”

  Ten car-sickening minutes later (Glasgow seems to be built on a grid system dropped across a bunch of hills, and its roads are populated exclusively by automotive maniacs), the driverless taxi drops you in a concrete wilderness near a river. Before you, a huge glass wall fronts a fifty-year-old concrete groundscraper. Someone’s unrolled a grubby cherry-coloured carpet onto the platform, and put out a notice-board. INTERACTIVE 18 flashes across it in gold letters: and PUBLIC WELCOME below, in a somewhat more subdued font. There are people visible inside—greeters and business types in smart-casual drag—and booths.

  You were having misgivings about this trip because it seemed to have all the ingredients of a wild goose chase except for the goose: But you’re here now, and it can’t be helped. You square your shoulders and follow him in. “Two public day passes,” Jack tells the bored attendant on the desk.

  “That’ll be fifty euros each, or you can fill in these surveys for a free, complimentary pass,” she tells you in an accent so thick you could use it as a duvet.

  You glance at the survey: It’s the usual intrusive rubbish, so (with a malign sense of glee) you answer it truthfully. No, you don’t buy any RPGs or subscribe to any MMOs. Yes, you’re a financial services industry employee. Yes, you make buying decisions with an eye-watering bottom line. Then you change your sex, age, date of birth, and name, just to be on the safe side before you hand it in and accept your free, complimentary (thanks for the market research data) badge.

  Inside the wide concourse, everything looks like, well, the kind of trade show that attracts the general public. There are booths and garish displays and sales staff looking professionally friendly, and there are tables with rows of gaming boxes on them. There’s even a stray book-store, selling game strategy guides printed on dead tree pulp. “Check what it looks like in Zone,” suggests Jack, so you tweak your glasses, and suddenly it’s a whole different scene.

  The concourse is full of monsters and marvels. A sleeping dragon looms over a pirate hoard, scales as gaudy as a chameleon on a diffraction grating: It’s the size of a young Apatosaurus, scaly bat-like wings folded back along its glittering flanks like a fantastic jet fighter. Beyond it, a wall opens out into the utter darkness of space, broken only by the curling smoke-trail of a nebula and the encrusted flanks of a scabrous merchant spaceship trolling the final frontier for profit or ple
asure. Half the sales staff have morphed into gaudy or implausible avatar costumes, from caped and opera-hatted Victorian impresarios to swashbuckling adventurers. “How are we going to find anyone in this?” you ask helplessly, as a whole company of wolves trot past a booth where a group of sober-looking marketers are extolling the virtues of their firm’s reality development engine.

  “Check your email…”

  He’s right. There’s a note from Wayne, giving you name, rank and serial number on the elusive KingHorror9. It’s probably not strictly legal—there are data protection and privacy laws to tap-dance around—but then, what KingHorror9 is doing isn’t strictly legal, either. And they’re here somewhere. You look around. Then it occurs to you that if there’s a whole bunch of Zone servers running here, and you’ve got a Zone character, you might as well use it. So you tell your phone to load Avalon Four, log yourself in as Stheno, and look around again.

  The dragon’s still there, but the gaggle of Victorian maidens in big frocks have vanished, replaced by a huddle of warty-skinned kobolds; the walls have morphed from concrete to the texture of damp granite, and the huckster tables and booths have been replaced by broken-down wooden shacks and brightly painted gypsy carriages. The developers’ booth has decayed into a mausoleum occupied by a grisly vanguard of skeletons and zombies, who hang on the every word of the livid witch-king who stands before the sacrificial altar. Somebody has spray-bombed one side of it with a big neon arrow (it really is glowing) and the words, AUCTION IN FOUR MINUTES. “Ah. I get it,” you say. There’s no reply. When you glance round, Jack’s vanished.

  JACK: This Is Not a Game

  For the first time, you have a target and a true name: Mr. Wu Chen. Never mind which is the family name and which the personal, at least it’s a name. And it’s attached to a credit card number, although you’ve only got the last four digits. Gentlemen, start your search engines. Elaine is wandering along behind you with the slightly stunned expression of a Mormon missionary at a Pagan Federation summer camp—it obviously looks like a target-rich environment—but the set of co-ordinates attached to Wu Chen’s badge (which, like all the attendee badges at this shindig is bugged with seven flavours of RFID—you checked your privacy at the door when you filled out that marketing questionnaire, unless you remembered to pack a tinfoil wallet) is moving slowly through the huge auditorium at the back of the building.

  You lock Wu Chen into the map widget hovering over to the left, then simultaneously log all your Zone IDs on simultaneously, collapsing their various shards into a single mish-mash view. Why stick with a single reality when you can walk through a multiverse? Most people are only running avatars in one realm or another, and viewing them all simultaneously is an exercise in whimsy: Here’s an astronaut talking to a devil, next door to an Orc buying a book from a vampire. It’s like being stuck inside a bazaar of the bizarre. A lecture or talk or some kind of interview is breaking up in the room to your right and there’s a coffee stand to your left, starkly mundane between a timber-framed stately home and a parked flying saucer. Then you look closer. Someone’s tagged it: AUCTION IN FOUR MINUTES. As you look, the FOUR changes to THREE. The tag references a certain eBay auction…A quick glance at your map widget confirms that Wu Chen is in room 112, which is up an escalator on the left and down a corridor.

  You take off up the hall fast, shouldering your way between a troupe of baboons and a Waffen SS officer who glares at you with ill-concealed annoyance. Mr. Wu Chen owes you some answers, and you’re going to get them. But lurking behind your surface preoccupation with the Dietrich-Brunner job, there’s an unpleasant realization gnawing away at your guts. Someone is sending you nastygrams—someone who seems to know you’re working for Elaine and who’s getting all their information about you via the net is trying to get at you via your nieces. You don’t have kids, or a partner, or much of anything—all you friends are absent—but whoever they are, they’ve sunk their claws into the nearest soft spot they can find on the net. You’re not by nature a violent man, indeed usually you go out of your way to avoid confrontations—but that’s not going to work here. The kind of shit who’d threaten a couple of kids is unlikely to play by the rules. Either they’re totally psychotic, or disastrously misinformed—but whatever the reason, they think that Elaine’s investigation, or your involvement, is a personal threat to them. They’re not playing games. Why else would they respond that way? The stakes aren’t limited to just the crazy consultancy fee CapG are paying you anymore. There’s an icy nugget of indigestible anxiety in your stomach, and it’s telling you that you need to find Mr. Wu Chen and his stolen stash of vorpal blades and djinn lamps before he disposes of them and fades into the background, leaving you to blunder about in the darkness until someone tries to chain you to another lamppost or frame you for child abduction: or something almost unimaginably worse.

  You’re panting as you take the escalator steps two at a time, racing up them and along the corridor against the flow of bodies coming out of the conference room. It’s bang on the hour, and the program items are all changing in lockstep, creating swirling vortices of bodies to drown in. Room 112 is round a corner, and as you get to it, you see that the door’s wedged open and it’s almost empty. There are tables up and down each wall, with laptops open on them in neat rows linked together with security cables: They’ve been running some kind of demo. A dozen or so people are milling around, some of them poking at keyboards and some of them just chatting. You look at them with Zone-enabled eyes and see blank-faced noobs and a solitary, glum-looking Orc pounding a keyboard. An azure gemstone revolves above his head, his guilt engraved upon it.

  You twitch all your personae except Theodore G. Bear into invisibility as you walk up to him. “I’m here about the auction,” you say to his hunched shoulder.

  The Orc yelps and spins round, catching the edge of the laptop screen with one sleeve and nearly sending it flying. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “Get real,” you say. Then you remember to be polite: You might have to hand this over to the cops, right? “You’re auctioning a bunch of Kensu content, prestige items. You didn’t get them the usual way. Did you expect nobody would notice?”

  The Orc cowers. His Zonespace muscles may be green and rippling, but in meatspace he’s just a scrawny little guy, possibly not even out of his teens. You’re no muscle-bound hulk, but you don’t look as if a strong breeze could blow you away: And besides, you’ve got the advantage of surprise on your side. “What do you want?” he quavers.

  “Information.” You fabricate an unfriendly smile. “How you got the items, for starters. Who from, and when, and where. Right now, this is still an internal investigation, but Kensu are looking to set their lawyers on whoever carried out the heist. You can reduce your exposure by co-operating fully.”

  Chen glances from side to side, hunting a way out. “I don’t know anything!” he protests. “I got this loot from the clubhouse basement! Someone else put it there—”

  “Tell me where the clubhouse is. Tell me when you got it.”

  “You think I’m stupid?”

  He’s selling loot behind their backs; that’s a weak spot. You tweak your smile slightly. “No, I think you’re trying to make some extra money. Which is why I’m here. We can do this off-line, if you want—nobody needs to know.”

  His sidelong glances slow down. “You’re crazy, man,” he hisses. “I don’t know anything.”

  “You know about the clubhouse.” He tenses: Oops, back off. “Look, I’m not after you. I’m trying to get my teeth into them. Ten thousand euros in blind DigiCash for what you know, starting with the clubhouse’s Zone co-ordinates.”

  Ten K is a respectable sum—it’s more than you used to earn in a month—but you’re pretty sure that Elaine will sign off on it without blinking if it gets you hard information. Chen looks like he’s considering it. Then he shakes his head rapidly. “Not enough. You think I’m crazy? Guoanbu will have my kidneys if I give you that!”<
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  “Fifteen,” you say without waiting. He begins to turn his head away. “Twenty.” He looks back at you.

  “Not enough. This conversation is over.”

  “I can go higher, but I need clearance,” you tell him. Which is bending the truth—you couldn’t even make either of the earlier figures stick without permission—but it’s a hook; question is, will he bite?

  “Two million, and witness protection, and I tell you everything,” he says flatly. “A new identity. You can arrange that, yes?”

  “Huh?” You gape at the Orc like he’s grown a second head. It’s an out-of-context problem, you suddenly realize. “You think I’m the government?”

  He looks at you with an expression of equal parts contempt and desperation, then flicks down his glasses and bangs out on the wings of a teleport spell, elsewhere into Avalon. But spells have echoes, and the fleeing Orc isn’t as hot as he thinks; you’ve got admin permissions thanks to Hayek Associates’ pull, and you IM Venkmann a brisk note as you follow him. You find yourself in a cellar, dank and stone-floored: The walls are almost completely hidden by racks of weapons and closed treasure-chests. There’s also a very surprised Orc. He reaches over his back and pulls a sword on you, then attacks. “Leave me alone!” he yells.

  Simultaneously, back in the real world, something punches you hard in your side, rocking you back on your feet. You stagger, and the motion sensors in your glasses cut them back to semi-transparent—an emergency measure—and you see Mr. Wu Chen run through the doorway. You feel a little dizzy and instinctively raise your hand. It’s just a dagger strike—no real hit points to it—so you stagger after Chen.

  The translucent Orc tries to bring his big blue-glowing cleaver of a broadsword down on your ursine head, but you’re armoured up to munchkin levels and deflect it with ease. You stumble as you go through the doorway, chasing the fleeing student, and there’s something odd about your jacket, a crunching, broken feeling. Something is hanging out of your left pocket. You grab hold of it and there’s a sudden sharp flash of pain as you stick something sharp into your hand. “Shit!” you swear, and turn your glasses fully transparent.