Halting State

by Charles Stross

  “Now. Who’s first?”

  ELAINE: Stitch-up

  En garde!

  You are standing in the nave of a seventeenth-century church, its intricately carved stone surfaces dimly illuminated by candles. Your right foot is forward, knee slightly bent, and you can feel the gentle curve of the worn flagstone beneath the toes of the hand-stitched leather slipper you’re wearing. Your right arm is raised, and your hand extended as if you are pointing a gun diagonally across your chest, muzzle wavering towards the roof of the west wing: With your left hand, you support your right, just as if you’re holding a heavy pistol. Heavy pistol about sums it up—the long sword may be made of steel and over a metre long, but it weighs no more than a Colt Python, and it’s balanced so that it feels like an extension of your fingertips.

  You are facing a man who is about to try to kill you. He’s wearing a black Kevlar-reinforced motor-cycle jacket with lead weights Velcro’d to it, plus jeans, DMs, and a protective helmet with a cluster of camera lenses studding its blank-faced shell. Like you, he’s holding a long sword of fifteenth-century design, its steel cross-guards shielding his hands, which are, in turn, raised, like a baseball striker poised ready for the ball. But you don’t see the biker jacket or DMs because, like your opponent, you’re also wearing a full facial shield with head-up display, and it’s editing him into a full suit of Milanese plate, the Renaissance equivalent of a main battle tank.

  “Let’s try that again,” you offer, tensing.

  “Sure.” He rocks slightly on the balls of his feet, and for an instant you have the surreal sense that he’s not holding a sword at all—it’s a cricket bat, and he’s got it the wrong way up.

  “Your mother wears army boots!”

  You’re not sure that’s the right thing to say to a late fifteenth-century main battle tank, but he takes it in the spirit you intended—and more importantly, he spots you changing guard, lowering the point of your sword. And he goes for you immediately, nothing subtle about it, just a diagonal swing, pivoting forward so he can slice a steak off you.

  Of course, this is just what you expected when you twisted your wrist. You dip your point and grab your blade with your left hand, blocking him with a clang. He tries to grab your blade with his left hand, but you keep turning, raising the point—you’re using your sword like a short stabbing spear now—and hook the tip into his armpit like a one-and-a-half-kilo can-opener while hooking his knee with your left foot.

  Unlike a modern main battle talk, the old-fashioned version can fall on its arse.

  “Ouch! Dammit. Point to you, my lady.”

  “That’s your brachial artery right there,” you comment, taking a deep breath as you watch the bright gouts of virtual blood draining from him.

  You take a step back, and your enemy does likewise as soon as he’s picked himself up. Both of you let your blades droop. “How did you know about the army boots?” he asks.

  Whoops. “Lucky guess?”

  “Oh. I thought maybe you knew her.” There’s disappointment in his voice, but the sealed helm opposite doesn’t give anything away.

  “No, sorry.” Your heart’s still pounding from the stress of the moment—thirty seconds of combat feels like thirty minutes in the gym or three hours slaving over a hot spreadsheet—but a certain guilty curiosity takes over. “Was she a Goth or a hippy?”

  “Neither: She was in the army.” His foot comes forward, and his sword comes up and twitches oddly, and before you can shift feet, it thumps you on the shoulder hard enough to let you know you’ve been disarmed—literally, if there was a cutting edge on these things. “Ahem, I mean, she was into the army. New Model Army, dog-on-a-string crusties from Bradford.”

  “I know who they are,” you snap, taking two steps back and raising one hand to rub your collar-bone, which is not as well padded as it ought to be and consequently smarts like crazy. “And in a minute I want you to show me what you just did there.” No camisole tops at work for a few days, you remind yourself, which is kind of annoying because you can live without the extra ironing and the knowledge that Mike landed one on you. (You overheard him telling a newbie “She’s got reflexes like a greased whippet on crystal meth” the other week, and you were walking on air for days: It’s true, but Mike’s got extra reach and upper-body muscle, and all you have to do is let yourself get distracted, and he’ll teach you just what that mediaeval MBT can do.) “But first, let someone else use the floor.”

  You retire to the pews at the left of the aisle, sheathing your sword and stripping your headgear as Eric and Matthew take your place, joking about something obscure and work-related. You drop out of haptic space and without your eyewear continually repainting him in armour, Mike reverts to his workaday appearance, a biker with a borg head transplant. Then he strips off the battered Nokia GameCrown to reveal a sweaty brown ponytail and midthirties face, and shakes his head, presumably at seeing you as yourself for the first time in an hour, rather than a femme fatale with farthingales and a falchion. (And that’s not so flattering, is it? Because you may not be overweight, but let’s face it, dear, people mistake you for a librarian. And while you work with books, you’re not exactly involved in publishing.) “I was wondering if I could have a word of your advice, Elaine,” he says as he slouches onto the unforgiving bench seat.

  “What, a technical issue?” You raise a damp eyebrow. Mike’s been doing this stuff years longer than you have, since before AR and OLARP games began to show, practically since back in the Stone Age when you either did dress-up re-enactment or actual martial arts (and never the twain shall meet); and aside from your oiled-canine reflexes, he’s basically just plain better than you’ll ever be. “I suppose…”

  “It’s not about that,” he says, sounding uncertain. The penny drops, just as he goes on to say: “It’s about the car insurance.”

  You get this from time to time, although there are blessings to be counted: It’s not like you’re a lawyer or a doctor or something. “I don’t work that end of the business,” you remind him.

  “Yeah, I know that. But you know Sally was in a shunt on the M25 last week?” (Sally is Mike’s wife: a bottle-blonde middle-management type who tolerates his night out with the lads once a week with an air of mild, weary contempt. You suppose they must see something in each other, but…) “We got this bill for the recovery truck and repairs, then the other driver’s claiming private medical expenses, and the thing is, she swears there was another car involved, that didn’t stop.”

  You’ve got a sinking feeling that you know what’s coming, but you can’t just leave Mike dangling so you restrict yourself to a noncommittal “Hmm?”

  Eric and Matthew are poised on the floor in front of you, almost motionless, knees and elbows occasionally flexing slightly. None of the chatter you and Mike go in for. A couple of the others are working out, warming up in the vestry, and you can hear Jo’s boom box thudding out an obscure Belgian industrial stream as they grunt and groan about another day at the office. “She was driving along in the slow lane near junction nineteen, heading towards Heathrow, behind the guy she tail-ended. Doing about ninety, there weren’t any trucks about, but traffic was heavy. Anyway, she says a white Optare van overtook them both, pulled in front of the Beemer, and braked, and by the time she was on the hard shoulder there was no sign of it.”

  “Hmm.” You carefully put your sword down, then nudge it under the bench where nobody will trip over it. “You haven’t said ‘swoop and squat’ yet, but that’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the damage?”

  “Well, Sally’s carrying six points on her license and she had that car-park smash last year. She’ll lose her no-claims discount, which’ll cost us about eight hundred extra when we renew the insurance.”

  “Ouch.” Your bruised clavicle throbs in sympathy. Driving’s an expensive pastime even before you factor in diesel at 5 a litre, speed cameras every quarter of a kilometre on all the A-r
oads, and insurance companies trying to rape the motorists to recoup their losses on the flood-plain property slump. “Who are you with?”

  “Nationwide.”

  Well, that’s a relief—an old-fashioned mutual society, instead of a pay-by-credit-card web server owned by Nocturnal Aviation Associates Dot Com (motto: “We fly by night”) out of the back of a cybercafé in Lagos. “That’s good news. What’s the Beemer trying to dun you for?”

  “Sixteen thousand in repairs—listen, it’s not a current model, Sally said she thought it was about ten years old—two thousand for roadside recovery, and, you’re going to love this, nine thousand in fees for orthopaedic treatment. They’re claiming whiplash injury.”

  “I see. Nearly thirty grand?” You shake your head. Mike’s right, that’s nearly an order of magnitude over the odds for a simple tailend shunt on a motorway at rush hour. Even at ninety kilometres per hour. And whiplash—“Listen, all BMWs have been fitted with head restraints since forever, and they’ve had side-impact and frontal air bags for at least two decades. That kind of claim means they’re talking surgery, which means time off work, so they’re gearing up to hit you with a loss-of-earnings. I expect they’ll try to drop another thirty grand on the bill in a month or two.”

  Mike’s face was sweaty to begin with: Now it’s turning the colour of the votive candles they’d be burning if this was still a functioning church. “But we’ve got a ten per cent excess…”

  “Right. So you’ve got to make sure the other guy doesn’t get his hands on it, don’t you? You’re right about it sounding like a swoop and squat, and that medical claim is a classic. Medical confidentiality is a great blind for snipers, but we can poke a hole in it if there’s a fraud investigation in train. Now, Nationwide still have some human folks on the web in the Customer Retention and Abuse groups, and what you need to do is to get this escalated off the call-centre ladder until a human being sees it, then you need to hammer away.”

  “But how do I…?”

  You start checking off points on your fingertips. “You start by getting Sally to offer them her car’s black-box log. Once you know exactly where she was when the incident happened—the black-box GPS will tell you that—you tell them to serve a FOIA disclosure notice on the Highways Agency for their nearby camera footage—if they won’t listen at first, I’ll talk you through doing that yourself. That will tell you whether the Optare was involved, in which case you can kick Abuse into opening a fraudulent claim file on the other driver. Then you can go after the medical side. If the other driver has a doctor’s note, pull their BMA records and see if they’re legit—I’ll bet you a bottle of Chardonnay there’s a reprimand on file because doctors who’re willing to diagnose fictional ailments for cash rarely stop at one. Once you’ve got that, you can go after the vehicle with a statutory vehicle history disclosure notice—that’s what the police use on you if they think you’re driving a chop job—and then you can query the vehicle’s book value. At which point, if you’re right and it’s a swoop and squat, NU will hit up their insurer for the full value of the claim and blacklist them, while indemnifying you. Your insurer should do all of this automatically if you get their Abuse team’s attention, but you don’t have to wait—the forms are all online, you can do it from your phone, and once you’ve got the ball rolling, your insurer will pick it up.”

  Mike goes glassy-eyed halfway through your explanation, but that’s okay: He’s nodding like a parcel-shelf ornament, which means he’s got the essential message that he’s anything but helpless. Civilians confronted by an alien bureaucracy always feel helpless at first, but once they realize there’s a way to get what they want, they usually recover. “I think I got some of that—”

  “I’ll email you tomorrow.” From the office, in your copious free time, you’ll off-handedly throw him a FAQ: Nailing Petty Insurance Fraud 101. Mike asking you to help with Sally’s fraudulent car claim is a bit like calling in an air strike to deal with a primary-school bully; but he’s your friend, and besides, if anyone in the office notices and makes a fuss, you can point out that it’s good public relations.

  “Thanks, ever so.” With classic English understatement, he looks more grateful than he sounds.

  While you were talking, Eric and Matthew have somehow gone from twitching slightly to Matthew lying on his back with the tip of Eric’s sword touching his stomach. As you watch, Eric brings up his point in salute and backs out of the duelling space. You stand up, feeling an itchy urge to claw your way back out of your work headspace, and turn to Mike: “Best of three rounds?”

  JACK: Steaming

  Debug mode:

  You are sitting, half-asleep, in an armchair. Your eyes are closed, and you feel very unsteady. Your head’s full of a postviral haze, the cotton-wool of slowed reflexes and dulled awareness. In stark contrast to the normal state of affairs, you can hear yourself think—there’s just one little voice wobbling incessantly about from side to side of your cranial prison, which is no surprise after the amount of skunk you just smoked. In the distance, the chiming clangour of tram-bells sets a glorious harmony reverberating in icy splendour across the rooftops. And you are asking yourself, like the witchy-weird voice in a video of an old Laurie Anderson performance:

  “What am I doing here?”

  Restart:

  There’s a ringing in your ears. Oops, must have drifted off. That’s the trouble with smoking shit to help yourselves forget—

  Yourselves? Well yeah, there’s you, and there’s Mitch, and there’s Budgie. Tom couldn’t come because he was busy being newly married and responsible, but between you and Mitch and Budgie, you’re three of the four corners of the former Social Networking Architecture Team, and you’ve flown out here on a budget shuttle from Turnhouse to get falling-down legless and scientifically test all that research into whether cannabis destroys short-term memory, because god help you, it’s better than remembering how badly you’ve been shafted.

  Which is how come you’re sitting in a half-collapsed armchair, stoned out of your box, on the narrow strip of flagstoned pavement alongside the Prinsengracht canal, listening to alarm bells—

  And contemplating the wreckage of your career, after four years in the elite Dirty Tricks wing of LupuSoft, working on special projects for nobbling your corporate master’s rivals, then a transfer to the relatively clean game-play side of STEAMING. Four years of top-secret death marches and psychotic deadline chases in beige-walled cubicle hell (when you’d rather have been sailing the wine-dark seas); frenzied developer boot camps held in sinister wire-fenced floodlit compounds in the Grampians; weekends spent following the team at home and away events with a laser range-finder and a dynamics package (and wasn’t it fun trying to avoid that big ned from Portobello who’d got it into his head that you’re some kind of head-hunter from down south who’s gonnae gut his side, and kept trying to get his posse to stomp your head in?). And all the while you’re living off peanut-butter sandwiches and stale sushi take-aways while your waistline expands and your visual range contracts as you stare at a screen the size of a secondary-school whiteboard all day long and half of the night.

  Then there were the dying weekends, weekends stolen from the company management by sheer bloody-minded smack-downs with HR so you could go back to Rochdale to spend some time with your ma, who was in a bad way from the lung cancer, or visit Sophie and Bill and the nieces. Until one day Ma wasn’t there anymore, and the rest of it, and that’s you in that corner there, you with your sixty-thousand-euro salary and your legacy that went partway to a poky wee place in the Colonies and a mortgage you won’t pay off before you retire, and no fucking life whatsoever. (Well, there’s your knitting habit and your criminal record: But that’s just fodder for your OCD.) This is your life, it’s been your life since you clawed your way from CS graduate to start-up seven years ago, and your so-called life is such a bijou bourgeois piece of shit that there’s no room for anything but work in it, so you’ve been keeping yourself too busy
to care until—

  Last week they cancelled STEAMING and told you to clear your desk at half an hour’s notice. Here’s your next month’s pay in lieu, now get the hell out of here, you freak! And you suddenly realise that you haven’t got a life. Even though they made you learn more about Scottish Premier League fitba than the captain of the national squad, the bastards.

  “Excuse me. You cannot be sleeping here—”

  Restart:

  The worst thing about it all is that you hate football.

  Of course, to have admitted that you hated football while you were working on STEAMING would have been a bit like one of the US president’s staffers confessing to thinking religion was overrated, abstinence didn’t work, and what the country really needed was a short sharp dose of communism with a side order of Islamic extremism to go. It’s one of those things that you just couldn’t talk about at LupuSoft, not while they had the exclusive rights to both the Hibs’ and Rangers’ fan club franchises and were trying to milk the surplus income out of all the assorted bampots, neds, and ne’er-do-wells who figured that a LARP where you get to play at football hooligans among consenting adults was better than the other kind of live-action role-playing. (In which you played at football hooligans with non-consenting adults, while the combined manpower of Lothian’s finest and the Rock Steady Crew played collar-the-radge back atcha with CS gas and tasers.) On the other hand, you were able to suppress or sublimate your hatred without too much difficulty. You’re a bourgeois liberal geek who thinks “team player” is a term of abuse, but you believe in society, you believe in checks and balances, you believe in getting your own back on the thick-headed sports jocks who made life excitingly unpleasant for you in school…and as it happens, while you were working on STEAMING you could convince yourself that you were doing your bit, because any job that gets the brangling thugs playing a game on their mobies instead of lobbing tinnies and chibbing innocent bystanders up the high street has got to be a good thing. Network-mediated LARPs have been the gaming story of the decade, ever since SPOOKS came along and gave actuaries a chance to live a secret agent life on the side; STEAMING was set to ring the cash register again and take the nutters off the street. And it paid the mortgage, besides.