Halting State

by Charles Stross

  “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 re-enactment, 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 hit 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.

  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, l
ike 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 data 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 co-ordinate 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?