Halting State hs-1

by Charles Stross

  “And what’s the objective of their game?” you ask.

  “As far as we can tell, it’s capture the flag—the first team to take control of the backbone routers of a medium-sized EU member state wins. And guess what? They were all set to succeed, because some bastard—no, I have no idea who it is—leaked them a copy of the backbone authentication pad. They’ve still got it, and they’re running all over our telecoms infrastructure in hobnailed boots, because we don’t dare shut down and reboot everything until we know where they got the keys. And you know what? We wouldn’t have had any idea at all, if one of their low-level grunts hadn’t hatched a plan to make some money on the side. Which is where you come in…”

  JACK: Sex Offender

  Two hours after Michaels drops his cluster bomb of revelations, you stumble out of the rabbit-hole under Hayek Associates, exhausted, hungry, and not sure whether to be angry or scared.

  At least Elaine looks as coolly imperturbable and spotless as ever: Maybe her suit’s made of Teflon. She glances up at the grey overcast, already spitting fat, isolated rain-drops in preparation for the main program. “Let’s get you home,” she says, and taps her earpiece with a knowing expression. “We need to talk.”

  “You don’t need to,” you say, because it’s the right thing to do, according to the manners gland (which normally reports directly to the mummy lobe, except the mummy lobe is off-line right now, gibbering and sucking its thumb). “We could head back to your hotel.”

  “Rubbish.” She looks at you oddly. “You’re at the end of your tether. Which way is the bus-stop?”

  “It’s just uphill from the end of the drive…”

  Another five minutes, and you’re ensconced in adjacent seats on a two-thirds-empty LRT special, slowly climbing Drum Brae with a whining from its rapeseed-fuelled power pack that bodes ill for the future. It’s electric blue inside, with orange grab rails, and the sky outside the advertisement-obscured windows is a louring slate-grey promise of things to come. Your mind’s spinning like a Scottish Hydro turbine, chasing your own tail from pillar to post. Tracking down the Orcish thieves and their stolen stash of vorpal blades is neither here nor there anymore—what’s important is keeping your head, while all around you other folks are losing theirs to the snicker-snack of the twenty-first-century yellow peril.

  “Did you buy that line of bullshit?” you ask her.

  “You’re tired,” she repeats. She rolls her eyes sideways, and you follow the direction of her gaze, coming up hard against the little black eyeball of a camera. Oops. No wonder they call these fuckers Optares—there’re at least eight of them visible, and no telling if they’re broken or—“Let’s get home. No chit-chat.”

  Paranoid thoughts begin spooling through your mind, following a multiplicity of threads. You’ve just come out of Hayek Associates, with a whole bunch of random fragments and the blinding revelation that Michaels’s operation has been penetrated, and he either doesn’t know, or isn’t going to tell you. Now, let’s suppose that Michaels was right, that one or other of the Beijing clans have their hooks into, well, everything. Can you get home safely? They’ve got the buses’ cams—no more fallible video recorders behind the driver’s seat, not after 7/7—and the traffic cams and…but no, HA pointedly don’t have any cameras overlooking their car-park, do they? And face recognition off of a camera is notoriously CPU-intensive and not the kind of thing a quantum shoe-box under the server rack will help with, not with the current state of the art. Good. If you’d called a taxi, you might be up shit creek again, but buses still have drivers to extract the pocket change from tourists and ne’er-do-wells who don’t have a RiderPass. It’s not anonymous transport—that probably doesn’t exist anymore, unless you go on horseback or ride a bicycle—but it’s the next best thing: Transport with no real-time ID tracking. The bad guys might well know where you live and where HA’s offices are, and make the logical public transport connection…or would they? Who knows? Put yourself in the head of a puppet master in an office in downtown Guanzhou, pulling the strings for an ARG played by foreign devils. This is not a game. Which means—

  The bus lurches away from the kerb and trundles towards your stop. You reach up and push the button, then stand: Catching Elaine’s eye, you nod at the exit. “Next stop.”

  Pervasive game-play. They’ve got reality by the short-and-curlies, thanks to the cryptography gap Michaels kindly pointed out to you. “It’s not as if this stuff is new,” he explained. “The NSA were doing it years before anyone else, before their recent unfortunate circumstances.” They got Elsie, Michaels tells you—and there’s a big black belly-laugh hanging over a yawning pit of terror you don’t have the guts to think about yet. Michaels hung your virtual alter ego out as bait, and now you and Elaine are it, the plot coupon at the heart of the next level of the game that he is spinning for the unseen masters of reality in Beijing. If Chen—Team Red’s non-virtual eyes and ears on the ground, a foreign student at large in Scotland—hadn’t fucked up by getting greedy and trying to abuse his access to their key cracker to line his own pocket, you’d all still be flailing around in the dark as opposed to this turbid twilight.

  How do you roll up a foreign spy network when the spies don’t even know what they’re doing? Not to mention your own counter-espionage fools…

  You’re on the pavement now, and the rain is splattering around you. You glance, longingly, in the direction of Burt’s Bar, just over the road—good beer and excellent pies—but there’ll be too many people about, too many pairs of flapping ears and unblinking video eyes and mobile phones that double as bugging devices. And you’re feeling bruised and paranoid enough that you need some privacy. “This way,” you tell Elaine, still not quite sure why she insisted on coming home with you rather than having a natter in some coffee shop.

  You shamble across the cobbled road at a near trot, turn towards Glenogle and your wee Colonies house, and the heavens open all at once. Suddenly you’re dashing for cover beneath an artillery barrage of water-bombs, Elaine stampeding along behind you—and it’s a couple of hundred metres to go. While you’re both paused at a kerbside to check for traffic, an SUV aquaplanes past, malevolently hugging the gutter and spraying a mucky sheet of water across your legs. Elaine swears quietly behind your back as you cross the road, but then you’re at the right side street, and heading for the cast-iron gate.

  She grabs your arm. “Stop,” she hisses.

  “But it’s pouring—” You stop. “Yes?”

  “This the door?” You nod. “Give me your keys, okay? And hang back.”

  Oh, for fuck’s sake. “I’m not stupid,” you grunt. And you drop into SPOOKS mode and scan the hedges and parked cars to either side for signs, eyeballs wide open for watchers and lurking booby-traps. Sidling up your own garden path like you expect to find a ninja hiding in the recycling bin would make you feel like an idiot even without the cold rain dripping down the back of your neck, but you’ve done this often enough in role-play that the tradecraft is almost automatic: And then you’re at your own keyhole, glancing round the door-frame for signs and portents like anonymous black boxes that weren’t there the day before.

  Nothing. And it’s your house. As you stick the key in the lock, you say, over your shoulder, “Is your phone switched off?”

  “Whoops.” She’s fumbling in the darkness and the rain as you step inside and turn the hall light on.

  “Come on in and close the door, then.”

  There’s no rain inside the house except for that which drips off your sodden jacket and trousers and trickles down your hair and into your eyes. You stumble into the hall wearily and shrug out of your soaking jacket. Reaching into the pockets, you pull out your phone—off—and your keyboard (also off, probably terminally so) and glasses. The sound of the cloud-burst fades as Elaine locks the front door and stomps her feet dry on the mat. “I’m soaked. That fucking Chelsea tractor really got me.”

  “Me, too. I think they do it deliberately.” Drive wi
th their near-side wheels in the overflowing gutter, just to inundate the automotively challenged who can’t afford the ruinous road tax. You kick your trainers off, stumble up to the bedroom door, and grab the dressing-gown off the back of the door. “Here, make yourself at home. Is your suit machine-washable?”

  “Of course.” She looks at you warily, then takes the dressing-gown. “Hey, you don’t need to—”

  “It’s no trouble. Look, let me stick some real coffee in the pot, then we can talk.”

  “Talk is good.” She looks around the living room, at the tangles of wires plugged into the overloaded ten-way gang in the corner and the bookcase with its middle shelves bowed beneath a stack of old d20 game supplements and graphic novels; then she plants herself in the far corner of the newer of the two IKEA futons that constitute 90 per cent of the soft furnishings and bends down to remove her shoes. You shake your head and duck into the kitchen to grapple with your feelings. It’s smaller than the galley of an Airbus, but you can get the coffee started while giving her a modicum of privacy. And it gives you a chance to gibber quietly for a couple of minutes and try to calm yourself down.

  When you emerge again, calm and collected and bearing two reasonably clean mugs full of organic fairtrade espresso, it’s to find a twilight surprise. Elaine is bending over the power hub, systematically following cables from wall wart to blinkenlight. She seems to be trying to turn everything off. She’s wearing your dressing-gown: Her trousers and jacket are an untidy puddle in the middle of the rug. You clear your throat. “Oh, hi,” she says. “Any idea how many gadgets you’ve got plugged in here?”

  “Um. Too many?” She’s got you bang to rights. “What are you doing?”

  She pushes the off button on the video receiver. “If we’re going to talk, we might as well do it in private. Besides, the lights were bugging me. I counted sixteen before I lost track.”

  A moment’s stock-taking tells you that she’s not about to do any damage—everything here’s an embedded appliance except for the household disk farm next to the fireplace. “One moment.” You bend down and rummage for the wall plug, then flick the switch. Everything on the power hub flickers and dies simultaneously. “That do you?”

  “Let’s see.” She picks up her phone from the precarious pile of coffee-ringed magazines on the side-table and frowns at it. “Yeah. The snitch is muzzled.”

  “Snitch?”

  “Spooks Control sent me a bug detector. Something about it reprogramming my phone’s processor to sniff for different emission sources? Does that sound right?”

  It sounds like a high-end cognitive radio application, and probably illegal as hell—one that can override the built-in standards firmware and turn a handset into a scanner that can monitor any radio-based protocol its antenna can pull in. (Radio interference, after all, is purely an artefact of buggy receiver design.) Back when you thought SPOOKS was a game, it would just have been a prop, but now…“It’s plausible. What does it say?”

  “It said something in here was transmitting, but it stopped when you pulled the plug.” She closes her phone. “Sound like a bug to you?”

  You glance at the streaming media hub, LEDs dark and lifeless. That’s your musical life, buddy, right there in the corner. “Might be.” If someone was going to plant a bug on you, where better to put it than in the firmware of a gizmo that’s transmitting all the time? “Coffee?”

  “Thanks.” She accepts the mug gratefully. “About your washing-machine—”

  “It’ll take about three hours, if you still want to use it. But I can lend you a spare pair of jeans and a jacket if you don’t.”

  “You don’t need to, but thanks.” A certain tension goes out of her. “Show me where you keep the machine?” The washer/dryer is under the kitchen work-top. It’s fully automatic, setting its cycle from the RFIDs in her jacket and trousers. Thirty seconds later she curls up on the futon opposite you with her coffee mug, eyes dark and serious in the gloom. (You hadn’t realized just quite how much illumination the various gizmos contributed to your den.) “Okay. What do you think is going on?”

  “Well—” You stop, half-tongue-tied by the sight of her sitting opposite you, large as life, wearing your dressing-gown. There’s a subtext here that you’d barely allowed yourself to notice, consciously: Do you suppose she’s here because she likes you? The mummy lobe wants to kick up a censorious fuss, but it’s at a loss for words: You’re not terribly good at dealing with the rules of the game Elaine seems to be playing, or even recognizing when a game’s in progress, so you retreat hastily in the direction of something you understand.

  “I think we can trust Barry about as far as we can throw him. He’s definitely part of SPOOKS, and SPOOKS ties into the police or intelligence services at some level—otherwise, we wouldn’t have gotten the taxi ride. And he’s fed us a great story-line. Beyond that…”

  She stares at you from the darkness. “Your niece, Elsie. You’re…you don’t seem to be worrying about her. Is that just a story? Jack?”

  The roaring in your ears is like the engine of an oncoming juggernaut on the wrong side of the road, headlights blazing and horn blaring. “I can’t”—don’t want to—“face…”

  “Jack?” She leans forward, visibly concerned. “What is it?”

  You force yourself to take a breath and try to nail down the mess of emotions she’s stirred up. “I can’t…look, trust me on this?”

  “Trust you?” She’s still tense.

  Another deeper breath. “It’s complicated. I’ll try to explain later. For now, let’s just say there’s stuff Michaels knows about if he’s plugged into the police. And there’s nothing—from here—I can do for her.”

  “But I’d have thought—” She stops, with a visible effort. “You’re sure?”

  You nod, not trusting yourself to say any more. You feel shaky. It’s all true—Elsie is beyond your ability to help—but you don’t like to think about it. It’s just too painful.

  Elaine sits back, looking thoughtful. After a moment, she glances away. “You trust Barry to look after Elsie, but you don’t trust his operation as far as you can throw him. Is that right?”

  That’s an easy one to catch. “They’ve been penetrated by the other side. And what about the rest of it? That piece of paper? How do we know it’s genuine?”

  She shakes her head. You trace the outline of her face against the dim light from the street filtering through the net curtains. “The paperwork’s the real thing. Either that, or the cop who handed it to us wasn’t. And with the lights and the way he bent the speed limit on the way over…no.”

  “Bugger.” You take an experimental sip of coffee. “Okay. So SPOOKS is basically a tool that permits an electronic intelligence agency to run a metric shitload of unwitting human intelligence agents, weekend spies. They trained us, and now we’ve been activated to deal with a threat. The alleged threat, the one they say they want us to look at, is a different kind of gaming gambit: a botnet attack on a small European state, where the zombies are obedient human gamers who think they’re just having fun and the director is a procedural content generator—”

  “Huh.” The tip of her nose crinkles slightly when she frowns. “I’m not a gamer, you’ll have to define your terms.”

  “Terms?” You back-track, trying to work out what confused her. “Procedural content?” She nods. “Content is, well, the map of the dungeon, location of treasure, where the monsters live, what the wallpaper looks like. Any game is full of the stuff, and it’s expensive to do by hand—you need tile illustrators, narrators, musicians, programmers, a whole bunch of skills. So over the past couple of decades the industry’s put a lot of effort into procedural game design—AI tools that can design a virtual-reality environment on the fly for players to explore. It’s not just multiplayer games like Avalon Four; there’s been work on ARG—artificial reality games—that can take a set of starting hints and design a conspiracy to drop on top of the players. You know, generate scripts for phon
e calls, order up custom gadgets to be planted at certain locations, hire actors…?”

  She looks blank, the same way she did right before you hit on your spreadsheet-as-programming metaphor, but this time you can’t quite see a way around it. “Artificial reality?”

  “Yeah! SPOOKS is a variant on it, heavily mediated via the net, but you get ones in which there are actors and sets—you sign up to be inside the story. Like I LOVE BEES—that was the first one to go large—or DARK DESIGNS.”

  “Pay to be inside the story.” She looks distant. “So, uh. Suppose someone’s set up a content generator to try and hijack a country. Bribe police constable A to ignore game-player B—who thinks it’s a game—to carry bomb C (which is a firework, modified by a pyrotechnics geek who thinks they’re building it for a special effects outfit) into a parliament building where useful idiot D will install the detonator. That sort of thing. Right?”

  “Something like that.” You take another sip of coffee. “They’re exploiting our shitty wide-open crypto infrastructure, of course. Everything, phones, Internet, the lot, runs over TCP/IP these days—blame some really stupid decisions back in the oughties. They should have known better; it’s hackable as hell, so, in an attempt to lock things down, the government decreed that access to the national-level routers, the boxes that manage all the traffic, would be secured using a code called a one-time pad. OTP codes are great—they’re totally unbreakable if you don’t have a copy of the key—but they’ve got a big drawback: You need a copy of the key, a long sequence of random numbers, at each end-point. And if someone who’s not supposed to have a copy of the key gets hold of it, the whole thing is blown wide open. Anyway, what Michaels was telling us was, someone leaked those keys to Team Red. As the actual connections between routers are secured using symmetric cyphers that are easy to crack if you’ve got a quantum processor, it means they can snoop on anything. The National ID Register—never mind that it’s poisoned, full of bogus records—the ID cards themselves use last-generation public-key encryption that a quantum processor can break almost instantly. And if Team Red have got a copy of the backbone keys, they can impersonate anyone they want to be, up to a point. The content engine can fake the ID of the first minister, but it still takes a voice actor to impersonate the first minister on the phone, right? So they’ve got this amazing backdoor, but wherever possible, they’re doing stuff via the net. And as the net is so heavily surveilled, they’re focussing on the bits that are hardest to monitor—stuff that goes on inside the big distributed games in Zonespace, where the rules change from minute to minute, and the players can implement their own in-game game engines.”