Halting State

by Charles Stross

  You stare out onto the high street. It’s the usual congested mess of buses and taxis queuing for Haymarket Interchange, with a couple of supertrams parked nose-to-tail and gumming everything up. Things have never been right there since they installed the light rail system, but nobody on the Council’s about to admit that they should have knocked down about a billion euros’ worth of historic listed buildings before they built the bloody tracks. It looks like pedestrian hell down there, even without the shambling crowd of people getting off the trams, moving oddly.

  “What am I meant to be looking for, Bob?” you ask, forcing yourself to be patient.

  “Zombies, skipper. What do they look like to you?”

  You stare, wishing you could use your goggles—the digital zoom would be right handy at this point. It looks like any other crowd to you, at first, so you squint and look at the edges. They’re walking funny, lurching from side to side. And why has that guy got his arms outstretched? He blunders about, colliding with a woman in a business suit that’s ripped from shoulder to sleeve, and her face—

  “Jesus, Bob.” You blink, then swallow. “There’s no such thing as zombies.” A little niggling doubt worries away at you. “But get yerself down to reception and tell them to shut the doors, just in case. I’m going to make some calls.”

  You pull your phone out and speed-dial Liz. There’s no wait, just an immediate canned message. “Hello, you are through to Detective Inspector Kavanaugh’s voice mail. Please leave a message.”

  Shit. Why’s her phone switched off? You glance out of the window again, just to confirm what you can see. “Skipper, Sue here. Ye dinna have tae take ma wuird fer it, I’ll text you a photie”—you pause, trying to get a grip on your accent, which is making a bid for freedom (as it often does in moments of stress)—“but we’re holed up in the Malmaison and there’s a bunch of zombies on the pavement outside.” You swallow. “Whit should I do?” You end the call, then take a couple of snaps of the shambling horde and send them to Liz’s mailbox. It’s probably one of those old-time flash mobs, but why here, why now, and why zombies?

  You go back into the conference room just as Elaine, nodding furiously at no one in particular, ends her call and glances at you. “Sorry I was rude earlier, Sergeant. Nobody told me to expect you.”

  “Reet.” You shake your head. “What’re you doing?”

  “Being bait.” She swings an office chair round and sits down on it, facing you. “Actually, Jack’s the bait, I’m supposed to co-ordinate the response.”

  Bait? Response? “Bait for who?” you ask cautiously.

  “A bunch of gamers in China.” She sniffs. “They’re all over our critical infrastructure, but they made a few mistakes, and now Jack’s wearing a false identity—Nigel MacDonald, the guy you’ve been looking for—and we”—her emphasis on the last word is extremely odd—“expect the bad guys to expose themselves, trying to locate him so they can shut him up. They don’t know MacDonald is a sock-puppet, you see.”

  “And you are…?” Scrabbling for traction, springs to mind.

  “I’m secret agent X, it seems.” She grimaces. “Thing is, we don’t know how they’re going to try to get at Jack, but he’s raising a fuss to make them pay attention—”

  “Got it,” says the man himself, still hunched over his gaming box. There’s a pause in his incessant typing.

  “Got what?” you and Elaine ask, almost simultaneously.

  “What they’re fucking doing,” says Jack, triumphantly. “At least, I think I know what they’re doing.”

  “What are they doing, Jack?” asks Elaine. She’s flexing her hands unconsciously, so that for a moment you think she’s fantasizing about strangling him.

  “They’ve set up a botnet, and now they’re controlling it through Zonespace. Zonespace runs distributed across most mobile phones—just about any multi-user game you play relies on one or another version of Zone/DB to handle transactions. They’re sending control packets disguised as flocks of birds or patterns of trees in the forests, or something, you know? Updating the database, and relying on the zombies in the botnet to pick up the changes. It’s their backdoor into the public network, by the way—they feed instructions to the zombies, and the zombies with the stolen authentication pad update the routing tables. The traffic looks like game-play to GCHQ or CESG or NSA or whoever’s sniffing packets; looking in-game for characters run by Abdullah and Salim holding private chat about blowing up the White House garden gnomes won’t get you a handle on what’s going on because they’re not using the game as a ludic universe to chat in, they’re using it as a transport layer! They’re tunnelling TCP/IP over AD&D!”

  You look at Elaine. “Is he usually like this?”

  She sniffs. “I’m beginning to wonder.” Looking at Jack: “What can we expect?”

  “Besides the big-time griefing? Michaels figures the Guoanbu will pull Team Red off us as soon as he hands them a list of names and faces. Nigel MacDonald is there to distract their attention—they’re meant to think his oppo are just a branch of the existing security services with a super-programmer on board, sort of a Ken Thompson figure—rather than understanding what Hayek Associates and SPOOKS are really about. But I reckon Team Red are going to be reluctant to go back in their box. They’ll take advantage of whatever chaos they can create to go after MacDonald, which means me.”

  Griefing is what Davey got suspended from school for last year, not something you associate with spies and terrorists: But on the other hand…they seem to know what they’re doing, and you’ve been told to look after them, right? So you open your mouth: “I’m told there’s a blacknet operating in Edinburgh, and the inspector figures it’s possible it organized what happened to Wayne Richardson. Would this be something your bad guys might use?”

  “Fuck!” Jack jerks in his chair like you’ve brought out a car battery and clamped the shockers to his wedding tackle. “Of course it would be!” (Make it a truck battery.) “That would explain—” He turns back to his laptop and starts typing again. “Fuck, fuck…” It seems that under pressure Jack comes down with a wee dose of the Tourette’s: a good thing you aren’t logging evidence right now, isn’t it?

  “Is a blacknet what I think it is?” asks Elaine. There’s some kind of racket from outside the window: You’re thinking you ought to go and keep an eye on it.

  “Probably.” Where’s Bob? You can understand the skipper taking her time phoning you back, but Bob’s running late. “At the protocol level, it’s an anonymous peer-to-peer currency system. It asks you to do favours, it does you favours. Like, be in front of a building with a running motor at such a time with the backdoors open, and drive to an address where someone’ll be waiting for you with a wallet full of cash and another stolen car.” At least, that’s the innocent-sounding version, because, let’s face it, burglary and criminal damage go together like love and marriage, or robbery and a get-away carriage—and most of the stuff blacknets get used for starts there and gets worse real fast. None of the perps know each other, because it’s all done with zero-knowledge proofs and anonymous remixers running out of zombie servers on some poor victim’s home-entertainment system that’s downloaded one piece of X-rated malware too many. “That’s why I’m here, to make sure nobody tries to kill Nigel MacDonald.”

  There’s a roar from outside, the sound of a crowd yelling a single word over and over again.

  “What’s that?” asks Elaine.

  “Sounds like”—shit, where’s Bob?—“brains,” you say faintly.

  Outside the window, the zombies are holding a pavement sit-in. “What do we want? Brains! When do we want them? Nowwwww…”

  “I’d better go sort this out, before they try to storm the hotel.”

  ELAINE: Zombie Mush

  “What am I looking at?” you ask.

  “A map of Zonespace, with shard frontiers and zombies.”

  “What kind of zombies?”

  “In this context, gamers who’ve been subverte
d. See them over there? The blue dots are your tribe, SPOOKS players who’re also Zone gamers.” There are surprisingly few of them on the map. “The distortion—that’s latency time. Things are really fucked up, I can’t see any websites outside…shit. I think the bad guys must have decided to make happy with all the backbone bandwidth in Scotland. They’ve gotten the authentication keys, so they can mess with the routers in SCOLocate, and the main telcos—there are only a couple of dozen who own their own fibre.”

  You grapple with the magnitude of the problem. “I don’t understand why I’m looking at this, Jack.”

  “The question isn’t where Team Red got the keys to the realm from: Hayek Associates have a copy of the one-time pad, because they’re sniffing on everything. The question is, Who inside Hayek Associates leaked the pad, via the blacknet? Barry’s gotten through to the disaster planning people. They’ve generated fresh master pads, and they’re pushing copies out to the main switches by courier—they’re implementing the national zero-day exploit plan. The goal is to throw the switch at noon, at which point all Team Red’s careful work goes down the toilet. Then they’ll reboot CopSpace completely and load freshly signed certificates for the dot-sco domain by hand on the root servers, and a bunch more fiddly stuff. But the main thing is, once they change the one-time pads for admin access to the national backbone routers, Team Red will be unable to tap traffic at will. Zonespace will go down at noon, too, and that won’t be coming back up for a wee while: When it does, they’ll be frozen out. Our problem is to locate Team Red’s avatars and kill them repeatedly until they stay dead—that should tie them up in PvP until it’s too late, and sends them the message: We know who they are, and if they fuck with us, we’ll take them down. And whoever their inside man or woman at Hayek Associates is, will probably bolt…So get co-ordinating, okay?”

  “Right.” You shuftie over to your own laptop and blink at the screens until you stop feeling cross-eyed. “Don’t you have macros for this?”

  Jack gives you a toothy grin. “Macros for combat would be a breach of the T&Cs, wouldn’t they?”

  “I knew you were going to say something about that.” Grind, grind, grind your foes…Something about this whole set-up doesn’t add up, but you can’t quite put your finger on what feels wrong.

  “That’s what I was digging out of Lovecraftland.” He pulls his phone out and sets it on the desk next to his laptop. “It’s a stress-testing framework I wrote, ages back. Give it a bunch of Zone character accounts, and it’ll run them as a swarm, targeting whatever you put in their path.” He rolls his eyes.

  “That doesn’t sound right.” You stare at him.

  “Dead right it’s not.” He stares right back. “That’s why I buried a backup copy out in the boonies: insurance.”

  “Insurance—”

  “It’s the flip side of a coyote tunnel they wanted installing. You find a bunch of gamers who’re not having any fun, and you lure them to your new setting, see? Come play with us, we’re more fun. Give us your account, and we’ll migrate your players into our new game and give you three months extra time, free. Which is where the stress tester comes in. Because if you give it a bunch of moribund characters in the old game, you can, uh, stress-test it. Just to make it even less fun for the stay-behinds.”

  “You wrote that?” The more you think about it, the less you like the sound of it.

  “Yup. On instructions from management at LupuSoft.” He grins humourlessly. “For stress-testing our own products, honest. This sort of thing happens all the time in a mature market—it’s all about ensuring your customers have fun, and the other side don’t. It’s all okay, as long as you don’t actually use it for immoral, illegal, or fattening purposes: It has entirely legitimate applications. And it’s not the sort of thing you can easily explain not wanting to write in front of an employment tribunal. So there I was, thinking there was some mistake about Dietrich-Brunner Associates needing my particular skill set after all.” He clicks on a button, and another window opens, more text scrolling. “Look in your controls, under DM, options, stress.”

  You bring up the pie menu and see it at once. “Now, let me just load the bunch of accounts that Barry beamed at my phone this morning…”

  His phone is blinking its wee sapphire light for attention. Transfer in progress. A whole bunch of blue dots are showing up on the map of Zonespace, like a toxic rash infecting it from Jack’s mobie. You move your cursor towards them—it’s got a funny lasso icon now—and herd them all together. This is a god mode—you can drop in behind their eyes and drive them, one-on-one, or you can string a whole bundle of them together in a mob and tell them to follow the leader. Who can be another zombie, with an assigned target, or you can run them yourself. It’s a deeply ugly trick, a custom-built griefing tool, but it’s just what you need right now and you have to ask yourself, How much of this did Barry Michaels expect?

  You drop into Stheno’s eyes. It comes easily. You’re standing in the middle of a dirt track, woods to one side and a mountain range just visible in the distance across a field of maize to the other. You look round and see the most bizarre assortment of thuggish allies you can imagine. Orcs, humans, dwarfs, ice elves, a couple of giants, and a solitary dalek: They’re milling around like a flock of sheep. “Listen up!” you yell, trusting the rudimentary speech-to-text capabilities of the mobies they’re running on. “Follow me! Kill anything that’s wearing this!” You hold up the scroll Jack hands you and show them the design inscribed on it in blood, an ideogram of chaos. “Get moving!” And then you hit the GM menu and drop god-level privileges on every last one of Jack’s zombie horde.

  It’s Zonespace, and there’s a city here, a city built on the glacier-rasped basalt plug of an extinct volcano. Huge lumps of steep granite rear from the pine-forested flanks of a huge loch, and the swampy slopes down to a rough timber-crafted coastal harbour in which galleons and triremes swing at anchor. Someone’s obviously been having fun with a bunch of historical maps, because you recognize bits of it from context—a huge castle looming from the top of a basalt spine, a proud royal palace sprawling at the opposite end of the Royal Mile—but you’re pretty certain the real Dunedin never had a mangrove swamp where now the railway station sits, nor was there a rain forest in Leith or an Aztec step-pyramid out by the Gyle.

  But that’s all by the by. You’ve got an army of hundreds and a sword in your hand (not to mention snakes in your hair) and a job to do of killing every Orc you can see, repeatedly, until they stop coming back from the dead. Maybe it’s going to work out, you think. Now all I need to do is figure out how to run god mode in SPOOKS and establish a perimeter. And so you flip back to the desktop and log in to the call-centre application Michaels gave you, just as the office door opens.

  JACK: In the Box

  You’re watching over Elaine’s shoulder to see if she’s got the hang of riding the horde of zombie griefers you’ve just unleashed, which is why you’re puzzled in the extreme when she zips out of the game interface and flips over to the laptop’s other screen to start messing with some other application. “What are you—” doing? you begin to say, as the door opens and you look round expecting to see Sergeant Smith or her big goon of a trainee, and instead find yourself looking at Marcus Hackman, who is staring at you with an expression of concentrated loathing that is rendered even more frightening by what he’s pointing at you: an extremely illegal black-market automatic pistol.

  “Don’t move,” he says. “Keep your hands where I can see them. Both of you,” he adds, as Elaine begins to turn round to see what’s going on—her back is to the door. He steps sideways, out of the doorway, and kicks it shut, keeping his back to the wall.

  What the fuck? you think, a sick, sinking sensation loosening your guts. A lot of things come into abrupt focus. Hackman is wearing his usual expensive suit, but he hasn’t shaved recently, and his normally lacquered hair-style is giving way to minor chaos, strands and tufts out of place. His left shoe, highly polished,
has a scuff mark on its toe. And the gun, a Yarygin PYa if you’re any judge of such things (and you swallowed the Zone Weapons Bible whole during your probationary period, lo those many years ago, as young men are wont to do) has seen better days since it fell off the back of a Russian army lorry and into the hands of some blacknet-connected mafiya scumbag.

  “Mr. Reed. If you don’t do exactly as I say, I shall shoot Ms. Barnaby. Ms. Barnaby, if you disobey an instruction, I shall shoot Mr. Reed. If you understand what I’m saying, you may nod.”

  You swallow and make like a parcel-shelf ornament. After a momentary hesitation, Elaine does likewise. The small of your back is chilly with perspiration.

  “Very good,” says Hackman, as if he’s speaking to a small child. “Where’s your phone, Ms. Barnaby? Quickly.”

  “In my hip pocket,” she says, again hesitating slightly.

  “Good. Ms. Barnaby, when I finish talking, I want you to take Mr. Reed’s phone—there on the desk—and without standing up I want you to drop it in the trash can.” The bin is under the desk, between your right leg and her left. “Do it.”

  Shit. You watch as she reaches across you with her left arm and takes your mobie from where it’s sitting next to the laptop and slowly moves it over the bin. Double shit. Of course it can’t recognize her, so she can’t speed-dial the distress number even if CopSpace was working—

  Clonk.

  “Good. Now, Mr. Reed, when I finish talking, you will reach over and take Ms. Barnaby’s phone from her pocket and put it in the bin. Without standing up.”

  “But it’s—”

  “Shut up,” he snarls, and you put a sock in it fast. “Ms. Barnaby may rise slightly to give you access. She will keep both hands on the table as she does so. If she takes either hand off the table or moves either foot while she is standing, I will shoot you. If you understand, nod.”

  You feel yourself nodding. This can’t be happening, can it? He’s about three metres away, too damn far to try and get to him—he’d shoot one of you first. If it was just you, you might try something (poor impulse control said Miss Fuller in elementary fourth, a damning diagnosis of potential heroism), but he’s aiming at Elaine, and just the thought of him putting a bullet in her makes your heart hammer and turns your vision grey at the edges.