Halting State

kind of bampot builds a bomb with dry ice special effects and blinking LEDs, anyway? You unhook your cams and walk around it slowly, panning up and down to capture the lot.

“Wait!” Kemal hisses. “Don’t get too close.” He steps towards you. At the same moment, you feel an odd tugging. It’s almost as if your cam has acquired a life of its own. Startled, you pull back, then glance at the thermos flask. You’re two metres away from it. You can feel the chilly vapour on your skin: You try not to inhale as you sweep the camera across the scene, then take a step back.

“Is it dangerous?” Liz demands, “Because if so, we’ve got to evacuate—”

“It’s another server,” Kemal says carefully, “but not a kind you can buy in a shop. In fact, what it’s doing here…” He trails off. “The power’s down,” he remarks quietly. “The refrigerator fans are quiet.”

“How long until it reaches its critical temperature?” asks Mario, right behind him.

Kemal nearly jumps. “We can’t risk that! We need it intact.”

“Tell me what’s going on,” Liz insists.

Kemal grunts, a sound like an irritated pig. “This whole installation shouldn’t exist. You don’t just drop data centres in the middle of suburbs; you’d need to get the power company to run extra cables in from the substation. There are enough processor blades in the next room to listen in on every Internet packet and voice call in Scotland; we think”—he points at the steaming Frankenstein machine—“this is probably the refrigeration vessel for a quantum processor—”

A door slams in the next room. You hear raised voices. Angry voices, and footsteps coming closer. Liz gestures you to one side of the door, and you quietly pull your can of whoop-ass. She nods minutely and takes a step back.

“—don’t care! You shouldn’t be here!”

“—idiots had checked with eurocontrol first—”

The doors bang open. Liz is already standing to one side, and she’s drawn her warrant card.

Standing in the doorway is one of Kemal’s henchmen, caught in vituperative argumentation with a familiar figure—Barry Michaels, CTO of Hayek Associates—and someone else behind him, middle-aged and red-faced. Barry’s hair is even more fly-away than it was when you turned up in his boardroom last Thursday, and he’s the one who’s doing most of the shouting. Henchman Number One, for his part, has lost his Man in Black poise. Possibly this is something to do with the way Barry—who, you notice, not only looks like an old public-school boy but is built like an old public-school rugby squad quarterback—has got him by the scruff of his immaculate suit jacket and is almost frog-marching him—

“Stop right there,” Liz says firmly. “You’re under arrest.”

You step sideways, keeping them both covered with your pepper spray.

Barry snorts, disgustedly. “No I’m not. Chief Constable?”

You look past him, at the man in the hounds-tooth check trousers and scary canary-yellow cardigan, with the golfing shoes and the somehow familiar face. So does Liz.

“Oh shit,” she says faintly.

“You can say that again. If you like,” says Deputy Chief Constable McMullen, who right this moment is looking distinctly peevish about been pulled away from the golf course on his day off. “Inspector, I’m here to tell you to do whatever this man tells you to do. Do you understand?”

Liz’s face is a picture. “Sir?”

Barry clears his throat. “Inspector, please turn around and face the wall. Try and forget everything you’ve seen in this building.” After a moment, he glances your way. “That goes for you, too, Sergeant.”

“But—”

“Do as he says,” McMullen says firmly. He sounds more resigned than anything else. “He’s in charge here.”

You lower your pepper spray reluctantly. “What’s going on?” you ask, inexplicably pleased with yourself for stifling your initial instinct to yell whae the fuck? instead.

“It’s a mix-up,” says Michaels. “Not your fault—not your force’s fault, Mr. McMullen, nobody local is blameworthy—but Kemal here forgot to notify eurocontrol about what he was doing. They’d have told him to leave well alone, but he had to go for gold, didn’t you? Now we’re just going to have to sit tight until the clean-up crew arrive to sweep the mess under the rug and put everything back where it belongs. Otherwise…” He sniffs. “I was serious about facing the wall, Sergeant.”

You glance at Liz. She nods. You turn around.

“I’m going to have to confiscate your evidence footage,” he adds, apologetically.

“What?” You can’t stop yourself. “That’s illegal!”

“I think you’ll find my department has a specific exemption.” He speaks with the Olympian certainty of a man who can use a deputy chief constable as his personal warrant card. He clearly outranks Kemal and his merry Men in Black. Hell, he probably outranks the minister. What does that mean? “We’ll just have to wait here for the cleaners. Shouldn’t be too long.”

Kemal clears his throat. “The power’s off. Is your quantum gadget stable? If it warms up?”

“Not my field, old boy, I’m a peopleware person. I suppose the cleaner chappies will sort it out once we get the power back up—we’ll be invoicing you for the downtime—”

At which moment, the big electromagnet quenches.

ELAINE: System Fails, People Die

It’s your fault Jack nearly got arrested. But what did you expect?

Luckily there’s camera footage of the incident, and he’s the one with a hole in his jacket and a broken chunk of electronics, not to mention the fact that the nearest thing to a knife on his person is a multitool with a one-inch blade. But afterwards, you’re so angry you could kick yourself—or preferably the jobsworth in the security guard’s uniform who called the police over and told the constable that Jack had assaulted someone else—a someone else who by that time had probably legged it all the way over the great firewall of China and was, to put it in copspeak, Unable to Testify.

Equally luckily, the constable was willing to listen to your eyewitness account before doing anything hasty. So instead of filling out an arrest form, a disclosure notice for the CCTV footage was served, and sometime in the next couple of weeks Strathclyde’s finest will review the take and see if a crime was, in fact, committed.

Of course, you’d been labouring under the misapprehension that the men and women in uniforms wearing SECURITY badges were actually there to provide security, as opposed to preventing attendees from chugging the free plastic cups of sherry provided by some of the more optimistic exhibitors: But that’s par for the course in Glasgow, it seems; the commission of an actual crime fills their dour Presbyterian hearts with joy (look, a member of the criminal classes is actually working!) while a complaint from the victim is an occasion for much swithering about clean-up rates and blackening the name of our good town and so on and so forth.

Which is why you find yourself, about two hours later, standing on a street outside the conference centre, miles from anything (except for a couple of high-rise hotels, a preserved dockyard crane the size of the Eiffel Tower, and a Foster Associates’ mothership that looks to have suffered a wee navigation mishap on final approach into London’s docklands), trying to cajole a shocky and stressed-out Jack in the direction of shelter. Because it’s Glasgow, where the weather offers you a creative combination of hypothermia and sunburn simultaneously: and right now it’s playing a DJ mix with six El Nino events, a monsoon, and a drought on the turntables.

Anyway. Blood sugar is the most important thing to get under control after a stressful confrontation, so that’s what you decide to tackle first. “C’mon, Jack, let’s get back to the city centre and try to find some lunch.”

Jack groans and mutters something inaudible. He’s been withdrawn, like a snail pulling itself tightly back into its shell, ever since the security goons ejected you both from the giant wood-louse; and it’s not just his lack of an umbrella. “’M an idiot.”

You know better than to agree with that self-summary, and you also know better than to disagree with it. “No, that idiot with the badge was the idiot. You aren’t an idiot yet—but you will be if you don’t get something to eat and a chance to chill out. You’re taking the rest of the day off. Understand?”