Charles Stross - Halting State

You realize your jaw’s gaping wide open. “You’ve been betting on your own company failing ?”

“You youngsters.” His expression is coolly cynical: “You were still in short pants during the first dot-com bubble, weren’t you? Fucking amateur get-rich-quick schemes. I made my first fortune and lost it before you were even out of school. I know the signs.” He twitches the gun barrel towards you, then back to Elaine. “Seen it before, twice over. But this time I was ready. All it takes is a couple of million and the right suit, and you can buy in, and be out before the starry-eyed optimists notice what’s going on.”

“But you can’t…be…” Elaine is almost stuttering with surprise. And you can tell what’s going through her head. You were onto a winner! Chief executive of a Potemkin corporation, backed by the security services! Just lie back and let the money roll in! “I don’t believe it.”

“Is that your bag?” Hackman asks, deceptively casual, with a nod towards the duffel bag and its cylindrical protuberance, where it sits beside the window.

“Yes.” Elaine nods.

“Stand up, slowly. Slowly now, go and stand beside it. You’ll notice I’m pointing my gun at Ms. Barnaby, Mr. Reed, so don’t do anything silly, or I shall have to shoot her.”

Realizations crystallize in parallel as you see Elaine slide sideways towards the bag. Like: Hackman is a fruitcake. And: He doesn’t know you know about Wayne. And: Wayne’s dead, and who the hell do you think killed him? “Are you working for Team Red?” you ask.

“Shut up. I’m working for myself.” So he’s been going through the blacknet, not knowing who’s on the other side of it, also tapping it for what it can give them. And he’s still pointing the gun at Elaine. Oh shit. Elaine is tense: She glances at you wide-eyed, like a woman about to stick her head in a hangman’s noose. You can read her expression, clear as day— I’m doing this for Elsie. And that’s what triggers the honesty attack as the mummy lobe, hitherto catatonic with fright, finally takes over your tongue:

“Elsie died six years ago, Hackman. Your blacknet friends are lying to you.”

And it’s true, and the confession rips you back to that horrible morning in the mortuary down south where they showed you the photographs, then waited while you got a grip on yourself and blew your nose and wiped your eyes—you didn’t throw up until later, after the sixth pint of the evening—and were very sorry, sir, to put you through this, but we need to know, we need to know who was in the car because after it came out from underneath the articulated lorry you had no family at all , you had no life , and that was when you began paying the Absent Friends subscription, because even the simulacrum of your sister and nieces gives you something to talk about, it’s better than nothing at all. People instinctively know when a member of the herd is the last of their kind, and you can’t live with the sympathetic glances, and you can’t live with the isolation, either, and how were you to know? It’s just your reality, these days, an embarrassing ghost you’ve dragged around with you ever since the accident. A bodyguard of ghosts.

The ghosts surround you as you stand up and take a step away from Elaine, away from the desk where the zombie-haunted laptop is co-ordinating the automatic mop-up operation to a war Hackman doesn’t even know is happening, a second step to widen the gap and close with Marcus as the gun barrel turns to track you and shoots.

BANG.

You didn’t know it could be that loud: It’s not just a noise, like in the games, it’s a solid force hammering on your eardrums and punching at you. But you take another step and reach for the gun.

BANG.

This time you feel something like a punch in the ribs. But you’re close enough to grab at Hackman’s arm, now, even though your legs don’t seem to want to work properly. It’s very odd: You’ve almost got your hand on the gun-barrel, but it’s getting farther away, and what’s the ceiling doing? Something hits you appallingly hard in the back, and then your head’s in agony as you whack it on the floor, and the gun is still pointing at you, with Hackman’s face behind it, snarling like a shark that’s scented blood on the boardroom carpet and is about to bite your throat out—

Then Elaine takes a brisk step forward, straightening up from where she’s grabbed something from her bag with both hands, pivots smartly on her left ankle, and swings a huge sword over him in a motion like the windscreen wiper from hell. Through your ringing ears you hear a crunch of bone. And the last thing you see is Hackman, a surprised expression on his face, toppling towards you, as Elaine staggers with the effort of halting the instinctive backstroke that would take his face off.

Restart:

A white plastic ceiling above you, lights, and a green shape hunched over your face. Some kind of mask. Whatever you’re lying on jars painfully as the wheels ride over speed pillows. And you wish they’d turn off the siren.

Been here before. Didn’t like it any better the first time. “Looks like he’s coming round.”

Nope, sorry.

Restart:

You’ve been shot in the chest, in case you hadn’t guessed. Twice—once wasn’t enough for you? So you had to go and be a hero, because you knew what Hackman didn’t know you knew, which is that his friends on the other end of the anonymously remixed blacknet link, Team Red, had already tried to kill you a couple of times over: And to make things better, Hackman had already iced his partner in insider trading, Wayne Richardson, and it therefore followed that he wasn’t about to leave you or Elaine behind to point the finger at him. Because that’s what blacknets are good for: buying illegal handguns, arranging executions, raising dirty money at insane short-term interest rates to invest in a gamble that your own corporation is going to tank within weeks.

And you’d been meaning to tell Elaine about your lack of a real life sometime, anyway.

But getting yourself shot wasn’t clever, was it? It hurts. It’s down to a dull ache now—either you’re dying, or they whacked you full of morphine—and you can breathe, but there’s something annoying in your nose. Maybe opening your eyes would be a good idea, although they’re hot and gummy, and you feel almost as fuzzy as that time in Amsterdam, sitting in a burning chair by a canal and a broken shop window.

( Burning? Why did you think the chair was on fire?)

You manage to crowbar your eyelids apart. It’s a huge effort, but it’s rewarded by a worried face, blurred but recognizable, a ferret sniffing over its prey as if unable to decide whether to bite or groom it. “Jack?” She squeezes your hand. “Jack?”

“Grrrrumph.” That’s a highly compressed shorthand version of are you alright? Did Hackman get away? Where are the police? And what’s happening? Unfortunately, your throat didn’t work too well, so you cough and try again: “’Laine?”

She squeezes your hand so hard you’re afraid she’s going to crush it. “Don’t you ever do that to me again!” Then she lets go abruptly, as if she’s suddenly realized what she’s doing and got self-conscious. “For fuck’s sake,” she bursts out suddenly. “You really scared me!”

I scared you ? you think, but it’s too much of an effort to say that. “Hackman?”

She sniffs, misunderstanding. “Untrained handgun versus trained sword at that range? I was just waiting for a chance to draw on him.” She’s still holding your hand. There’s steel in those fingers, you realize. “Good thing for his sake it was blunt when I went into krumphau on him, or he’d be missing both hands.”