Halting State

by Charles Stross

  What the hell? You’re supposed to be in quick time thanks to the dust you snorted, forcing the local Zonespace servers to crank down the time base for everyone else within the game’s event horizon (meaning, this room). Maybe Stheno’s LARP-addled mode can only do real-time, and the god mode Venkmann dropped on you both so casually has stopped the game engines from downgrading her movement rate. Or something like that…You’re still turning towards the next pebble-skinned party pooper as Stheno twists sideways and jabs her frog-sticker at him, misses, and does a neat back-flip. The slaad twitches, roars, then takes a swipe at her. “Why can’t I touch the fucking thing?” she yells frustratedly.

  “You’re not equipped for it! And he’s got too many hit points!” you yell back at her, reloading in a hurry because bad guy #4 is sneaking up behind her with malice clearly in what passes for its tiny mind. “Clear the area! No, duck!”

  She ducks, still holding on to her hilts like grim death, and you blast a cloud of buckshot across her shoulders and into frogface’s maw. He sneezes, green goop flying, and begins to Incant. That’s a bad sign, those things have big death-magic mojo. So far, the bot’s been playing them clumsily, using a tank to run over individual infantry instead of shelling them from the next county over—but if it gets its shit together, you’re going to be in a world of hurt. As if that’s not enough, you hear a low-pitched warning buzz: Your Shield of Steel Focus is nearing the end of its life, and any moment now you’re going to be unprotected.

  You begin to back towards the Iron Maiden, hoping to use it as an obstacle, when Stheno leans over the supine slaad and starts horsewhipping it with her snake-headed dreadlocks. Which, surprisingly, works—the thing must have been pretty near to dead already. There’s a crackling tinkle as the grotesque frog-statue rolls over on its side, and then she vaults over it towards bad guy #4. He’s still busy Incanting—these spells take time—so you follow her, pitching in with all four paws in the faint hope of breaking his concentration roll. Only, no dice. Stheno has another momentary lapse of co-ordination and goes head first into the far wall, limbs spazzing wildly. Slaad #4 emits a strange howl and points, and all hell breaks loose—in the direction of the thoroughly immobilized Venkmann.

  You whack the demon alongside his head with an ursine pawful of claws. That gets his attention: He turns and clumsily gouges at you with a scaly hand, gobbling and gurgling incoherently. You whack him again while Stheno leans forward and makes stabby to no particular avail. The gobbling rises towards an angry, incoherent peak, then stops, breaking up like a bandwidth-choked voice call. Another whack, and the slaad subsides in a twitching heap, oozing corrosive juices that eat away at the tiled floor.

  “It didn’t work,” she says plaintively. “I kept trying to go into haptic contact-mode, and it wouldn’t work!”

  “Whoa,” you wheeze. “You mean, like, full-body input? That doesn’t work in Avalon Four without a hack pack on the side.” Typical noob trick, trying to use an esoteric interface and going arse over tit, instead of simply whaling away with the plus-three Axe of Decerebration. “Let’s check on Venkmann.” You shamble over towards the Iron Maiden, kicking dismembered amphibian parts out of your way. Venkmann’s still wired into the shredder, kicking and twitching, so you call up the debugger console again and drop a break point on the thing. He falls away from it, collapsing on the floor. For a moment you think he’s dead, but he magics up some hit points from somewhere and is back on his feet.

  “What the fuck was that all about?” he demands, irritably. “When I catch the mother-fucker who invented those—” He rambles on angrily for some time while you examine the code hooked into the Iron Maiden, which is still sparking and fulminating on an al fresco basis. Interestingly, it seems to have erased itself. If you hadn’t had a devkit buffer open before the extradimensional mugging, you wouldn’t even have noticed the missing twelve thousand lines of code. “What happened?”

  “Who’s got write access to your version control system?” you ask Venkmann.

  “Huh? What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Plenty, I think.” You stare at the Iron Maiden, then tweak a couple of resources. The cascade of sparks and the violet pulsing aura go away. “Should be possible to look inside that without triggering the trap, now.”

  Venkmann leans forward. “Either of you got a familiar?”

  “Um.” You should have thought of that: Just because you disarmed the trap doesn’t mean that it’s safe to look. “I’m fresh out of ’em. How about you?”

  “I’ve got a snake,” Stheno offers uncertainly.

  “Badger,” says Venkmann. He turns round and begins to incant. There’s a bang and a cloud of purple smoke as a confused-looking badger appears.

  “What…” Stheno begins to ask.

  “It’s a familiar. He can see through its eyes, okay?” Venkmann continues to incant. A moment later, the badger shimmers and warps into invisibility. “Now it’s an invisible badger—the best kind of camera.” Venkmann bends down, picks something up, and leans over the Iron Maiden before releasing it.

  “Well, there’s a surprise!”

  “What’s down there?”

  “It’s a rabbit-hole,” he says slowly, looking around as if at a different landscape.

  “Where’s it go?”

  “Looks like Zhongguo shard, going by the map. Which is part of Hentai Animatics’ zone, and we don’t have an admin contract for that. I think you’ve just uncovered an illegal-immigrant tunnel.”

  SUE: Chop Shop

  Hackman’s weird outburst has haunted you all through the case team meeting up at the station, despite your hasty cramming on blacknets and anonymizing peer-to-peer crime networks and the people who set them up and skim off the profits; in particular his admonition not to have anything to do with the “bottom-feeding scum.” Bottom-feeding scum are, you might say, something of a professional specialty—and not just when you’re hauling bodies out of the Water of Leith; all you need is to think back to the last open evening at the wee one’s school, and it’s there fair and square in the playground with a squint and a buzz cut to go with the sharpie in its back pocket. It disnae matter whether they’re bottom-feeding scum with a chib and a crack habit or the up-market kind who book the assassinations of their business rivals via blacknet. So, with the inspector’s encouragement, you head back to Hayek Associates’ bunker—where by now they’re hunkering down under their concrete eaves to avoid the barrage of writs and journalists’ inquiries whistling down on them from parts north, east, west, and south—to go Liaise with some Victims.

  It’s early afternoon when you park next to the muddy pot-hole at the edge of the car-park. First off, you check the Mess Hall to grab a coffee and see who’s there. A couple of the quants are hanging around the coffee machine: Your glasses—now configured for off-line browsing—remind you of their names, Couper, Sam (“traceroute is my bitch”) and Evans, Darren. You walk up behind them. “Sam, Darren,” you say, with a smile, “how are you doing today?”

  They both nearly jump a mile: They may be thick as thieves, but they lack the reflexes of the pathologically non-law-abiding. Turning these nice middle-class nerds inside out and shaking them until the pips squeak would be so easy it’d make the baby Jesus cry: They’re still terrified of parking tickets. Clearly neither of these two are running an illicit blacknet. They haven’t even been exposed to the long arm of the law often enough for it to lose its dreadful majesty. “Fine! Fine! What you want?” Darren asks, too eager for his own good.

  “A regular coffee, hold the sugar,” you suggest, and damn if Sam doesn’t turn and make a pathetic lunge for the control panel, so eager to oblige that if you slid an unsigned confession under his fingers, he’d be in for the high jump tomorrow. Aye, this one would have been blackboard monitor in junior six, right enough. Not to mention the class swot. Which may actually make the job at hand harder—they’ll drown you in irrelevant details if you give them the chance. “I was wanting to interview bot
h of you later today, get your account of what happened. Are you free later on?”

  “Uh, yeah, just not right now.” Darren is recovering his composure faster than Sam. “Busy fighting fires, covering for that asshole Nigel. He hasn’t updated the group-reconciliation files since last Wednesday, and we’re going to be in the shitter if we don’t get it under control before the weekly M4 policy session.”

  “Your coffee, miss…?” says Sam.

  “Sergeant, actually.” You smile at him as you take the cup. “Sergeant Smith.” That’s right, grind it in, define your authority now so he bends the neck later. “When’s the policy session?”

  “Uh, Wednesday, actually,” volunteers Darren, getting his act together. “I guess I can make some time late this afternoon or maybe tomorrow morning, but right now we’ve got to patch Nigel’s—”

  The door opens, and another quant comes in, along with two suits whom your specs unhelpfully identify as VISITOR 1 and VISITOR 2. “That’s okay,” you say. “Tomorrow will do. Ten o’clock?” He nods. “Okay, see you then.” You nod at Sam, also, and he seems to take it as a dismissal and scuttles away with his tail between his legs. Which leaves you with an opportunity to check out the visitors before you move on. You put your smiling meet-the-people face in place and turn to face them.

  “Hello,” you say. VISITOR 1 is male, late twenties, overweight, badly shaved, and that suit really doesn’t go with the faded black tee-shirt. VISITOR 2 is female, skinny, somewhere in that vague period between late teens and midthirties, and looks like she knows far too much about spreadsheets for her own good. Black suit, very corporate, well-coordinated. Verdict: They’re technical/clerical citizens. Subtype: probably law-abiding, apart from the occasional furtive joint. “I haven’t seen you around here before. Are you from”—you nudge up the case database—“Dietrich-Brunner Associates?”

  VISITOR 1 is of a kind with Sam, but VISITOR 2 is made of sterner stuff: She sniffs and gives you an old-fashioned look. “Could be,” she says. “Who are you?”

  You stare back at her: She’s a bit mousy, but you’ve met her type before—usually giving you a nasty grilling on the witness stand.

  “I’m Detective Sergeant Smith,” you tell her, “working out of Meadowplace station.” You drop the smile. “You are from Dietrich-Brunner?”

  VISITOR 2 continues to make with the long stare, but VISITOR 1 caves. “Um, yeah, we are. She’s the organ grinder, I’m just the performing monkey.” He mimes shaking a hat.

  VISITOR 2 elbows him in the ribs, sharply. “No, you’re a dancing bear. Do try to get the right species!” She faces you: “I’m sorry we seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot. I’m Elaine Barnaby, and yes, I’m from Dietrich-Brunner—I’m a forensic accountant. Jack here is a game-development consultant, and he’s acting as my guide. Now, what can we do for you, Sergeant?”

  “You can help yourselves to a coffee, then maybe tell me why Marcus Hackman might not want people such as yourselves, um, crawling around on his turf?”

  She raises an eyebrow. “Ah, that is an interesting turn of phrase. His?”

  Good, that’s got her attention. “Depends. What are you doing here? I mean, in Hayek Associates’ offices?”

  “Oh, that.” She sniffs. Jack bends over the coffee machine, mumbling to himself, then starts punching buttons like it’s a Game Boy. Your fingers are itching to stick their names into CopSpace and see what comes back, but that might be a wee bit too obvious if you did it right now…“I’m supposed to be conducting a security audit on a bank in an online game. At least, that’s what I thought the picture was yesterday. In practice…I take it you’re here because Wayne or Marcus or someone reported the intrusion last week? That’ll have gone on your case-load as a crime, possibly hacking, possibly theft or fraud—whatever. Well, DBA got sucked in because one of our senior partners vetted Hayek’s board before their IPO the other month, and this stinks of an inside job. So Chris panicked and dragged a team of us up here to do something about it. Now there’s a programmer missing and that’s…well, it’s enough to get him off the hook, so he’s pissing off back to the City, but my job—and Jack’s—is to confirm that it really was this Nigel MacDonald that did it, dot the i’s and cross the t’s. I think Chris may even be planning to pull strings and get NFIU to take us on as specialist subcontractors, if he can sort out the cross-border jurisdictional voodoo.”

  That sets you back on your heels: The Crime and Rehabilitation Office hires civilian specialists from time to time, it’s true, and the technical side of this investigation is going to the National squad as soon as anyone notices it—does that make these people bystanders or fellow cops? Leave it to Liz to sort out the turf wars, you decide. “Ah, well, I cannae be telling you anything until someone tells me you’re to be working on the case,” you temporize. “But if there’s anything ye’ve found about the situation, and especially about Nigel MacDonald, I’d love to hear it.”

  “Yes, there’s—” Jack begins eagerly, before Elaine gives him a look that could strip paint. There’s some interesting chemistry going on there, if you’re any judge of such things.

  “I think what he means to say is, we’d be happy to co-operate with your investigation purely on a professional peer-to-peer basis with appropriate confidentiality safeguards in place for a pooling of information,” she picks up, facing you like she’s holding a royal flush. And, indeed, she is. So you smile and take a mouthful of too-hot coffee. One point to her.

  “Well, that’s a start.” You pause a moment. “You said something about knowing what you were meant to be doing yesterday. What’s changed since then?”

  “We’re trying to track down where Tricky Dicky hid the loot,” says Jack, ignoring the warning look Elaine sends him. “Seeing he’s not here for us to ask. Hmm. Do you have him in custody yet?”

  You weigh your answer carefully. “Not yet. In fact, if you should see him, I’d appreciate it if you’d IM me. My colleagues do indeed have some questions we’d like to put to him.” Starting with, how’d you come back from the grave? Assuming you existed in the first place? But there’s no call to go frightening the horses just yet, so you keep that thought to yourself.

  “I think we can do that,” Jack says, seemingly oblivious as Elaine raises the energy level from Defrost to Nuke. “Problem is, it could be anywhere in Zonespace, or even out of it. Avalon Four isn’t the only game sharing this platform, and whatever was stolen, if they can get it out of Avalon and into somewhere else…” He trails off.

  “What is it?” Elaine asks sharply.

  “eBay.” He pulls on a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. “Assuming this was a real bank robbery, what do you do with the goods?”

  “The goods?” You look perplexed. “Banks hold money…”

  Jack shakes his head. “This is a game, remember.” He glances at Elaine, who nods slowly. “The bank’s not somewhere that manages risk; it’s somewhere that stores value. You can only carry so much crap around with you in Zonespace without becoming encumbered, which slows you up. So Hayek run the bank and sell safety deposit storage. This gives players who haven’t bought themselves a castle yet a place to stash their goodies while they’re running around on quests, and it also siphons money out of the game stealthily, in bank charges. Anyway, what was stolen was the contents of about three thousand safety deposit boxes. Actually, the real crime was that someone corrupted the digitally signed ownership certificates for objects in the database, turning them over to some third party: The Orcs were just warm bodies to carry the loot away. Once they had it, the ownership certificates got swapped around again via a remixer to stop Hayek or Kensu International from figuring it out—they don’t routinely log all ownership changes, it’d be like running a supermarket chain’s stock control system—then got the hot goods out of Avalon Four and onto another shard via the rabbit-hole.”

  This sounds horribly familiar. “You think there’s a fence somewhere?”

  Jack scratches the side of his nose,
then takes the glasses off and polishes them on his tee-shirt. “The whole scenario makes no sense at all unless there’s a fence.” He examines the glasses. “In-game auction-houses won’t touch stolen goods, but if they’ve got a conduit set up, say in another real-world jurisdiction or even in another Zone partition, they could sell the loot on eBay. The trouble is going to be getting a list of the stuff that’s been stolen, then checking for all the possible auction-houses. And that’s before you start to wonder if the stolen prestige items have been hacked on by someone with crafting skillz…”

  It is horribly familiar: There’s a wee garage down in Cramond that Mac’s been trying to shut down for years—the owner’s a big ned, done time in Bar-L for receiving, and the inspector swears blind he’s running a chop shop—but he’s never been able to pin anything on it. You’ve got unfond memories of spending nights and mornings keeping an eye on his back yard via spy cam, trying to spot a delivery. And on a larger scale, it’s what those blacknets you were reading up on are supposed to do—antisocial networking sites. “Where would you go to look?”

  “I’d start by trying to find out what’s been stolen,” says Jack. “And then I’d write a bot, to go round all the online auctions trying to match a shopping list against what’s on sale. Drill down, cross-correlate the merchants”—he’s going all cross-eyed, and you’re not the only one who’s staring at him as if he’s turned into some kind of delphic oracle—“see if any names keeping coming up.”