Halting State

and south—to go Liaise with some Victims.

It’s early afternoon when you park next to the muddy pot-hole at the edge of the car-park. First off, you check the Mess Hall to grab a coffee and see who’s there. A couple of the quants are hanging around the coffee machine: Your glasses—now configured for off-line browsing—remind you of their names, Couper, Sam (“traceroute is my bitch”) and Evans, Darren. You walk up behind them. “Sam, Darren,” you say, with a smile, “how are you doing today?”

They both nearly jump a mile: They may be thick as thieves, but they lack the reflexes of the pathologically non-law-abiding. Turning these nice middle-class nerds inside out and shaking them until the pips squeak would be so easy it’d make the baby Jesus cry: They’re still terrified of parking tickets. Clearly neither of these two are running an illicit blacknet. They haven’t even been exposed to the long arm of the law often enough for it to lose its dreadful majesty. “Fine! Fine! What you want?” Darren asks, too eager for his own good.

“A regular coffee, hold the sugar,” you suggest, and damn if Sam doesn’t turn and make a pathetic lunge for the control panel, so eager to oblige that if you slid an unsigned confession under his fingers, he’d be in for the high jump tomorrow. Aye, this one would have been blackboard monitor in junior six, right enough. Not to mention the class swot. Which may actually make the job at hand harder—they’ll drown you in irrelevant details if you give them the chance. “I was wanting to interview both of you later today, get your account of what happened. Are you free later on?”

“Uh, yeah, just not right now.” Darren is recovering his composure faster than Sam. “Busy fighting fires, covering for that asshole Nigel. He hasn’t updated the group-reconciliation files since last Wednesday, and we’re going to be in the shitter if we don’t get it under control before the weekly M4 policy session.”

“Your coffee, miss…?” says Sam.

“Sergeant, actually.” You smile at him as you take the cup. “Sergeant Smith.” That’s right, grind it in, define your authority now so he bends the neck later. “When’s the policy session?”

“Uh, Wednesday, actually,” volunteers Darren, getting his act together. “I guess I can make some time late this afternoon or maybe tomorrow morning, but right now we’ve got to patch Nigel’s—”

The door opens, and another quant comes in, along with two suits whom your specs unhelpfully identify as VISITOR 1 and VISITOR 2. “That’s okay,” you say. “Tomorrow will do. Ten o’clock?” He nods. “Okay, see you then.” You nod at Sam, also, and he seems to take it as a dismissal and scuttles away with his tail between his legs. Which leaves you with an opportunity to check out the visitors before you move on. You put your smiling meet-the- people face in place and turn to face them.

“Hello,” you say. VISITOR 1 is male, late twenties, overweight, badly shaved, and that suit really doesn’t go with the faded black tee-shirt. VISITOR 2 is female, skinny, somewhere in that vague period between late teens and midthirties, and looks like she knows far too much about spreadsheets for her own good. Black suit, very corporate, well-coordinated. Verdict: They’re technical/clerical citizens. Subtype: probably law-abiding, apart from the occasional furtive joint. “I haven’t seen you around here before. Are you from”—you nudge up the case database—“Dietrich-Brunner Associates?”

VISITOR 1 is of a kind with Sam, but VISITOR 2 is made of sterner stuff: She sniffs and gives you an old- fashioned look. “Could be,” she says. “Who are you?”

You stare back at her: She’s a bit mousy, but you’ve met her type before—usually giving you a nasty grilling on the witness stand.

“I’m Detective Sergeant Smith,” you tell her, “working out of Meadowplace station.” You drop the smile. “You are from Dietrich-Brunner?”

VISITOR 2 continues to make with the long stare, but VISITOR 1 caves. “Um, yeah, we are. She’s the organ grinder, I’m just the performing monkey.” He mimes shaking a hat.

VISITOR 2 elbows him in the ribs, sharply. “No, you’re a dancing bear. Do try to get the right species!” She faces you: “I’m sorry we seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot. I’m Elaine Barnaby, and yes, I’m from Dietrich-Brunner—I’m a forensic accountant. Jack here is a game-development consultant, and he’s acting as my guide. Now, what can we do for you, Sergeant?”

“You can help yourselves to a coffee, then maybe tell me why Marcus Hackman might not want people such as yourselves, um, crawling around on his turf?”

She raises an eyebrow. “Ah, that is an interesting turn of phrase. His?”

Good, that’s got her attention. “Depends. What are you doing here? I mean, in Hayek Associates’ offices?”

“Oh, that.” She sniffs. Jack bends over the coffee machine, mumbling to himself, then starts punching buttons like it’s a Game Boy. Your fingers are itching to stick their names into CopSpace and see what comes back, but that might be a wee bit too obvious if you did it right now…“I’m supposed to be conducting a security audit on a bank in an online game. At least, that’s what I thought the picture was yesterday. In practice…I take it you’re here because Wayne or Marcus or someone reported the intrusion last week? That’ll have gone on your case-load as a crime, possibly hacking, possibly theft or fraud—whatever. Well, DBA got sucked in because one of our senior partners vetted Hayek’s board before their IPO the other month, and this stinks of an inside job. So Chris panicked and dragged a team of us up here to do something about it. Now there’s a programmer missing and that’s…well, it’s enough to get him off the hook, so he’s pissing off back to the City, but my job—and Jack’s—is to confirm that it really was this Nigel MacDonald that did it, dot the i’s and cross the t’s. I think Chris may even be planning to pull strings and get NFIU to take us on as specialist subcontractors, if he can sort out the cross-border jurisdictional voodoo.”

That sets you back on your heels: The Crime and Rehabilitation Office hires civilian specialists from time to time, it’s true, and the technical side of this investigation is going to the National squad as soon as anyone notices it—does that make these people bystanders or fellow cops? Leave it to Liz to sort out the turf wars, you decide. “Ah, well, I cannae be telling you anything until someone tells me you’re to be working on the case,” you temporize. “But if there’s anything ye’ve found about the situation, and especially about Nigel MacDonald, I’d love to hear it.”

“Yes, there’s—” Jack begins eagerly, before Elaine gives him a look that could strip paint. There’s some interesting chemistry going on there, if you’re any judge of such things.

“I think what he means to say is, we’d be happy to co-operate with your investigation purely on a professional peer-to-peer basis with appropriate confidentiality safeguards in place for a pooling of information,” she picks up, facing you like she’s holding a royal flush. And, indeed, she is. So you smile and take a mouthful of too-hot coffee. One point to her.

“Well, that’s a start.” You pause a moment. “You said something about knowing what you were meant to be doing yesterday. What’s changed since then?”

“We’re trying to track down where Tricky Dicky hid the loot,” says Jack, ignoring the warning look Elaine sends him. “Seeing he’s not here for us to ask. Hmm. Do you have him in custody yet?”

You weigh your answer carefully. “Not yet. In fact, if you should see him, I’d appreciate it if you’d IM me. My colleagues do indeed have some questions we’d like to put to him.” Starting with, how’d you come back from the grave? Assuming you existed in the first place? But there’s no call to go frightening the horses just yet, so you keep that thought to yourself.

“I think we can do that,” Jack says, seemingly oblivious as Elaine raises the energy level from Defrost to Nuke. “Problem is, it could be anywhere in Zonespace, or even out of it. Avalon Four isn’t the only game sharing this platform, and whatever was stolen, if they can get it out of Avalon and into somewhere else…” He trails off.

“What is it?” Elaine asks sharply.

“eBay.” He pulls on a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. “Assuming this was a real bank robbery, what do you do with the goods?”

“The goods?” You look perplexed. “Banks hold money…”

Jack shakes his head. “This is a game, remember.” He glances at Elaine, who nods slowly. “The bank’s not somewhere that manages risk; it’s somewhere that stores value. You can only carry so much crap around with you in Zonespace without becoming encumbered, which slows you up. So Hayek run the bank and sell safety deposit storage. This gives players who haven’t bought themselves a castle yet a place to stash their goodies while they’re running around on quests, and it also siphons money out of the game stealthily, in bank charges. Anyway, what was stolen was the contents of about three thousand safety deposit boxes. Actually, the real crime was that someone