Charles Stross - Halting State

You shake your head. Michaels is dropping a bunch of random jigsaw pieces on the table in front of you, all shaken up, and expecting you to put them together, and you’re not sure you’ve got the big photograph to work from yet. “What are you getting at?” you ask. “Because I don’t see what this has got to do with us.”

“It’s a lot to take in all at once.” Michaels shrugs self-deprecatingly. Aw, shucks. “Let’s just say…I’d like you to imagine that somewhere in the bowels of a shopping mall in Beijing, some game-obsessed otaku types are really getting into a multiplayer game called, oh, something like whatever’s the Mandarin for ‘Global Conquest.’ There’s a whole bunch of them, in two gaming clans: call them Team Red and Team Blue. And somewhere in an office block, some differently game-obsessed intelligence officers working for the Guoanbu have decided that maybe, just maybe, these gaming clans are what the Soviet KGB used to call useful idiots , back in the day, and give them their head. The Chinese have a short way with hackers. Time was, they’d end up in pieces in an organ bank: These days it’s cheaper to grow organs, so they’re more likely to get twenty years’ hard labour, but it’s still not exactly something they encourage. But it’s a different matter if the hacking is directed at an enemy of the state. And so these gaming clans, these useful idiots, they’re playing out their game of ‘Global Conquest,’ and, rather than shitting on them from a great height, someone high up in the Guoanbu has given them limited access to one of the quantum processors in the basement of the State Academy of Sciences.”

“And what’s the objective of their game?” you ask.

“As far as we can tell, it’s capture the flag—the first team to take control of the backbone routers of a medium-sized EU member state wins. And guess what? They were all set to succeed, because some bastard—no, I have no idea who it is—leaked them a copy of the backbone authentication pad. They’ve still got it, and they’re running all over our telecoms infrastructure in hobnailed boots, because we don’t dare shut down and reboot everything until we know where they got the keys. And you know what? We wouldn’t have had any idea at all, if one of their low-level grunts hadn’t hatched a plan to make some money on the side. Which is where you come in…”

Two hours after Michaels drops his cluster bomb of revelations, you stumble out of the rabbit-hole under Hayek Associates, exhausted, hungry, and not sure whether to be angry or scared.

At least Elaine looks as coolly imperturbable and spotless as ever: Maybe her suit’s made of Teflon. She glances up at the grey overcast, already spitting fat, isolated rain-drops in preparation for the main program. “Let’s get you home,” she says, and taps her ear-piece with a knowing expression. “We need to talk.”

“You don’t need to,” you say, because it’s the right thing to do, according to the manners gland (which normally reports directly to the mummy lobe, except the mummy lobe is off-line right now, gibbering and sucking its thumb). “We could head back to your hotel.”

“Rubbish.” She looks at you oddly. “You’re at the end of your tether. Which way is the bus-stop?”

“It’s just uphill from the end of the drive…”

Another five minutes, and you’re ensconced in adjacent seats on a two-thirds-empty LRT special, slowly climbing Drum Brae with a whining from its rapeseed-fuelled power pack that bodes ill for the future. It’s electric blue inside, with orange grab rails, and the sky outside the advertisement-obscured windows is a louring slate-grey promise of things to come. Your mind’s spinning like a Scottish Hydro turbine, chasing your own tail from pillar to post. Tracking down the Orcish thieves and their stolen stash of vorpal blades is neither here nor there anymore—what’s important is keeping your head, while all around you other folks are losing theirs to the snicker-snack of the twenty-first-century yellow peril.

“Did you buy that line of bullshit?” you ask her.

“You’re tired,” she repeats. She rolls her eyes sideways, and you follow the direction of her gaze, coming up hard against the little black eyeball of a camera. Oops. No wonder they call these fuckers Optares—there’re at least eight of them visible, and no telling if they’re broken or —“Let’s get home. No chit-chat.”

Paranoid thoughts begin spooling through your mind, following a multiplicity of threads. You’ve just come out of Hayek Associates, with a whole bunch of random fragments and the blinding revelation that Michaels’s operation has been penetrated, and he either doesn’t know, or isn’t going to tell you. Now, let’s suppose that Michaels was right, that one or other of the Beijing clans have their hooks into, well, everything . Can you get home safely? They’ve got the buses’ cams—no more fallible video recorders behind the driver’s seat, not after 7/7—and the traffic cams and…but no, HA pointedly don’t have any cameras overlooking their car-park, do they? And face recognition off of a camera is notoriously CPU-intensive and not the kind of thing a quantum shoe-box under the server rack will help with, not with the current state of the art. Good. If you’d called a taxi, you might be up shit creek again, but buses still have drivers to extract the pocket change from tourists and ne’er-do-wells who don’t have a RiderPass. It’s not anonymous transport—that probably doesn’t exist anymore, unless you go on horseback or ride a bicycle—but it’s the next best thing: Transport with no real-time ID tracking. The bad guys might well know where you live and where HA’s offices are, and make the logical public transport connection…or would they? Who knows? Put yourself in the head of a puppet master in an office in downtown Guanzhou, pulling the strings for an ARG played by foreign devils. This is not a game. Which means—

The bus lurches away from the kerb and trundles towards your stop. You reach up and push the button, then stand: Catching Elaine’s eye, you nod at the exit. “Next stop.”

Pervasive game-play. They’ve got reality by the short-and-curlies, thanks to the cryptography gap Michaels kindly pointed out to you. “It’s not as if this stuff is new,” he explained. “The NSA were doing it years before anyone else, before their recent unfortunate circumstances.” They got Elsie, Michaels tells you—and there’s a big black belly-laugh hanging over a yawning pit of terror you don’t have the guts to think about yet. Michaels hung your virtual alter ego out as bait, and now you and Elaine are it , the plot coupon at the heart of the next level of the game that he is spinning for the unseen masters of reality in Beijing. If Chen—Team Red’s non-virtual eyes and ears on the ground, a foreign student at large in Scotland—hadn’t fucked up by getting greedy and trying to abuse his access to their key cracker to line his own pocket, you’d all still be flailing around in the dark as opposed to this turbid twilight.

How do you roll up a foreign spy network when the spies don’t even know what they’re doing? Not to mention your own counter-espionage fools…

You’re on the pavement now, and the rain is splattering around you. You glance, longingly, in the direction of Burt’s Bar, just over the road—good beer and excellent pies—but there’ll be too many people about, too many pairs of flapping ears and unblinking video eyes and mobile phones that double as bugging devices. And you’re feeling bruised and paranoid enough that you need some privacy. “This way,” you tell Elaine, still not quite sure why she insisted on coming home with you rather than having a natter in some coffee shop.