Halting State (11 page)

“You’ve got a whole load of kit.”

“Yeah. I’m Theodore G. Bear. The G. stands for Grizzly, and I’m an
ursus
.” You rear up and look down your nose at her from your full three metres, then pull out the huge, brass-barreled blunderbuss you carry in your pack and sling it around your neck where she can see it: “I believe in the right to keep and arm bears.” It’s about the size of a five-pounder carronade off of one of Captain Kidd’s frigates, and it’s been personally blessed by the Spirit of the Age, which gives it a serious edge against superstitionists and darklings. You wait for the groan, then add, “The best way to do this is if I carry you, so I’m going to sit down now, and then I want you to try the mount command.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Nope.”

She fiddles around for a minute, then suddenly she’s sitting on your pack, which has sprouted stirrups and a natty little leather saddle. “Hey! I can ride?”

“It’s a standard skill for epic characters. Don’t try it on anyone you aren’t campaigning with, they might get pissed off. Okay, time to wander.” You stand up and head for the big double doors at the front of the temple, keeping it slow. “This is the Temple of Newborn Souls on the Island of Is, which sits in the Nether Sea just off the coast of the main continent, which is called…Hell.”

Hell lies outside the universe, and is thus largely exempt from the laws of physics. Its geometry is a Dantesque parody, for while the Nether Sea is flat, the entirety of the continent lies below sea-level, a vast trumpet bell some thousands of leagues wide stretched out across the knife-sharp line where the sea meets the swirling vacuity that forever hides this realm from Heaven.

How do you describe a continent of pain that has been hollowed out into a frozen whirlpool, forever held below the cliffs of roaring, glass-green waves that somehow flail at the abyss, without ever curling over and toppling over to inundate the red-glowing wilderness?

How do you describe the turbulent flocks of the venal, swirling like starlings in the autumn air above the muddy fields of the Somme? How to picture the power-pylon ranks of impaled, damned souls marching in synchrony across the deserts of the fourth circle? The searing black-iron skyscrapers of Dis, windows glowing with diabolical light?

It’s like something out of Hieronymus Bosch, of course. Bosch, as pastiched by a million expert systems executing code that procedurally clones and extrapolates a work of art across a cosmic canvas. Procedural Bosch, painting madly and at infinite speed to fill in the gaps in a virtual world, guarded by the titanic archangels of Alonzo Church and Alan Turing, spinning the endless tape…

It’s funny how it takes game space to bring out the poet in you. And it’s even funnier how you’re embarrassed about letting it show.

“That’s Hell. Don’t worry about it, it’s just a little joke that got out of hand.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Not at all!” You lumber forward onto the stony path that meanders around the temple, heading downhill towards the beach front. “What happened was, the original set-up is where you go to acquire a body; hence, Limbo. Then a couple of the procedural content guys got bored and decided to have fun with the back-drop. This was all pre-alpha, back in the pioneering days, but they’d seen the movie”—and bloody awful you thought it was, too: an aging Patrick Stewart as Satan, hamming it up for the jeezmoid market—“and somehow managed to grab a chunk of scenery rights by a backdoor licensing deal. So we’re in Limbo, on the hill overlooking a sinkhole estate. And we’re about to teleport ourselves down to Earth, just as soon as I find the, ah—”

You find the right sacred grove, and flop down on the holy mosaic, which lights up in response:
Standard Lambent Radiosity Tint #2
, if you’re an accurate judge of such things.

“But why is it still here?”

“It’s somewhere we can banish persistent griefers.” The damned souls in this particular hell are there for violations of game law—ranging from beating up noobs and stealing to more recondite offences against virtual reality. All they can do is lie, broken and impaled upon their wheels, screaming abuse at the robot devils until their sentence is done, and they can go back to the game. “Okay, hold on. We’re going down to Vhrana.”

The sky turns deep blue, the world freezes, and a progress bar marches slowly across it from horizon to horizon. Ethereal runes written in aurorae six hundred kilometres high scrawl across the heavens,
UPDATING REALITY
, and for a moment your skin crawls with superstitious dread.
Someday we’re all going to get brain implants and experience this directly. Someday
everyone
is going to live their lives out in places like this, vacant bodies tended by machines of loving grace while their minds go on before us into strange spaces where the meat cannot follow
. You can see it coming, slamming towards you out of the future, like the empty white static that is all anyone has ever heard from beyond the stars: a Final Solution to the human condition, an answer to the Fermi paradox, lights on at home and all the windows tightly shuttered. Because it’s a thing of beauty, the ability to spin the cloth of reality, and you’re a sucker for it: Isn’t story-telling what being human is all
about
?

And then your claws click down on cobble-stones and the horizon implodes into the uneven Tudor timber-framed frontages of the high street in Vhrana.

Vhrana is the capital city of Cordua, in northern Breasil on the continent of Mu. It’s about two kilometres in diameter, built atop a mushroom-shaped dome of limestone that has come adrift from its foundations and floats about a kilometre up above the rain-forest-covered flanks of Mount Panesh. Enterprising adventurers have quarried out vast cellars beneath their picturesque guild-houses, and for a pittance you can descend through the endless passages until you come to a wicker platform overlooking the jungle. Then you can rent a bamboo-and-silk hang-glider and descend to the surface or, if you are Adept, levitate by the power of will alone.

Vhrana is a mess of clashing architectural styles, but the Duke has imposed a certain uniformity over it all by restricting the supply of certain building materials—not unlike Edinburgh, come to think of it. Thus, the timber-framed Tudor look hunches cheek by jowl with lighter wood-and-wicker buildings, some of them thatched, and the odd eruption of elvish structures—tediously similar to late-mediaeval Japan, in your opinion, but at least it doesn’t clash too violently. There aren’t many people out on the streets yet, for it’s still morning in most of North America, but as you make your way towards the northern market hall, you pass a number of hawkers selling their stuff.

“What are you looking for?”

“Voodoo board. I’m pretty sure it’s near the north end of this market. We’re in a no-PvP zone, by the way, you can hop down and explore if you want: Nobody’s going to jump you.”

“Oh. Okay, then.” She manages to dismount without impaling herself on a street sign while you sniff around among the market stalls—a lot of their keepers are in zombie mode, crying out their sales spiel in a loop—and look for the board. Eventually you find it, tucked away between the Golden Lotus Peace and Justice Co-operative (actually the local chapter of the Assassins Guild) and the Temple of Ru’aark. You scroll through flashing names and blinking icons, looking for—

“The missing guy. What’s his name?”

“Nigel MacDonald, aka Nigel Reliable. Not.”

“I meant, his Zone name. Names. Any inkling?”

“What, you mean what his character was called?”

“No, his
true
name. The one that’s attached to any character he’s playing, so his friends can find him. Like, I’m currently being Theodore G. Bear, but my Zone handle is JackReed. You’re currently being Anonymous Coward—sorry, that’s a generic, you haven’t named your noob—but when we logged you in we created an account with the Zone handle ElaineBarnaby. Yes?”

“Oh, right. Wouldn’t he just be NigelMacDonald?”

“Nope. For one thing, that’s a common name. I only got JackReed because I’ve been playing since the early days, and I pulled a few strings; name squatting is a national sport hereabouts. And for another, I’m thinking if we want to trace Mr. Reliable, we need to know what his handle was.” You think for a moment. “What his handles were…”

She’s sharp. “Plural?”

“You got it.” You stare at her noob. There’s a faint
ding
as a name finally appears over her asp-haired head: Stheno.
Good, she’s cluing up.
“Listen, it’s a quarter to five, and if we don’t get hold of his handle real soon now, we’re not going to be able to get any further today. Assuming he was hiding something, we need to know who we’re looking for. So. Got any bright ideas?”

“Yes. Let’s run through that tutorial you told me about. We’ll worry about finding MacDonald’s name tomorrow; first I figure I need to know what I’m doing. Or did you have other plans for the evening?”

Being first on scene has its little perks, and one of them is that under the Victims of Crime (Restitution) Act (2010)—a hang-over from before the independence vote went through—if an offence has been committed against a designated Victim of Crime with a pecuniary value of blah or a custodial sentence of wibble, the designated VOC must be assigned a Victim Liaison Officer, to do the touchy-feely hand-wringing shit and dial the Samaritans for them. You were the first responder to Hayek Associates, you’re not part of Liz’s trained and certified gang of murder puppies, and the pecuniary value is clearly well outside the two-thousand-euro threshold, so she patted you on the head and told you to run along and be a good little VLO for Hayek Associates.

But how the fuck do you counsel a corporation that’s been mugged?

“Hello, I’m your Victim Liaison Officer. I understand you’re a bit upset about it—share price down in the dumps, third quarter figures looking a bit dodgy, that kind of thing—would you like to talk to someone sympathetic? A cup of tea, perhaps?”

So you go back on site, nip down the fire stairs and through the blast doors round the back, and bang on the Great White Chief’s door.

“Who is it?”

You open the door. “Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Hackman, but I was wondering if you’d have the time for a wee chat.” You smile, making friendly.

Marcus Hackman’s office is all done up in chrome and black like an eighties bachelor pad. Mary has a thing for design magazines, and you recognize the Eames chair and lounger, and you’ll swear you’ve seen that desk somewhere famous. One wall is cluttered with photographs and certificates and the sort of shit the terminally insecure use to reassure themselves that they really matter; or maybe it’s what aggressive office sociopaths use to browbeat the terminally insecure into thinking that
they
really matter. The shark bares his teeth at you in a not-too-cannibalistic manner. “I can spare you five minutes.”

“Thank you, sir.” You smile right back at him. “First things first, are you aware of your rights under the Victims of Crime Act?” You blink the relevant paragraphs up in front of your right eye, just in case: “As a Victim of Crime, you have the right to a Victim Liaison Officer, and I thought you’d be pleased to know that I’m here to help everybody deal with any unpleasant consequences emerging from the incident.”

His cheek twitches. “You mean, to spy on us,” he accuses.

“I wouldna put it like that, sir. Victims of Crime can be quite upset by the process. They need support, they need regular updates on the progress of investigations, and it helps just a little bit to make sure that they don’t get the feeling they’ve been dumped. We wouldn’t want anyone to get any ideas about taking the law into their own hands, either—”

He raises a hand. “Please. Let’s be honest and
open
here.” He smiles with exaggerated bonhomie at the brim of your hat, mugging for the camera. “A financial institution managed by my
company
has been robbed, and a member of my management team fucked up by inviting you in rather than going through the correct channels. Quite obviously, your boss thinks it’s an inside job, so she’s set you to snoop around and see if the insider freaks and makes a run for it.” (He puts his hand down on the pile of papers cluttering up his desktop: You try to eyeball them discreetly, zooming for an image capture, but his hand’s in the way.) “That’s fine and dandy. You just don’t need to play the happy clappy let’s-all-hold-hands script at
me
. I’ve got more important things to worry about.”

“Like what?”

He looks at you briefly, then makes a flicking motion with his fingertips.

“You want to say something off the record?” you ask.

He nods.
Interesting.

You shrug. “This is
most
irregular,” you tell him as you pull out your phone and hit the big red button labelled
OFF
. He doesn’t need to know that it’s not your only camera.

Hackman leans forward, across his desk. “You know we’ve been served with two search-and-seizure orders in the past day? One’s from a specialist risk-consultancy agency. The other’s from our insurance underwriters. They’re going to be coming through here in hobnailed boots over the next couple of days, and believe me, you haven’t seen victims until you’ve seen what those thugs are going to leave behind. They mean to prove negligence on our part: There’s a lot of money at stake. If you’re poncing around in the background, trying to get my people to open up and go all weepy on your shoulder, then potentially you are going to do me a lot more harm than the initial incident.” His shoulders are quivering with something very like anger but so tightly controlled that all that comes across is a sense of desperate urgency. “There are going to be people running around these offices, people I can’t legally keep out, bottom-feeding scum who are
not friendly
. Like you, they’re investigators. Unlike you, they’re not investigating the crime in order to find the perpetrator; they’re looking for an excuse for a deep-pocket lawsuit. They want to take everything I’ve built here and steal it, and if they can find a legal pretext to do so, they will stop at nothing. They’re trash and I wouldn’t cross the road to piss on them if they were on fire—but I can’t
legally
stop them, even though I’d like to break their arms and legs and, and—”

Hackman pauses for breath, pauses to collect himself: He’s red in the face and breathing deeply. You force yourself not to recoil. You’re used to MOPs venting at you, but what’s freakily weird about this time is that as far as Hackman is concerned, you’re just a bystander, a convenient audience for his theatre of hate. For a moment you wonder if he’s having a heart attack, or maybe an orgasm, but then he pulls together another of his slick smiles and aims it at you, and it’s Game On again, with the charm ray turned all the way up to eleven. “Obviously, I’d be overjoyed if you could find the weakest link here and nail their hide to the front door. If nothing else, it would get me off the hook with the bottom feeders. But I do not want you snooping around in a manner that…
encourages
them. They’re hostiles, and they don’t know anything that can contribute to your investigation; all they can do is smear shit on the walls and steal the carpet.
Am I clear?
”

You stare at Hackman, taken aback by his ferocity. He’s still doing that shaky-trembly thing again; but it’s not anger that you can see in him now, it’s pure and simple hatred. The big man’s got his radge on, hasn’t he? Fascinating! Not to mention scary enough you’d be calling for backup if he was in the high street wearing a hoodie. Here in the executive office suite, and him wearing a suit, it’s only a bit less scary: But you know how to deal with this kind of customer, and anyhow, he’s not going to get violent at
you
, is he? Unlike 90 percent of the scum you get to deal with on the street, physical violence is the last thing you’re likely to encounter from Hackman. (Which only makes him all the more dangerous.) “You’ve been completely clear, sir. Thank you very much. If you don’t mind, I’m going to turn my mobile on again.” You reach up and hit the phone’s button.
Stick
that
on the station evidence server and let Liz suck it.
You smile at him reassuringly: “I’m here to help
you
, sir. You don’t need to worry about bystanders.” Then you back out of his office, very slowly, not taking your eyes off him, not giving him an opportunity to attack.

Okay, so you’re the designated Victim Liaison Officer for a corporation that’s been mugged. But what do you do when the CEO’s a psychopath who’s out for revenge?

You hear from Liz around five o’clock, just as you’re about to go off shift. “Can you drop in the station on your way home? Verity’s called a facial over the MacDonald business, and he wants your input.”

Typical,
you think, but you swallow it: She’s the skipper, and you’ve got to admit, this business is turning into a real pile of shit. With blood on the carpet and a programmer who went missing right about the time his employer reported a multi-million-euro hit, things are not looking good; the pressure is going to be telling on Liz from Verity, if not the chief. It’s still just a missing person case leg-humping a white-collar fraud, but with the amount of money at stake (and the Sexy! New! Technology! angle), there’s going to be Media Attention landing on your collective ass real soon now, if it hasn’t already, and the chief constable takes a dim view of media whores who don’t deliver. So you drive over to Meadowplace Road and mooch into the conference room with its tatty wallpaper and ancient flickering fluorescent lights, by way of the coffee machine on the second floor.

Liz is sitting at the front of the table with an expression like someone peed in her miso soup. Jimmy the X-Ray Specs and Roger the Ram are gassing about the morning’s breaking and entering, while a whole bunch of heavy SOCOs are nattering over their notes and a couple more sergeants from X Division are trailing you in. One of them you recognize as one of the stand-offish suits who was up at the bunker the other morning. All told you’re out on a limb: You’re not normally involved in this kind of incident meeting, and indeed you’re one of only a couple of uniforms in the bunch. “Alright, folks, let’s get started,” Liz calls, just as the door opens and another suit walks in. “Sir, we were just getting started. Would you like a chair, or…?”

“No, you carry on,” says Chief Superintendent Verity, and you cringe slightly: He’s got a voice like a rat-tail rasp, and rumour says he’s not long for the shop, the lung cancer’s not responding to treatment very well. For him to have dragged himself out to this session suggests that arses are being well and truly kicked all the way up to the top in officer country, if not the Justice Ministry. Trust that bastard Hackman to have friends in Holyrood.

“Alright, everyone. I assume you all know what this is about. We started off with a white-collar crime, a CMA special, last Thursday at Hayek Associates over in Granton. A whole bunch of money went missing. We got the call by mistake—one of their managers panicked and dialled 211 instead of trying to shovel things under the rug, and I think there’s a story in that. But anyway, on Friday we discovered a member of staff wasn’t answering the phone. As of this morning, things get slightly worse insofar as we now have a missing person on our hands, with a bunch of evidence that points to it being murder: His flat’s been done over, there’re signs of a struggle, and I believe Bill has got something to tell us about his movements. Take it away, Bill.”

Bill stands up, shuffling his tablet and a bunch of papers in a conference portfolio. He’s one of the suits from the woodshed the other day: fortysomething, salt-and-pepper moustache, dour puss with lips like he’s bitten a lime expecting nothing better. “Aye, well. The subject, one Nigel MacDonald, has no previous. He came to our attention in the course of the ongoing investigation at Hayek Associates, who employ him as a programmer.” Which is a load of bollocks, if you’re to believe what Wayne and the others are pointedly
not
saying: It’s like describing a brain surgeon as a first-aider. But the evidence is there in cold figures on their payroll, and the way everyone at Hayek tenses up and goes close-mouthed when you ask how they’re going to fill his boots. “Mr. MacDonald works from home an awful lot, and nobody’s seen hide nor hair of him since last Wednesday. By which I mean nobody’s seen email or spoken to him on the phone.”

Bill unfolds a fat swatch of paper from his portfolio. “I ran a query through NCIS”—the National Criminal Information System, not yet disentangled from the English one, even after eight years of IT-mediated divorce proceedings—“and then when that came back empty, I asked for a banking trace. That’s empty, too. He hasna spent a cent since Wednesday except for direct debits on his bank account. So I applied to NIR for a transaction log. Mr. MacDonald hasna presented his ID card to an Authorized Agency”—one with a direct line to the National Identity Register—“in more than three years. In fact, he hasna ever been stopped and checked. He
did
use it to open bank and credit accounts when it was issued, and he used it to apply for the mortgage on his hoose, but aside from that he’s the regular Invisible Man. He doesna drive a car or own a bus pass, so there’s nothing to be done aboot his movements. I havena pulled the street cameras yet, but if we have tae do it, I wouldna bet on his mug showing up.” He stepped down from the podium, an expression of disgust on his face.

“Thank you, Bill,” Liz says drily. “Scene of Crime next. Dr. Tweed?”

The “doctor” isn’t medical; Tweed is a lab monster with a Ph.D. and a perpetual air of mild amusement. Inevitably, he wears a sports jacket in the offending fabric, complete with corduroy elbow patches. And unlike Bill, he feels no need to stand up or parade around the front of the room. “I’m glad you called me for this one, it makes a nice change from the usual ned domestics turned messy.” He fiddles for a moment with his laptop, then you see the entire back wall of the conference room vanish into CopSpace, replaced by a walk-through ludium—the entire scene digitized and uploaded into virtual reality.

“Let’s start here, in the front hall. When the ram team laid the door down, they covered the dust and print evidence from the last people to traverse the hall. When the initial survey was over, Marge and Hal from Fettes Row came in and took an impression in aerogel foam. There’s lots of dust there, and a couple of partials, but the most recent footprints are useless because whoever left them was using disposable polythene overshoes with some kind of vascular lining. Just like Marge and Hal, in fact.”

You sit up and start paying real attention. You had the idea that MacDonald and his friends were a wee bit paranoid, but this is right out of order.

“It’s the same throughout the flat. It’s been turned over by professionals. Mr. MacDonald appears to have had a serious gadget habit, not to mention some apparatus on the roof that I’ll get to shortly, and the hardware is still there. But every last piece of personal memorabilia has been removed. The place is unnaturally clean, except for the kitchen. There’s no food apart from the fridge, for example. No personal items: no photographs, no paintings or posters, no books or magazines or newspapers, no toothpaste or painkillers in the bathroom cabinet, no nail clippers, no toilet paper. Someone took the time to vacuum behind the washing machine. If I didn’t know better, I’d say nobody lived there at all, except for the kitchen. Basically, the crime scene has been thoroughly sanitized by somebody with more than a passing knowledge of forensics.”