Charles Stross - Halting State

“Very possibly,” says Liz. For his part, Verity looks like he’s bitten into an apple and found half a worm. “I wasn’t going to put it in so many words, but the roomful of kit makes me think that we may be up against a blacknet here—possibly the same one we had all that trouble with last year.” There are groans all around the room, especially from the old-school detective suits at the back. “What we found in the flat fits the pattern, and MacDonald’s disappearance would also fit if you view it as an elimination followed by sanitary measures.”

“It does that,” Verity grates, letting the words out reluctantly, “so we’ll consider it. Fuck . Alright, it’s showtime. Bill, get onto facilities and book an incident room. Liz, I trust ye’ve started a new HOLMES instance? Email everyone the URL and start getting this all into it. Pencil me in the SIO slot and keep me updated. Who’s handling the Pilton murder, isn’t it Fergus? Let’s get this linked into that data set and see what we can fish up…”

You realize with a sinking feeling that everybody else around here knows what Liz and Verity are speaking about—and from the long faces it’s bad, very bad indeed. But you didnae get to be a sergeant by sticking your pinkie up and saying Please miss, what blacknet was tha’? So you get yourself into CopSpace and go hunting it, and when you see what comes back, you just about boak.

Because if Liz is right, that poor bastard MacDonald won’t be giving you a witness statement. And that’s just for starters…

You don’t know what you were expecting from the body shop, but it certainly wasn’t a rumpled-looking bear-driving gamer called Jack. (Alias Teddy or otherwise.) And while you do know what you were expecting from the investigation, it wasn’t spend a rainy afternoon in a hotel conference room playing swords’n’sorcery games.

But at least Jack’s congenial, and he seems to know how the game works, which is the main thing.

You’re about halfway through the tutorial, learning how to pick locks, sneak across butterfly floors, and turn small furry critters to stone with your Mad Powerz, when your phone rings. You put the game on hold for a moment: “Yes?”

It’s Chris Morgan. “Elaine? We’re breaking for a bite to eat now, and it’s a good excuse to get everybody up to date. Want to meet me in the lobby in ten minutes?”

You spare a glance for the mouse you’re trying to turn into a stalactite. “Can do.” A thought strikes you. “Should I bring Jack?”

“Jack? The body shop guy?”

“The consultant,” you correct him.

“Hmm. Yes, bring him along. I’m not sure what he can contribute, but you never know.”

You hang up, glare at the wee sleekit, couring, timorous beastie, and try the gesture again. Voilà : instant stone-baked rodent. Well, at least that worked. You log out, then tap Jack on the shoulder. He jumps. “Yes?” he asks.

“Finish whatever you’re doing, we’re going for dinner. On the company.”

“What—okay, yeah.” You can just about see his eyes twitching behind the opaque disks of his gaming glasses. “Ten seconds…right.” He slides the glasses off. “What should I expect?”

“We’re going for dinner,” you repeat patiently. “You know, a chance to have a meeting without starving to death.”

“Yes, but who with? You’re the only person I’ve met so far,” he adds.

“Oh, right. I guess I should have introduced you—well, the rest of the team was in a meeting when you showed up, so it wasn’t exactly practical. Now’s your chance. Unless you had something else on?”

Jack looks momentarily perplexed. “No, nothing doing,” he says ruefully. He lays his glasses down carefully on top of the gaming laptop—the screen’s a shimmery blur from where you’re sitting. “I have no life.” He chuckles, trying to make a joke of the obviously defensive reaction, and you feel a stab of unworklike empathy.

“Well, let’s go.” You stand up. “I’ll introduce you to everybody.”

Chris is down in the lobby with Mohammed and Brendan. They’ve shed their ties, which is a bad sign—either there’s zero probability of any client action today, or Chris is planning on leading an overnight death march. But at least it’ll be a well-fed death march, you figure, as he leads you all into the hotel bistro. The manager has already sorted out a table at the back. A minute later Margaret and Faye show up and the forced small-talk and time-filling silences stop.

“Brendan, why don’t you fill us all in on the time line?” Chris suggests, once introductions are made and starters are ordered.

“Sure.” Brendan stares at his water glass dourly for a moment. (Another sign that things are going badly: Chris didn’t start by ordering a couple of bottles of stockbroker’s ruin. He wants everybody sober.) “It’s a mess. Here’s what we know. Last Thursday someone at Hayek managed to get the police interested . They were supposed to be keeping a lid on it pending a proper investigation, but someone panicked, and to make matters worse, it’s local plod, not SOCA or the Serious Fraud Agency. Then the police discovered that one of Hayek’s people, Nigel MacDonald, is missing. The latest update—don’t ask me for details, and I shall tell you no lies—is that it’s a full-on missing person investigation. Seems the plod went to call on Mr. MacDonald at home and found signs of a struggle: They’re treating it as a possible murder case.”

You look around the table as your soup arrives: There are long faces all round. “That isn’t very helpful,” Margaret says carefully. Damn right it isn’t: Having to work with the police getting underfoot is bad enough, having the Police actually threatening to do their job …

“Indeed not.” Brendan sounds ghoulishly pleased with himself. “Can I continue? It appears to be an inside job, the insider in question has vanished, the police think he may be dead, and to add to the fun, they’re treating the offices as a secondary crime scene. If MacDonald is dead, that turns this into a murder investigation, and they pull out all the stops.” His glance takes in Jack, who is sitting next to you, shoulders slightly hunched as he chews on a crust of garlic bread. “Obviously, they’re going to consider the robbery in Avalon Four as a likely motive for the hypothetical killing, so if that happens, we won’t be able to move without tripping over a dibble.”

Margaret smiles and puts her soup spoon down. “What did you achieve today?” she asks you. And you think: I should have seen this coming .

“I—” You corpse for a moment. What the hell are you going to say? I played games for four hours straight? It must show on your face because Margaret’s smile becomes slightly fixed as she waits. “I, uh…”

“Um. May I?” asks Jack. You nod, speechless. “We obviously couldn’t get access to Hayek Associates, so we decided to use the time productively by setting up a high-performance Zone client network, then covering some essential familiarization material. We also discussed ways and means of tracking Mr. MacDonald’s history in Zonespace, because—as you’re no doubt aware—most inside jobs also involve an external partner who can launder the merchandise, and finding the outside connection is our best hope for discovering what actually happened inside Hayek Associates.”

He then launches into a spiel of explanatory technobabble that leaves you agog with admiration. It’s not so much the ten-euro words that do it as the polished professionalism with which he slots them together. For a moment, you almost know what it must feel like to be a Thames Gateway resident talking to a flood insurance salesman. “That’s about it,” you add, shrugging, when he nods at you. “Any questions?” You hold your breath, hoping nobody calls your bluff.