Charles Stross - Halting State

You plonk your ad hoc phone book on the blotter in front of him. “Is this what you’re after? I cannae let you keep it—it’s for Inspector Kavanaugh.”

“Just give me a minute…” He goes over it with a pen, copying lines into the gaps on his own list. “We’re not to use the photocopiers, the chief said. Not till they’ve been vetted by ICE.”

You take a deep breath. Well, if that’s how it is …“There’s a team meeting on the Hayek Associates job. You know where it is? I’m due there.”

“Room 204.” He glances up. “I havenae seen the inspector yet, miss. You go up there, and I’ll send someone up with yer list when I’m through with it.”

You thank him and head for the staircase. On your way through the office you notice that the monitors are all turned to face the walls and there’s an unusual clattering, thudding noise—someone’s wheeched out a metal box with a keyboard on the front of it and they’re banging the keys like they’re wee trip-hammers. There’s a sheet of paper sticking out the top, and it vibrates whenever they hit it: a typewriter ? Phones are ringing everywhere, the bleeping of cheap no-name mobies, and there’s a big red plastic thing with a rotary dial on the front on the duty sergeant’s desk, like something out of an Agatha Christie video. Jesus, you think, if we’re knocked back into the twentieth century, how’re we going to know what to charge the customers with? It’s a scary thought: The succession of criminal justice acts that the old British government passed, and then the revised justice acts since independence, replaced the old catch-all offences like “breach of the peace” with a huge array of very specific charges (“being aggressive in charge of a Segway or similar scooter after midnight in a residential area”), such that you really need the expert system on your phone to figure out precisely how to throw the charge book at them. Never mind the fact that the station doesn’t have a bloody paper ledger anymore and you can’t actually book a customer into the cells without a worki…

You slip in the back of room 204 and find it’s already crowded. You’ve seen the faces before, at last week’s video conference—this time they’re all present and correct and not wearing their goggles. Verity looks royally fucked-off about something or other, and the detective suits aren’t looking too happy either. And there are others present—what looks like the whole of the murder team from St. Leonard’s, who were working on the Pilton case, chasing Liz’s chimerical blacknet. Full house. Verity glares directly at you. “I believe you’ve got a phone for me, Sergeant?”

“Certainly, sir.” You walk right on up to the front and hand it to him, along with its box. “The front desk is copying the phone book for you. By hand.”

His cheek twitches as he turns the gadget over in his hands. “I see a camera.” He mimes snapping a shot as he turns to Bill the Suit. “Tell ’em to photograph the pages and text me the picture. That’ll do for now. Get the list typed up and reshoot it, then send it to one of those online OCR services.” Bill looks shocked. “Go on! If they’re Googling all the civilian traffic in Scotland, it’s too late, already.” Behind you, the door opens again; you glance round and recognize Liz Kavanaugh. “Ah, good,” rasps Verity, as Bill heads for the door to engage in his amateur photography. “I was wondering when you’d get here!”

“Yes, well, I was regrettably delayed.” Liz looks at you pointedly. “You’ve got a phone for me?” You hand the mobie over. She takes it and goes over to the vacant chair next to Verity. “I had to stop to get eyeball confirmation of a murder victim’s ID.”

“ Another …?” Verity’s eyebrows go up. “Is it connected?”

“Definitely.” Liz grins like a skull.

“Well, shite. If you’ll pardon my French.” Verity doesn’t hold with bad language, which makes him something of an anomaly north of the border. “Who is it this time?”

“Wayne Richardson, a Hayek Associates’ employee who has been helping with our investigations this past week.” She nods at you, and you tense. “He was the source of the original crime report and the first indication that, uh, Nigel MacDonald was missing . I caught up with our two external investigators, Mr. Reed and Ms. Barnaby, and they confirmed his identity.”

“That makes it, what? Four this week?”

“Three, sir,” Liz says firmly. “Because Nigel MacDonald doesn’t exist.”

Verity rolls his eyes. “Explain.”

“Sir.” Liz faces the roomful of faces. “There’s a body in Pilton. Last night, there was another body in Strathclyde—looked like a foreign-exchange student who’d gone for a midnight walk on the Clockwork Orange tracks, except his blood alcohol was zero, serum cortisol was sky-high, and there were other physical signs of stress—and, earlier in the day, he’d tried to stab a person of interest in my other case. This morning Wayne Richardson of Hayek Associates shows up dead: hit and run, apparently on his way to work, except that the hit and run in question was a taxi under remote drive authority by persons unknown.” There’s an audible wave of angry muttering from around the room. “These events are connected to an alleged kidnapping down south the day before yesterday, to yesterday’s fun and games involving Europol, a warehouse in Leith, and a bunch of very expensive servers”—you can see Verity wincing at the memory—“and this morning’s major incident alert and to the flat on the meadows with a satellite uplink on the roof we did over earlier in the week, so if anyone hasn’t got the message already, if you’ve got a PDA, or an official phone, or a personal phone you owned more than twenty-four hours ago, switch the bloody thing off right now .”

Verity glares at the assembled roomful of dibbles. “ Do it!” There’s another wave of fidgeting and you get the feeling that most of it is make-show to clue the boss in that various folks aren’t totally fucked in the heid—Liz said Civil Contingencies Act earlier, and that’s enough to put the wind right up you because that bland-sounding piece of legislation lays out the rules for declaring a State of Emergency, and you’d bet good money that every other one of the lads and lasses here got tipped off about it before they started their shift, just like you. “Continue, Inspector.”

“I don’t know who our Pilton body is, and I doubt we’re going to find out via the normal channels, because he wasn’t listed in the National Identity Register.” Which is a pish-poor excuse for a mess of an identity system, has been ever since the idiots who brought it in got the wind up them over the civil disobedience campaign and turned it into a dumping ground for every buggy civil service client tracking database the pre-defederalization UK owned—but still, not listed is a headache: It’s a synonym for up to no good in copspeak. “I do know that Nigel MacDonald, who we’ve pegged as missing in suspicious circumstances in the Hayek Associates investigation, is in the register but doesn’t actually exist, but I’ve been ordered not to investigate him further because it’s a matter of national security. His flat was rented by parties unknown and seems to have been being used as a remixer by the blacknet we’ve been looking for, and I suspect the late Mr. Richardson could have told us some more about that if he wasn’t currently occupying a drawer in the mortuary.”

At that point, the muttering gets loud enough that Kavanaugh stops talking and waits for it to die down. “If you’ll permit me to continue? Yes? The third body, the exchange student, was implicated in the same business, and so are Hayek Associates, who employed the fourth, although I am assured ”—at this point she stares, unreassuringly, at Verity—“that they’re on our side. This is a national-security clusterfuck rather than a police investigation, and we would be shutting it down forthwith, as soon as we’ve dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s, except for the small problem that we’ve been told by the intel community that whoever we’re up against has penetrated not only the national switched telecommunications backbone but CopSpace from top to bottom and we’re to go on standby for a major terrorist incident within the next twenty-four hours.” Liz pauses to take a deep breath, but nobody interrupts: “I don’t know where they got hold of all this, but they’re taking it seriously enough that the minister of justice has just issued an Emergency Regulations order as set out under Part 2 of the Civil Contingencies Act, while they redistribute fresh authentication keys to every telco and ISP in the country. And I believe that’s what the chief inspector is just about to tell us all about…”