Halting State

by Charles Stross

  You are getting a queasy feeling about this set-up: something’s not right. CapG’s client—damn them for shielding this room so you can’t Google on Dietrich-Brunner—need a game engineer. They know jack shit about game development, so they hit up their usual outsourcing agency, which turns out to be CapG. Who, what a surprise, also know jack shit about game development, so they go to AlfaGuru and Monster and all the other bottom-feeding body shops with some CV they got off the net, and you just happen to be the first person they found who matches the search criteria. Trouble is, it sounds like a complete clusterfuck waiting to happen. Neither the client nor the resourcing agency knows what the hell he’s doing. You’ll probably get there and find out they really want an airline pilot or a performing seal or something. And wouldn’t that be bloody typical?

  While you are having second thoughts, Mr. Pin-Stripe seems to come to some sort of decision. And he opens his mouth:

  “As you have no doubt already realized, this is an unusual contract for us. One of our clients, Dietrich-Brunner Associates, are in some distress. They are a specialist reinsurance risk analysis house; they negotiated the guarantees for a venture capital corporation that backed a very promising game industry company that went public a few weeks ago. It now appears that a complex crime has been committed inside Avalon Four, and to cut a long story short, certain parties are liable for an enormous amount of money if the details come out.” He pauses. “Have you signed our non-disclosure agreement yet?”

  “You want an NDA?” You shrug: “Sure.” Everybody demands NDAs. Probably Fiona-on-the-front-desk was supposed to nail you for one on your way in the door. That’s okay, you can sort it out later.

  “Good.” Mr. Pin-Stripe nods, jerkily, at which point the brilliantly photorealistic anonymizing pipeline stumbles for the first time, and his avatar falls all the way down the wrong side of uncanny valley—his neck crumples inwards disturbingly before popping back into shape. (You can fool all of the pixels some of the time, or some of the pixels all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the pixels all of the time.) “Dietrich-Brunner Associates have assembled a tiger team of auditors who are about to move in on the target corporation. Their goal is to prove criminal culpability on the part of Hayek Associates’ board, which has implications for the size of their liability—they also want to give the police any necessary assistance in bringing the criminals to justice. However, DBA are not a games company. They lack specialist expertise, and one of their analysts has asked for someone with a skill set almost identical to yours.” You sit up straight. He can’t be thinking about that, can he…? It’s not something you list on your CV, other than in the vaguest terms—some of the projects they had you working on back before you shifted sideways into STEAMING are dual-use, quite close to violating the law on hacking tools.

  “If you accept this contract—which will be a strictly short-term one, billable hourly—you will be assigned to their team as a domain-specific expert to help them understand what happened. You will be working under condition of strictest secrecy, before and after the job. You started when you walked in the door of this office. Is that acceptable?”

  You take a deep breath. The moment crystallizes around you—the grubby paint, the underlying sickly-sweet smell of blocked drains, the two false faces on the desktop before you—and your headache and sense of world-weary fatigue returns. The mummy lobe reminds you that you’ve got six weeks’ salary in your bank account: You don’t have a car or a girlfriend, your only real outgoing expenses are the house and the residual payments on the mortgage from Mum’s chemo, and you’ve been working so many eighty-hour weeks that you haven’t had time to spend your 60K-plus-bonuses package on anything else. You don’t need the kind of political turdball that you can see rolling down the gutter towards you on the leading wave of a flash-flood. You especially don’t need a couple of smug suits leaning on you to take it on the cheap because you’ve been unemployed for all of forty-eight hours in the middle of the biggest industry bubble since AJAX and Web 2.0. The mummy lobe is telling you to say no.

  So you open your mouth and listen to yourself say, “I want eight thousand a day. Plus expenses.”

  This is the polite, industry-standard way of saying “piss off, I’m not interested.” You did the math over your morning coffee: You want to earn 100K a year, what with those bonuses you’ve been pulling on top of your salary. (Besides, a euro doesn’t buy what it used to.) There are 250 working days in a year, and a contractor works for roughly 40 per cent of the time, so you need to charge yourself out at 2.5 times your payroll rate, or 1000 a day in order to meet your target. Not interested in the job? Pitch unrealistically high. You never know…

  “Done,” says Mr. Pin-Stripe, staring at you expressionlessly. And it is at that point that you realize you are well and truly fucked.

  SUE: Gaining Access

  It’s Monday morning, and you are semi-officially PO’d.

  Thursday was bad enough—you didn’t wrap up until Liz Kavanaugh and her firm were well installed, grilling the MOPs one-on-one. Before you clocked off, Liz took you aside for a little off-line time. “Sergeant Smith? Mind if I call you Sue?”

  You nodded cautiously, because you always found it hard to tell where Inspector Kavanaugh was coming from. (She looks like she’s heading for politician-land, with her law degree and tailored suits, but what she wants along the way—who knows? She’s still a bloody sharp cop.) Whatever, pissing her off was a very low priority on your check-list, and if she wanted to be friendly, that was fine.

  “Nice to know.” She smiled briefly, more of a twitch than anything else. “I’m short-handed, and you were first on scene, so you’re already up to speed. I’ve got a feeling that there’s a lot more to this than meets the eye because I’m getting a ton of static already. Holyrood is really rattled, and a whole bunch of interested parties are about to descend on this bunch. And I’m going to lose Sergeant Hay and DC Parker to the Pilton murder enquiry tomorrow. So if you’ve got nothing more urgent to do”—which translates from inspector-speak into this is your number one priority as of now, sunshine—“I’m going to ask you to stick around for the time being.”

  To which all you could do was shrug and say, “Could you clear it through Mac first, Inspector? He’s my skipper, an’ I wouldn’t want him to think I was deserting the ship.”

  Kavanaugh nodded briskly and book-marked your request, and that was your Friday case-load blown out the water, not to mention your monthly clean-up rate: Jimmy Hastie would just have to wait until someone else could collar the little gobshite for something. But at least you wouldn’t have to tell the skipper yourself.

  Friday was worse than you expected. You turned up at nine o’clock sharp, frazzled from a breakfast argument with Mary over who was going to fetch Davey after school—with the wee scally himself making a bid for beer money by offering to take himself down to Water World if only you’d give him the readies—only to find that Mac might have detached you, but he was hanging on to Bob. So you headed over to the bunkerful of crazies on your lonesome, only to find a very inspectorly Liz Kavanaugh briefing a reporter from the Herald outside the bunker doors, and a couple of suits from X Division skulking around out back for a quick fag. They were very old boy’s club, and you barely got the time of day from them: arseholes. So you went inside and buckled down to interviewing the help, except you couldn’t get a handle on whatever it was they were speaking: It sounded like English—they were all southern transplants—but the words didn’t make any sense. After the third shot at getting Sam Couper to explain how he knew the Orcs were Pakistani Orcs (and not, say, Japanese Orcs, or your more reliably radge subspecies from Dalhousie), and getting a different reply each time—culminating in your having to ask him how to spell “multiswarmcast minimum-latency routing”—you excused yourself and went to find the inspector.

  “I don’t understand these folks’ tongue, Liz. They’re space aliens from the planet IT industry. Maybe someone from ICE can ta
lk techie to them? It’s like the joke about the post-modernist gangster who makes you an offer ye canna understand. More to the point, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking for, an’ that’s a wee bit of a handicap. I mean, with your average wee ned, it’s pretty clear what’s gan on, what mischief they’re up to, but this shower don’t tick like that. Can you not give me some guidance?”

  Kavanaugh fixed you with a baby-blue gaze so pointed you could have booked her for carrying a sharpie: “You’re recording everything, aren’t you? I know you’re not a specialist. They know that, too. Just do the interviews, and someone who knows what to look for will go over them later. We’ll get a full gesture and voice stress breakdown, not just what they’re mouthing off, and if we’re lucky, someone will get over-confident and forget they’re not just talking to you. Understand? Once we know who’s not telling us everything, we can roll it up from there.”

  You nodded. Not that understanding made it fun, but at least you weren’t wasting your time. “Okay, I got that. You figure it’s an inside job, and maybe we can flush our bird by playing dumb.”

  “You mean, if it’s an inside job.” The inspector’s façade cracked for a moment: She looked tired. “Of course, it might not be. In which case we’re in a deep pile of dogshit, and it’s going to take SOCA to dig us out of it. Have you got everyone pencilled in on your list yet?”

  You zoomed a GANT chart you’d been working on and zapped it in front of her: “I’ve not met this Nigel MacDonald yet. He wasn’t in yesterday, and he isn’t here today. Works from home, according to Richardson. Some kind of programmer. I phoned his number, but he isn’t answering.”

  “Well. If I were you, I’d go round and bang on his door.” She grinned. “Rattle some cages. Within reason,” she added hastily.

  Within reason.

  Which was the rub: Way back when you were doing a social psych module for your degree in police studies, you went through a period when you used to try and nail every damn category of offender to one of the steps of Maslow’s pyramid of needs. Take your common-or-garden ned (or chav, if they’re from south of the border): You know what motivates them. It’s basic stuff, a couple of steps up the hierarchy—beer and sex, mostly, and maybe the need to have a bigger boom box in their tinny wee shitebox of a jacked-up hatchback. Fitba’s a bit too intellectual for that bunch, except for the tribal element. And neds are the bread and butter of community policing: domestics and public order offences and drugs plus the odd bit of petty theft. Pencil that in as physiological/safety stuff, with a dusting of sex on top. So you got a certain kind of crime that fit their needs, and a certain type of motivation, and figuring out how to join up the dots was mostly quite straightforward.

  Whereas…

  Where the hell did stock options fit in hierarchy theory? Or designing a better fire elemental? It was all right off the map, tap-dancing on the self-actualization pinnacle of the hierarchy. Your neds wanted to eat, get drunk, or fuck, and the bad things they could do were quite predictable—but the double-domes in the bunker were all at the top of the food-chain already—they either didn’t need or didn’t want that stuff. Forget boom boxes for the motor, half the staff drove Mercs or Maseratis, and the other half didn’t drive at all, probably thought it was a Crime against Gaia. What recondite shit could they get up to in pursuit of self-actualization? Especially in a business that made money, near as you can tell, by refereeing a game?

  It’s enough to make an honest cop’s head hurt.

  Being politely thick at the gearheads was getting to you, so after lunch you got in the car and trundled over to Mr. MacDonald’s house, which turned out to be a top-floor flat in Bruntsfield, just off the Links. Which would have made for a nice side trip, but by the time you’d found somewhere to park and then climbed four flights of stone steps—like most of Edinburgh, the tenement he’d chosen to live in predated the invention of the steam engine, never mind lifts—you were deeply unamused to find yourself facing a locked oak door with a discreetly reinforced frame and an unanswered doorbell.

  Standing on the wicker door-mat, you speculated for a few moments: Maybe the sly bugger’s legged it to Dubai to spend his ill-gotten gains? (Assuming for a moment that the ill-gotten gains existed—you weren’t too clear on that.) You glanced up. There was the usual skylight over the stairwell, but you were buggered if you were about to go shinnying up on the roof, twenty metres up, just to try and sneak a peek through the shutters. If Liz wants me to break my neck, she can write me a memo. Instead, you put in a request for a UAV overflight and some pix: lowest priority so it wouldn’t come off your budget, just something to add to the task list of the next one of the force’s spy planes to overfly the neighbourhood. You tagged the flat as NOT RESPONSIVE TO OFFICER in CopSpace, time-stamped it, scribbled out a paper police access form, and jammed it through the letter-box, then headed back to the bunker, so you could spend the rest of your afternoon being talked down to by nerds.

  At least you got Saturday and Sunday off for your sins.

  Which brings you around to the here and now of Monday morning, and the team meeting Liz has called while you’re sipping your latte in Starbucks (as usual). Mac released you to her almost by return of IM, so now you’re stuck working with the old-school suits from X Division, not to mention a new boss who’s too smart by half. Wonderful…

  “I think we’ve got preliminary coverage of all the parties on the scene of crime. Not that it makes much sense to talk about the scene as such, but Grant tells me the imaging is complete, so we’ve got an evidence sandbox with a complete snapshot of Hayek Associates’ IT set-up as of Thursday evening, with traffic inputs since then.” The inspector shrugs elegantly. You’re not sure whose office she’s sitting in with her cam, but it’s plusher than yours. “Now for the follow-up.” She pauses and looks straight at the phonecam, for all the world as if she’s reading from a teleprompter. “Mark, if I read my tea leaves correctly, we’re going to get a shitload of interested parties descending on the scene today, from insurers and underwriters on down. I want a complete visitor log and report on what they want with the target. Maybe we’ll get something back from shit-storm analysis this time.”

  Mark—Sergeant Burroughs—grunts something semi-audible.

  “Yes, I want a full background on everyone.” Kavanaugh raises her coffee mug (genuine ceramic, none of your recyclable cardboard nonsense). “You and Grant can go camp out in the bomb shelter this morning. I’ll be along later. Sergeant Smith.” (You stiffen unconsciously.) “It’s been forty-eight hours. Have we heard from your missing party?”

  “No mam.” It’s out of your mouth before you realize it. “I emailed, phoned, IM’d, left a paper note, and banged on his door, if that’s what you’re asking. And I started the clock.”

  “Well then.” She smiles. “He works from home, we have reason to believe he’s got material evidence relating to an ongoing investigation in his possession, and he isn’t answering the door after forty-eight hours. Meet me at the Meadowplace station in half an hour. It’s time to call in the ram team.”

  Warrender Park Terrace. To your left, the Links, grassy meadow with cycle paths and ancient trees spreading their boughs over the parked cars. To your right, your typical Edinburgh tenement block; roughly carved stone blocks, rickety doors on the common stairwell shared by a dozen flats, and no sign of what’s going on behind those politely drawn slatted blinds and net curtains. It could conceal genteel working-class pensioner poverty, or a space-age bachelor pad. A loudly arguing family of five or a solitary bloater rotting in an armchair in front of a dusty TV.

  CopSpace sheds some light on matters, of course. Blink and it descends in its full glory. Here’s the spiralling red diamond of a couple of ASBO cases on the footpath (orange jackets, blue probation service tags saying they’re collecting litter). There’s the green tree of signs sprouting over the doorway of number thirty-nine, each tag naming the legal tenants of a different flat. Get your dispatcher to drop you a ticke
t, and the signs open up to give you their full police and social services case files, where applicable. There’s a snowy blizzard of number plates sliding up and down Bruntsfield Place behind you, and the odd flashing green alert tag in the side roads. This is the twenty-first century, and all the terabytes of CopSpace have exploded out of the dusty manila files and into the real world, sprayed across it in a Technicolor mass of officious labelling and crime notices. If labelling the iniquities of the real world for all to see was enough to put an end to them, you could open CopSpace up as a public overlay and crime would vanish like a hang-over. (If only half the tags weren’t out-of-date, and the other half was free of errors…)

  You park up behind the Tranny just as Kavanaugh and Sergeant Gavaghan are stretching their legs and the ram team are getting their kit-bags out. She nods at you, and Gavaghan makes eye contact. He’s okay, you’ve worked with him before. “Where is it?” asks the skipper.

  “Up here.” You point. A couple of uniforms you don’t know start hauling their bags towards the steps. “Whoa, it’s the top-floor flat. Let me show you.” One of them mutters something under his breath. You pretend not to notice.

  It’s a warm day, and the smell of cut grass and pollen from the horse chestnuts on the Links tickles your nose. By the time you reach the top of the stairs, you’re breathing a bit faster than you should be. You bend down and examine the letter-box. Your access form is still in place. More to the point, the Evening Post is jammed halfway through. The freesheet comes out on Thursdays, clinging grimly to its declining circulation. The inspector’s right behind you. You point at the letter box and she nods. “Not a good sign. Very well. Sergeant Gavaghan, would you like to inspect the premises before we go in?”