Charles Stross: Halting State

“It’s not about that,” he says, sounding uncertain. The penny drops, just as he goes on to say: “It’s about the car insurance.”

You get this from time to time, although there are blessings to be counted: It’s not like you’re a lawyer or a doctor or something. “I don’t work that end of the business,” you remind him.

“Yeah, I know that. But you know Sally was in a shunt on the M25 last week?” (Sally is Mike’s wife: a bottle-blonde middle-management type who tolerates his night out with the lads once a week with an air of mild, weary contempt. You suppose they must see something in each other, but…) “We got this bill for the recovery truck and repairs, then the other driver’s claiming private medical expenses, and the thing is, she swears there was another car involved, that didn’t stop.”

You’ve got a sinking feeling that you know what’s coming, but you can’t just leave Mike dangling so you restrict yourself to a noncommittal “Hmm?”

Eric and Matthew are poised on the floor in front of you, almost motionless, knees and elbows occasionally flexing slightly. None of the chatter you and Mike go in for. A couple of the others are working out, warming up in the vestry, and you can hear Jo’s boom box thudding out an obscure Belgian industrial stream as they grunt and groan about another day at the office. “She was driving along in the slow lane near junction nineteen, heading towards Heathrow, behind the guy she tail-ended. Doing about ninety, there weren’t any trucks about, but traffic was heavy. Anyway, she says a white Optare van overtook them both, pulled in front of the Beemer, and braked, and by the time she was on the hard shoulder there was no sign of it.”

“Hmm.” You carefully put your sword down, then nudge it under the bench where nobody will trip over it. “You haven’t said ‘swoop and squat’ yet, but that’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the damage?”

“Well, Sally’s carrying six points on her license and she had that car-park smash last year. She’ll lose her no-claims discount, which’ll cost us about eight hundred extra when we renew the insurance.”

“Ouch.” Your bruised clavicle throbs in sympathy. Driving’s an expensive pastime even before you factor in diesel at 5 a litre, speed cameras every quarter of a kilometre on all the A-roads, and insurance companies trying to rape the motorists to recoup their losses on the flood-plain property slump. “Who are you with?”

“Nationwide.”

Well, that’s a relief—an old-fashioned mutual society, instead of a pay-by-credit-card web server owned by Nocturnal Aviation Associates Dot Com (motto: “We fly by night”) out of the back of a cybercafé in Lagos. “That’s good news. What’s the Beemer trying to dun you for?”

“Sixteen thousand in repairs—listen, it’s not a current model, Sally said she thought it was about ten years old—two thousand for roadside recovery, and, you’re going to love this, nine thousand in fees for orthopaedic treatment. They’re claiming whiplash injury.”

“I see. Nearly thirty grand?” You shake your head. Mike’s right, that’s nearly an order of magnitude over the odds for a simple tailend shunt on a motorway at rush hour. Even at ninety kilometres per hour. And whiplash—“Listen, all BMWs have been fitted with head restraints since forever, and they’ve had side-impact and frontal air bags for at least two decades. That kind of claim means they’re talking surgery, which means time off work, so they’re gearing up to hit you with a loss-of-earnings. I expect they’ll try to drop another thirty grand on the bill in a month or two.”

Mike’s face was sweaty to begin with: Now it’s turning the colour of the votive candles they’d be burning if this was still a functioning church. “But we’ve got a ten per cent excess…”

“Right. So you’ve got to make sure the other guy doesn’t get his hands on it, don’t you? You’re right about it sounding like a swoop and squat, and that medical claim is a classic. Medical confidentiality is a great blind for snipers, but we can poke a hole in it if there’s a fraud investigation in train. Now, Nationwide still have some human folks on the web in the Customer Retention and Abuse groups, and what you need to do is to get this escalated off the call-centre ladder until a human being sees it, then you need to hammer away.”

“But how do I…?”

You start checking off points on your fingertips. “You start by getting Sally to offer them her car’s black-box log. Once you know exactly where she was when the incident happened—the black-box GPS will tell you that—you tell them to serve a FOIA disclosure notice on the Highways Agency for their nearby camera footage—if they won’t listen at first, I’ll talk you through doing that yourself. That will tell you whether the Optare was involved, in which case you can kick Abuse into opening a fraudulent claim file on the other driver. Then you can go after the medical side. If the other driver has a doctor’s note, pull their BMA records and see if they’re legit—I’ll bet you a bottle of Chardonnay there’s a reprimand on file because doctors who’re willing to diagnose fictional ailments for cash rarely stop at one. Once you’ve got that, you can go after the vehicle with a statutory vehicle history disclosure notice—that’s what the police use on you if they think you’re driving a chop job—and then you can query the vehicle’s book value. At which point, if you’re right and it’s a swoop and squat, NU will hit up their insurer for the full value of the claim and blacklist them, while indemnifying you. Your insurer should do all of this automatically if you get their Abuse team’s attention, but you don’t have to wait—the forms are all online, you can do it from your phone, and once you’ve got the ball rolling, your insurer will pick it up.”

Mike goes glassy-eyed halfway through your explanation, but that’s okay: He’s nodding like a parcel-shelf ornament, which means he’s got the essential message that he’s anything but helpless. Civilians confronted by an alien bureaucracy always feel helpless at first, but once they realize there’s a way to get what they want, they usually recover. “I think I got some of that—”

“I’ll email you tomorrow.” From the office, in your copious free time, you’ll off-handedly throw him a FAQ: Nailing Petty Insurance Fraud 101. Mike asking you to help with Sally’s fraudulent car claim is a bit like calling in an air strike to deal with a primary-school bully; but he’s your friend, and besides, if anyone in the office notices and makes a fuss, you can point out that it’s good public relations.

“Thanks, ever so.” With classic English understatement, he looks more grateful than he sounds.

While you were talking, Eric and Matthew have somehow gone from twitching slightly to Matthew lying on his back with the tip of Eric’s sword touching his stomach. As you watch, Eric brings up his point in salute and backs out of the duelling space. You stand up, feeling an itchy urge to claw your way back out of your work headspace, and turn to Mike: “Best of three rounds?”

Debug mode:

You are sitting, half-asleep, in an armchair. Your eyes are closed, and you feel very unsteady. Your head’s full of a postviral haze, the cotton-wool of slowed reflexes and dulled awareness. In stark contrast to the normal state of affairs, you can hear yourself think—there’s just one little voice wobbling incessantly about from side to side of your cranial prison, which is no surprise after the amount of skunk you just smoked. In the distance, the chiming clangour of tram-bells sets a glorious harmony reverberating in icy splendour across the rooftops. And you are asking yourself, like the witchy-weird voice in a video of an old Laurie Anderson performance: