Halting State hs-1

by Charles Stross

  The vaguely rat-faced guy from last night—Brendan—raises a document wallet. “This says you’re going to give us access. Why not just get it over with?”

  “Give me that,” the silverback says contemptuously. He sniffs a couple of times as he reads it. Meanwhile, you fidget with your specs. There’s a new layer on the room, and a whole bunch of documents. It’s lawsuit-space: Cool! You glance at the auths and see that you’re on the Dietrich-Brunner case folder—they’ve listed you as staff, so you can edit their files. “Chris, I’d appreciate a word with you and your counsel in private with me and Phil.” He glances at a cynical thirty-something who is doodling notes with a pen on a yellow legal pad. “Just to clear the air.”

  Chris turns round. “You heard him, everybody take ten.” He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. Thinking you might as well beat the rush, you slide out the door about five seconds ahead of Elaine.

  “What’s going on?” you ask.

  “Chris and Hackman are trying to outasshole each other.” Her lips underscore the dry disapproval of her tone. “When they finish posturing, the lawyers will broker a deal, and the winner gets to dry-hump the loser’s leg.”

  You roll your eyes. It’s not exactly a novelty, but…“Why is it that the further up the greasy pole you look, the more childish the games get?”

  She examines you with clinical interest, as if looking for signs of life on Mars. “Let’s go find the coffee station. I think they’ll be at it for at least half an hour. Got to make it look hard-fought.”

  As it happens, Elaine is out by less than four minutes. You’re just finishing a polystyrene cup of mechaccino from the robot caffeine dispenser in the Mess Hall (that’s what it still says on the door) and you’ve just about gotten round to thinking why me? for the third time this morning when Cynical Phil sticks his head round the door. “It’s safe to come back, the shooting’s over,” he mutters, then withdraws in a hurry. Everyone puts their coffee down and troops obediently back to the boardroom, where the Chris-and-Hackman show has dropped the final curtain.

  “You’ve got a week,” says Hackman. He looks like he wants to bite someone’s throat out: No wonder his lawyer didn’t want to hang around. “Your tech heads can poke around as much as they need to, and Rebecca and Mike will give them what they need.” A subtle emphasis on the last word there. “Wayne will act as gatekeeper. You want something, you ask Wayne, he’s got the authority to say yes or no. Your accounts team can dupe our personnel files and accounts and look at them off-line, subject to nondisclosure arrangements. But I don’t want you underfoot. Two bodies, one week, that’s all you get to plant down here.”

  One week? Chris smiles lopsidedly and nods at Elaine. “That should be sufficient,” he says confidently. “I’ve got every faith in you, Elaine.” And that’s you, and your eight grand a day, right there.

  Midafternoon finds you attending a business meeting in a dungeon under Vhrana, with a gorgon called Stheno and a dark elf archer called Venkmann. Venkmann is one of the house avatars, currently being driven by Mike Russell. He has black-enamelled armour, an elaborately engraved skull-faced helmet, a twenty-centimetre-long Fu Manchu moustache, and an evil laugh—and that’s just the visible assets. “Where do you want to start?” he asks.

  “The Orcs.” You ground your blunderbuss on the uneven, rubble-strewn floor of the cave and lean on it. “They were bearers, right?”

  “Pretty much.” Venkmann raises one bony finger. Its tip glows green as he commences writing notes that hover in the air behind him. “Encumbrance, one hundred and ten pounds each before they hit a movement penalty.”

  “Did you go hunting their registered owners?”

  “Yup.” Venkmann scrawls another check mark in mid-air. “All forty were signed up via a botnet in Malaysia, using stolen credit cards. The cost of a tag in Avalon Four is low enough that their banks just authorized the transactions without doing a fraud check.”

  The gorgon is looking a little bit lost. Periodically, she shrugs or twitches, stereotyped body language untouched by mortal puppeteer. “Where did the card numbers come from?” she finally asks.

  “Who knows?” Venkmann shrugs. “It’s petty crime at this level—fifteen euros here and there. We told the cops, who made a note of it, but—”

  “No, I mean, did all the numbers come from the same source?” she asks. “If some web storefront got themselves hacked, that might tell us something. Work it from the other end, find the hacker, find who they sold the numbers to.”

  Venkmann looks perplexed. “Is that possible?” he asks.

  You shift your weight between feet and rumble bearishly. “Of course it’s possible,” you point out. “There’s a real world out there, Mike. Maybe we ought to ask the cops if they’ve covered that angle yet.”

  “The cops will take the details and give you a pat on the head, then they’ll ignore you,” predicts Stheno. “It’s a volume crime, they don’t investigate small frauds individually, it’s not cost-effective.” A small buzzing insect, no doubt attracted by the smell of blood, flies too close to her, and one of her asps snaps at it. The snake-lock misses, but the fly drops to the floor and shatters like glass. “If you expect them to share intelligence, you’re mistaken. The rule is, information flows into an investigation, never out of it. Break the rule, and you risk tipping off the target.”

  Venkmann walks over to the Iron Maiden that leans up against the far wall of the dungeon. He idly spins the hand-crank that winches the lid up. “Whatever. We got forty Orcs. They didn’t act like a bunch of macro zombies. When I reran the footage, they were acting too random, too human—making mistakes and cancelling out of them, that kind of thing. They were following their leader, and when they ran, they ran back here.”

  “Orcs. Treasure. How did they get into the bank?” you ask.

  “Someone gave them ownership privs on the loot.” Venkmann sounds annoyed. “The same someone who nerfed the gods, presumably.”

  “Could someone have cracked Hayek Associates’ root certificate from outside?” you ask. “Or do you think it was an inside job?”

  Venkmann winches the Iron Maiden’s lid all the way open. What’s inside lies in darkness. “What I think is, there’s a bug in Kensu’s shitty Chinese code. It might be a memory leak—someone left a fence-post error in a copy-on-write primitive or something—or maybe something more exotic, but someone figured out a privilege-escalation attack that works. If you can get deity level rights, you can probably de-escalate other folks, too. The question is, who got root? And what did they do with the loot, anyway?”

  You snort. “Treasure is treasure. That’s what eBay is for.” It’s worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it—like bank-notes, which used to carry the words, I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ten pounds.

  “Yes, but they haven’t shown up there yet. This is stolen goods, I think we might get a stop put on the auction a bit faster than usual.” He clears his throat. “Anyway. After they got here, they, well, they made an unorthodox exit.”

  He gestures at the Iron Maiden.

  “You have got to be kidding,” you say. If you die in-game, your body—and what it’s wearing—stays where you fell. You reincarnate in your bare scuddies and you’ve got to run if you want to re-equip before some scavenging farmer grabs your kit. But the Iron Maiden is tagged as a shredder—it’s got the permanent death attribute, a creepy purple glow surrounding it in your admin-enhanced vision. That’s pretty damned unusual in this kind of game space; it doesn’t just kill you, it shreds you beyond resurrection. “What would be the point of that?”

  “Well, obviously it killed them fatally. More importantly, it surrendered ownership of their in-game assets to, to whoever was waiting here. The Fence.”

  “Ah,” says Stheno, sounding as if she’s just achieved enlightenment.

  “So let’s replay the entry log for this shard and see who came here,” you suggest, “before the Orcs showed up with the loot.”
<
br />   “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” says Stheno.

  “Huh?”

  “Open Sesame!” she cries. And the Iron Maiden starts flashing.

  “What the fuck?” says Venkmann.

  “Go on, open it up,” Stheno urges.

  “Not likely, it might be a trap.”

  Venkmann’s risk-averse attitude bugs you, so you put your mad skillz to work. Bringing up the in-game debugger in your field of view shows a whole bunch of scripting cruft attached to the torture implement. “Hey, this thing is really over-engineered for a simple killing machine, huh?”

  “What? What’s—” Venkmann can see what you’re seeing, and you get the feeling that back in his office Mike is twitching with something other than a caffeine jag. “Hey, that’s not right. It says it’s signed by…” He trails off, muttering to himself, and the Venkmann avatar lolls on its feet like a hanged puppet, only its jittery fingertips showing that it’s not dead.

  WHAT’S HE DOING? Stheno IMs you.

  “There’s about”—you run a quick compile/syntax check on the tree—“about fifteen thousand lines of code attached to that thing, where there should only be a couple of hundred. They’re digitally signed using the Hayek corporate certificate, too, which means that someone at HA put them there. Numpties.”

  “You’re telling me they didn’t even check? Before now?” the snake-woman hisses at you.

  “Yeah, looks like.”

  “Jesus.” She glances at you. “How do you know this?”

  “You’ve got access to a built-in debugger and development suite whenever you’re running in god mode”—a nasty thought strikes you—“and there was a bunch of core database code in that thing: If someone’s planted a trigger in a public table and a watcher somewhere else in Zonespace—”

  There’s a brilliant blue flash of light from the Iron Maiden, prompting you nearly to sprain a thumb bringing up a bunch of defensive spells you keep ready for just such occasions. “Shit!” yells Venkmann. Darkness gathers, fulminating, in the corners of the room, a smoky penumbral effusion spilling from the crack that has opened up in reality. You power up the Shield of Steel Focus and the Dome of Defence in a hurry, watching the world around you blur into watery unfocus as figures with too many limbs step out of the corners, moving in insectile stop-go jerks.

  Venkmann is frozen over the gaping maw of the Iron Maiden, held in place by some unseen force. You turn to confront the intruders and realize that Stheno is outside your zone of protection. Shit. This is going to be ugly. There are four of the things, like gigantic anthropomorphic toads with strangely articulated limbs and great horned heads. You crack open a vial of Neverslow and inhale the bitter fumes, then unsling your blunderbuss as the world around you seems to slow, jerking in stop-frame animation. The gun’s already loaded with coarse-ground silver filings and lead shot, and when you pull, it bangs deafeningly in the confined space, blasting a cloud of smoke and sparks at the nearest of the demonic intruders, who yells raucous rage at you but doesn’t even stop coming. You can see the haze of improbability spiralling around its head, the madness in its eyes—it’s a fucking slaad of some kind! What are they doing here?—and then it raises its webbed hands in a spell-caster’s gesture, and a vast bloom of emerald fire envelops you. Which is a huge relief because it tells you you’re up against a bot; no human player—not even a total noob—would do something that stupid.

  Two of the slaad’s fellow gate-crashers run into your Dome of Defence from either side, rattling your teeth as you invert the blunderbuss and reload as fast as you can. Reflexes left over from your munchkin days take over, and you blaze away, trying meanwhile to figure out what it all means. (You were looking for a clan of cannon fodder, not a booby-trapped artefact that triggers a teleport routine to drop a gang of pissed-off midlevel demons on you: Who put it here, and why?) “Stheno, you still alive?”

  “Yes! What’s going on?”

  “They’re trying to kill us, and they’re a whole lot more powerful than Orcs. Get behind me, I’ll handle—”

  “No you won’t.” Stheno steps daintily around the Iron Maiden—Venkmann still wired to it with blue sparks flashing off his hair—and draws a long sword she found somewhere. Her status icon shows that she’s trying to go into some weird-ass haptic combat mode, something only idiot LARPers use, and you swear quietly as you dump a handful of Dust of Dispelling down the smoking maw of your gun and raise it again. One of the slaadi is going for her, which means—

  A huge fountain of blood squirts across the room in arterial gouts. Shit, exit one auditor, dashed bad game-play, do you want to reincarnate in the middle of a fight? You shrug and drop the hammer on the demon as it scrabbles with ichor-dripping claws at the edge of your dome. Stupid fuckers, they’ve got a magical arsenal all of their own: Played straight, they could take you down in minutes. Magic stick go Bang and you can see daylight—okay, torchlight—through the beastie’s rib-cage as it takes a tumble. Good. You turn to the next one, only to find that Stheno’s still in the game and has got in ahead of you with that sword. She’s holding it at a weird angle and as the slaad screams and launches itself at her, she twists it and hops sideways, as if that’s going to achieve anything. The predictable thing happens—it takes a swipe at her but misses, probably because she’s accidentally triggered her Tumble talent and gone cartwheeling face-first into the wall.

  What the hell? You’re supposed to be in quick time thanks to the dust you snorted, forcing the local Zonespace servers to crank down the time base for everyone else within the game’s event horizon (meaning, this room). Maybe Stheno’s LARP-addled mode can only do real-time, and the god mode Venkmann dropped on you both so casually has stopped the game engines from downgrading her movement rate. Or something like that…You’re still turning towards the next pebble-skinned party pooper as Stheno twists sideways and jabs her frog-sticker at him, misses, and does a neat back-flip. The slaad twitches, roars, then takes a swipe at her. “Why can’t I touch the fucking thing?” she yells frustratedly.

  “You’re not equipped for it! And he’s got too many hit points!” you yell back at her, reloading in a hurry because bad guy #4 is sneaking up behind her with malice clearly in what passes for its tiny mind. “Clear the area! No, duck!”

  She ducks, still holding on to her hilts like grim death, and you blast a cloud of buckshot across her shoulders and into frogface’s maw. He sneezes, green goop flying, and begins to Incant. That’s a bad sign, those things have big death-magic mojo. So far, the bot’s been playing them clumsily, using a tank to run over individual infantry instead of shelling them from the next county over—but if it gets its shit together, you’re going to be in a world of hurt. As if that’s not enough, you hear a low-pitched warning buzz: Your Shield of Steel Focus is nearing the end of its life, and any moment now you’re going to be unprotected.

  You begin to back towards the Iron Maiden, hoping to use it as an obstacle, when Stheno leans over the supine slaad and starts horsewhipping it with her snake-headed dreadlocks. Which, surprisingly, works—the thing must have been pretty near to dead already. There’s a crackling tinkle as the grotesque frog-statue rolls over on its side, and then she vaults over it towards bad guy #4. He’s still busy Incanting—these spells take time—so you follow her, pitching in with all four paws in the faint hope of breaking his concentration roll. Only, no dice. Stheno has another momentary lapse of coordination and goes head first into the far wall, limbs spazzing wildly. Slaad #4 emits a strange howl and points, and all hell breaks loose—in the direction of the thoroughly immobilized Venkmann.

  You whack the demon alongside his head with an ursine pawful of claws. That gets his attention: He turns and clumsily gouges at you with a scaly hand, gobbling and gurgling incoherently. You whack him again while Stheno leans forward and makes stabby to no particular avail. The gobbling rises towards an angry, incoherent peak, then stops, breaking up like a bandwidth-choked voice call. Another whack, and the slaad subsides in a tw
itching heap, oozing corrosive juices that eat away at the tiled floor.

  “It didn’t work,” she says plaintively. “I kept trying to go into haptic contact-mode, and it wouldn’t work!”

  “Whoa,” you wheeze. “You mean, like, full-body input? That doesn’t work in Avalon Four without a hack pack on the side.” Typical noob trick, trying to use an esoteric interface and going arse over tit, instead of simply whaling away with the plus-three Axe of Decerebration. “Let’s check on Venkmann.” You shamble over towards the Iron Maiden, kicking dismembered amphibian parts out of your way. Venkmann’s still wired into the shredder, kicking and twitching, so you call up the debugger console again and drop a break point on the thing. He falls away from it, collapsing on the floor. For a moment you think he’s dead, but he magics up some hit points from somewhere and is back on his feet.

  “What the fuck was that all about?” he demands, irritably. “When I catch the motherfucker who invented those—” He rambles on angrily for some time while you examine the code hooked into the Iron Maiden, which is still sparking and fulminating on an al fresco basis. Interestingly, it seems to have erased itself. If you hadn’t had a devkit buffer open before the extradimensional mugging, you wouldn’t even have noticed the missing twelve thousand lines of code. “What happened?”

  “Who’s got write access to your version control system?” you ask Venkmann.

  “Huh? What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Plenty, I think.” You stare at the Iron Maiden, then tweak a couple of resources. The cascade of sparks and the violet pulsing aura go away. “Should be possible to look inside that without triggering the trap, now.”

  Venkmann leans forward. “Either of you got a familiar?”

  “Um.” You should have thought of that: Just because you disarmed the trap doesn’t mean that it’s safe to look. “I’m fresh out of ’em. How about you?”