Halting State

“The Orcs.” You ground your blunderbuss on the uneven, rubble-strewn floor of the cave and lean on it. “They were bearers, right?”

“Pretty much.” Venkmann raises one bony finger. Its tip glows green as he commences writing notes that hover in the air behind him. “Encumbrance, one hundred and ten pounds each before they hit a movement penalty.”

“Did you go hunting their registered owners?”

“Yup.” Venkmann scrawls another check mark in mid-air. “All forty were signed up via a botnet in Malaysia, using stolen credit cards. The cost of a tag in Avalon Four is low enough that their banks just authorized the transactions without doing a fraud check.”

The gorgon is looking a little bit lost. Periodically, she shrugs or twitches, stereotyped body language untouched by mortal puppeteer. “Where did the card numbers come from?” she finally asks.

“Who knows?” Venkmann shrugs. “It’s petty crime at this level—fifteen euros here and there. We told the cops, who made a note of it, but—”

“No, I mean, did all the numbers come from the same source?” she asks. “If some web storefront got themselves hacked, that might tell us something. Work it from the other end, find the hacker, find who they sold the numbers to.”

Venkmann looks perplexed. “Is that possible?” he asks.

You shift your weight between feet and rumble bearishly. “Of course it’s possible,” you point out. “There’s a real world out there, Mike. Maybe we ought to ask the cops if they’ve covered that angle yet.”

“The cops will take the details and give you a pat on the head, then they’ll ignore you,” predicts Stheno. “It’s a volume crime, they don’t investigate small frauds individually, it’s not cost-effective.” A small buzzing insect, no doubt attracted by the smell of blood, flies too close to her, and one of her asps snaps at it. The snake-lock misses, but the fly drops to the floor and shatters like glass. “If you expect them to share intelligence, you’re mistaken. The rule is, information flows into an investigation, never out of it. Break the rule, and you risk tipping off the target.”

Venkmann walks over to the Iron Maiden that leans up against the far wall of the dungeon. He idly spins the hand-crank that winches the lid up. “Whatever. We got forty Orcs. They didn’t act like a bunch of macro zombies. When I reran the footage, they were acting too random, too human—making mistakes and cancelling out of them, that kind of thing. They were following their leader, and when they ran, they ran back here.”

“Orcs. Treasure. How did they get into the bank?” you ask.

“Someone gave them ownership privs on the loot.” Venkmann sounds annoyed. “The same someone who nerfed the gods, presumably.”

“Could someone have cracked Hayek Associates’ root certificate from outside?” you ask. “Or do you think it was an inside job?”

Venkmann winches the Iron Maiden’s lid all the way open. What’s inside lies in darkness. “What I think is, there’s a bug in Kensu’s shitty Chinese code. It might be a memory leak—someone left a fence-post error in a copy-on-write primitive or something—or maybe something more exotic, but someone figured out a privilege- escalation attack that works. If you can get deity level rights, you can probably de-escalate other folks, too. The question is, who got root? And what did they do with the loot, anyway?”

You snort. “Treasure is treasure. That’s what eBay is for.” It’s worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it—like bank-notes, which used to carry the words, I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ten pounds.

“Yes, but they haven’t shown up there yet. This is stolen goods, I think we might get a stop put on the auction a bit faster than usual.” He clears his throat. “Anyway. After they got here, they, well, they made an unorthodox exit.”

He gestures at the Iron Maiden.

“You have got to be kidding,” you say. If you die in-game, your body—and what it’s wearing—stays where you fell. You reincarnate in your bare scuddies and you’ve got to run if you want to re-equip before some scavenging farmer grabs your kit. But the Iron Maiden is tagged as a shredder—it’s got the permanent death attribute, a creepy purple glow surrounding it in your admin-enhanced vision. That’s pretty damned unusual in this kind of game space; it doesn’t just kill you, it shreds you beyond resurrection. “What would be the point of that?”

“Well, obviously it killed them fatally. More importantly, it surrendered ownership of their in-game assets to, to whoever was waiting here. The Fence.”

“Ah,” says Stheno, sounding as if she’s just achieved enlightenment.

“So let’s replay the entry log for this shard and see who came here,” you suggest, “before the Orcs showed up with the loot.”

“Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” says Stheno.

“Huh?”

“Open Sesame!” she cries. And the Iron Maiden starts flashing.

“What the fuck?” says Venkmann.

“Go on, open it up,” Stheno urges.

“Not likely, it might be a trap.”

Venkmann’s risk-averse attitude bugs you, so you put your mad skillz to work. Bringing up the in-game debugger in your field of view shows a whole bunch of scripting cruft attached to the torture implement. “Hey, this thing is really over-engineered for a simple killing machine, huh?”

“What? What’s—” Venkmann can see what you’re seeing, and you get the feeling that back in his office Mike is twitching with something other than a caffeine jag. “Hey, that’s not right. It says it’s signed by…” He trails off, muttering to himself, and the Venkmann avatar lolls on its feet like a hanged puppet, only its jittery fingertips showing that it’s not dead.

WHAT’S HE DOING? Stheno IMs you.

“There’s about”—you run a quick compile/syntax check on the tree—“about fifteen thousand lines of code attached to that thing, where there should only be a couple of hundred. They’re digitally signed using the Hayek corporate certificate, too, which means that someone at HA put them there. Numpties.”

“You’re telling me they didn’t even check? Before now?” the snake-woman hisses at you.

“Yeah, looks like.”

“Jesus.” She glances at you. “How do you know this?”

“You’ve got access to a built-in debugger and development suite whenever you’re running in god mode”—a nasty thought strikes you—“and there was a bunch of core database code in that thing: If someone’s planted a trigger in a public table and a watcher somewhere else in Zonespace—”

There’s a brilliant blue flash of light from the Iron Maiden, prompting you nearly to sprain a thumb bringing up a bunch of defensive spells you keep ready for just such occasions. “Shit!” yells Venkmann. Darkness gathers, fulminating, in the corners of the room, a smoky penumbral effusion spilling from the crack that has opened up in reality. You power up the Shield of Steel Focus and the Dome of Defence in a hurry, watching the world around you blur into watery unfocus as figures with too many limbs step out of the corners, moving in insectile stop-go jerks.

Venkmann is frozen over the gaping maw of the Iron Maiden, held in place by some unseen force. You turn to confront the intruders and realize that Stheno is outside your zone of protection. Shit. This is going to be ugly. There are four of the things, like gigantic anthropomorphic toads with strangely articulated limbs and great horned heads. You crack open a vial of Neverslow and inhale the bitter fumes, then unsling your blunderbuss as the world around you seems to slow, jerking in stop-frame animation. The gun’s already loaded with coarse-ground silver filings and lead shot, and when you pull, it bangs deafeningly in the confined space, blasting a cloud of smoke and sparks at the nearest of the demonic intruders, who yells raucous rage at you but doesn’t even stop coming. You can see the haze of improbability spiralling around its head, the madness in its eyes— it’s a fucking slaad of some kind! What are they doing here?— and then it raises its webbed hands in a spell-caster’s gesture, and a vast bloom of emerald fire envelops you. Which is a huge relief because it tells you you’re up against a bot; no human player—not even a total noob—would do something that stupid.

Two of the slaad’s fellow gate-crashers run into your Dome of Defence from either side, rattling your teeth as