Halting State

pikes. Just like Craigmillar at chucking out time on a Saturday night, you figure, only not as ugly.

There are many of them, for the column is at least ten rows deep: And something vast and red and reptilian looms behind them, ancient and malign.

Then the picture freezes.

“You are looking at an Orcish war band. There are at least forty of them, and they’re a very long way from home. The thing behind them is a dragon. They seem to have brought him along for fire support. Which is impossible, but so is what happens next.”

The picture unfreezes.

The Orcish warriors spread out and adopt a spearheaded formation. Their leader barks a sharp command, and the pikes are lowered to face the denizens of the bank, who are turning to watch with gathering astonishment and anger. Here and there the bright glamour of incantations shows a spell-caster winding up to put the intruders in their place. And then—

A wave of darkness descends across the room, and the occupants freeze in their tracks.

“This is when something—we’re not sure what—nerfed our admins back to level zero and cast a Time Stop on everyone in the room. That’s a distressingly high-powered spell, and it normally affects just one target at a time.”

Flashes and flickers of light fitfully stab into the darkness. The Orcs are dispersing, fanning out with the speedy assurance of stage-hands moving the furniture and props while the stage lights are dimmed. They move between flicker and fulmination, snatching up leather sacks and ornately decorated chests, seizing swords and swapping their cheap leather armour for glittering plate. Over the space of a minute they denude the floor of the bank, snatching up the treasures that are inexplicably popping into view from the ethereal vaults.

Finally, their leader barks another command. The Orcs converge on his banner, his helmet nodding high beneath its column of five skulls—and they form up neatly into columns again, and march out through the mangled wreckage of the doors. As the last one leaves the threshold, the darkness disperses like mist on a summer morning. A couple of the braver warriors give shouts of rage and chase after their stolen property—but the dragon is waiting, and the smell of napalm is just the same in Avalon Four as on any other silver screen.

“We’ve been robbed,” says Richardson. “Got the picture yet?”

It’s time to rub your eyes and start asking hard questions. So someone found a bug in your game, and you called the Polis? Looks like a good place to start. While these tits are wasting your time, ordinary folk are being burgled.

“You said the Orcs were a long way from home. How do you know that?”

Sam Couper—the middle geek—sniggers. “Traceroute is my bitch.” He shuts up immediately when he sees Hackman sizing him for a side order with fries.

“My colleague is trying to explain”—Beccy Webster’s subtlety of emphasis is truly politician grade; she probably mimes to Wendy Alexander videos before breakfast every morning—“that they were controlled by a bunch of gold farmers in a sweatshop in Bangladesh. But we lost them when they ran over the border into NIGHTWATCH.”

“We could have nailed them if that ass-hat Nigel would show his sorry ass in the office once in a while.” Russell is clearly pissed about the missing Nigel, but you can follow that up later.

“NIGHTWATCH is another game?” You’re in danger of getting a cramp in your raised eyebrow.

Webster nods, sparing a warning glance for the three stooges. “Yes, it’s operated by Electronic Arts. They in-source quant services behind their own iron curtain, so we don’t have admin privileges when we go there.”

She pauses, mercifully, and you think of your upcoming evidence session and fail to suppress a groan. “So why did you call us?” you ask. “It seems to me this is all internal to your games, aye? And you’re supposed to be the folks who stop players from, from”—you shrug, searching for words—“arsing about with virtual reality. Right?” Wasting Polis time is an offence, but somehow you don’t think the skipper would thank you for charging this shower. More trouble than it’s worth.

“You listen to me.” When Hackman speaks, you listen: He’s got the same sense of menacing single- mindedness as a Great White homing in on a surfboard. “The exploit isn’t as simple as robbing a virtual bank of virtual objects. The way Avalon Four is architected means that someone had to leak them a private cryptographic token before they could change the ownership attributes of all those objects.” He clears his throat. “You shouldn’t have been called.” He spares a paint-blistering glare for Richardson: “This is a job for SOCA, not the local police…But seeing you’re here, you might as well note that not only has an offence has been committed subject to Section three of the CMA, as amended post independence in 2014”— shite, he’s got you—“but we just completed our flotation on AIM three weeks ago last Monday, and our share price this morning was up nearly twenty-seven per cent on the post-IPO peak. If we don’t find the bastards who did this, our shares are going to tank, which will rip the shit out of the secondary offering we were planning to make in six months. The timing’s too cute: This isn’t just a hacking incident, it’s insider trading. Someone’s trying to depress our share price for their own financial gain.”

“What’s the current damage?” asks Richardson, unable to control his stock-option twitch.

“Down two point four, word doesn’t seem to have leaked yet.” Michaels sounds like he’s reading an obituary notice. “But when it goes, if we lose, say, thirty per cent—that’s twenty-six million euros.”

Hackman unleashes his fish-killer grin again: “Thirty per cent? We’ll be lucky to get away with ninety.” He glances at you, and you see that the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “Now, would you like to borrow a telephone? So you can, I don’t know, maybe call in the real detectives?”

You don’t want to let the gobshite see he’s rattled you, but 26 million puts a whole different complexion on things: Normally robbery doesn’t score too high on the KPI matrix, but something on this scale has the potential to go Political. So you stare him down while you put on your best Morningside cut-glass court-appearance accent. “I am a detective sergeant, Mr. Hackman. And I’m afraid that due to current force-manning constraints, we can’t just drop everything and start an immediate large-scale investigation. I have to file an incident report with my inspector, and he has to take it to the chief constable; then it’s his decision whether or not to call in SOCA.” (The Scottish Organised Crime Agency, who will slot the job into their priority tree somewhere between chasing international plutonium smugglers and rescuing kittens from window ledges.) You smile, oh-so-friendly, and let him see your teeth. “So I’m going to start by interviewing everyone in this room separately, then I’ll prepare my report, and as soon as it’s ready, I’ll send it up the line.” (Right after you finish with your plead-by-email recording.)

“Now. Who’s first?”

ELAINE: Stitch-up

En garde!

You are standing in the nave of a seventeenth-century church, its intricately carved stone surfaces dimly illuminated by candles. Your right foot is forward, knee slightly bent, and you can feel the gentle curve of the worn flagstone beneath the toes of the hand-stitched leather slipper you’re wearing. Your right arm is raised, and your hand extended as if you are pointing a gun diagonally across your chest, muzzle wavering towards the roof of the west wing: With your left hand, you support your right, just as if you’re holding a heavy pistol. Heavy pistol about sums it up—the long sword may be made of steel and over a metre long, but it weighs no more than a Colt Python, and it’s balanced so that it feels like an extension of your fingertips.

You are facing a man who is about to try to kill you. He’s wearing a black Kevlar-reinforced motor-cycle jacket with lead weights Velcro’d to it, plus jeans, DMs, and a protective helmet with a cluster of camera lenses studding its blank-faced shell. Like you, he’s holding a long sword of fifteenth-century design, its steel cross-guards shielding his hands, which are, in turn, raised, like a baseball striker poised ready for the ball. But you don’t see the biker jacket or DMs because, like your opponent, you’re also wearing a full facial shield with head-up display, and it’s editing him into a full suit of Milanese plate, the Renaissance equivalent of a main battle tank.