Halting State

corrupted the digitally signed ownership certificates for objects in the database, turning them over to some third party: The Orcs were just warm bodies to carry the loot away. Once they had it, the ownership certificates got swapped around again via a remixer to stop Hayek or Kensu International from figuring it out—they don’t routinely log all ownership changes, it’d be like running a supermarket chain’s stock control system—then got the hot goods out of Avalon Four and onto another shard via the rabbit-hole.”

This sounds horribly familiar. “You think there’s a fence somewhere?”

Jack scratches the side of his nose, then takes the glasses off and polishes them on his tee-shirt. “The whole scenario makes no sense at all unless there’s a fence.” He examines the glasses. “In- game auction-houses won’t touch stolen goods, but if they’ve got a conduit set up, say in another real-world jurisdiction or even in another Zone partition, they could sell the loot on eBay. The trouble is going to be getting a list of the stuff that’s been stolen, then checking for all the possible auction-houses. And that’s before you start to wonder if the stolen prestige items have been hacked on by someone with crafting skillz…”

It is horribly familiar: There’s a wee garage down in Cramond that Mac’s been trying to shut down for years—the owner’s a big ned, done time in Bar-L for receiving, and the inspector swears blind he’s running a chop shop—but he’s never been able to pin anything on it. You’ve got unfond memories of spending nights and mornings keeping an eye on his back yard via spy cam, trying to spot a delivery. And on a larger scale, it’s what those blacknets you were reading up on are supposed to do—antisocial networking sites. “Where would you go to look?”

“I’d start by trying to find out what’s been stolen,” says Jack. “And then I’d write a bot, to go round all the online auctions trying to match a shopping list against what’s on sale. Drill down, cross-correlate the merchants”— he’s going all cross-eyed, and you’re not the only one who’s staring at him as if he’s turned into some kind of delphic oracle—“see if any names keeping coming up.”

Barnaby snaps her fingers, a dry, popping sound. “Time series analysis on the transaction log from the auctions,” she says, leading you to wonder whether you’re surrounded by complete nutters or just very, very strange detectives.

Jack shakes his head. “I’d better go see if Mike’s got a list—”

You reach a decision. Funny how Marcus Hackman’s bottom-feeding scum are a lot more human than he is, isn’t it? “No you won’t. We will. Because if you find anything, and there are names attached, I’ll be wanting a wee word with them.”

It turns out that nobody actually knows what’s been stolen.

“You’ve got to understand, it’s a distributed database,” says Couper, looking flustered—when you and Jack found him he was hunkered down in a nest of big flat screens full of tiny coloured text with a ragged left margin, and it took a tap on the shoulder before he’d look up—“we don’t track everything centrally.”

“What about the journal logs?” asks Jack. Someone behind you snaps their fingers.

“Well sure, but we’re typically tracking close to a million transactions per minute. Good luck if you expect us to grep that.” He kicks his chair back from his workstation and turns to face you. “You’d have to track the user handles from when they logged in—”

“Can’t you put up a notice somewhere?” asks Elaine. “Ask for information.” She pauses.

Couper doesn’t give her a breathing space. “Sure, but nobody would—”

“Tell them it’s to register an insurance claim,” she interrupts, raising her voice. Someone’s been taking assertiveness classes, you realize. “That Hayek Associates are trying to get the items back, but will be unable to return unclaimed items.”

“But they’ll claim all sorts of shit that they never had!”

“Really?” She gives Couper a withering look: “I’d never have guessed. Poor innocent me, nobody told me that people lie while I was studying for my master’s in forensic accountancy…”

“But what use is it?” Couper looks upset, more than anything: “It doesn’t make sense!”

“It’s simple enough. Most people will tell the truth, especially when we tell them we just want to know their five top items, so we can verify them against our database.”

“But there isn’t a database—” Couper stops dead.

Elaine nods, smiling a little smile. “But they don’t know that, do they?”

“Oh. Right, well then.” Couper shakes his head.

“I’ll need admin access to the auction-houses,” Jack adds.

Couper splutters. “You can’t be serious! They’re in this to make money. They could sue us into the ground if we let you mess with their stock—”

“Read-only,” Jack says firmly. “I need to write a scraper that can trawl their database for hot property.”

“Talk to Wayne, or Beccy. I can’t give you access without their sayso.” Sam crosses his arms stubbornly. “Go on. I can’t help you.”

Elaine looks at you and raises an eyebrow. “Sounds like a plan,” you tell her. The thought of giving Wayne Richardson, Prize Twat, a bad case of indigestion holds a curious appeal for you. “Let me handle this.”

ELAINE: Game of Spooks

It’s about eight fifteen when you finally get out of Hayek Associates’ offices and summon a taxi to whisk you back to your hotel room. You are, not to put it too pointedly, dog-tired. On the plus side, at least you made some progress. That cop, Sergeant Smith, looks like she’s going to be a useful contact, and Jack is certainly paying his way. When you left him back at the bunker, he was elbow deep in whatever it is that programmers do, oblivious to everything else. Which is kind of annoying, because he’s about the only person up here who you know who isn’t a co-worker, and now you’ve got to face an evening in a strange city on your own, but what the hell. They call this place the Athens of the North—there’s got to be something you can do by yourself on a summer night, hasn’t there?

Well, no.

Back in your room, you have a quick shower, then check the eating-out guide, by which time it’s past nine and you’re half past hungry. You’re not keen on going back to the places you went into with Jack, not on your own, and the room service menu looks okay, so you order up a big green salad in penance for yesterday’s business meeting, then it’s ten, and the hotel gym’s closed, and where the fuck did the day go? It’s even worse than a weekday in London—at least there you can break the commute home in a cocktail bar with some friends.

It’s ten thirty and you’re glumly contemplating an early night and a seven o’clock session in the gym when your phone rings. You look at the display with a sinking feeling: It’s a particularly tedious LARP called SPOOKS, a real-time game in which you’re acting your parts in a shadowy pan-European intelligence agency locked in a struggle for global hegemony with the forces of Chinese military intelligence, the Russian FSB, and, of course, the CIA.

“Yes?” You try not to snap.

“Elaine Barnaby? This is Spooks Control. Are you busy right now?”

You glance around your beautifully decorated and utterly sterile worker cell: “Not particularly. You know I’m in Edinburgh?”

“That’s why we’re calling.” Your nameless Control sounds drily amused. “On behalf of our sponsors.” The spooks at the centre of the organization in the game you play. “Your authenticator is—” He rattles off a string of nonsense words, just to prove he’s got access to your Control file.

“I’m on business…”

“So are we. We were hoping you could do us a small favour while you’re there.”

“How small?” As usual, there’s no face to go with the call, just the eye-in-a-glass-pyramid-in-Docklands logo. If this was a video call, at least you could glare at him. “It’s half past bloody ten!”

“We need a small parcel delivering.”

“A small parcel. What’s wrong with FedEx?”

“Well, as you just pointed out, it’s half past ten at night. The parcel’s sitting downstairs in your hotel lobby. It