Halting State hs-1

by Charles Stross

  “I’ve got a snake,” Stheno offers uncertainly.

  “Badger,” says Venkmann. He turns round and begins to incant. There’s a bang and a cloud of purple smoke as a confused-looking badger appears.

  “What…” Stheno begins to ask.

  “It’s a familiar. He can see through its eyes, okay?” Venkmann continues to incant. A moment later, the badger shimmers and warps into invisibility. “Now it’s an invisible badger—the best kind of camera.” Venkmann bends down, picks something up, and leans over the Iron Maiden before releasing it.

  “Well, there’s a surprise!”

  “What’s down there?”

  “It’s a rabbit-hole,” he says slowly, looking around as if at a different landscape.

  “Where’s it go?”

  “Looks like Zhongguo shard, going by the map. Which is part of Hentai Animatics’ zone, and we don’t have an admin contract for that. I think you’ve just uncovered an illegal-immigrant tunnel.”

  SUE: Chop Shop

  Hackman’s weird outburst has haunted you all through the case team meeting up at the station, despite your hasty cramming on blacknets and anonymizing peer-to-peer crime networks and the people who set them up and skim off the profits; in particular his admonition not to have anything to do with the “bottom-feeding scum.” Bottom-feeding scum are, you might say, something of a professional specialty—and not just when you’re hauling bodies out of the Water of Leith; all you need is to think back to the last open evening at the wee one’s school, and it’s there fair and square in the playground with a squint and a buzz cut to go with the sharpie in its back pocket. It disnae matter whether they’re bottom-feeding scum with a chib and a crack habit or the up-market kind who book the assassinations of their business rivals via blacknet. So, with the inspector’s encouragement, you head back to Hayek Associates’ bunker—where by now they’re hunkering down under their concrete eaves to avoid the barrage of writs and journalists’ inquiries whistling down on them from parts north, east, west, and south—to go Liaise with some Victims.

  It’s early afternoon when you park next to the muddy pot-hole at the edge of the car-park. First off, you check the Mess Hall to grab a coffee and see who’s there. A couple of the quants are hanging around the coffee machine: Your glasses—now configured for off-line browsing—remind you of their names, Couper, Sam (“traceroute is my bitch”) and Evans, Darren. You walk up behind them. “Sam, Darren,” you say, with a smile, “how are you doing today?”

  They both nearly jump a mile: They may be thick as thieves, but they lack the reflexes of the pathologically non-law-abiding. Turning these nice middle-class nerds inside out and shaking them until the pips squeak would be so easy it’d make the baby Jesus cry: They’re still terrified of parking tickets. Clearly neither of these two are running an illicit blacknet. They haven’t even been exposed to the long arm of the law often enough for it to lose its dreadful majesty. “Fine! Fine! What you want?” Darren asks, too eager for his own good.

  “A regular coffee, hold the sugar,” you suggest, and damn if Sam doesn’t turn and make a pathetic lunge for the control panel, so eager to oblige that if you slid an unsigned confession under his fingers, he’d be in for the high jump tomorrow. Aye, this one would have been blackboard monitor in junior six, right enough. Not to mention the class swot. Which may actually make the job at hand harder—they’ll drown you in irrelevant details if you give them the chance. “I was wanting to interview both of you later today, get your account of what happened. Are you free later on?”

  “Uh, yeah, just not right now.” Darren is recovering his composure faster than Sam. “Busy fighting fires, covering for that asshole Nigel. He hasn’t updated the group-reconciliation files since last Wednesday, and we’re going to be in the shitter if we don’t get it under control before the weekly M4 policy session.”

  “Your coffee, miss…?” says Sam.

  “Sergeant, actually.” You smile at him as you take the cup. “Sergeant Smith.” That’s right, grind it in, define your authority now so he bends the neck later. “When’s the policy session?”

  “Uh, Wednesday, actually,” volunteers Darren, getting his act together. “I guess I can make some time late this afternoon or maybe tomorrow morning, but right now we’ve got to patch Nigel’s—”

  The door opens, and another quant comes in, along with two suits whom your specs unhelpfully identify as VISITOR 1 and VISITOR 2. “That’s okay,” you say. “Tomorrow will do. Ten o’clock?” He nods. “Okay, see you then.” You nod at Sam, also, and he seems to take it as a dismissal and scuttles away with his tail between his legs. Which leaves you with an opportunity to check out the visitors before you move on. You put your smiling meet-the-people face in place and turn to face them.

  “Hello,” you say. VISITOR 1 is male, late twenties, overweight, badly shaved, and that suit really doesn’t go with the faded black tee-shirt. VISITOR 2 is female, skinny, somewhere in that vague period between late teens and midthirties, and looks like she knows far too much about spreadsheets for her own good. Black suit, very corporate, well-coordinated. Verdict: They’re technical/clerical citizens. Subtype: probably law-abiding, apart from the occasional furtive joint. “I haven’t seen you around here before. Are you from”—you nudge up the case database—“Dietrich-Brunner Associates?”

  VISITOR 1 is of a kind with Sam, but VISITOR 2 is made of sterner stuff: She sniffs and gives you an old-fashioned look. “Could be,” she says. “Who are you?”

  You stare back at her: She’s a bit mousy, but you’ve met her type before—usually giving you a nasty grilling on the witness stand.

  “I’m Detective Sergeant Smith,” you tell her, “working out of Meadowplace station.” You drop the smile. “You are from Dietrich-Brunner?”

  VISITOR 2 continues to make with the long stare, but VISITOR 1 caves. “Um, yeah, we are. She’s the organ grinder, I’m just the performing monkey.” He mimes shaking a hat.

  VISITOR 2 elbows him in the ribs, sharply. “No, you’re a dancing bear. Do try to get the right species!” She faces you: “I’m sorry we seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot. I’m Elaine Barnaby, and yes, I’m from Dietrich-Brunner—I’m a forensic accountant. Jack here is a game-development consultant, and he’s acting as my guide. Now, what can we do for you, Sergeant?”

  “You can help yourselves to a coffee, then maybe tell me why Marcus Hackman might not want people such as yourselves, um, crawling around on his turf?”

  She raises an eyebrow. “Ah, that is an interesting turn of phrase. His?”

  Good, that’s got her attention. “Depends. What are you doing here? I mean, in Hayek Associates’ offices?”

  “Oh, that.” She sniffs. Jack bends over the coffee machine, mumbling to himself, then starts punching buttons like it’s a Game Boy. Your fingers are itching to stick their names into CopSpace and see what comes back, but that might be a wee bit too obvious if you did it right now…“I’m supposed to be conducting a security audit on a bank in an online game. At least, that’s what I thought the picture was yesterday. In practice…I take it you’re here because Wayne or Marcus or someone reported the intrusion last week? That’ll have gone on your case-load as a crime, possibly hacking, possibly theft or fraud—whatever. Well, DBA got sucked in because one of our senior partners vetted Hayek’s board before their IPO the other month, and this stinks of an inside job. So Chris panicked and dragged a team of us up here to do something about it. Now there’s a programmer missing and that’s…well, it’s enough to get him off the hook, so he’s pissing off back to the City, but my job—and Jack’s—is to confirm that it really was this Nigel MacDonald that did it, dot the i’s and cross the t’s. I think Chris may even be planning to pull strings and get NFIU to take us on as specialist subcontractors, if he can sort out the cross-border jurisdictional voodoo.”

  That sets you back on your heels: The Crime and Rehabilitation Office hires civilian specialists from time to time, it’
s true, and the technical side of this investigation is going to the National squad as soon as anyone notices it—does that make these people bystanders or fellow cops? Leave it to Liz to sort out the turf wars, you decide. “Ah, well, I cannae be telling you anything until someone tells me you’re to be working on the case,” you temporize. “But if there’s anything ye’ve found about the situation, and especially about Nigel MacDonald, I’d love to hear it.”

  “Yes, there’s—” Jack begins eagerly, before Elaine gives him a look that could strip paint. There’s some interesting chemistry going on there, if you’re any judge of such things.

  “I think what he means to say is, we’d be happy to co-operate with your investigation purely on a professional peer-to-peer basis with appropriate confidentiality safeguards in place for a pooling of information,” she picks up, facing you like she’s holding a royal flush. And, indeed, she is. So you smile and take a mouthful of too-hot coffee. One point to her.

  “Well, that’s a start.” You pause a moment. “You said something about knowing what you were meant to be doing yesterday. What’s changed since then?”

  “We’re trying to track down where Tricky Dicky hid the loot,” says Jack, ignoring the warning look Elaine sends him. “Seeing he’s not here for us to ask. Hmm. Do you have him in custody yet?”

  You weigh your answer carefully. “Not yet. In fact, if you should see him, I’d appreciate it if you’d IM me. My colleagues do indeed have some questions we’d like to put to him.” Starting with, how’d you come back from the grave? Assuming you existed in the first place? But there’s no call to go frightening the horses just yet, so you keep that thought to yourself.

  “I think we can do that,” Jack says, seemingly oblivious as Elaine raises the energy level from Defrost to Nuke. “Problem is, it could be anywhere in Zonespace, or even out of it. Avalon Four isn’t the only game sharing this platform, and whatever was stolen, if they can get it out of Avalon and into somewhere else…” He trails off.

  “What is it?” Elaine asks sharply.

  “eBay.” He pulls on a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. “Assuming this was a real bank robbery, what do you do with the goods?”

  “The goods?” You look perplexed. “Banks hold money…”

  Jack shakes his head. “This is a game, remember.” He glances at Elaine, who nods slowly. “The bank’s not somewhere that manages risk; it’s somewhere that stores value. You can only carry so much crap around with you in Zonespace without becoming encumbered, which slows you up. So Hayek run the bank and sell safety deposit storage. This gives players who haven’t bought themselves a castle yet a place to stash their goodies while they’re running around on quests, and it also siphons money out of the game stealthily, in bank charges. Anyway, what was stolen was the contents of about three thousand safety deposit boxes. Actually, the real crime was that someone corrupted the digitally signed ownership certificates for objects in the database, turning them over to some third party: The Orcs were just warm bodies to carry the loot away. Once they had it, the ownership certificates got swapped around again via a remixer to stop Hayek or Kensu International from figuring it out—they don’t routinely log all ownership changes, it’d be like running a supermarket chain’s stock control system—then got the hot goods out of Avalon Four and onto another shard via the rabbit-hole.”

  This sounds horribly familiar. “You think there’s a fence somewhere?”

  Jack scratches the side of his nose, then takes the glasses off and polishes them on his tee-shirt. “The whole scenario makes no sense at all unless there’s a fence.” He examines the glasses. “In-game auction-houses won’t touch stolen goods, but if they’ve got a conduit set up, say in another real-world jurisdiction or even in another Zone partition, they could sell the loot on eBay. The trouble is going to be getting a list of the stuff that’s been stolen, then checking for all the possible auction-houses. And that’s before you start to wonder if the stolen prestige items have been hacked on by someone with crafting skillz…”

  It is horribly familiar: There’s a wee garage down in Cramond that Mac’s been trying to shut down for years—the owner’s a big ned, done time in Bar-L for receiving, and the inspector swears blind he’s running a chop shop—but he’s never been able to pin anything on it. You’ve got unfond memories of spending nights and mornings keeping an eye on his back yard via spy cam, trying to spot a delivery. And on a larger scale, it’s what those blacknets you were reading up on are supposed to do—antisocial networking sites. “Where would you go to look?”

  “I’d start by trying to find out what’s been stolen,” says Jack. “And then I’d write a bot, to go round all the online auctions trying to match a shopping list against what’s on sale. Drill down, cross-correlate the merchants”—he’s going all cross-eyed, and you’re not the only one who’s staring at him as if he’s turned into some kind of delphic oracle—“see if any names keeping coming up.”

  Barnaby snaps her fingers, a dry, popping sound. “Time series analysis on the transaction log from the auctions,” she says, leading you to wonder whether you’re surrounded by complete nutters or just very, very strange detectives.

  Jack shakes his head. “I’d better go see if Mike’s got a list—”

  You reach a decision. Funny how Marcus Hackman’s bottom-feeding scum are a lot more human than he is, isn’t it? “No you won’t. We will. Because if you find anything, and there are names attached, I’ll be wanting a wee word with them.”

  It turns out that nobody actually knows what’s been stolen.

  “You’ve got to understand, it’s a distributed database,” says Couper, looking flustered—when you and Jack found him he was hunkered down in a nest of big flat screens full of tiny coloured text with a ragged left margin, and it took a tap on the shoulder before he’d look up—“we don’t track everything centrally.”

  “What about the journal logs?” asks Jack. Someone behind you snaps their fingers.

  “Well sure, but we’re typically tracking close to a million transactions per minute. Good luck if you expect us to grep that.” He kicks his chair back from his workstation and turns to face you. “You’d have to track the user handles from when they logged in—”

  “Can’t you put up a notice somewhere?” asks Elaine. “Ask for information.” She pauses.

  Couper doesn’t give her a breathing space. “Sure, but nobody would—”

  “Tell them it’s to register an insurance claim,” she interrupts, raising her voice. Someone’s been taking assertiveness classes, you realize. “That Hayek Associates are trying to get the items back, but will be unable to return unclaimed items.”

  “But they’ll claim all sorts of shit that they never had!”

  “Really?” She gives Couper a withering look: “I’d never have guessed. Poor innocent me, nobody told me that people lie while I was studying for my master’s in forensic accountancy…”

  “But what use is it?” Couper looks upset, more than anything: “It doesn’t make sense!”

  “It’s simple enough. Most people will tell the truth, especially when we tell them we just want to know their five top items, so we can verify them against our database.”

  “But there isn’t a database—” Couper stops dead.

  Elaine nods, smiling a little smile. “But they don’t know that, do they?”

  “Oh. Right, well then.” Couper shakes his head.

  “I’ll need admin access to the auction-houses,” Jack adds.

  Couper splutters. “You can’t be serious! They’re in this to make money. They could sue us into the ground if we let you mess with their stock—”

  “Read-only,” Jack says firmly. “I need to write a scraper that can trawl their database for hot property.”

  “Talk to Wayne, or Beccy. I can’t give you access without their sayso.” Sam crosses his arms stubbornly. “Go on. I can’t help you.”

  Elaine looks at you and raises an eyebrow. “Sounds like a plan
,” you tell her. The thought of giving Wayne Richardson, Prize Twat, a bad case of indigestion holds a curious appeal for you. “Let me handle this.”

  ELAINE: Game of Spooks

  It’s about eight fifteen when you finally get out of Hayek Associates’ offices and summon a taxi to whisk you back to your hotel room. You are, not to put it too pointedly, dog-tired. On the plus side, at least you made some progress. That cop, Sergeant Smith, looks like she’s going to be a useful contact, and Jack is certainly paying his way. When you left him back at the bunker, he was elbow deep in whatever it is that programmers do, oblivious to everything else. Which is kind of annoying, because he’s about the only person up here who you know who isn’t a co-worker, and now you’ve got to face an evening in a strange city on your own, but what the hell. They call this place the Athens of the North—there’s got to be something you can do by yourself on a summer night, hasn’t there?

  Well, no.

  Back in your room, you have a quick shower, then check the eating-out guide, by which time it’s past nine and you’re half past hungry. You’re not keen on going back to the places you went into with Jack, not on your own, and the room service menu looks okay, so you order up a big green salad in penance for yesterday’s business meeting, then it’s ten, and the hotel gym’s closed, and where the fuck did the day go? It’s even worse than a weekday in London—at least there you can break the commute home in a cocktail bar with some friends.

  It’s ten thirty and you’re glumly contemplating an early night and a seven o’clock session in the gym when your phone rings. You look at the display with a sinking feeling: It’s a particularly tedious LARP called SPOOKS, a real-time game in which you’re acting your parts in a shadowy pan-European intelligence agency locked in a struggle for global hegemony with the forces of Chinese military intelligence, the Russian FSB, and, of course, the CIA.

  “Yes?” You try not to snap.

  “Elaine Barnaby? This is Spooks Control. Are you busy right now?”

  You glance around your beautifully decorated and utterly sterile worker cell: “Not particularly. You know I’m in Edinburgh?”