Charles Stross - Halting State

You shamble across the cobbled road at a near trot, turn towards Glenogle and your wee Colonies house, and the heavens open all at once. Suddenly you’re dashing for cover beneath an artillery barrage of water-bombs, Elaine stampeding along behind you—and it’s a couple of hundred metres to go. While you’re both paused at a kerbside to check for traffic, an SUV aquaplanes past, malevolently hugging the gutter and spraying a mucky sheet of water across your legs. Elaine swears quietly behind your back as you cross the road, but then you’re at the right side street, and heading for the cast-iron gate.

She grabs your arm. “Stop,” she hisses.

“But it’s pouring—” You stop. “Yes?”

“This the door?” You nod. “Give me your keys, okay? And hang back.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake. “I’m not stupid,” you grunt. And you drop into SPOOKS mode and scan the hedges and parked cars to either side for signs, eyeballs wide open for watchers and lurking booby-traps. Sidling up your own garden path like you expect to find a ninja hiding in the recycling bin would make you feel like an idiot even without the cold rain dripping down the back of your neck, but you’ve done this often enough in role-play that the tradecraft is almost automatic: And then you’re at your own keyhole, glancing round the door-frame for signs and portents like anonymous black boxes that weren’t there the day before.

Nothing. And it’s your house. As you stick the key in the lock, you say, over your shoulder, “Is your phone switched off?”

“Whoops.” She’s fumbling in the darkness and the rain as you step inside and turn the hall light on.

“Come on in and close the door, then.”

There’s no rain inside the house except for that which drips off your sodden jacket and trousers and trickles down your hair and into your eyes. You stumble into the hall wearily and shrug out of your soaking jacket. Reaching into the pockets, you pull out your phone—off—and your keyboard (also off, probably terminally so) and glasses. The sound of the cloud-burst fades as Elaine locks the front door and stomps her feet dry on the mat. “I’m soaked. That fucking Chelsea tractor really got me.”

“Me, too. I think they do it deliberately.” Drive with their near-side wheels in the overflowing gutter, just to inundate the automotively challenged who can’t afford the ruinous road tax. You kick your trainers off, stumble up to the bedroom door, and grab the dressing-gown off the back of the door. “Here, make yourself at home. Is your suit machine-washable?”

“Of course.” She looks at you warily, then takes the dressing-gown. “Hey, you don’t need to—”

“It’s no trouble. Look, let me stick some real coffee in the pot, then we can talk.”

“Talk is good.” She looks around the living room, at the tangles of wires plugged into the overloaded ten-way gang in the corner and the bookcase with its middle shelves bowed beneath a stack of old d20 game supplements and graphic novels; then she plants herself in the far corner of the newer of the two IKEA futons that constitute 90 per cent of the soft furnishings and bends down to remove her shoes. You shake your head and duck into the kitchen to grapple with your feelings. It’s smaller than the galley of an Airbus, but you can get the coffee started while giving her a modicum of privacy. And it gives you a chance to gibber quietly for a couple of minutes and try to calm yourself down.

When you emerge again, calm and collected and bearing two reasonably clean mugs full of organic fairtrade espresso, it’s to find a twilight surprise. Elaine is bending over the power hub, systematically following cables from wall wart to blinkenlight. She seems to be trying to turn everything off. She’s wearing your dressing-gown: Her trousers and jacket are an untidy puddle in the middle of the rug. You clear your throat. “Oh, hi,” she says. “Any idea how many gadgets you’ve got plugged in here?”

“Um. Too many?” She’s got you bang to rights. “What are you doing?”

She pushes the off button on the video receiver. “If we’re going to talk, we might as well do it in private. Besides, the lights were bugging me. I counted sixteen before I lost track.”

A moment’s stock-taking tells you that she’s not about to do any damage—everything here’s an embedded appliance except for the household disk farm next to the fireplace. “One moment.” You bend down and rummage for the wall plug, then flick the switch. Everything on the power hub flickers and dies simultaneously. “That do you?”

“Let’s see.” She picks up her phone from the precarious pile of coffee-ringed magazines on the side-table and frowns at it. “Yeah. The snitch is muzzled.”

“Snitch?”

“Spooks Control sent me a bug detector. Something about it reprogramming my phone’s processor to sniff for different emission sources? Does that sound right?”

It sounds like a high-end cognitive radio application, and probably illegal as hell—one that can override the built-in standards firmware and turn a handset into a scanner that can monitor any radio-based protocol its antenna can pull in. (Radio interference, after all, is purely an artefact of buggy receiver design.) Back when you thought SPOOKS was a game, it would just have been a prop, but now…“It’s plausible. What does it say?”

“It said something in here was transmitting, but it stopped when you pulled the plug.” She closes her phone. “Sound like a bug to you?”

You glance at the streaming media hub, LEDs dark and lifeless. That’s your musical life, buddy, right there in the corner. “Might be.” If someone was going to plant a bug on you, where better to put it than in the firmware of a gizmo that’s transmitting all the time? “Coffee?”

“Thanks.” She accepts the mug gratefully. “About your washing-machine—”

“It’ll take about three hours, if you still want to use it. But I can lend you a spare pair of jeans and a jacket if you don’t.”

“You don’t need to, but thanks.” A certain tension goes out of her. “Show me where you keep the machine?” The washer/dryer is under the kitchen work-top. It’s fully automatic, setting its cycle from the RFIDs in her jacket and trousers. Thirty seconds later she curls up on the futon opposite you with her coffee mug, eyes dark and serious in the gloom. (You hadn’t realized just quite how much illumination the various gizmos contributed to your den.) “Okay. What do you think is going on?”

“Well—” You stop, half-tongue-tied by the sight of her sitting opposite you, large as life, wearing your dressing-gown. There’s a subtext here that you’d barely allowed yourself to notice, consciously: Do you suppose she’s here because she likes you? The mummy lobe wants to kick up a censorious fuss, but it’s at a loss for words: You’re not terribly good at dealing with the rules of the game Elaine seems to be playing, or even recognizing when a game’s in progress, so you retreat hastily in the direction of something you understand.

“I think we can trust Barry about as far as we can throw him. He’s definitely part of SPOOKS, and SPOOKS ties into the police or intelligence services at some level—otherwise, we wouldn’t have gotten the taxi ride. And he’s fed us a great story-line. Beyond that…”

She stares at you from the darkness. “Your niece, Elsie. You’re…you don’t seem to be worrying about her. Is that just a story? Jack?”

The roaring in your ears is like the engine of an on-coming juggernaut on the wrong side of the road, headlights blazing and horn blaring. “I can’t”— don’t want to —“face…”