Charles Stross - Halting State

You’re hitting traffic now, surging along one of the main arteries into the western suburbs. Your driver’s still going fast, but he’s not using his siren or overtaking: He’s just relying on folks to get out of his way. Evidently you don’t rate stunt-driving. A few moments later you recognize where you’re going. The police car is taking you back to Hayek Associates’ offices: You recognize the wide, straight main road with trees to one side and a hill on the other. But before you can figure out a way to warn Jack, the car is turning right, up the hill, and into the car-park outside the bunker.

The slippery public-schoolboy type, Barry Michaels, is bouncing up and down on his toes in the entrance like the floor’s red-hot. Which is a definite oh shit moment, because it crystallizes an uneasy nagging suspicion you couldn’t quite bring yourself to articulate earlier: If SPOOKS is for real, then why can’t there be more to Hayek Associates than meets the eye?

“Come with me, please, Mr. Reed, Ms. Barnaby.” Barry manages to sound completely in control of the situation, and judging by the presence of the police, he’s not wrong. You manage to nod, and follow him into the lift.

“Marcus is out of the office on business, and I sent Wayne on a wild goose chase,” Michaels confides, as the lift drops down towards the underworld. “So you don’t have to worry about the civilians getting underfoot.” As the lift stops, he jams his thumb on the close button and simultaneously pokes the call button. The lift jerks into motion again, descending. “This is the sub-basement. I’ll have to ask you to leave all your personal electronics in the basket, I’m afraid.”

The sub-basement is walled in concrete and smells of mould and neglect. What light there is comes from a caged incandescent bulb that dates to the Cold War, or maybe the Battle of Britain.

“What is this place?” asks Jack, sounding more than slightly dazed.

“I told you, it’s the sub-basement.” Michaels points to a wire supermarket shopping basket. “Your gadgets, please. Now. ” At first you think he’s taking the piss, but then he shoves his left shirt cuff up and unfastens a very expensive Breitling chronometer. “You can collect them again on the way out.” You obediently place your hand-bag on the counter, then put your glasses in the basket. Jack, meanwhile, is building a small pyramid: keyboard (very much the worse for wear), phone, specs, something that looks like a multifunction power pack, other less-identifiable stuff…It’s a wonder he doesn’t clank when he moves. Michaels nods approvingly, then opens the single door. It’s thin plywood, but the frame looks more like an airport metal detector. “Go on. Third door on the right.”

There’s a short corridor. Michaels carefully shuts the door behind himself. For a moment you think about opening one of the wrong doors—but it’s very Bluebeard’s castle down here, and you know what happens to girls who open the wrong doors in that story, don’t you? The lights are all naked bulbs behind wire shields, hard-wired to switches that look like something out of the Stone Age. No electronics. Go figure.

Finally, the three of you are alone in a whitewashed room with half a dozen battered office chairs, a wooden table, and a sideboard with a kettle sitting on it. “Sorry about the lack of amenities,” Michaels says brusquely. “Help yourself to tea or coffee, I’ll be back in a minute.” He ducks out the door before you can say anything.

Jack looks at you. You look at Jack. He raises an eyebrow. “So what do you think?” he asks suddenly.

“Don’t ask me, I’m in over my head.” You look around curiously. There’s no network cabling, no phone sockets, no nothing except for an old tin kettle on a camping gas-ring and a light bulb out of the last century. You’ve got a creepy feeling that if they could, they’d have rigged this bunker up for gas-light. “I think we’re under a shielded nuclear bunker, and there are no cables.” You walk round the table and light the burner. The kettle’s already full of water. “Judging from what Michaels said, we’re going to be here a while. How do you take your coffee?”

The kettle is just about coming up to the boil when Michaels returns. He’s carrying a fat cardboard folder full of paper. “Ah, good.” He plants the folder on the desk, then he sits down limply, as if he’s been on his feet for hours. “You’re both probably looking for an explanation for what’s going on here. Unfortunately, I can’t give you one.” He glances from you to Jack and back again, and there’s very little of the bumptious ex-public-school boy left in his expression. “Not because I don’t want to, or I’m not allowed to, but because we don’t have much more than pieces of a puzzle right now.”

Jack, who has been slumped in a chair for the past minute or so, suddenly stiffens. “What’s this shit about Elsie being kidnapped?”

“I’m very sorry to say, we don’t have any news of her yet.” Michaels opens the folder and pulls out a stapled memo—you try to read it, but you can’t make out much more than a certain familiar coat of arms at the top of the page. “If it’s any consolation, it’s quite likely that nothing’s happened to her yet, and probably nothing will.”

“Nothing…” Jack’s at a loss for words, grasping at straws: And that makes you quietly angry at Michaels, who should know better than to string Jack along like this. The kettle’s bumping, so you stand up and walk round the table to fill the mugs you set out earlier. Moving is easier than sitting still.

“Are you looking for Elsie?” you ask Michaels. “Because it seems to me that this wouldn’t have happened if not for your games…”

“We traced Jack’s calls and the photographs,” says Michaels. “There’s an ARG called SPYTRAP—you’ve heard of it? The photographs were pulled off a roadside traffic camera, the printing and envelope delivery were care of an unwitting SPYTRAP player, and the phone call…” He shrugs. “Best guess right now is that the whole thing was automatic—one of the other side’s data-mining bots determined that you were in a position to threaten their scheme and began yanking strings, starting with getting you arrested in Amsterdam.”

“Huh?” Jack somehow manages to look endearingly stupid when he gapes like an idiot, more like a large but thick sheep-dog than a village idiot. “But it’s not—”

“You’re flagged as a SPOOKS player.” Michaels taps the folio, then glances straight at you. “And you live within ten kilometres of a subject of interest, and have near enough exactly the same skill set. Locking you down for a couple of days while they make their move would be prudent, don’t you think?”

Well. “Who’s the subject of interest?” you ask. It’s not as if you haven’t guessed already, but some confirmation would be nice.

“Nigel MacDonald. Who doesn’t actually exist— Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there: He wasn’t there again today, I wish that man would go away —he’s a figment of our reality-fabrication department’s imagination.”

“Which organization’s division?” asks Jack: “Hayek Associates, or SPOOKS, or whoever you are?”

Michaels nods. “Jolly good question. As you’ve probably surmised, Hayek Associates are a front. It’s a real enough company and Wayne and Marcus are real enough business men, and it’s even profitable—but that’s not what it’s here for. It—I should say ‘we’—are a listening post on the virtual frontier. It’s our job to keep an eye open for certain activities that…well, for a last-decade example, do you remember the flap some years ago over terrorists holding training camps in Second Life? Not that that’s quite what was going on—they weren’t training camps, it was just a convenient place to go and swap intelligence or give orders, once the web and email and telephone networks were all being tapped—but, the thing is, for the past twenty years we’ve been trying to nail down every communications channel that the bad guys might use, and the trouble is, it doesn’t work .” He shoves his hair back with one hand, and for a moment the boyish good looks collapse in haggard disarray. “Because bandwidth expands faster than storage, and every time we think we’ve got one type of channel locked down, a new one comes along, and we can’t back-track to hunt traffic in a medium we didn’t know existed. And then some disruptive new technology comes down the pipeline and makes everything we’re doing obsolete in a couple of months…”