Halting State hs-1

by Charles Stross

  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 pleasure. 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 coordinates 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.
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  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 coordinates.”

  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!”

  “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.

  There’s a short-bladed knife embedded in the remains of what used to be your pocket folding keyboard, and your hand is dripping blood where you grabbed hold of the blade. Elaine is coming through the door, looking annoyed. “He stabbed me,” you say, and sit down hard on the nearest chair. “He…stabbed…me…?”

  The keyboard caught it. No surprise there—you rarely go outdoors without a keyboard, mouse, phone, spare PDA, and selection of witty repartee—but you’re at a loss for words. You flick your glasses back to the fight scene as Elaine swears and grabs your left hand. The Orc is backed into a corner, whaling away at you with a virtual pigsticker.

  WHATS UP? IMs Venkmann.

  “Track me in Zone,” you tell the half-empty room as Elaine presses a tissue onto your hand. “I’m where the loot is, and the guy beating up on me knows how it got there.”

  “Next time leave the fighting to me,” Elaine tells you. She sounds pissed.

  “But he stabbed me—” Your hand is hurting.

  “No, he stabbed a piece of junk in one of your pockets.”

  “I’m going to nail him!” You twitch your right hand, unlimbering the blunderbuss of +6 dungeon clearing.

  “No, you’re going to come with me and file a report to Security, then we’re going to sit down and have a nice cup of tea and a chat with Constable Friendly. Believe me, you don’t want to be chasing after a violent assailant—”

  “No, I mean, in Avalon Six.” You’re seeing red now. The blunderbuss booms, sparking and filling the cellar with smoke. There’s a very badly damaged Orc in front of you, backing desperately towards a doorway, as Theodore T. Bear snarls a bass rumble and reloads. “I said I was here for the auction, and he freaked. But I found the loot.”

  “You.” She crowds you back against the table and abruptly reaches forward and pulls your gaming glasses right off your face.

  “Hey!” you protest, nose to nose with her, so uncomfortably close that you can smell her breath, a mixture of stale coffee and a faint fragrance you can’t quite identify, eyeball to eyeball with her worried expression. “I was getting somewhere—”

  “Russell can track him through Zone. You’ve got a confirmed ID, but more importantly, you got yourself assaulted. This isn’t a game, Jack. You don’t want to find him! You want the police to deal with it. Don’t worry about evidence, there are two security cams in every room and hallway.”

  You feel embarrassed: She’s absolutely right. You’re also feeling a little shaky. You don’t know quite how you expected Wu Chen to react, but trying to stab you and making a run for it—if he’d had a real sharpie instead of a penknife, or if he’d missed the keyboard, which you’re going to have to replace, dammit—it’s outside the playbook and there’s no GM to appeal to. “Crap,” you mumble.

  “You can say that again.” Elaine pauses. For a moment you made naked eye contact with her, unscreened by enhanced reality: It’s acutely embarrassing, the kind of out-of-context behaviour that business etiquette is intended to avoid. She looks shaken, too, but she’s keeping a good lid on it. “Come on, let’s get you patched up,” she says, taking a step backwards, and breaking whatever information transfer it was that was going on between you via some kind of sub-verbal mammalian protocol layer.

  Then she takes you by the undamaged hand and leads you back into the real world.

  SUE: Pigs in a China Shop

  By the time you reach your destination in Leith, there’s a full-dress panic in progress. Liz has I
M’d Detective Superintendent Verity direct—with Kemal from Europol’s encouragement—and Verity has hit the panic button and sent every warm body south of Pilton on a wild goose chase to cordon off the block around the warehouse on Lindsay Road. Which is more than slightly inconvenient, because it’s about a hundred metres up the road from the National Executive complex on Victoria Quay, which is home to about five thousand civil service PowerPoint pushers and the population of designer furniture stores, ethnic restaurants, exclusive health clubs, real ale pubs, and cheap hookers who serve them. If Verity—or his boss, because this kind of shit tends to rise to the top—has to evacuate Victoria Quay, Questions Will be Asked in Parliament, not to mention generating many megabytes of editorial wittering in the virtual birdcage liners, and possibly some discreet resignations if the shit overflows and ends up in the air-conditioning. In fact, you wouldn’t be surprised if Verity is crapping his britches by now: This has the potential to turn into an Ian Blair moment, the kind of policing SNAFU that remains the stuff of legend decades later. Kemal and his crack squad of dark-suited mirrorshade-wearing super-cops may be used to this sort of shit, but Edinburgh’s a wee little regional boutique capital of some half million souls, about as far off the terrorism map as Oklahoma City. Which probably explains why events unfold like the Keystone Kops on crack, only with better special effects.

  The remote control BMWs slow down as they hit Starbank Road and rumble alongside the docks, then pull in just past the old Newhaven fish market. “Everybody out,” says the man in black. “We walk from here.” There’s a vanload of uniforms parked up ahead: They’re setting up a barricade and preparing to divert the flow of traffic into town. It’s going to cause a real clusterfuck in short order, because half the delivery trucks for the Ocean Terminal Shopping Centre, and all the consumers, go this way—not to mention the buses and the Line Two supertrams. In fact, it’s going to be nearly as bad as that time some prize tit invited Tony Blair to come out of retirement and give the graduation speech up at Heriot-Watt. “Liz, are you sure you need me for this? Because Mac’s going to be needing every warm body he can get—”