Halting State

ice-sheet. “Hang on, that’s impossible. I think.”

“Right.” She nods, vigorously. “That’s what everyone I spoke to at Hayek Associates said. But they would say that, wouldn’t they?”

“Let me get this straight. Hayek Associates are a stabilization house, aren’t they? And they’ve been stabilizing Avalon Four—”

“A stabilization house would be a company that manages the in-game economy, wouldn’t it?” She’s making odd gestures with her hands, and for a moment they distract you because it looks like knitting, only nobody would use a two-hundred-millimetre needle.

“I think we’re using divergent terminology, but yes. I say ‘second-tier industry subcontractor,’ you say ‘bank.’ But the thing is, if it’s properly designed, robbing the bank should be impossible.”

“Why? It’s a database server, isn’t it? Someone grabbed a bunch of entries from a table and deleted—”

“Not exactly.” This is giving you a headache. “Zone games don’t run on a central server, they run on distributed-processing nodes using a shared network file system. To stop people meddling with the contents, everything is locked using a cryptographic authorization system. If you ‘own’ an item in the game, what it really means is that nobody else can update its location or ownership attributes without you using your digital signature to approve the transaction—and a co-signature signed by a cluster of servers all spying on each other to make sure they haven’t been suborned.”

“So it’s not physically on a server?” You can see her trying to keep up. “Could someone forge the signatures?”

“Not really.” You’re racking your brains now, because the authentication architecture of Zone isn’t something you’ve really studied, but a couple of old university courses are raising dusty echoes in the back of your head. “It’s based on the old DigiCash protocol, invented by a cryptographer called David Chaum, back in the eighties and early nineties. He figured it could replace credit cards on the Internet—it was designed to allow anonymous transactions but prevent fraud, and cryptographers had been whacking on it with clubs for twenty years before the Zone consortium picked it. The signature mechanism is very secure—you’d need to suborn the root keyservers for the entire Zone game space…”

You trail off into silence. Whoops, you think, and kick yourself. Suddenly a grand an hour doesn’t seem like very much money at all. Ms. Barnaby is looking at you with an expression you last saw in primary third, when Mrs. Ranelagh didn’t deign to notice your wee waving hand in time to give you a toilet ticket.

“Yes?” she asks, compressing so much data into the twenty-four-bit monosyllable that if you could patent the algorithm, you’d be set for life.

“Well, uh, I…wow,” you manage. “Why did you want me?”

She unwinds by a fraction of a degree. “You’ve got the same background and experience as the programmer who’s missing from Hayek Associates.” Programmer who’s—shaddup, Jack. “Everyone else is focussing on HA’s business-level organization, they dumped the gaming stuff on me, and I’m not really an expert.” She gives a little self-deprecating laugh that raises the temperature back above zero. “So I asked for a native guide.”

Ah. That explains it. Well, no it doesn’t, you realize, but it goes at least a third of the way towards it. “What do you do?” you ask her.

“I’m a forensic accountant.” She pulls that prim, mousy, librarian face again as she taps a bunch of papers in her folio into line.

“Oh. Well, ever done any gaming?” There’s always a chance. Some of the deadliest GMs you ever ran into back in your table-top days were accountancy clerks by day.

“Not that kind. Why, do you think…?”

You glance at the blank white walls of the conference room. Perfect. “Now’s your chance. Do you have a line of expenses?”

“What are you suggesting?”

It’s still only a vague thought, but…“We could go have a sniff round Hayek Associates, but we’ll only get the cold shoulder, and, besides, they’ll be logging everything you do. I think we ought to go have a word with this programmer of theirs—”

“Can’t do that, he’s missing.”

“Missing? When?”

“The police say he disappeared, probably over the weekend.” She makes it sound like he pulled a sickie. You shudder. There’s a lot of money in a hack on Zone’s DigiCash layer, but enough for that? “We can’t get access to HA’s offices until the police finish whatever it is they’re doing, so we’re stuck sitting on our thumbs for today, anyway.”

“Oh. Well then.”

“Well?” She looks at you expectantly, and you realize she can’t be all that much older than you. The librarian act is elaborate camouflage. Behind it, who is she really?

“Well, if that’s the case, can your expense budget run to a taxi out to PC WORLD and a pair of high-end gaming boxes?”

“Yes, I think it would,” she says slowly. “What have you got in mind?”

“A guided tour of Avalon Four, from the inside, so you know what you’re getting yourself into. Are you game for it?”

Limbo. In mythology, it used to be where the dead babies were stacked like cord-wood, awaiting a bureaucratic salvation. Limbo: the dusty front porch of hell. In Zone terminology, Limbo is the hat-check desk.

You’ve configured yourselves for spatial proximity, so you step into reality next to the unformed noob. The noob’s not got as far as adopting any specific species or gender, so they’re present as a humanoid blob of mist floating above the marble floor of the temple. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes. You mean through my headset?”

“That’s right.” You take a look around while she’s fiddling with her senses. The temple is vaguely classical, Doric columns and marble floors around a raised central area with your traditional altar, columns of flickering light rising from it towards the airy dome of the ceiling. There’s a ghostly choir improvising atmospherically in the background. “Found the controller yet?”

“I think so—” The noob jolts violently, then sprints across the floor, slamming face-first into a pillar. “Ouch! What just happened?”

“I think you set your acceleration too high.”

An hour later she’s still fiddling with her hair, and you’re wondering if maybe you would have done better to give her an off-the-shelf identity: Answering occasional questions and helping the noob work out who she wants to be is intermittently amusing, but it’s not exactly getting the job done. On the other hand, you’ve got to admit that those asp-headed dreadlocks are very cool indeed, and more to the point, she’s not going to be able to do her job if she doesn’t at least have some idea of why people invest so much time and effort in their characters. “I think we should get moving,” you suggest.

“You think?” The noob turns to look at you and, to your surprise, raises an eyebrow: Obviously she’s been exploring the somatics while your mind was wandering. “How does this look?”

“It looks fine.” For a first attempt. The tools for creating a character in Zonespace are a lot finer and more subtle than those offered by the older MMOs, but by the same token, they’re harder to use well: Some people make a tidy real-world living just by fine-tuning other players’ avatars. What Elaine has come up with is a passable attempt at an anime medusa, with brightly textured skin like vinyl, big brilliant eyes, and colourful clothing. “Okay, to start with, you’ll need this.” You hand her a short-sword that she’s skilled up for. “And this.” A chain-mail vest, slightly rusty. “You wear them like so.” The noob nods. “And now you either need to learn how to navigate—there’s a tutorial garden outside the door over there—or I can teach you.”

“Which do you recommend?”

She’s either being very patient or she’s actually enjoying the novelty of it all. “I’d do both. Stick with me for now, then go online yourself tonight and mess around with the tutorial.”

“Okay.” She sounds sceptical. You glance sidelong out of game space and see her as she is, focussed