Halting State

by Charles Stross

  You have the uncomfortable feeling that the inspector is trying to tell you exactly the opposite of the words she’s using. “Aye, too convenient.”

  “My thoughts exactly. I don’t buy that line about this being unconnected. And I’m really worried about that blacknet set-up in MacDonald’s house. It doesn’t fit.” She takes a sip of her Turkish coffee, and it’s at that exact point that you realize what’s going on.

  Liz is scared shitless. She thinks she’s got a sleeping dragon by the tail, and she’s not sure it isn’t about to wake up. So she’s decided to designate you as her insurance policy.

  “Jesus, skipper.”

  “He’s not answering his IMs this century.”

  “If we can’t get ahold of MacDonald, who’re we going to go after?”

  “Haven’t you heard from your two new contacts today? The nerd and the librarian?”

  “No, I—” You pause. “They were dead keen to be helpful yesterday,” you say doubtfully.

  The waitress is back with a platter of meze for Liz and a traditional Scottish fry-up breakfast for you.

  “After lunch I want you to plug yourself back in and see what’s keeping them from you,” says the inspector. “Then I’d like you to go and talk to them, off the record. They’re not suspects, but if what I think is happening is actually happening, they might be in danger if too much information about them shows up in CopSpace.”

  “In CopSpace? But—”

  “Sergeant, this is way out of my league, but I’m not convinced that idiot Kemal from Brussels was wrong. I think there’s some kind of shitty infowar nonsense going on, some kind of nasty little intra-European diplomatic espionage spat. I’ve got a nasty feeling that someone’s already been murdered because of it, and if we don’t call time, there may be a bunch more bodies showing up. And worst of all—I think whoever’s behind it has got their claws into CopSpace, maybe a blacknet, too. And you know something? I don’t intend to do their dirty work for them…”

  ELAINE: Shanghaied

  Sitting in the back of the police car as it careens along the M8 with its lights flashing, you suddenly realize you feel deathly tired—and sick. Not nauseous, not period pain, just the kind of gut-deep malaise that comes from being stressed to the breaking point. Everything’s happened too fast for you to get a handle on it: from Jack stumbling on a Chinese student who thought you were working for the security services, to Jack being stabbed, then the insane call from Spooks Control and the taxi trying to kill you both, then the word that one of Jack’s nieces had been kidnapped, and now this…it’s too fucking much. You want to hit PAUSE, make yourself a nice mug of Horlicks, put your feet up, and watch a fluffy romantic comedy before curling up in bed. Or maybe get your shiny new claymore, find a gymnasium, and spend half an hour walloping the living shit out of a dummy. Your mental overload light is flashing red. It’s too fucking much: And you’re not getting any time off to assimilate it.

  Sucks to be you.

  Constable Patel isn’t being a whole bag of laughs—he’s so keyed up and focussed on the head-up display and the steering wheel that you’re terrified he’ll explode if you ask him anything (like, oh, “are we nearly there yet?” for values of there that map onto wherever you’re taking us), and in any case the speed with which he’s zipping past the cars and trucks in the slow lane clues you in that maybe he’s exceeding the speed limit just a little—and Jack’s not much use right now, either. Come to think of it, if you’re feeling like a pile of crap, what’s he going through right now? You glance sideways, just enough to see that he’s slumped against the opposite door, cheek leaning against the window, looking half-asleep. Just mild shock, the paramedics said, but that’s not the half of it. You know what it’s like to get home after a burglary, or to hear that a friend’s died suddenly—more’s the pity, from personal experience—and right now Jack shouldn’t be here: He should be at home and in bed. A million spy thrillers and hard-boiled detective capers insist that the hero bounces back right after being slugged upside the head, but real life’s not like that. Sucks to be him, too. You’re torn between sympathy and a despicable little sense of warmth that comes from knowing that he’s got it even worse than you have. That’s not nice, and it’s making you feel guilty, so you shove it to the back of your head. Sympathy is respectable; that’ll do for now.

  Your left spectacle frame vibrates, signalling that your phone wants to talk to you about something. Annoyed, you hit the display sync button. It’s an instant message from—

  JACK: dont look at me dont act suspicious

  You nearly bite your tongue, so hard is the urge to look round or speak aloud. Instead, you start finger-typing. And what you type is—

  ELAINE: WTF?

  JACK: our driver is listening

  ELAINE: so?

  JACK: need 2 talk l8r not near phones

  ELAINE: LOL, afraid of bugs???

  JACK: yes

  ELAINE: got crypto on fone lines

  JACK: HA keys compromised. who else?

  ELAINE: U R paranoid

  JACK: ORLY?

  A cold shiver runs up your spine as Officer Friendly slows, then accelerates up a slip road towards the gyratory that connects the motorway to the city bypass.

  ELAINE: l8r

  JACK: OK

  You clear the chat log from your phone, then switch it to standby again. What Jack’s saying is clear enough, and for all that you think he’s being a bit paranoid, he’s got a point. You’re sitting in the back of a fucking police car, for crying out loud!

  Of course, if Jack’s afraid they’re monitoring your phone and using it as an omnidirectional bug, why the hell did he have to IM you? He’s not stupid enough to think that they won’t be snooping on his texts as well, is he? Or maybe he wants them to think he’s paranoid and needs to talk to you in private? But if that’s the case, surely they’re going to realize he’s trying to make them think he’s paranoid and—that way madness lies, the infinite receding mirror-walled tunnel of spy-versusspy. Which, let’s be honest, is what you both signed up for in a fit of boredom or a burst of manic competitive analysis, never suspecting that SPOOKS wasn’t simply a game but is some kind of Machiavellian ploy to get thousands of willing agents’ boots on the ground. Useful idiots, the real spymasters used to call them, the cannon-fodder of human intelligence gathering.

  You’re hitting traffic now, surging along one of the main arteries into the western suburbs. Your driver’s still going fast, but he’s not using his siren or overtaking: He’s just relying on folks to get out of his way. Evidently you don’t rate stunt-driving. A few moments later you recognize where you’re going. The police car is taking you back to Hayek Associates’ offices: You recognize the wide, straight main road with trees to one side and a hill on the other. But before you can figure out a way to warn Jack, the car is turning right, up the hill, and into the car-park outside the bunker.

  The slippery public-schoolboy type, Barry Michaels, is bouncing up and down on his toes in the entrance like the floor’s red-hot. Which is a definite oh shit moment, because it crystallizes an uneasy nagging suspicion you couldn’t quite bring yourself to articulate earlier: If SPOOKS is for real, then why can’t there be more to Hayek Associates than meets the eye?

  “Come with me, please, Mr. Reed, Ms. Barnaby.” Barry manages to sound completely in control of the situation, and judging by the presence of the police, he’s not wrong. You manage to nod, and follow him into the lift.

  “Marcus is out of the office on business, and I sent Wayne on a wild goose chase,” Michaels confides, as the lift drops down towards the underworld. “So you don’t have to worry about the civilians getting underfoot.” As the lift stops, he jams his thumb on the close button and simultaneously pokes the call button. The lift jerks into motion again, descending. “This is the sub-basement. I’ll have to ask you to leave all your personal electronics in the basket, I’m afraid.”

  The sub-basement is walled in concrete and smells
of mould and neglect. What light there is comes from a caged incandescent bulb that dates to the Cold War, or maybe the Battle of Britain.

  “What is this place?” asks Jack, sounding more than slightly dazed.

  “I told you, it’s the sub-basement.” Michaels points to a wire supermarket shopping basket. “Your gadgets, please. Now.” At first you think he’s taking the piss, but then he shoves his left shirt cuff up and unfastens a very expensive Breitling chronometer. “You can collect them again on the way out.” You obediently place your hand-bag on the counter, then put your glasses in the basket. Jack, meanwhile, is building a small pyramid: keyboard (very much the worse for wear), phone, specs, something that looks like a multifunction power pack, other less-identifiable stuff…It’s a wonder he doesn’t clank when he moves. Michaels nods approvingly, then opens the single door. It’s thin plywood, but the frame looks more like an airport metal detector. “Go on. Third door on the right.”

  There’s a short corridor. Michaels carefully shuts the door behind himself. For a moment you think about opening one of the wrong doors—but it’s very Bluebeard’s castle down here, and you know what happens to girls who open the wrong doors in that story, don’t you? The lights are all naked bulbs behind wire shields, hard-wired to switches that look like something out of the Stone Age. No electronics. Go figure.

  Finally, the three of you are alone in a whitewashed room with half a dozen battered office chairs, a wooden table, and a sideboard with a kettle sitting on it. “Sorry about the lack of amenities,” Michaels says brusquely. “Help yourself to tea or coffee, I’ll be back in a minute.” He ducks out the door before you can say anything.

  Jack looks at you. You look at Jack. He raises an eyebrow. “So what do you think?” he asks suddenly.

  “Don’t ask me, I’m in over my head.” You look around curiously. There’s no network cabling, no phone sockets, no nothing except for an old tin kettle on a camping gas-ring and a light bulb out of the last century. You’ve got a creepy feeling that if they could, they’d have rigged this bunker up for gas-light. “I think we’re under a shielded nuclear bunker, and there are no cables.” You walk round the table and light the burner. The kettle’s already full of water. “Judging from what Michaels said, we’re going to be here a while. How do you take your coffee?”

  The kettle is just about coming up to the boil when Michaels returns. He’s carrying a fat cardboard folder full of paper. “Ah, good.” He plants the folder on the desk, then he sits down limply, as if he’s been on his feet for hours. “You’re both probably looking for an explanation for what’s going on here. Unfortunately, I can’t give you one.” He glances from you to Jack and back again, and there’s very little of the bumptious ex-public-school boy left in his expression. “Not because I don’t want to, or I’m not allowed to, but because we don’t have much more than pieces of a puzzle right now.”

  Jack, who has been slumped in a chair for the past minute or so, suddenly stiffens. “What’s this shit about Elsie being kidnapped?”

  “I’m very sorry to say, we don’t have any news of her yet.” Michaels opens the folder and pulls out a stapled memo—you try to read it, but you can’t make out much more than a certain familiar coat of arms at the top of the page. “If it’s any consolation, it’s quite likely that nothing’s happened to her yet, and probably nothing will.”

  “Nothing…” Jack’s at a loss for words, grasping at straws: And that makes you quietly angry at Michaels, who should know better than to string Jack along like this. The kettle’s bumping, so you stand up and walk round the table to fill the mugs you set out earlier. Moving is easier than sitting still.

  “Are you looking for Elsie?” you ask Michaels. “Because it seems to me that this wouldn’t have happened if not for your games…”

  “We traced Jack’s calls and the photographs,” says Michaels. “There’s an ARG called SPYTRAP—you’ve heard of it? The photographs were pulled off a roadside traffic camera, the printing and envelope delivery were care of an unwitting SPYTRAP player, and the phone call…” He shrugs. “Best guess right now is that the whole thing was automatic—one of the other side’s data-mining bots determined that you were in a position to threaten their scheme and began yanking strings, starting with getting you arrested in Amsterdam.”

  “Huh?” Jack somehow manages to look endearingly stupid when he gapes like an idiot, more like a large but thick sheep-dog than a village idiot. “But it’s not—”

  “You’re flagged as a SPOOKS player.” Michaels taps the folio, then glances straight at you. “And you live within ten kilometres of a subject of interest, and have near enough exactly the same skill set. Locking you down for a couple of days while they make their move would be prudent, don’t you think?”

  Well. “Who’s the subject of interest?” you ask. It’s not as if you haven’t guessed already, but some confirmation would be nice.

  “Nigel MacDonald. Who doesn’t actually exist—Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there: He wasn’t there again today, I wish that man would go away—he’s a figment of our reality-fabrication department’s imagination.”

  “Which organization’s division?” asks Jack: “Hayek Associates, or SPOOKS, or whoever you are?”

  Michaels nods. “Jolly good question. As you’ve probably surmised, Hayek Associates are a front. It’s a real enough company and Wayne and Marcus are real enough business men, and it’s even profitable—but that’s not what it’s here for. It—I should say ‘we’—are a listening post on the virtual frontier. It’s our job to keep an eye open for certain activities that…well, for a last-decade example, do you remember the flap some years ago over terrorists holding training camps in Second Life? Not that that’s quite what was going on—they weren’t training camps, it was just a convenient place to go and swap intelligence or give orders, once the web and email and telephone networks were all being tapped—but, the thing is, for the past twenty years we’ve been trying to nail down every communications channel that the bad guys might use, and the trouble is, it doesn’t work.” He shoves his hair back with one hand, and for a moment the boyish good looks collapse in haggard disarray. “Because bandwidth expands faster than storage, and every time we think we’ve got one type of channel locked down, a new one comes along, and we can’t back-track to hunt traffic in a medium we didn’t know existed. And then some disruptive new technology comes down the pipeline and makes everything we’re doing obsolete in a couple of months…”

  Jack glances at you sidelong while the middle-aged spookmaster is fumbling to articulate whatever it is he’s got stuck in his mind. His expression is so dry you have to bite your lip. Dry as in tinder-dry. Jack’s finally getting angry, and you’ve got a feeling that you don’t want to be inside the blast radius when he goes off. “Jack’s niece,” you prompt Michaels. “What makes you think she’s safe?”

  “Well, for starters there’s the fact that she’s been abducted by the procedural content engine from a role-playing game, rather than a slavering paedophile. In fact, if this is the usual way these things play out, she probably doesn’t even know she’s been kidnapped as such, any more than you realized you were being taken out of circulation by a rival intelligence agency in Amsterdam. It’s all just a game to her. Look, I can promise you that we’re working on it, and I won’t be lying. But, in all honesty—we can’t just call the local police and tell them to go in with tasers drawn. Firstly, we’re not sure where she is, yet, and secondly, if the police find her too fast, it’ll tip the opposition off that we’re onto their game. That would be disastrous—it would invite escalation—”

  And then Jack blows his top.

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean? It seems to me that we’ve already been pretty fucking escalated, all the way into a gravel quarry if we hadn’t broken out! Chen was scared shitless—he thought someone was going to try to kill him—and I’ll bet you that if he shows up again, it’ll be in an organ bank. These fuck
ers aren’t playing games, Mister Spook, sir, in case you’ve forgotten there are several million euros missing—”

  You’ve got a very peculiar feeling that Jack is playing some kind of game with Michaels, but you haven’t got a clue what the rules are. And then Michaels shakes his head. “That’s irrelevant.”

  You can’t keep your mouth shut at that. “What do you mean, it’s irrelevant? What are we here for, then?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” Michaels breathes heavily. “Are you going to listen?”

  “Fuck no, I’m trying to tell you you’ve been—” But that’s just the tail-end of Jack’s venting, and he manages to shut himself up before he really puts his foot in his mouth. He’s not stupid, is Jack; unlike some of the geeks you’ve known in your time, he can get a message if you hit him over the head with it hard enough. (He seems to be housetrained, he’s not pushy, and he doesn’t smell bad: If it wasn’t for the tee-shirts and furtive programming runs, he’d have trouble hanging on to his geek licence.) “Go on, please,” he says, with a very odd look on his face.

  “Thank you. Let me lay out a few things first, by way of establishing a context. This is about national security, and, if you’re anything like the civilians I’ve dealt with in the past, you’re about to ask what it’s got to do with you. So I’d like to nail that down first so we can skip the stupid questions later. Clear?”

  You nod, warily. National security is a weasel term that covers a multitude of sins, but you’ll let it pass for now. Whose national security? is the next question you’ve got in mind…

  “This is the twenty-first century, and we’re in the developed world. You’re probably thinking wars are something that happens in third-world shit-holes a long way away. And to a degree, you’d be right. Modern warfare is capital-intensive, and it hasn’t really been profitable for decades; it was already a marginal proposition back in 1939 when Hitler embarked on his pan-European asset-stripping spree—his government would have been bankrupt by March 1940 if he hadn’t invaded Poland and France—and it’s even worse today. When the Americans tried it in Iraq, they spent nine times the value of the country’s entire oil reserves conquering a patch of desert full of—sorry, I’m rambling. Pet hobby-horse. But anyway: Back in the eighteenth century, von Clauswitz was right about war being the continuation of diplomacy by other means. But today, in the twenty-first, the picture’s changed. It’s all about enforcing economic hegemony, which is maintained by broadcasting your vision of how the global trade system should be structured. And what we’re facing is a real headache—a three-way struggle to be the next economic hegemon.”