Charles Stross - Halting State

That sets you back on your heels: The Crime and Rehabilitation Office hires civilian specialists from time to time, it’s true, and the technical side of this investigation is going to the National squad as soon as anyone notices it—does that make these people bystanders or fellow cops? Leave it to Liz to sort out the turf wars, you decide. “Ah, well, I cannae be telling you anything until someone tells me you’re to be working on the case,” you temporize. “But if there’s anything ye’ve found about the situation, and especially about Nigel MacDonald, I’d love to hear it.”

“Yes, there’s—” Jack begins eagerly, before Elaine gives him a look that could strip paint. There’s some interesting chemistry going on there, if you’re any judge of such things.

“I think what he means to say is, we’d be happy to co-operate with your investigation purely on a professional peer-to-peer basis with appropriate confidentiality safeguards in place for a pooling of information,” she picks up, facing you like she’s holding a royal flush. And, indeed, she is. So you smile and take a mouthful of too-hot coffee. One point to her.

“Well, that’s a start.” You pause a moment. “You said something about knowing what you were meant to be doing yesterday. What’s changed since then?”

“We’re trying to track down where Tricky Dicky hid the loot,” says Jack, ignoring the warning look Elaine sends him. “Seeing he’s not here for us to ask. Hmm. Do you have him in custody yet?”

You weigh your answer carefully. “Not yet. In fact, if you should see him, I’d appreciate it if you’d IM me. My colleagues do indeed have some questions we’d like to put to him.” Starting with, how’d you come back from the grave? Assuming you existed in the first place? But there’s no call to go frightening the horses just yet, so you keep that thought to yourself.

“I think we can do that,” Jack says, seemingly oblivious as Elaine raises the energy level from Defrost to Nuke. “Problem is, it could be anywhere in Zonespace, or even out of it. Avalon Four isn’t the only game sharing this platform, and whatever was stolen, if they can get it out of Avalon and into somewhere else…” He trails off.

“What is it?” Elaine asks sharply.

“eBay.” He pulls on a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. “Assuming this was a real bank robbery, what do you do with the goods?”

“The goods?” You look perplexed. “Banks hold money …”

Jack shakes his head. “This is a game, remember.” He glances at Elaine, who nods slowly. “The bank’s not somewhere that manages risk; it’s somewhere that stores value. You can only carry so much crap around with you in Zonespace without becoming encumbered, which slows you up. So Hayek run the bank and sell safety deposit storage. This gives players who haven’t bought themselves a castle yet a place to stash their goodies while they’re running around on quests, and it also siphons money out of the game stealthily, in bank charges. Anyway, what was stolen was the contents of about three thousand safety deposit boxes. Actually, the real crime was that someone corrupted the digitally signed ownership certificates for objects in the database, turning them over to some third party: The Orcs were just warm bodies to carry the loot away. Once they had it, the ownership certificates got swapped around again via a remixer to stop Hayek or Kensu International from figuring it out—they don’t routinely log all ownership changes, it’d be like running a supermarket chain’s stock control system—then got the hot goods out of Avalon Four and onto another shard via the rabbit-hole.”

This sounds horribly familiar. “You think there’s a fence somewhere?”

Jack scratches the side of his nose, then takes the glasses off and polishes them on his tee-shirt. “The whole scenario makes no sense at all unless there’s a fence.” He examines the glasses. “In-game auction-houses won’t touch stolen goods, but if they’ve got a conduit set up, say in another real-world jurisdiction or even in another Zone partition, they could sell the loot on eBay. The trouble is going to be getting a list of the stuff that’s been stolen, then checking for all the possible auction-houses. And that’s before you start to wonder if the stolen prestige items have been hacked on by someone with crafting skillz…”

It is horribly familiar: There’s a wee garage down in Cramond that Mac’s been trying to shut down for years—the owner’s a big ned, done time in Bar-L for receiving, and the inspector swears blind he’s running a chop shop—but he’s never been able to pin anything on it. You’ve got unfond memories of spending nights and mornings keeping an eye on his back yard via spy cam, trying to spot a delivery. And on a larger scale, it’s what those blacknets you were reading up on are supposed to do—antisocial networking sites. “Where would you go to look?”

“I’d start by trying to find out what’s been stolen,” says Jack. “And then I’d write a bot, to go round all the online auctions trying to match a shopping list against what’s on sale. Drill down, cross-correlate the merchants”—he’s going all cross-eyed, and you’re not the only one who’s staring at him as if he’s turned into some kind of delphic oracle—“see if any names keeping coming up.”

Barnaby snaps her fingers, a dry, popping sound. “Time series analysis on the transaction log from the auctions,” she says, leading you to wonder whether you’re surrounded by complete nutters or just very, very strange detectives.

Jack shakes his head. “I’d better go see if Mike’s got a list—”

You reach a decision. Funny how Marcus Hackman’s bottom-feeding scum are a lot more human than he is, isn’t it? “No you won’t. We will. Because if you find anything, and there are names attached, I’ll be wanting a wee word with them.”

It turns out that nobody actually knows what’s been stolen.

“You’ve got to understand, it’s a distributed database,” says Couper, looking flustered—when you and Jack found him he was hunkered down in a nest of big flat screens full of tiny coloured text with a ragged left margin, and it took a tap on the shoulder before he’d look up—“we don’t track everything centrally.”

“What about the journal logs?” asks Jack. Someone behind you snaps their fingers.

“Well sure, but we’re typically tracking close to a million transactions per minute. Good luck if you expect us to grep that .” He kicks his chair back from his workstation and turns to face you. “You’d have to track the user handles from when they logged in—”

“Can’t you put up a notice somewhere?” asks Elaine. “Ask for information.” She pauses.

Couper doesn’t give her a breathing space. “Sure, but nobody would—”

“Tell them it’s to register an insurance claim,” she interrupts, raising her voice. Someone’s been taking assertiveness classes, you realize. “That Hayek Associates are trying to get the items back, but will be unable to return unclaimed items.”

“But they’ll claim all sorts of shit that they never had!”

“Really?” She gives Couper a withering look: “I’d never have guessed. Poor innocent me, nobody told me that people lie while I was studying for my master’s in forensic accountancy…”

“But what use is it?” Couper looks upset, more than anything: “It doesn’t make sense!”

“It’s simple enough. Most people will tell the truth, especially when we tell them we just want to know their five top items, so we can verify them against our database.”

“But there isn’t a database—” Couper stops dead.