Charles Stross - Halting State

“Is a blacknet what I think it is?” asks Elaine. There’s some kind of racket from outside the window: You’re thinking you ought to go and keep an eye on it.

“Probably.” Where’s Bob? You can understand the skipper taking her time phoning you back, but Bob’s running late. “At the protocol level, it’s an anonymous peer-to-peer currency system. It asks you to do favours, it does you favours. Like, be in front of a building with a running motor at such a time with the backdoors open, and drive to an address where someone’ll be waiting for you with a wallet full of cash and another stolen car.” At least, that’s the innocent-sounding version, because, let’s face it, burglary and criminal damage go together like love and marriage, or robbery and a get-away carriage—and most of the stuff blacknets get used for starts there and gets worse real fast. None of the perps know each other, because it’s all done with zero-knowledge proofs and anonymous remixers running out of zombie servers on some poor victim’s home-entertainment system that’s downloaded one piece of X-rated malware too many. “That’s why I’m here, to make sure nobody tries to kill Nigel MacDonald.”

There’s a roar from outside, the sound of a crowd yelling a single word over and over again.

“What’s that?” asks Elaine.

“Sounds like”— shit, where’s Bob ?—“brains,” you say faintly.

Outside the window, the zombies are holding a pavement sit-in. “What do we want? Brains! When do we want them? Nowwwww …”

“I’d better go sort this out, before they try to storm the hotel.”

“What am I looking at?” you ask.

“A map of Zonespace, with shard frontiers and zombies.”

“What kind of zombies?”

“In this context, gamers who’ve been subverted. See them over there? The blue dots are your tribe, SPOOKS players who’re also Zone gamers.” There are surprisingly few of them on the map. “The distortion—that’s latency time. Things are really fucked up, I can’t see any websites outside…shit. I think the bad guys must have decided to make happy with all the backbone bandwidth in Scotland. They’ve gotten the authentication keys, so they can mess with the routers in SCOLocate, and the main telcos—there are only a couple of dozen who own their own fibre.”

You grapple with the magnitude of the problem. “I don’t understand why I’m looking at this, Jack.”

“The question isn’t where Team Red got the keys to the realm from: Hayek Associates have a copy of the one-time pad, because they’re sniffing on everything . The question is, Who inside Hayek Associates leaked the pad, via the blacknet? Barry’s gotten through to the disaster planning people. They’ve generated fresh master pads, and they’re pushing copies out to the main switches by courier—they’re implementing the national zero-day exploit plan. The goal is to throw the switch at noon, at which point all Team Red’s careful work goes down the toilet. Then they’ll reboot CopSpace completely and load freshly signed certificates for the dot-sco domain by hand on the root servers, and a bunch more fiddly stuff. But the main thing is, once they change the one-time pads for admin access to the national backbone routers, Team Red will be unable to tap traffic at will. Zonespace will go down at noon, too, and that won’t be coming back up for a wee while: When it does, they’ll be frozen out. Our problem is to locate Team Red’s avatars and kill them repeatedly until they stay dead—that should tie them up in PvP until it’s too late, and sends them the message: We know who they are, and if they fuck with us, we’ll take them down. And whoever their inside man or woman at Hayek Associates is, will probably bolt…So get co-ordinating, okay?”

“Right.” You shuftie over to your own laptop and blink at the screens until you stop feeling cross-eyed. “Don’t you have macros for this?”

Jack gives you a toothy grin. “Macros for combat would be a breach of the T#amp#Cs, wouldn’t they?”

“I knew you were going to say something about that.” Grind, grind, grind your foes …Something about this whole set-up doesn’t add up, but you can’t quite put your finger on what feels wrong.

“That’s what I was digging out of Lovecraftland.” He pulls his phone out and sets it on the desk next to his laptop. “It’s a stress-testing framework I wrote, ages back. Give it a bunch of Zone character accounts, and it’ll run them as a swarm, targeting whatever you put in their path.” He rolls his eyes.

“That doesn’t sound right.” You stare at him.

“Dead right it’s not.” He stares right back. “That’s why I buried a backup copy out in the boonies: insurance.”

“Insurance—”

“It’s the flip side of a coyote tunnel they wanted installing. You find a bunch of gamers who’re not having any fun, and you lure them to your new setting, see? Come play with us, we’re more fun. Give us your account, and we’ll migrate your players into our new game and give you three months extra time, free. Which is where the stress tester comes in. Because if you give it a bunch of moribund characters in the old game, you can, uh, stress-test it. Just to make it even less fun for the stay-behinds.”

“ You wrote that?” The more you think about it, the less you like the sound of it.

“Yup. On instructions from management at LupuSoft.” He grins humourlessly. “For stress-testing our own products, honest . This sort of thing happens all the time in a mature market—it’s all about ensuring your customers have fun, and the other side don’t. It’s all okay, as long as you don’t actually use it for immoral, illegal, or fattening purposes: It has entirely legitimate applications. And it’s not the sort of thing you can easily explain not wanting to write in front of an employment tribunal. So there I was, thinking there was some mistake about Dietrich-Brunner Associates needing my particular skill set after all.” He clicks on a button, and another window opens, more text scrolling. “Look in your controls, under DM, options, stress.”

You bring up the pie menu and see it at once. “Now, let me just load the bunch of accounts that Barry beamed at my phone this morning…”

His phone is blinking its wee sapphire light for attention. Transfer in progress. A whole bunch of blue dots are showing up on the map of Zonespace, like a toxic rash infecting it from Jack’s mobie. You move your cursor towards them—it’s got a funny lasso icon now—and herd them all together. This is a god mode—you can drop in behind their eyes and drive them, one-on-one, or you can string a whole bundle of them together in a mob and tell them to follow the leader. Who can be another zombie, with an assigned target, or you can run them yourself. It’s a deeply ugly trick, a custom-built griefing tool, but it’s just what you need right now and you have to ask yourself, How much of this did Barry Michaels expect?

You drop into Stheno’s eyes. It comes easily. You’re standing in the middle of a dirt track, woods to one side and a mountain range just visible in the distance across a field of maize to the other. You look round and see the most bizarre assortment of thuggish allies you can imagine. Orcs, humans, dwarfs, ice elves, a couple of giants, and a solitary dalek: They’re milling around like a flock of sheep. “Listen up!” you yell, trusting the rudimentary speech-to-text capabilities of the mobies they’re running on. “Follow me! Kill anything that’s wearing this!” You hold up the scroll Jack hands you and show them the design inscribed on it in blood, an ideogram of chaos. “Get moving!” And then you hit the GM menu and drop god-level privileges on every last one of Jack’s zombie horde.