Halting State

by Charles Stross

  That pisses you off, and you’re a sufficiently powerful sorcerer that you don’t have to take that sitting: So you turn and prepare to zap a fireball at them as your magic armour comes online.

  But nothing happens. You twitch. “Give me fire support!” yells Alice. “Someone heal Helmut—”

  You line up another fireball and let rip. Nada. Huh? Something’s clearly wrong.

  Another hostile steps out from behind the archers. This one is wearing a suit of powered battle armour and carrying a small tactical atomic grenade launcher from SPACE MARINE. Which is just not possible in Zone—it’s a tech-level transgression, not to mention a red flag to the moderators—but the last thing you see of your enemies is the red-glowing ideogram floating in the depths of his helmet face-plate as he pulls the trigger.

  And brings the curtain down on Oberon the Warlock as neatly as any game you’ve ever lost.

  Fucking cheats!

  The next morning you awaken in a breathless near panic, one of those I’m-late-I’m-late-I’m-late tension dreams you get just before the alarm tweedles. You bounce out of bed too fast, get dizzy, stagger to the shower, begin getting dressed, and realize you only bought the one dress shirt to go with the suit. So you end up being ten minutes late out the door, unshaven and wearing a grand’s worth of pinstripes over a STEAMING tee-shirt that promises to bam yer pot, Jimmy.

  You hop the bus from the high street out to Drum Brae, shifting the time with a wee dip into Ankh-Morpork. The bus trundles past ominously looming hunchbacked houses, cars replaced by noisome horse-drawn wagons, pedestrian commuters by a mixture of dwarfs, golems, werewolves, and humans from various periods of History-Land™. There are only a couple of icons spinning over players’ heads, though—Discworld™ isn’t too popular among the nine-till-five set. It’s all a bit drearily boring, so you drop out of the overlay and into your newsfeed for the rest of the trip.

  The Hayek Associates’ offices—well, you’d heard about the old government nuclear command/control bunker out near Corstorphine hill, but you weren’t sure you believed in it until now. The car-park is full of Porsches and Bentleys, plus a Police van: All it needs is a bathroom with a Jacuzzi full of brightly coloured machine parts to make your day. You head for the entrance, where a big guy with a badly trimmed moustache and a suit that screams “cop” in sixteen different languages steps into your path.

  “Hold on, son. What are you here for?”

  You swallow. “I’m a contractor, working for Dietrich-Brunner Associates, who I’m supposed to be meeting here”—you check your glasses—“ten minutes ago.” Damn.

  Mr. Moustache pulls out an ancient smartphone that bristles with keyboardy goodness. “Just a mo. Can I see your ID card?”

  You resist the urge to get shirty and open your wallet. “Yup.”

  “Okay.” He checks his phone. “In you go, Mr. Reed.”

  “Thanks—” You pause, suddenly realizing something. “Who are you?”

  “The tooth fairy, son.” His cheek twitches, then he reaches into his suit pocket and produces a warrant card. “In you go.”

  “You can never be too sure,” you say, risking it, and scurry inside before the mummy lobe can scream and faint at your scandalous temerity in questioning his authority.

  The bored temp on the reception desk stares at you like you’re something she trod in by accident: “You’re late,” she says. “Second level, room 110.” She points at the lift opposite, then hands you a badge. You get the message, and head straight for room six (having figured out—unlike the temp—that of course the lunatics at Hayek Associates number everything in binary).

  Room six turns out to be a boardroom. The door’s open, and as you slide through it crabwise in an unconscious attempt to render yourself invisible you find Elaine, half the gang from last night, and a bunch of strangers, some of whom have that geek vibe to them. Chris, Elaine’s boss, is speaking. You sneak in and stand at the back like a naughty schoolboy while Chris rolls on in an imperious tone of voice, telling the bunch of strangers that he’s got the legal equivalent of a carrier strike group zeroed in on them, and they’d better give him access all areas, or else. Which goes down about as well as you’d expect.

  “What you’re asking for is impossible,” snaps the leader of the enemy faction, a big silverback marketroid with all the charm of a Gitmo interrogator. “The audit can be arranged, if you’re willing to pay for it and contract with a mutually acceptable third party who will be bound by our standard NDAs, but the rest is right out. You’re asking for a complete copy of our database and transaction log, plus core mission-critical systems so you can perform a hostile audit while we’re trying to keep our business running in the face of an external hack attack: That’s just not practical, unless you’ve got a few hundred petabytes of storage kicking around and a data centre to run the sandbox in.”

  The vaguely rat-faced guy from last night—Brendan—raises a document wallet. “This says you’re going to give us access. Why not just get it over with?”

  “Give me that,” the silverback says contemptuously. He sniffs a couple of times as he reads it. Meanwhile, you fidget with your specs. There’s a new layer on the room, and a whole bunch of documents. It’s lawsuit-space: Cool! You glance at the auths and see that you’re on the Dietrich-Brunner case folder—they’ve listed you as staff, so you can edit their files. “Chris, I’d appreciate a word with you and your counsel in private with me and Phil.” He glances at a cynical thirty-something who is doodling notes with a pen on a yellow legal pad. “Just to clear the air.”

  Chris turns round. “You heard him, everybody take ten.” He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. Thinking you might as well beat the rush, you slide out the door about five seconds ahead of Elaine.

  “What’s going on?” you ask.

  “Chris and Hackman are trying to outasshole each other.” Her lips underscore the dry disapproval of her tone. “When they finish posturing, the lawyers will broker a deal, and the winner gets to dry-hump the loser’s leg.”

  You roll your eyes. It’s not exactly a novelty, but…“Why is it that the further up the greasy pole you look, the more childish the games get?”

  She examines you with clinical interest, as if looking for signs of life on Mars. “Let’s go find the coffee station. I think they’ll be at it for at least half an hour. Got to make it look hard-fought.”

  As it happens, Elaine is out by less than four minutes. You’re just finishing a polystyrene cup of mechaccino from the robot caffeine dispenser in the Mess Hall (that’s what it still says on the door) and you’ve just about gotten round to thinking why me? for the third time this morning when Cynical Phil sticks his head round the door. “It’s safe to come back, the shooting’s over,” he mutters, then withdraws in a hurry. Everyone puts their coffee down and troops obediently back to the boardroom, where the Chris-and-Hackman show has dropped the final curtain.

  “You’ve got a week,” says Hackman. He looks like he wants to bite someone’s throat out: No wonder his lawyer didn’t want to hang around. “Your tech heads can poke around as much as they need to, and Rebecca and Mike will give them what they need.” A subtle emphasis on the last word there. “Wayne will act as gatekeeper. You want something, you ask Wayne, he’s got the authority to say yes or no. Your accounts team can dupe our personnel files and accounts and look at them off-line, subject to nondisclosure arrangements. But I don’t want you underfoot. Two bodies, one week, that’s all you get to plant down here.”

  One week? Chris smiles lopsidedly and nods at Elaine. “That should be sufficient,” he says confidently. “I’ve got every faith in you, Elaine.” And that’s you, and your eight grand a day, right there.

  Midafternoon finds you attending a business meeting in a dungeon under Vhrana, with a gorgon called Stheno and a dark elf archer called Venkmann. Venkmann is one of the house avatars, currently being driven by Mike Russell. He has black-enamelled armour, an elaborately engraved skull-faced helm
et, a twenty-centimetre-long Fu Manchu moustache, and an evil laugh—and that’s just the visible assets. “Where do you want to start?” he asks.

  “The Orcs.” You ground your blunderbuss on the uneven, rubble-strewn floor of the cave and lean on it. “They were bearers, right?”

  “Pretty much.” Venkmann raises one bony finger. Its tip glows green as he commences writing notes that hover in the air behind him. “Encumbrance, one hundred and ten pounds each before they hit a movement penalty.”

  “Did you go hunting their registered owners?”

  “Yup.” Venkmann scrawls another check mark in mid-air. “All forty were signed up via a botnet in Malaysia, using stolen credit cards. The cost of a tag in Avalon Four is low enough that their banks just authorized the transactions without doing a fraud check.”

  The gorgon is looking a little bit lost. Periodically, she shrugs or twitches, stereotyped body language untouched by mortal puppeteer. “Where did the card numbers come from?” she finally asks.

  “Who knows?” Venkmann shrugs. “It’s petty crime at this level—fifteen euros here and there. We told the cops, who made a note of it, but—”

  “No, I mean, did all the numbers come from the same source?” she asks. “If some web storefront got themselves hacked, that might tell us something. Work it from the other end, find the hacker, find who they sold the numbers to.”

  Venkmann looks perplexed. “Is that possible?” he asks.

  You shift your weight between feet and rumble bearishly. “Of course it’s possible,” you point out. “There’s a real world out there, Mike. Maybe we ought to ask the cops if they’ve covered that angle yet.”

  “The cops will take the details and give you a pat on the head, then they’ll ignore you,” predicts Stheno. “It’s a volume crime, they don’t investigate small frauds individually, it’s not cost-effective.” A small buzzing insect, no doubt attracted by the smell of blood, flies too close to her, and one of her asps snaps at it. The snake-lock misses, but the fly drops to the floor and shatters like glass. “If you expect them to share intelligence, you’re mistaken. The rule is, information flows into an investigation, never out of it. Break the rule, and you risk tipping off the target.”

  Venkmann walks over to the Iron Maiden that leans up against the far wall of the dungeon. He idly spins the hand-crank that winches the lid up. “Whatever. We got forty Orcs. They didn’t act like a bunch of macro zombies. When I reran the footage, they were acting too random, too human—making mistakes and cancelling out of them, that kind of thing. They were following their leader, and when they ran, they ran back here.”

  “Orcs. Treasure. How did they get into the bank?” you ask.

  “Someone gave them ownership privs on the loot.” Venkmann sounds annoyed. “The same someone who nerfed the gods, presumably.”

  “Could someone have cracked Hayek Associates’ root certificate from outside?” you ask. “Or do you think it was an inside job?”

  Venkmann winches the Iron Maiden’s lid all the way open. What’s inside lies in darkness. “What I think is, there’s a bug in Kensu’s shitty Chinese code. It might be a memory leak—someone left a fence-post error in a copy-on-write primitive or something—or maybe something more exotic, but someone figured out a privilege-escalation attack that works. If you can get deity level rights, you can probably de-escalate other folks, too. The question is, who got root? And what did they do with the loot, anyway?”

  You snort. “Treasure is treasure. That’s what eBay is for.” It’s worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it—like bank-notes, which used to carry the words, I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ten pounds.

  “Yes, but they haven’t shown up there yet. This is stolen goods, I think we might get a stop put on the auction a bit faster than usual.” He clears his throat. “Anyway. After they got here, they, well, they made an unorthodox exit.”

  He gestures at the Iron Maiden.

  “You have got to be kidding,” you say. If you die in-game, your body—and what it’s wearing—stays where you fell. You reincarnate in your bare scuddies and you’ve got to run if you want to re-equip before some scavenging farmer grabs your kit. But the Iron Maiden is tagged as a shredder—it’s got the permanent death attribute, a creepy purple glow surrounding it in your admin-enhanced vision. That’s pretty damned unusual in this kind of game space; it doesn’t just kill you, it shreds you beyond resurrection. “What would be the point of that?”

  “Well, obviously it killed them fatally. More importantly, it surrendered ownership of their in-game assets to, to whoever was waiting here. The Fence.”

  “Ah,” says Stheno, sounding as if she’s just achieved enlightenment.

  “So let’s replay the entry log for this shard and see who came here,” you suggest, “before the Orcs showed up with the loot.”

  “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” says Stheno.

  “Huh?”

  “Open Sesame!” she cries. And the Iron Maiden starts flashing.

  “What the fuck?” says Venkmann.

  “Go on, open it up,” Stheno urges.

  “Not likely, it might be a trap.”

  Venkmann’s risk-averse attitude bugs you, so you put your mad skillz to work. Bringing up the in-game debugger in your field of view shows a whole bunch of scripting cruft attached to the torture implement. “Hey, this thing is really over-engineered for a simple killing machine, huh?”

  “What? What’s—” Venkmann can see what you’re seeing, and you get the feeling that back in his office Mike is twitching with something other than a caffeine jag. “Hey, that’s not right. It says it’s signed by…” He trails off, muttering to himself, and the Venkmann avatar lolls on its feet like a hanged puppet, only its jittery fingertips showing that it’s not dead.

  WHAT’S HE DOING? Stheno IMs you.

  “There’s about”—you run a quick compile/syntax check on the tree—“about fifteen thousand lines of code attached to that thing, where there should only be a couple of hundred. They’re digitally signed using the Hayek corporate certificate, too, which means that someone at HA put them there. Numpties.”

  “You’re telling me they didn’t even check? Before now?” the snake-woman hisses at you.

  “Yeah, looks like.”

  “Jesus.” She glances at you. “How do you know this?”

  “You’ve got access to a built-in debugger and development suite whenever you’re running in god mode”—a nasty thought strikes you—“and there was a bunch of core database code in that thing: If someone’s planted a trigger in a public table and a watcher somewhere else in Zonespace—”

  There’s a brilliant blue flash of light from the Iron Maiden, prompting you nearly to sprain a thumb bringing up a bunch of defensive spells you keep ready for just such occasions. “Shit!” yells Venkmann. Darkness gathers, fulminating, in the corners of the room, a smoky penumbral effusion spilling from the crack that has opened up in reality. You power up the Shield of Steel Focus and the Dome of Defence in a hurry, watching the world around you blur into watery unfocus as figures with too many limbs step out of the corners, moving in insectile stop-go jerks.

  Venkmann is frozen over the gaping maw of the Iron Maiden, held in place by some unseen force. You turn to confront the intruders and realize that Stheno is outside your zone of protection. Shit. This is going to be ugly. There are four of the things, like gigantic anthropomorphic toads with strangely articulated limbs and great horned heads. You crack open a vial of Neverslow and inhale the bitter fumes, then unsling your blunderbuss as the world around you seems to slow, jerking in stop-frame animation. The gun’s already loaded with coarse-ground silver filings and lead shot, and when you pull, it bangs deafeningly in the confined space, blasting a cloud of smoke and sparks at the nearest of the demonic intruders, who yells raucous rage at you but doesn’t even stop coming. You can see the haze of improbability spiralling around its head, the madness in its eyes—it’s a fucking
slaad of some kind! What are they doing here?—and then it raises its webbed hands in a spell-caster’s gesture, and a vast bloom of emerald fire envelops you. Which is a huge relief because it tells you you’re up against a bot; no human player—not even a total noob—would do something that stupid.

  Two of the slaad’s fellow gate-crashers run into your Dome of Defence from either side, rattling your teeth as you invert the blunderbuss and reload as fast as you can. Reflexes left over from your munchkin days take over, and you blaze away, trying meanwhile to figure out what it all means. (You were looking for a clan of cannon fodder, not a booby-trapped artefact that triggers a teleport routine to drop a gang of pissed-off midlevel demons on you: Who put it here, and why?) “Stheno, you still alive?”

  “Yes! What’s going on?”

  “They’re trying to kill us, and they’re a whole lot more powerful than Orcs. Get behind me, I’ll handle—”

  “No you won’t.” Stheno steps daintily around the Iron Maiden—Venkmann still wired to it with blue sparks flashing off his hair—and draws a long sword she found somewhere. Her status icon shows that she’s trying to go into some weird-ass haptic combat mode, something only idiot LARPers use, and you swear quietly as you dump a handful of Dust of Dispelling down the smoking maw of your gun and raise it again. One of the slaadi is going for her, which means—

  A huge fountain of blood squirts across the room in arterial gouts. Shit, exit one auditor, dashed bad game-play, do you want to reincarnate in the middle of a fight? You shrug and drop the hammer on the demon as it scrabbles with ichor-dripping claws at the edge of your dome. Stupid fuckers, they’ve got a magical arsenal all of their own: Played straight, they could take you down in minutes. Magic stick go Bang and you can see daylight—okay, torchlight—through the beastie’s rib-cage as it takes a tumble. Good. You turn to the next one, only to find that Stheno’s still in the game and has got in ahead of you with that sword. She’s holding it at a weird angle and as the slaad screams and launches itself at her, she twists it and hops sideways, as if that’s going to achieve anything. The predictable thing happens—it takes a swipe at her but misses, probably because she’s accidentally triggered her Tumble talent and gone cartwheeling face-first into the wall.