Charles Stross - Halting State

“Mr. Richardson. I was hoping to find you here!”

Wayne gives you a rabbit-in-the-headlights look and backs into his room. “Really?” he asks cautiously.

You follow him in. It’s a dingy little hole, lit by a strip of blue-white daylight LEDs strung around the upper edges of the walls. He’s got a bunch of tattooed sheepskins with his name on them up on the wall behind his desk, framed so you can’t really miss them (ALL-ANGLESEY MIDDLE MANAGEMENT SHEEP SHAGGING CHAMPION, 2014) and a suspiciously large monitor parked on the blotter. “Have you by any chance seen Jack Reed or Elaine Barnaby today?” you ask him. And this time you’ve got the speech-stress monitor on real time, just out of curiosity.

“I’m sorry, I haven’t,” he says, and he’s telling the truth, dammit.

“Do you know where they’ve gone?” you ask.

“I’m sorry, but no. They haven’t been in all day.” He frowns pensively. “That’s odd, now you mention it.” He’s green-lit within the error bars, all the way: telling the truth again. How inconvenient. “They were running some sort of database trawl overnight, I think. They demanded access to a lot of rather sensitive data yesterday evening and left a big batch job running.”

“What kind of data were they after?” you ask, just cross-referencing in case it spooks Wayne into putting a foot wrong.

“A bunch of stolen magic plot coupons, described in Structured Treasure Language. I gave him read-only access to our code repository, so he could compile in some modules, and hooks into a bunch of the online auction-houses who buy and trade prestige goodies. I think that’s all, but I may be wrong—they were haggling with Sam.”

“Sam…?”

“Sam Couper.”

You twitch up a mug shot you captured earlier, back when you first parachuted into their full-metal panic. “Is he in today?”

“Sure!” Wayne looks surprised. “Third door down the hall on your left, you can’t miss it: It’s the one with the sign saying ‘Real programmers do it with a float’.”

He’s right, you can’t really miss it. So you walk right up to the door and, hearing voices, open it.

You are in a windowless room, with a huge, curved desk extending around three walls. The desk is covered in flat-panel displays, electronic gadgets, wires, books, print-outs, and half-eaten pizza crusts. The walls are covered with many-coloured maps gridded out with hexagonal overlays: What bare space there is is taken up by an Ansari Space Camp calendar. Three adult males sit bolt-upright in expensive wheelie chairs, facing the centre of the room, whistling a vaguely familiar melody while one of them—balding, thirtyish, red-faced—frowns furiously, concentrating as he juggles four or five small plush Cthulhu dolls. (After a moment you realize they’re all trying to whistle the Twilight Zone theme, slightly out of key.)

It takes a moment for them to notice you: Then the whistling falters to a diminuendo, followed by a splattering of bat-winged beanie-monsters crashing to the institutional blue-green carpet. For a moment there is a guilt-stricken silence so thick you could hear a snowflake fall, then one of them finds his voice. “What do you want?” he demands. It’s Sam “traceroute is my bitch” Couper, and his associates Darren and Mike. (Darren is the juggler of eldritch horrors.)

You smile evilly. “I want to pick your brains.”

Darren shudders, but Sam is made of tougher stuff. “I already told you everything I know.”

You can’t help it. Something about this room seems to exclude you. It must be all the frustrated testosterone sweated into the concrete walls over the years: But whatever it is, it gets right up your nose. “You told me everything you knew as of three days ago, Mr. Couper. I’d like to know what transpired between yourself and Jack Reed and Elaine Barnaby yesterday afternoon or evening.”

“Huh?” Sam looks surprised. “It was Wayne. He brought them in and told me, give them what they want. They wanted a list of what we could drag out of the journal logs from the bank, right before the robbery. And the source code to some of our in-house tools so that Reed could hack on them to go search for the missing loot. That’s all, I didn’t have anything to do with them afterwards.”

“I see.” Dammit, he’s telling the truth, too! How unhelpful. “Do you know when they left?”

“When they…? No, I don’t. Reed was still here when I went home, around 7:00 P.M. I think he was pulling an all-nighter.”

“Uh-huh.” Whatever else you can say about him, he sounds like a hard worker. You glance at Darren and Mike. “Do either of you know anything else? Your help would be very much appreciated.”

“Know—” Mike stops. “Yesterday Jack saved my ass.”

“What do you mean, he saved your ass?” you ask.

“We were—I was being Venkmann, one of the house avatars. Your two pet auditors were messing around in Avalon, and they called me in because they’d tracked down the entry point for the Orcs. Turns out it was a hacked Iron Maiden and someone had converted it into a shredder and added a bunch of traps. We were jumped by slaadi while I was immobilized, but they got me out of it. The other end of the shredder turns out to be in Zhongguo, where we don’t have any administrative access.”

It’s so much gibberish to you, but you pull one piece out of it as sounding like it needs further clarification. “Zhongguo?” You mangle his pronunciation. “Where’s that?”

“It’s another Zonespace game, run by Hentai Animatics. I captured the fight, if you want I can send you an AVI of it?”

He’s trying to be helpful, you realize with a sinking heart. That’s just what you don’t need—what you’re looking for is pushback, not volunteers. “Aye, if you could forward it to me that would maybe help,” you tell him to shut him up. “Well, I’ll be going.” You hesitate for a moment, looking at the plushies sleeping on the ocean-blue carpet. “Would you mind telling me what was all that about?” You manage to maintain an even tone of voice that would probably make Liz proud.

“Focus break,” says Russell. “We work till it gets too much, and then…juggling elder gods just seems to help with the stress, you know?”

“I see.” You beat a hasty retreat and manage to hold a lid on it until the door behind you is shut tight on the juggling rocket scientists and their mad ritual.

Hentai Animatics. At least you can see if that tentacle leads somewhere interesting…

When you step out of the lift back up to the car-park you discover that a cold drizzle is falling—and you’ve got even more voice mail to put a damper on the occasion. “Elaine from Dietrich-Brunner here—can you call me when you get this? I believe we’ve got a lead for you on the items that were stolen from Hayek Associates.” This does not improve your mood, especially when you check the time-stamp and realize it’s at least four hours old.

You call her back, but get put straight through to her voice mail. “Ms. Barnaby? This is Sergeant Smith, returning your call. Could you, or Mr. Reed if you are with him, call me back as soon as possible, please? Thanks.”

You’re getting a bad feeling about this. You’re supposed to be on top of things, but getting traction on this case is proving remarkably difficult—and that was before your voice mail started keeping its own counsel. Liz’s words float back to you: Whoever’s behind it has got their claws into CopSpace. Normally you wouldn’t credit such hallucinations, but Inspector Kavanaugh with her sharp suits and her degrees in criminology and social science isn’t so much climbing the greasy pole as riding up it on a personal jet pack; not so much a straight arrow as a guided missile aimed at making chief constable. If she’s going all swivel-eyed on you and muttering about spies and cloak-and-dagger stuff, but hasn’t gone completely off the deep end (and the arrival of Kemal’s bumbling gang of Keystone Kops this morning suggests that if she is nuts, the funny farm should be expecting a bumper crop), then you bloody ought to keep your eyes peeled for secret agents doing the funny handshake two-step down by the water of Leith.