Halting State

by Charles Stross

  At least, that’s how it had been before the Bologna cup final disaster, and the double whammy of the social psych study in The Lancet the very next week that stuck the proverbial sharpie in and twisted, hard. Questions were asked in the lumpy-looking construction site down Holyrood Road, and the ministers did wax worthy and serious and proceeded to apply the tawse of uptight self-righteousness to the rump of the dead equine of games industry self-regulation with gusto and vigour. At which point LupuSoft management revisited the risk-value trade-off inherent in defending their investment in a second-division virtual-world football-hooliganism game against a class-action lawsuit, and decided the professional thing to do was to downsize your team’s sorry ass.

  Maybe it could have gone the other way in the boardroom if the Polis hadn’t uncovered a network of Little League serial killer wannabes who were using STEAMING to rehearse next Saturday’s riot over on Easter Road: But that was the final nail in the coffin. All the suit-wearing world loves a geeky scapegoat, and you boys were going down in flames. So there was only one thing to do: fly out to Amsterdam and get absolutely steaming drunk for the weekend, not to mention so stoned you’re having auditory hallucinations to the sound of the tram bells.

  “Excuse me, sir, but you cannot sleep here.”

  You open your eyes. The auditory hallucination is peering at you through her surveillance goggles as if she’s never seen a stoned tourist before. She’s been so polite that for a moment you feel a flash of perverse gratitude until the weed clears enough for you to realize that she is a member of the Politie and quite capable of summoning a vanful of black-clad accomplices who will vanish you into some concrete custody cell faster than you can snap your fingers if she chooses officially to notice that you are not terribly conscious.

  You try to say, “Please don’t arrest me, I’m just a sleepy tourist, I won’t be any trouble,” but it all runs together at the back of your tongue and comes out as something like “nnnghk.” You tense your arms and prepare to lift yourself out of the armchair—standing up would seem like the right thing to do at that point—but that’s when you realize the armchair is situated adjacent to a street sign on a pole, to which your friends have kindly handcuffed your left wrist. And that goddamn ringing noise won’t stop—it’s not in your ears at all, is it?

  “Um?” you say, dully staring past the cop in the direction of the antique shop on the other side of the pavement. There’s something odd about the window, the pattern the lights make as they reflect off it—or don’t, as the case may be. Broken, you tell yourself sagely. Someone has broken the antique shop window and dragged this annoyingly gezellig armchair out onto the pavement for you to sit in. Talk about game scenarios gone wrong: It’s like something you might end up dumped into in STAG NIGHT: THE PURSUIT if you started griefing the bridesmaids.

  “Does this chair belong to you, sir?”

  Sometimes when you laugh you come out with a burbling, hiccuping sound, like a hyena that’s choking to death on its food. You can hear it right now, welling up out of your shirt pocket, tinny and repetitive. It’s the ultimate custom ring-tone, as annoying as a very annoying thing indeed, except this particular piece of intellectual property isn’t owned by a bunch of gouging cunts.

  “’Scushe me, tha’s my phone…” Your right hand is free, so you try and insert your fingers in your shirt pocket and play chase the mobie. Somehow in the past hour your hand has grown cold and numb, and your digits feel like frankfurters as the handset slips past them, giggling maniacally.

  “Pay attention, sir. Did you take that chair from the shop? Who handcuffed you to the NO PARKING sign? I think you’d better blow into this meter, sir.”

  She’s a sight easier to understand than the local Edinburgh Polis, which is no bad thing because the voice at the end of the line is anything but. “Jack? Hi, it’s Sophie! Are you alright? Are you busy right now?”

  “No, not now—”

  “Oh that’s a shame, I’m really sorry, but can you do me a favour? It’s Elsie’s birthday the Tuesday after next, and I was wondering—”

  You breathe on the end of the cop’s torch as she holds it under your mouth, then swallow. Your sister is tweeting on the end of the line, oblivious, and you really need to get her off the phone fast. You force unwilling lips to frame words in an alien language: “Email me. Later…”

  “But it’s important!” Sophie insists. “Are you alright Jack? Jack?” The plangent chords of her West Midlands accent form brassy patterns of light on the end of the torch, where an LED is glowing red, like the call disconnect button on your phone.

  “I think you’d better come with me, sir.” She has a key to the handcuffs, for which you are duly grateful, but she wants you to put your phone away, and that’s surprisingly difficult, because Sophie keeps going on about something to do with your oldest niece’s birthday and Confirmation—hubby Bill wants Elsie and Mary to have a traditional upbringing—and you keep agreeing with her because will you please put the phone down, a Dutch cop is trying to arrest me isn’t a standard way to break off this kind of scenario. (If only families came with safewords, like any other kind of augmented-reality game.) Things are stuck at this point for a tense few seconds as you mug furiously at the officer, until she raises one index finger, then unlocks the handcuff from around the pole, twists your arm around the small of your back, wheechs the mobie out of your grasp, and has your wrists pinioned before you can say “hasta la vista.”

  It’s shaping up to be a great weekend, make no mistake. And there’s always Monday to look forward to!

  INTERLUDE: CIA World Factbook, 2017

  SCOTLAND

  Location: 54 38 N, 1 46 W—Western Europe, occupying the northern two-fifths of the island of Great Britain.

  FLAG

  Description: Sky-blue background with a white Cross of St. Andrew (diagonal) superimposed. As a member state of the EU, the EU flag may also be flown.

  NAME OF COUNTRY

  Conventional long form: Republic of Scotland

  Conventional short form: Scotland

  Data code: SCO

  Type of government: republic, EU core member state

  Capital: Edinburgh

  Independence: 1 January 2012

  Constitution: 13 March 2011; adopted 1 January 2012 at formal independence

  Legal system: based on Roman law and traditional Scottish law, substantially modified by indigenous concepts; compliant with EU corpus juris; compliant with EU

  ECONOMY

  Economic overview: The economy is small and trade dependent. Offshore oil and gas, once the most important sector, is now dwarfed by industry, which accounts for 32% of GDP and 46% of export and employs 25% of the labor force. The financial sector is still large, and accounts for 24% of GDP and 40% of exports; Scotland is home to a disproportionate percentage of the former United Kingdom’s banks and insurance companies. Since independence and EU membership, the country has benefited from substantial EU assistance in developing its poorest regions. Inflation is low and there is a regular annual trade surplus. Unemployment remains a serious problem in regions formerly dominated by smokestack industry, and is a major focus of government policy.

  Politics: Scotland is noted for its ingrained left-wing political bias and rejection of the liberal economic and conservative social policies encouraged south of the border—this tendency contributed to the breakup of the former United Kingdom. The ruling Scottish National Party is nevertheless providing aggressive assistance to inward-investing companies and has established an industrial development office to encourage small indigenous firms. The model pursued has been described as “following Ireland and Norway,” and Scotland is widely viewed as being one of the “Atlantic Tiger” group of small but healthy economies on the western rim of the EU…

  SUE: Earning Overtime

  You’ve been on scene for an hour already, your stress levels are rising, and it’s taken you this long to figure out just one thing: You’re going to be late for yo
ur evidence ’cast thanks to Wayne Richardson, Marketing Director and Prize Twat, who sits wittering and wringing his hands on the other side of his desk while you try to figure out how to investigate a crime that was committed by a radge bunch o’ faeries in a place that doesn’t exist. Your smartphone’s nagging you about hitting your transferrable overtime limit, and you’ve already blown your quota for time off in lieu this month; if this goes on you’re gonnae have to put it on unpaid hours and file for a time credit from Human Resources. It’s even threatening to snitch to the Occupational Health Department that your Work/Life Balance is out of kilter: If this goes on, it’ll be off to the compulsory Yoga and Aromatherapy classes with Stress Management for you. Inspector Mac will gently chide you in that calm and measured tone of voice that’s fifty times worse than being screamed at by a tanked-up ned: politely enquiring why you didn’t talk the idiot into going straight to SOCA instead of dropping his pants on your desk (and Mac’s by proxy). And speaking of neds, that’s exactly what there’s going to be one more of back on the streets if the sheriff fails to see your testimony in their browser when they come to that case.

  Congratulations. You’ve got the investigation from hell to add to your desk load: one that’s probably going to run and run for weeks and months, suck in scarce resources from all over, and likely as not will never deliver a clean-up because the festering cunts who go in for high-order stock scams and use botnets in Pakistan can also afford silver-tongued barristers. So your clean-up metric is about to take a nose-dive in the shitter, and all because Wayne Richardson, Marketing Director, panicked and phoned 211 instead of listening to his boss and emailing his company lawyers.

  Things are just about coming together in an investigatory sort of way. You’ve borrowed the MD’s office, and they’ve hooked you up with access outwith the corporate DMZ so you can talk to the station again. Along with the formal caution, you tipped them the nod that they’ll get their shinies back after the ICE take a gander at them, which may take some time, so they should kick back and relax. With any luck, that should stop them from getting all upset while the Information Crime Executive play with their toys. (You wouldn’t bother except they’re Victims, and Victims of Class at that, and the Victim’s Charter Ombudsman can have your guts for downpipes if you piss them off: So don’t do that, alright?) You’ve called the said scene-of-crime boys and told them to get their arses down here, and you’ve uploaded that first barking boardroom scene up to the station server, and you’ve tasked Bob with getting statements, fingerprints, and DNA swabs from the other witnesses.

  You’re getting ready to take a deposition from Wayne Richardson, Prize Twat, and you’re beginning to feel like it’s all under control, when your phone rings. It’s on voice-only and with a sinking feeling you see it’s the skipper. “I ken I’m late, sir, but there’s nothing to be done about it, this one’s doing my head in. If you’ve been following it…?”

  “Aye well, I have that, Sue.” Mac sounds unnaturally phlegmatic about the whole business. “It’s not your fault you’re running late. How many statements have you got lined up?”

  You take a deep breath. “There’s eight o’ them in the shop, and another who works from home. They’re trying to call him in but he isna answering his phone or IM. There was no signal down here ’til I got them to give me a line, so I went manual at first. I’ve sent you the boardroom shoot, that’s our formal complaint. I was about to have a talk with Mr. Richardson from Marketing, to get the statements going. The alleged crime…I’ve just uploaded a copy o’ their video grab; I figure it speaks for itself. I’ve called ICE in, but they’re swearing blind about how the crime happened on a bunch of mobile phones all over the planet, so I figure we’re just going to have to hope there’s some evidence for them to find when they lift their laptops. Just getting a straight story about what it is these folks do for a living is giving me a migraine. Anyway, even with Bob helping, interviewing this shower is going to take me a couple of days, and I’m not afrit to say, I’m in over my head, sir.”

  Which is the honest truth. Collaring neds for breaking and entering is one thing, managing the gay community outreach program and training constables is another, but international cybercrime in a nuclear bunker under Drum Brae is right off the map. It’s not something they teach you how to tackle in the coursework for the sergeant’s exam. You don’t mean it to come out sounding like a whining plea for help, but it does: “What do you want me to do next?”

  Inspector McGregor, bless him, isn’t old-school and doesn’t believe in hanging his officers out to dry. “Ach, well, you’ve made a good start simply by hanging in there and taking names.” He pauses for a moment, then his voice deepens slightly, his tone confiding. “I just got word from Division that they’ve had a notification of serious financial crime served by a bunch of solicitors working for a shower called Tiger Investments in London. Meanwhile, a different firm working for Hayek Associates PLC—who would be your mob, I’m thinking—are yammering on the phone about hacking and insider trading, so it looks like the shite’s already hit the fan, and everyone’s lawyering up for a pie fight. Consider yourself lucky the Scotsman hasn’t already sent a news crew. Anyhoo, Liz Kavanaugh and her firm are on their way over as soon as they can extricate themselves from a meeting, so look busy and secure the area. All you need to do is stop anyone leaving, log any traffic, start the interviews, and hold the fort until she takes over, and you’re out of there with full marks. Are you okay with that?”

  You breathe a sigh of relief. Detective Inspector Kavanaugh is a high-flyer who’s got her teeth well into the local heavies; let her break her skull on this one. “Aye, that’s doable, sir. But, about the Hastie case—”

  “That’s your wee ned, is he not?”

  You feel a stab of gratitude that he picked up on it: “The very same, sir.”

  “I’ll get on to the Sheriff’s court and try to buy us a week. If they’re not having it, and you’re still tied up I’ll send someone round to record you on-site, but I’m not taking you off the SOC until X Division have got their feet on the ground. Is that alright by you?”

  “Aye. Sir.” You breathe another sigh of relief. You’ll probably be late coming off shift, and you’re going to spend a good part of Friday hanging around here—you know all about those X Division high-flyers and their meetings—but that’s the least of your worries right now, and what with the paperwork this is going to generate, you’ll make it up in desk time over the next week. “I’ll get right to it.”

  “Bye.” He ends the call, and you open the door. The pacing stops suddenly: Wayne nearly jumps out of his expensively manicured skin as he notices you.

  “Mr. Richardson? If I can have a few minutes of your time?” You smile politely, not showing him your teeth.

  “Um, I was about to call our US office, fill them in on the picture—”

  It’s two hours to shift end and it’s Mary’s night off, which means she’ll be annoyed if you’re not home in time to keep Davey under control when the wee pest gets home from school. If? When. You can just see this one running and running, so you drop the velvet glove treatment for a moment: “This is police business, Mr. Richardson. I want to take a formal statement from you right now. Your colleagues can wait.”

  “Uh…” He’s doing the fluttering thing again. “Alright.” He shuffles towards the office as if he thinks you’re going to arrest him. Which isn’t actually on the agenda yet, but…

  You point him at the visitor’s chair. “Look. Sit there. Yes, like that.” You put your phone on the desk and aim it at him. “This is a phone, okay, I know it looks clunky an’ old-fashioned, that’s because it’s shielded, ye ken? I want you to look at this camera. Alright, what’s going to happen is this. First, I’m going to officially caution you. This is routine, and it doesn’t mean I’m going to charge you with anything, but a crime has been committed here, and you’re on the scene, so it’s routine to caution everyone. Then I’m going to formally ID you, and we
’ll have a little chat, which will be logged under rules of evidence. At the end of this session, I’ll email ye the raw file. About three days later you’ll get a transcript in the email. What you do is you sign it in ink and bring it to the station within seven days, with your ID card, where we take a saliva sample, register it, and it goes into the file as evidence. That’s so it can be brought up in court.”

  He frowns, looking worried.

  “What?”

  “What if, uh, what if the transcript’s wrong? Or something?”

  You can’t help yourself: You snort. “The transcribers can be pish, sometimes, I’ll give ye that, it’s what you get when you farm out half the office jobs to Lagos and the other half to a buggy AI, but you’re allowed to correct it before you sign it. It’s your statement to us, ye ken. Just don’t spread it around.”

  (You don’t feel the need to remind him that failure to sign and return the affidavit within 7 (seven) working days is a summary offence under the Criminal Justice Reform (Scotland) Act (2012), failure to present a valid biometric ID card is a more serious offence under the Identity Cards Act (2006), and fiddling with the statement may be an offence under the Criminal Law (Consolidation) (Scotland) Act (1995). Because, well, as a law-abiding citizen it’s his job to know these things, and you’ve a not-quite-teenage son to be riding herd on besides.)