Charles Stross - Halting State

It is a hell of a shock, being expected to identify a dead body before breakfast, and you do not appreciate it—especially when you’re also trying to digest the significance of whatever happened between you and Jack last night (and won’t that suck, if Margaret or Chris or one of the other friendly piranhas at the office find out that you’ve been shagging the gamekeeper?) and you’re spending your sanity points worrying about what the hell the two of you have got yourselves into at a practical, spy-versus-spy, level. Not to mention Jack’s criminal-record equivalent of a lousy credit history with fries on top. Which is why you’re really quite relieved when the inspector has to rush off somewhere, pausing only to extract from you a promise that you’ll keep your phone switched on in case she wants to talk to you later. She witnesses for Dr. Hughes while the two of you sign a great big ledger—on real bleached wood-pulp—to agree that this day you have confirmed the identity of Richardson, Wayne, lately employed by Hayek Associates. And you’re hanging around in the lobby (waiting while Jack uses the toilet) when the doors open again and none other than Barry Michaels of Hayek Associates walks in.

“Ah, Miss Barnaby.” He smiles, affably. “And Mr. Reed is about, I take it?” He holds up a keyfob. “Come drive with me.”

You know an order when you hear one, but you still bridle at it: “You’ll have to do better than that!”

“Yes.” He puts his smile back in its box. “It’s time to do breakfast. Today’s going to be a busy day.”

“The hell it is.” Seeing Wayne laid out on the slab turned your stomach. “I didn’t sign on for this, Barry, I signed on for an artificial reality game, not Raw-head and Bloody-bones. We— I —quit.”

He shakes his head. “I wish you could, believe me, I wish you could.”

“Could what?” Jack chooses just this exact moment to pop out of the lavatory, shaking his head in ground-hog confusion. “What’s up?”

“We’re doing breakfast. I was just explaining to Miss Barnaby that it’s too late to opt out.”

“The hell it is—”

You turn away, but he’s too fast: “ They have your number, Elaine. I’d let you go—but Team Red won’t.”

Whoops. You stop, and take a deep, angry breath. “I think you owe us an explanation.”

“Over breakfast? I’m buying.”

“Mm, breakfast ,” says Jack, doing a convincing imitation of a dumb-ass cartoon character.

“Fuck off…” But it’s too late, you’re outvoted, and besides, you’re wearing his trousers. What else is there to do but listen to Michaels’s pitch?

Michaels leads you down an alley-way, across a main road, and into a gloomy-looking pub built into what looks to have been a mediaeval dungeon—all vaulted stone archways a metre and a half high, complete with blackened oak barrels wearing restaurant-drag table-tops. There are TV screens everywhere, as if trying to deny the essentially antediluvian origins of the place, but they can’t cover up the pervasive smell of rising damp. “The cooked breakfast here is really quite good,” Michaels asserts, “very twentieth-century Scottish.”

You let yourself be steered into ordering the cooked breakfast. You’re a good girl and you take your prophylactic statins every evening religiously: Saturated fats can hold no fear for you, at least in moderation and followed by a penance of tossed green salad.

“We should be secure in here,” Michaels explains over the top of the menu: “The walls are three feet thick and made of solid stone. People used to avoid the place—they couldn’t get a phone signal inside, and installing wifi was pointless—until a particularly bright landlord figured out she could make money by pitching it as a stuckist hangout.” And indeed when you look at your phone you see you’ve got zero bars of signal, even though you’re within sight of a window looking out onto the canyonlike depths of the Cowgate.

“So you wanted to tenderize us before breakfast.” Jack leans back against the bare stone wall. “Was that what that little piece of Grand Guignol back at the mortuary was all about, then?”

Michaels has the decency to look abashed. “That’s a bit unfair.”

“Really?” You glare at him. “The police roust us out of bed to come and view a body, and you just happen to be passing? Pull the other one!”

Michaels picks up a fork and stabs it in your direction: “Next you’ll be accusing me of murdering poor Wayne. Can you get it through your thick head that it’s not about you ?”

“If it’s not about us, then who killed Wayne?” asks Jack.

Michaels frowns. “I wish I knew,” he mutters, shoving his unruly forelock back into place. “Oh, I mean it was clearly Team Red who did it—but the why of it is another matter.”

Jack tenses. “I heard something,” he says, reluctantly.

“Yes?” Michaels raises an eyebrow.

“When I was working late. Day before yesterday.”

You feel like shaking him. “What did you—” Michaels holds up a hand.

“I was on my way out, about elevenish. Most of the lights were out. I heard a couple of voices arguing in one of the meeting rooms. One of them was—I’m pretty sure of this—Wayne Richardson.” He winces. “I don’t know who the other was. Male, that’s all. I thought you might know.”

Michaels is looking at Jack incredulously. “You don’t know who it was?”

“No.” Jack looks frustrated. “It’s rude to listen at doors, did you know that…?”

You bite your lower lip. It would not do to giggle at this point, they’d both get entirely the wrong idea about you, and that would be a mistake. Poor Jack: too honest for his own good. But you knew that already, didn’t you?

“Oh Jesus fucking Christ,” Michaels says disgustedly. “You thought it was me ?”

Jack just sits there, looking defensive.

“Well, why didn’t you say so before?” Michaels demands.

This has gone far enough. “Stop that!” you tell him. “Jack had no good reason to trust you, yesterday.” You’re not sure he has any reason to do so today, either. You take a stab in the dark. “Why should we trust you?”

Michaels is about to say something, but Jack beats him to it. “Someone’s penetrated your operation,” he says, remarkably calmly. “And you don’t know who. They were working with Wayne, weren’t they?”

“Go on.” Michaels rolls with the punch.

Jack swallows. “Let’s start with, who is Nigel MacDonald a cover for?” When Michaels doesn’t respond, he raises an eyebrow. “Well?”

Michaels shakes his head pensively. “There used to be an old joke in role-playing circles—it isn’t funny, these days—that there were only a thousand real people in the UK—everybody else was a non-player character. Now it’s pretty much the reverse.”

That’s worth blinking at. You can’t quite picture the urbane establishment-issue Barry Michaels as a spotty teenage D#amp#Der, but it would explain his current position, wouldn’t it? SPOOKS has got to have taken years to develop—it’s clearly a long-term project—which implies funding and pilot projects and all sorts of R#amp#D behind it.

“Nigel MacDonald was a useful sock-puppet for the SPOOKS development group at CESG,” he says slowly. “He was there so they could interact with the staff quants without tipping them off that they were actually talking to various people inside the Doughnut.”

“The Doughnut?”

“Cheltenham.” He frowns. “So we had this telecommuter on the payroll. Wayne tapped me on the shoulder about him a year ago when he realized Nigel didn’t actually live anywhere—he figured there was a payroll scam going on. So I rolled out the cover story and told Wayne to play along.”