Charles Stross - Halting State

Vhrana is a mess of clashing architectural styles, but the Duke has imposed a certain uniformity over it all by restricting the supply of certain building materials—not unlike Edinburgh, come to think of it. Thus, the timber-framed Tudor look hunches cheek by jowl with lighter wood-and-wicker buildings, some of them thatched, and the odd eruption of elvish structures—tediously similar to late-mediaeval Japan, in your opinion, but at least it doesn’t clash too violently. There aren’t many people out on the streets yet, for it’s still morning in most of North America, but as you make your way towards the northern market hall, you pass a number of hawkers selling their stuff.

“What are you looking for?”

“Voodoo board. I’m pretty sure it’s near the north end of this market. We’re in a no-PvP zone, by the way, you can hop down and explore if you want: Nobody’s going to jump you.”

“Oh. Okay, then.” She manages to dismount without impaling herself on a street sign while you sniff around among the market stalls—a lot of their keepers are in zombie mode, crying out their sales spiel in a loop—and look for the board. Eventually you find it, tucked away between the Golden Lotus Peace and Justice Co-operative (actually the local chapter of the Assassins Guild) and the Temple of Ru’aark. You scroll through flashing names and blinking icons, looking for—

“The missing guy. What’s his name?”

“Nigel MacDonald, aka Nigel Reliable. Not.”

“I meant, his Zone name. Names. Any inkling?”

“What, you mean what his character was called?”

“No, his true name. The one that’s attached to any character he’s playing, so his friends can find him. Like, I’m currently being Theodore G. Bear, but my Zone handle is JackReed. You’re currently being Anonymous Coward—sorry, that’s a generic, you haven’t named your noob—but when we logged you in we created an account with the Zone handle ElaineBarnaby. Yes?”

“Oh, right. Wouldn’t he just be NigelMacDonald?”

“Nope. For one thing, that’s a common name. I only got JackReed because I’ve been playing since the early days, and I pulled a few strings; name squatting is a national sport hereabouts. And for another, I’m thinking if we want to trace Mr. Reliable, we need to know what his handle was.” You think for a moment. “What his handles were…”

She’s sharp. “Plural?”

“You got it.” You stare at her noob. There’s a faint ding as a name finally appears over her asp-haired head: Stheno. Good, she’s cluing up. “Listen, it’s a quarter to five, and if we don’t get hold of his handle real soon now, we’re not going to be able to get any further today. Assuming he was hiding something, we need to know who we’re looking for. So. Got any bright ideas?”

“Yes. Let’s run through that tutorial you told me about. We’ll worry about finding MacDonald’s name tomorrow; first I figure I need to know what I’m doing. Or did you have other plans for the evening?”

Being first on scene has its little perks, and one of them is that under the Victims of Crime (Restitution) Act (2010)—a hang-over from before the independence vote went through—if an offence has been committed against a designated Victim of Crime with a pecuniary value of blah or a custodial sentence of wibble, the designated VOC must be assigned a Victim Liaison Officer, to do the touchy-feely hand-wringing shit and dial the Samaritans for them. You were the first responder to Hayek Associates, you’re not part of Liz’s trained and certified gang of murder puppies, and the pecuniary value is clearly well outside the two-thousand-euro threshold, so she patted you on the head and told you to run along and be a good little VLO for Hayek Associates.

But how the fuck do you counsel a corporation that’s been mugged?

“Hello, I’m your Victim Liaison Officer. I understand you’re a bit upset about it—share price down in the dumps, third quarter figures looking a bit dodgy, that kind of thing—would you like to talk to someone sympathetic? A cup of tea, perhaps?”

So you go back on site, nip down the fire stairs and through the blast doors round the back, and bang on the Great White Chief’s door.

“Who is it?”

You open the door. “Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Hackman, but I was wondering if you’d have the time for a wee chat.” You smile, making friendly.

Marcus Hackman’s office is all done up in chrome and black like an eighties bachelor pad. Mary has a thing for design magazines, and you recognize the Eames chair and lounger, and you’ll swear you’ve seen that desk somewhere famous. One wall is cluttered with photographs and certificates and the sort of shit the terminally insecure use to reassure themselves that they really matter; or maybe it’s what aggressive office sociopaths use to browbeat the terminally insecure into thinking that they really matter. The shark bares his teeth at you in a not-too-cannibalistic manner. “I can spare you five minutes.”

“Thank you, sir.” You smile right back at him. “First things first, are you aware of your rights under the Victims of Crime Act?” You blink the relevant paragraphs up in front of your right eye, just in case: “As a Victim of Crime, you have the right to a Victim Liaison Officer, and I thought you’d be pleased to know that I’m here to help everybody deal with any unpleasant consequences emerging from the incident.”

His cheek twitches. “You mean, to spy on us,” he accuses.

“I wouldna put it like that, sir. Victims of Crime can be quite upset by the process. They need support, they need regular updates on the progress of investigations, and it helps just a little bit to make sure that they don’t get the feeling they’ve been dumped. We wouldn’t want anyone to get any ideas about taking the law into their own hands, either—”

He raises a hand. “Please. Let’s be honest and open here.” He smiles with exaggerated bonhomie at the brim of your hat, mugging for the camera. “A financial institution managed by my company has been robbed, and a member of my management team fucked up by inviting you in rather than going through the correct channels. Quite obviously, your boss thinks it’s an inside job, so she’s set you to snoop around and see if the insider freaks and makes a run for it.” (He puts his hand down on the pile of papers cluttering up his desktop: You try to eyeball them discreetly, zooming for an image capture, but his hand’s in the way.) “That’s fine and dandy. You just don’t need to play the happy clappy let’s-all-hold-hands script at me . I’ve got more important things to worry about.”

“Like what?”

He looks at you briefly, then makes a flicking motion with his fingertips.

“You want to say something off the record?” you ask.

He nods. Interesting.

You shrug. “This is most irregular,” you tell him as you pull out your phone and hit the big red button labelled OFF. He doesn’t need to know that it’s not your only camera.

Hackman leans forward, across his desk. “You know we’ve been served with two search-and-seizure orders in the past day? One’s from a specialist risk-consultancy agency. The other’s from our insurance underwriters. They’re going to be coming through here in hobnailed boots over the next couple of days, and believe me, you haven’t seen victims until you’ve seen what those thugs are going to leave behind. They mean to prove negligence on our part: There’s a lot of money at stake. If you’re poncing around in the background, trying to get my people to open up and go all weepy on your shoulder, then potentially you are going to do me a lot more harm than the initial incident.” His shoulders are quivering with something very like anger but so tightly controlled that all that comes across is a sense of desperate urgency. “There are going to be people running around these offices, people I can’t legally keep out, bottom-feeding scum who are not friendly . Like you, they’re investigators. Unlike you, they’re not investigating the crime in order to find the perpetrator; they’re looking for an excuse for a deep-pocket lawsuit. They want to take everything I’ve built here and steal it, and if they can find a legal pretext to do so, they will stop at nothing. They’re trash and I wouldn’t cross the road to piss on them if they were on fire—but I can’t legally stop them, even though I’d like to break their arms and legs and, and—”