Halting State

by Charles Stross

  “Thanks.” She accepts the mug gratefully. “About your washing-machine—”

  “It’ll take about three hours, if you still want to use it. But I can lend you a spare pair of jeans and a jacket if you don’t.”

  “You don’t need to, but thanks.” A certain tension goes out of her. “Show me where you keep the machine?” The washer/dryer is under the kitchen work-top. It’s fully automatic, setting its cycle from the RFIDs in her jacket and trousers. Thirty seconds later she curls up on the futon opposite you with her coffee mug, eyes dark and serious in the gloom. (You hadn’t realized just quite how much illumination the various gizmos contributed to your den.) “Okay. What do you think is going on?”

  “Well—” You stop, half-tongue-tied by the sight of her sitting opposite you, large as life, wearing your dressing-gown. There’s a subtext here that you’d barely allowed yourself to notice, consciously: Do you suppose she’s here because she likes you? The mummy lobe wants to kick up a censorious fuss, but it’s at a loss for words: You’re not terribly good at dealing with the rules of the game Elaine seems to be playing, or even recognizing when a game’s in progress, so you retreat hastily in the direction of something you understand.

  “I think we can trust Barry about as far as we can throw him. He’s definitely part of SPOOKS, and SPOOKS ties into the police or intelligence services at some level—otherwise, we wouldn’t have gotten the taxi ride. And he’s fed us a great story-line. Beyond that…”

  She stares at you from the darkness. “Your niece, Elsie. You’re…you don’t seem to be worrying about her. Is that just a story? Jack?”

  The roaring in your ears is like the engine of an on-coming juggernaut on the wrong side of the road, headlights blazing and horn blaring. “I can’t”—don’t want to—“face…”

  “Jack?” She leans forward, visibly concerned. “What is it?”

  You force yourself to take a breath and try to nail down the mess of emotions she’s stirred up. “I can’t…look, trust me on this?”

  “Trust you?” She’s still tense.

  Another deeper breath. “It’s complicated. I’ll try to explain later. For now, let’s just say there’s stuff Michaels knows about if he’s plugged into the police. And there’s nothing—from here—I can do for her.”

  “But I’d have thought—” She stops, with a visible effort. “You’re sure?”

  You nod, not trusting yourself to say any more. You feel shaky. It’s all true—Elsie is beyond your ability to help—but you don’t like to think about it. It’s just too painful.

  Elaine sits back, looking thoughtful. After a moment, she glances away. “You trust Barry to look after Elsie, but you don’t trust his operation as far as you can throw him. Is that right?”

  That’s an easy one to catch. “They’ve been penetrated by the other side. And what about the rest of it? That piece of paper? How do we know it’s genuine?”

  She shakes her head. You trace the outline of her face against the dim light from the street filtering through the net curtains. “The paperwork’s the real thing. Either that, or the cop who handed it to us wasn’t. And with the lights and the way he bent the speed limit on the way over…no.”

  “Bugger.” You take an experimental sip of coffee. “Okay. So SPOOKS is basically a tool that permits an electronic intelligence agency to run a metric shitload of unwitting human intelligence agents, weekend spies. They trained us, and now we’ve been activated to deal with a threat. The alleged threat, the one they say they want us to look at, is a different kind of gaming gambit: a botnet attack on a small European state, where the zombies are obedient human gamers who think they’re just having fun and the director is a procedural content generator—”

  “Huh.” The tip of her nose crinkles slightly when she frowns. “I’m not a gamer, you’ll have to define your terms.”

  “Terms?” You back-track, trying to work out what confused her. “Procedural content?” She nods. “Content is, well, the map of the dungeon, location of treasure, where the monsters live, what the wallpaper looks like. Any game is full of the stuff, and it’s expensive to do by hand—you need tile illustrators, narrators, musicians, programmers, a whole bunch of skills. So over the past couple of decades the industry’s put a lot of effort into procedural game design—AI tools that can design a virtual-reality environment on the fly for players to explore. It’s not just multiplayer games like Avalon Four; there’s been work on ARG—artificial reality games—that can take a set of starting hints and design a conspiracy to drop on top of the players. You know, generate scripts for phone calls, order up custom gadgets to be planted at certain locations, hire actors…?”

  She looks blank, the same way she did right before you hit on your spreadsheet-as-programming metaphor, but this time you can’t quite see a way around it. “Artificial reality?”

  “Yeah! SPOOKS is a variant on it, heavily mediated via the net, but you get ones in which there are actors and sets—you sign up to be inside the story. Like I LOVE BEES—that was the first one to go large—or DARK DESIGNS.”

  “Pay to be inside the story.” She looks distant. “So, uh. Suppose someone’s set up a content generator to try and hijack a country. Bribe police constable A to ignore game-player B—who thinks it’s a game—to carry bomb C (which is a firework, modified by a pyrotechnics geek who thinks they’re building it for a special effects outfit) into a parliament building where useful idiot D will install the detonator. That sort of thing. Right?”

  “Something like that.” You take another sip of coffee. “They’re exploiting our shitty wide-open crypto infrastructure, of course. Everything, phones, Internet, the lot, runs over TCP/IP these days—blame some really stupid decisions back in the oughties. They should have known better; it’s hackable as hell, so, in an attempt to lock things down, the government decreed that access to the national-level routers, the boxes that manage all the traffic, would be secured using a code called a one-time pad. OTP codes are great—they’re totally unbreakable if you don’t have a copy of the key—but they’ve got a big drawback: You need a copy of the key, a long sequence of random numbers, at each end-point. And if someone who’s not supposed to have a copy of the key gets hold of it, the whole thing is blown wide open. Anyway, what Michaels was telling us was, someone leaked those keys to Team Red. As the actual connections between routers are secured using symmetric cyphers that are easy to crack if you’ve got a quantum processor, it means they can snoop on anything. The National ID Register—never mind that it’s poisoned, full of bogus records—the ID cards themselves use last-generation public-key encryption that a quantum processor can break almost instantly. And if Team Red have got a copy of the backbone keys, they can impersonate anyone they want to be, up to a point. The content engine can fake the ID of the first minister, but it still takes a voice actor to impersonate the first minister on the phone, right? So they’ve got this amazing backdoor, but wherever possible, they’re doing stuff via the net. And as the net is so heavily surveilled, they’re focussing on the bits that are hardest to monitor—stuff that goes on inside the big distributed games in Zonespace, where the rules change from minute to minute, and the players can implement their own in-game game engines.”

  “Right. Right.” She nods, her expression intent. “So we’ve got these two, uh, clans. Teams? Red versus Blue, playing for Scotland or Poland. And it’s all happening quietly when Chen and his accomplice…?”

  “Chen’s over here, being a pair of hands for Team Red. And he’s got access to their key cracker back home, and he thinks, why shouldn’t I make some money on the side? It’s typical, really: Great plan, but the operational security is blown wide open because a team member got greedy and ran a bank robbery in Avalon Four. Which must have netted him, oh, all of about ten thousand euros’ worth of loot, and maybe a death sentence from the Guoanbu when they find out. Which is why he was so desperate to spill his guts when we showed up.” Unconsciously, you find yourself rubbing yo
ur ribs. Right where the pocket with your keyboard was. “Jesus. He probably thought we were zombies closing on him, and we were going to put him in a taxi.”

  “The taxi was already waiting.” Elaine shudders delicately. “We weren’t its real target, we were just the useful idiots who were going to shanghai Chen. Only we screwed up.” She’s staring at you, you realize.

  Timing is everything. (But at least the mummy lobe has shut its trap, leaving you to coldly consider the picture with your Spy Sensibility, or maybe your Gamer’s Gonads.) “I was arrested in Amsterdam.”

  “Yes?” She sits up straighter.

  “On Friday night, last week. The bank robbery on the Island of Valiant Dreams happened on Thursday morning, didn’t it? Triggering Michaels’s man-trap.”

  “The man who never was, Nigel MacDonald—the fake identity built around your résumé.” She’s still staring at you. It’s as if you’ve fallen into the centre of her world. “How long have you been playing SPOOKS?”

  “Huh? Like I said, I did it years ago—on-the-job research, actually.”

  “Okay.” She makes deliberate eye contact. “So you expect me to believe that Hayek Associates had a Jack-shaped hole in its corporate structure just waiting for Mr. Chen to try a penetration attack on them?”

  “No, I—” You look away, embarrassed. Then an idea surfaces in your imagination like an iceberg. It’s too preposterous for words, but it fits the observable facts—“whoops.”

  “Yes?” She leans forward.

  “What if the whole reason STEAMING was shitcanned last week was because Michaels was planning to hire me anyway? Or rather…they’ve got a hole in their org chart with my name on it—or rather, ‘Nigel MacDonald,’ but I’m there if they need to activate me—and it’s not the only hole, they’ve probably got a bunch of other ones. Hell, there’s probably an agency somewhere with an Elaine-Barnaby–shaped hole in it by any other name, just waiting. Let’s suppose Michaels already had the wind up that something shitty was stinking up the Beijing gutters, and was getting ready to activate a counter-espionage unit to go looking for it. He was planning on running most of the team via SPOOKS, but he’d need some clueful people on the inside—I suspect he tapped me for the job of GM. But then the robbery pointed to the bad guys having penetrated a lot further than anyone realized, and the idiot marketing manager called in the cops. So he ensured that when you asked for a native guide, I was hired”—you flash back to that weird interview, with Mr. Pin-Stripe and Mr. Grey and the not-quite-right uncanny valley graphical overlay—“and he probably leaned on your boss to make sure you were left up here because, after all, you’re one of his pawns.”

  “Sounds plausible. I think you’re right about him tapping you for a job—but it’s not just the matter of your old employment being terminated. I think he had you arrested in Amsterdam just to drive you home with your tail between your legs.” She puts her coffee mug down.

  “Agh!” The mummy lobe manages to blurt out an indignant denial of your innocence, then shuts down in complete catatonic withdrawal.

  She grins at you impishly. “That’s how I’d have done it, anyway.”

  “You have an evil mind!”

  “And this is a bad thing how, exactly?”

  You find yourself returning her grin. “We’re going to need it if we’re going to figure out what Barry isn’t telling us. As long as you can remember only to use your powers for good.”

  “I’ll do my best. But anyway, Team Red are dug in, they can listen in on any communications in Scotland, and they can crack any of the common encryption systems in use.” She looks dubious. “Are we safe?”

  “I don’t know. Certainly Barry’s man-behind-the-curtain operation has got stuff that Team Red don’t know about or can’t break. And”—another iceberg heaves into view—“I think I just got it.”

  “Got what?” She looks anxious. “Is it catching?”

  “Skill set: Nigel MacDonald. Let’s suppose…yeah. Let’s say Barry got wind of Team Red’s existence and also got wind of Chen’s little bank robbery before it happened. Yes? Or even just the capability Chen had tucked up his post-graduate-student sleeve. ‘Nigel MacDonald’ shows up, encourages Chen to do the deed, then vanishes after the robbery. Team Red are trying to figure out what the ingenious Mr. Chen was up to, and they realize MacDonald has done a runner, so they focus on him as the accomplice. Then I turn up in their trawl, and—”

  Her eyes go wide. “Carry on, Nigel.”

  Nigel? It’s not a name you’d have picked for yourself, but if the hat fits…

  “Whoops. They set me up—and you—to go and poke Team Red with a pointy stick, and Team Red are primed to think that I’m their rogue member’s partner, right? They don’t know what Nigel MacDonald looks like, other than through his NIR entry. Shit, I bet you he’s my spitting image!”

  “What’s the opposite of identity theft? Identity donation?” She shakes her head. “Okay, so they’ve set you up as bait for Team Red. So that makes me…the sniper. Right?” She stands up. “Where’s the bathroom?”

  You point wordlessly and track her as she heads upstairs. The street light filtering through the hall window outlines the calves of her legs beneath the robe, drawing your eyes after her. It’s as if your mind is split three ways. Part of you is still trying to assimilate the fact that the other side play for keeps, and you are it. Not the People’s Republic of Scotland, but you, personally, are facing the sharp end of the best and the brightest of the Chinese Ministry of State Affairs, and you are not qualified to dabble in their games. Another part of you is now almost certain that Elaine is considering inviting you to play a different game, the oldest game there is—and the mummy lobe is tongue-tied and stricken with horror, realizing that, if you take up her invitation, you’ll have to explain both your little problems…And, finally, there’s the little fact that you’re playing a game you don’t understand the rules of against an artificial reality engine that Barry Michaels says has taken Elsie hostage, and that he thought it’d be a good idea to cross-link your National Identity Register files with those of an imaginary double agent. Slick public-school dog-fucker.

  With a creak of floor-boards, Elaine sits down beside you on the futon, graceful and elegant as only a gawky collection of librarian-shaped elbows and knees can be. “I’m trying to figure out what they expect me to do,” she says, arranging the dressing-gown so that it covers her bare toes. “And you,” she adds. “I know what role you’re meant to play, but who am I?”

  She’s eerily focussed, and you’re not entirely sure which game she’s talking about at this point. “Who do you want to be?” you ask, not quite looking at her directly.

  “I think”—she licks her upper lip nervously—“I want to be a spook.” Her pupils are wide and black in the twilight. “I know what I don’t want to be.”

  “Well, then. I think you’re already halfway there. You’re a forensic analyst with a security clearance, and you’re positioned so uncomfortably close to, uh, ‘Nigel MacDonald’ that if Team Red are tracking our meatspace location, they’ll figure MacDonald is under extreme close-up examination.”

  “But that’s not what you should have asked,” she says, nodding at the stack of dead home-entertainment gear.

  “Oh?”

  “You should have said, who do you want”—she looks you in the eye, and you realize it’s game on, and you freeze in her path like a pheasant in front of a highland Land Rover; because there’s one special unfair rule to this game that applies to you but not to anybody else: And now it’s time to tell her, you find you’re terrified, but you can’t not tell her, either, and retain a shred of self-respect—“to be?”

  Which is how Elaine ends up staying the night at your flat.

  Face it, it was probably inevitable from the moment you offered to lend her the use of the washing-machine and a spare pair of jeans. If you’d realized she was halfway to fancying you, you’d have panicked and stuck your foot so far down your throat y
ou could have kicked yourself in the ass: But by being considerate and friendly, you accidentally convinced her that you’re not a desperate loser. So she sat on your futon in the twilight, and you both chewed the paranoid cud and realized how isolated you were. And the next thing you noticed it was dark outside and the washing-machine was still running. “How do I get back to the hotel from here?” she asked. “Without using a taxi,” she added with the ghost of a smile.

  “There’s a bus that’ll take you most of the way—or I could walk you”—and then you stood up and looked out the window and saw the rain: not the roaring waterfall that had ambushed you on the way home, but a normal Edinburgh evening’s worth of rain, a sporadic tinkling of liquid shrapnel—“or you can use the futon if you like: There’s plenty of spare bedding.”

  “Thanks,” she said, a genuine smile now, and patted the futon beside her. “How about we order in a pizza? You’ve still got a land-line, right?”

  A pizza in the darkness demanded accompaniment—the neglected litre-bottle of Belgian beer in the fridge—and you rummaged around with the cables and plugged your pod straight into the speakers, and then she started rummaging through your music collection until she found a bunch of tracks by Miranda Sex Garden that you’d completely forgotten about to ooh and ah over, and made small-talk about gigs she’d been to (with a friend, you inferred, conveniently airbrushed out of the frame), and her gaming/re-enactment habit. There’d been an odd moment when she found a project you’d forgotten about sitting under the stack of magazines in the bathroom, but then you’d explained it was your knitting, not an ex’s, and she’d taken it in her stride; and that got you both onto talking about how your respective jobs had got in the way of you having a life, and opened the second (unchilled) bottle of Belgian beer. She’d asked how you were feeling after the crash, and confessed her neck was stiff, and you’d gingerly, inexpertly, rubbed it by way of confirmation. Until you’d tipsily noticed how late it was getting and had suggested maybe it was time to go to bed, and fetch the spare bedding—and she’d somehow managed to imply that this was unnecessary. She kissed you like a small, cold creature seeking warmth, and you’d tried desperately to remember how to kiss someone back passionately, half-paralysed with fear that the moment wasn’t going to last.