Halting State

by Charles Stross

  You can’t help yourself: “But I still don’t see why we need to be there in person.”

  Chris screws up his face and opens his mouth, but Margaret gets there first. “If I may?” she asks.

  Chris nods.

  “This doesn’t happen very often.” Margaret’s lips are as thin as a black line on a balance sheet. “I know what you’re thinking, Elaine. Usually we don’t need direct access. The trouble is, usually we’re looking for inconsistencies in the audit trail.” She glances at Chris to back her up. He nods thoughtfully. “Normally we have a good idea whether the data we’re being supplied with is sane: We’re looking for someone siphoning assets out through the backdoor, but we’re pretty sure the building exists in the first place.”

  Chris nods again. “But I’m told this breach took place in, in a game.” He glances at Margaret. “I’m still trying to work out the implications,” he admits. You shiver, as it becomes apparent: Chris and Margaret don’t have a clue what they’re doing! They’re trying to work it out from first principles. Which means this really is something unusual. “We don’t know whether there even is an audit trail. Or what an imaginary bank robbery in a virtual space means to our client. That’s what we’re going up there to establish.”

  “So why are you dragging Faye and Brendan along?” you ask.

  Margaret snorts. “To figure out whether we were sold a bill of goods by Hayek’s board. Chris doesn’t want to lose the TI account. Or Lloyds,” she adds pointedly.

  Oh. “You think they’re going to be unfriendly?”

  “I’m certain of it,” Chris says gloomily. “If this goes wrong, we could be looking at a catastrophic loss of goodwill, not to mention the Avixa account.” Avixa is a really big contract that’s too damn similar to TI for comfort. “So the plan is, we turn up unannounced on Monday.” He nods at Brendan. “Gene is drawing up an application for an Anton Pillar order”—he still uses the old term for a court search order—“and a freezing injunction behind it, which we’ll be serving on our arrival, I hope. Mohammed, you’re familiar with HA’s business structure and accounting procedures; we’re going to go over them with a nit comb. Margaret, Fred, and Faye will tackle business work flow, managerial competence, and anything else that springs to mind. Brendan, you’re there to serve the orders and liaise with our Scottish counsel if necessary. Keep our toe in the door. Elaine, Margaret tells me you’ve got some background in gaming. The asset loss took place inside a game supervised by Hayek Associates. I want you to go in and audit the bank inside the game. Can you do that?”

  Your mind goes blank. It’s like one of those horrible nightmares, turning up late at school to sit an exam in a subject you haven’t been studying for and finding you’re the only person wearing clothes because everyone else is naked—“You want me to what?”

  “Bank robbery inside an online game. Banks have accounts. Robberies leave a forensic trail. Yes?”

  You blink stupidly for a few seconds. “Yes, I…see. I think.” He glances away, obviously ready to proceed to the next item on his agenda, so you raise an uncertain hand. “I think you got the wrong end of the stick,” you say hesitantly. “This is an online game, right?”

  It’s Chris’s turn to blink. Did he think you were some kind of game wiz? “Well, yes. Why?”

  “I’ll need an interpreter,” you explain. “I don’t know as much about this stuff as I’m going to need to know”—no point saying you know nothing at all, that wouldn’t be constructive, and it’s being constructive under pressure that gets you promoted to partner, although seeing what that Stepford-esque process does to people over the past couple of years has taken the sheen off it—“and you said their head programmer has gone missing. Is he a suspect?”

  “I wouldn’t want to prejudice your investigation,” Margaret says with a funny little smile. “Draw your own conclusions.”

  “Well then.” You smile right back at her. Bingo. They think the programmer did it. Which means it’s probably an inside job, a crime inside a game. Whoopee. “Well, let’s pull this missing guy’s CV and hire someone just like him so I’ve got a native guide. A gamekeeper to find the poacher. Right?”

  “Right.” Chris nods, slowly. Then he makes a note on his pad. “I’ll tell Jessica to get onto CapG right away about matching a body to that skill set. I’m sure there was something about him in the pre-IPO filing. CapG should have—or be able to find—somebody on contract if we light a fire under them. Happy?”

  You nod. “Yes.” If you’re getting a gamekeeper to guide you through the undergrowth, you’re not being set up to take the fall. Which is good to know because you were getting anxious there for a minute.

  “That’s settled, then.” Chris momentarily forgets to look worried. “Any other questions?”

  JACK: mouthinsert(foot);

  By daybreak on Monday morning you are no longer in Amsterdam or hung-over, but you are still unemployed. It’s already light when you stumble downstairs, scrubbing at your face with the shaver (hard enough to raise welts—it needs a recharge), to spoon half-stale coffee into the filter cone. It’s the Big Day today, but your sole interview-worthy suit is three years out of fashion, none of your shirts are ironed (or made of fabric with no-wrinkle, for that matter), and your one-and-only tie has somehow acquired a big brown beer-stain while lurking at the back of the sock drawer. Sod it. You ask yourself: Am I that desperate yet? Well yes, maybe you will be: But this is only day one of your unemployed life, business is booming, the recruiters know you’re a techie, and if the interviews go badly, you can hit up your credit card for a new outfit afterwards. So you pull a not-too-stinky black tee out of the washer/dryer, round up yesterday’s jeans, and slop UHT and sugar into the chipped Microsoft Office mug on the kitchen work-top as you try to wake up. Then, just as you’re thinking about hitting the job boards, the phone rings.

  “Hello? Is that Jack Reed? This is Mandy from AlfaGuru. You posted that you were available on Thursday? We’ve had a job opening come up, and I wonder if you’d like to interview for it—”

  Thirty minutes later you’ve done a quick change into your interview suit and you’re walking along parking-choked Glenogle Road, heading towards the bus stops and picturesque boutiques on Queensferry Road. You’ve dumped all your usual game-space overlays except for Google Local and Microsoft RouteMaster, and the sky is stark and clear above you; the ghost world is almost empty but for the crawling trail of an airliner outbound towards North America, and a twirling red tag tracking your bus across the city towards you.

  Replaying the call from Mandy at AlfaGuru is almost enough to get you into a work-a-day frame of mind again. Mandy says the assignment’s to do with some kind of insurance-agency work and lists a skill set that matches yours. This comes as a big surprise. Since when do the finance industries code their payroll runs in Python 3000 and execute them on a Zone VM? She wants you to drop in on an office in Charlotte Square for an interview with the primary contractors, CapG Financial Services Consulting. If you get the job, AlfaGuru pockets 15 per cent from the customer for resourcing you. The more you think about it, the more likely it seems that Mandy has made a mistake. (“Games developer, accountant, what’s the difference?”) Unfortunately, she didn’t actually say who the ultimate client was, so you can’t Google them to be sure. Chalk it up to practice for the real job interviews you’ll be doing in a week or two. Why not play along? The worst they can do is tell you your suit sucks, and you knew that already.

  Meanwhile, in other local footnote news (digested from the dailies by your agents, after they prioritize the important stuff about industry mergers, devkit point releases, and new game announcements): The ongoing squabble between Holyrood and Westminster over who pays for counter-terrorism operations is threatening to turn nasty (because nobody north of the border really believes that Scotland is some kind of terrorism magnet, whatever the bampots in London think). The first minister is making some kind of high-profile announcement about reintroducing free schoo
ling to encourage the birth rate. And a Russian illegal immigrant has been necklaced down in Pilton, the victim of a suspected blacknet gangland slaying. It’s your usual Embra Monday morning rubbish, aside from the Brookmyre special.

  The bus snakes up the road in due course, flanks rippling with Hollywood explosions advertising Vin Diesel’s latest attempt to revive his ancient and cobwebby career. You climb in and grab the overhead rail, another anonymous traveller among the late flexitime commuters, the young ned females with baby buggies and streaked ponytails, and the buttoned-up Romanian grannies with shapeless wheelie-bags. At least there’s nobody on the bus with an ASBO warning flag twirling above their head.

  Charlotte Square marks the West End of the New Town (so-called because it was new when it was built in the 1760s: Edinburgh has history the way cats have bad breath). One side of it is linked to Princes Street and George Street by the short umbilical of South Charlotte Street. The central grassy square and man-on-a-pillar memorial is surrounded on all sides by looming grey town houses infused with the solidity of the Scottish Enlightenment and the gravitas of their seven-digit price-tags and Adam fireplaces. Nobody actually lives in these houses; they’ve long since been turned into very expensive offices, roosts for firms of solicitors and professional bodies and head-hunters: like CapG Consulting, to whose hallowed meeting facilitation centre you have been summoned.

  “Good morning, Mr. Reed!” chirps Fiona-on-the-front-desk, discreetly arphing your details from your ID card. “Are we here for our interview?” She addresses you with the chirpy condescension of a dentist’s receptionist talking to a sullen three-year-old.

  You briefly weigh the pleasure of making her cry against the potential damage to your credit rating and bite your tongue. “I guess I am.”

  “Let me just see where you need to go…” She has a traditional terminal on her desk, and makes a big show of tippy-tapping the keys and clicking the mouse. “Ooh, that’s interesting. The client is Dietrich-Brunner Associates, and according to AlfaGuru you’re an exact match for the skill set they’re looking for! Isn’t that exciting?”

  “Um,” you say, hoping to buy time. You can already feel an imaginary tie—you’re not wearing your beer-enhanced relic—squeezing your carotid artery shut. CapG is one of the really big outsourcing/rightsizing/bullshitting groups. They don’t employ game developers, they employ Excel macro monkeys and very expensive systems-management consultants. And whoever these Dietrich-Brunner people are, they don’t ring any bells from the gaming end of the industry. They sound more like a firm of up-market cat burglars, or maybe venture capitalists. “What exactly are they asking for?”

  There’s obviously been some kind of mistake. Maybe Fiona-on-the-front-desk is looking at someone else’s records.

  “Let’s see.” She squints at the screen and traces one finger down it, moving her lips. “CS degree, upper second honours or better. Lots of Python 3000 and also Zone administration on Symbian/GDF or .NETSpace. In your personal interests you’re down as a keen gamer—is that right?”

  You stare at her, open-mouthed, while she stares back at you as if she’s wondering if you need a nappy change. “That’s me,” you admit. “Are you sure you got the company right? They don’t sound like a gaming development house to me.”

  More clickey. “No, there’s no mistake, Mr. Reed. They’re insurance fraud investigators. I’ve got a couple of senior placement executives who’re dying to talk to you about the client’s requirements.” She puts her professional smile back in place: “According to your NI records, you’re resting between contracts right now. Would you like me to put your interview down against your Jobseeker’s Activity for this week?”

  You boggle for a moment. CapG are plugged into the social security database? The Jobseeker’s Activity requirement—the number of interviews you do per week—is one of the mandatory hurdles they put in your way before coughing up unemployment benefit. “I, uh, suppose so. So, there’s an interview?”

  “Yes, they’ll be with you in a few minutes if you just take a seat in interview room five?” She clearly can’t wait to get you out of her nice clean reception area. She’s probably afraid a real customer will walk through the door any moment now and mistake you for someone who actually works here.

  Room 101 is on the first floor, opposite the lavvy. You trudge up the stairs with a sinking feeling. It’s about the size of a toilet cubicle and there’s a smell of leaky drains to underscore the resemblance. Inside, you find the usual: multifunction printer, thin terminal, speakerphone, and a desk they probably stole from an old primary school while it was being demolished. The only windows are the ones on the antiquated screen. All in all, it’s a typical agency teleconferencing suite. You settle down in the chair and wait for your call, wishing the cheap bastards could stretch to a coffee robot.

  You’d do some digging for background on Dietrich-Brunner, but there’s an unaccountable lack of signal in this room: You’re completely off-line. Nice. You’re remembering why you don’t like temp work. CapG’s paranoia about—horrors!—their contractors actually talking to their clients without them being able to eavesdrop (“heaven knows what’ll happen, maybe the client will offer them a job without giving us our cut?”) turns these interviews into a bad time-travel trip: You’ve heard that this is what it used to be like for everybody back in the twentieth century, tied down by fixed land-lines and corporate firewalls.

  The screen rings, saving you from your Dilbert re-enactment experience. “Yes?” you ask, sitting up and centring your head in the mirror window.

  “Jack Reed?”

  The caller window expands to show you a much larger room and a couple of Suits. They’re sitting side by side behind a polished conference-table: call them Mr. Grey and Mr. Pin-Stripe for now, using the cut of their cloth as a reference point.

  “Yeah, that’s me.” You force yourself to smile. There’s a bit of echo in the pipe, so clearly CapG are trying to anonymize the routing. Either that, or they’re trying to convince you they’re a bunch of spooks trying to look like a body shop. Willy-warmers. “You’re looking for someone to do a number on a client called, um, Dietrich-Brunner Associates?”

  “Yes.” Mr. Pin-Stripe looks down his nose at you. “We understand you’ve worked on short-term trouble-shooting contracts before?” He’s about forty, immaculately turned out, greying at the temples, and to say he sounds dubious is an understatement.

  “Yeah. Before LupuSoft I did some temping.” Which is a polite euphemism for university vacation work and desperation stuff between real jobs, but with any luck they won’t ask for the gory details. ’Fes-sing up to three months on a front-line tech support desk might not be too convincing. “I prefer longer-term commitments.” Which is true enough, and it implies loyalty, you hope.

  Mr. Grey is about ten years younger, has blond fly-away hair, and is just as frozen-faced as Mr. Pin-Stripe. He cuts in rapidly.

  “It says on your CV that you’ve got a high reputation score on WorldDEV, is that right? And you spent the past nine months engineering an agile swarming combat model for a commercial product—STEAMING, is that the name? Is that right? At LupuSoft?” His voice is almost supine with a boredom completely at odds with his words: They’re obviously using an emo-filter on the voice stream. “I used to play PREMIERSHITS. They make really good games.”

  You nod, wearily. Echoes of your Sunday hangover chase the cobwebs and tumbleweed around your Monday morning head. “I was team leader on the extreme conflict group. We were implementing a swarm-based algorithm for resolving combat between ad hoc groups with positional input from their real-world locations—” You weeble on for a minute or so, playing buzzword bingo. Mr. Grey nods like a parcel-shelf novelty, hanging on your every word. The poor bastard looks like he still harbours secret romantic ideas about the gaming biz. Trapped in an outsourcing consultancy, writing requirements documents for a living, he imagines that if things were just slightly different, he could be cutting loose and hanging t
ough in some laid-back-but-dynamic programming nirvana. Little does he suspect…

  Eventually, Mr. Pin-Stripe takes over. (He’s been listening, his face completely expressionless all the while.) “I’m sure you’ve memorized all the Java APIs,” he says, unintentionally dating himself in the process. “But we’ve already made enquiries with LupuSoft, about the projects you worked on.” Oh shit. Does that include the special stuff we don’t talk about? you wonder. But he moves swiftly on. “What do you know about Avalon Four?”

  You rack your brains for a moment before you remember. “That’s a distributed realm running on Zone. Made by, um, Kensu? Out of Shanghai? It’s basically a fairly faithful implementation of Dungeons and Dragons, fourth edition D20 rules. Just like the old Bioware series, except it’s a Zone-based Massive.” Mr. Pin-Stripe’s face is still a rigid mask. You begin to wonder just how much image-processing horsepower is going on behind the screen—his voice is slightly fuzzed, too. Maybe they think you’ve got a speech-stress analyzer concealed in your belly-button? “With modern rules updates, of course. They had to ditch a lot of the Cthulhu stuff after Chaosium was acquired by Microsoft, but the world doesn’t really need another squid-shagger MORG…there’s money in AD&D, it’s a reliable cash cow, and that’s what Avalon Four is supposed to be.”

  “Have you ever played Avalon Four?” asks Mr. Pin-Stripe, his face still unreadable. You stare at the screen. There’s no sign of a pupillary reflex—in fact, his eyes are slightly fuzzy, at below-par resolution. Yup, what you see is definitely not what you get. For all you can tell, on the other side of that fat rendering pipeline Mr. Grey and Mr. Pin-Stripe could be naked, middle-aged, Korean housewives.

  “Sure.” You shrug. “I OD’d on D20s back in my teens, to tell the truth. It’s something to go back to for old times’ sake, but I don’t usually play more than the first level of a new game, just to cop a feel and eyeball the candy. Um, to see how they’ve implemented it. Zone’s full of MORGs, and it’s my job to add to them, not get lost playing them.”