Halting State

of their low-level grunts hadn’t hatched a plan to make some money on the side. Which is where you come in…”

JACK: Sex Offender

Two hours after Michaels drops his cluster bomb of revelations, you stumble out of the rabbit-hole under Hayek Associates, exhausted, hungry, and not sure whether to be angry or scared.

At least Elaine looks as coolly imperturbable and spotless as ever: Maybe her suit’s made of Teflon. She glances up at the grey overcast, already spitting fat, isolated rain-drops in preparation for the main program. “Let’s get you home,” she says, and taps her ear-piece with a knowing expression. “We need to talk.”

“You don’t need to,” you say, because it’s the right thing to do, according to the manners gland (which normally reports directly to the mummy lobe, except the mummy lobe is off-line right now, gibbering and sucking its thumb). “We could head back to your hotel.”

“Rubbish.” She looks at you oddly. “You’re at the end of your tether. Which way is the bus-stop?”

“It’s just uphill from the end of the drive…”

Another five minutes, and you’re ensconced in adjacent seats on a two-thirds-empty LRT special, slowly climbing Drum Brae with a whining from its rapeseed-fuelled power pack that bodes ill for the future. It’s electric blue inside, with orange grab rails, and the sky outside the advertisement-obscured windows is a louring slate-grey promise of things to come. Your mind’s spinning like a Scottish Hydro turbine, chasing your own tail from pillar to post. Tracking down the Orcish thieves and their stolen stash of vorpal blades is neither here nor there anymore— what’s important is keeping your head, while all around you other folks are losing theirs to the snicker- snack of the twenty-first-century yellow peril.

“Did you buy that line of bullshit?” you ask her.

“You’re tired,” she repeats. She rolls her eyes sideways, and you follow the direction of her gaze, coming up hard against the little black eyeball of a camera. Oops. No wonder they call these fuckers Optares—there’re at least eight of them visible, and no telling if they’re broken or—“Let’s get home. No chit-chat.”

Paranoid thoughts begin spooling through your mind, following a multiplicity of threads. You’ve just come out of Hayek Associates, with a whole bunch of random fragments and the blinding revelation that Michaels’s operation has been penetrated, and he either doesn’t know, or isn’t going to tell you. Now, let’s suppose that Michaels was right, that one or other of the Beijing clans have their hooks into, well, everything. Can you get home safely? They’ve got the buses’ cams—no more fallible video recorders behind the driver’s seat, not after 7/7—and the traffic cams and…but no, HA pointedly don’t have any cameras overlooking their car-park, do they? And face recognition off of a camera is notoriously CPU-intensive and not the kind of thing a quantum shoe-box under the server rack will help with, not with the current state of the art. Good. If you’d called a taxi, you might be up shit creek again, but buses still have drivers to extract the pocket change from tourists and ne’er-do-wells who don’t have a RiderPass. It’s not anonymous transport—that probably doesn’t exist anymore, unless you go on horseback or ride a bicycle—but it’s the next best thing: Transport with no real-time ID tracking. The bad guys might well know where you live and where HA’s offices are, and make the logical public transport connection…or would they? Who knows? Put yourself in the head of a puppet master in an office in downtown Guanzhou, pulling the strings for an ARG played by foreign devils. This is not a game. Which means—

The bus lurches away from the kerb and trundles towards your stop. You reach up and push the button, then stand: Catching Elaine’s eye, you nod at the exit. “Next stop.”

Pervasive game-play. They’ve got reality by the short-and-curlies, thanks to the cryptography gap Michaels kindly pointed out to you. “It’s not as if this stuff is new,” he explained. “The NSA were doing it years before anyone else, before their recent unfortunate circumstances.” They got Elsie, Michaels tells you—and there’s a big black belly-laugh hanging over a yawning pit of terror you don’t have the guts to think about yet. Michaels hung your virtual alter ego out as bait, and now you and Elaine are it, the plot coupon at the heart of the next level of the game that he is spinning for the unseen masters of reality in Beijing. If Chen—Team Red’s non-virtual eyes and ears on the ground, a foreign student at large in Scotland—hadn’t fucked up by getting greedy and trying to abuse his access to their key cracker to line his own pocket, you’d all still be flailing around in the dark as opposed to this turbid twilight.

How do you roll up a foreign spy network when the spies don’t even know what they’re doing? Not to mention your own counter-espionage fools…

You’re on the pavement now, and the rain is splattering around you. You glance, longingly, in the direction of Burt’s Bar, just over the road—good beer and excellent pies—but there’ll be too many people about, too many pairs of flapping ears and unblinking video eyes and mobile phones that double as bugging devices. And you’re feeling bruised and paranoid enough that you need some privacy. “This way,” you tell Elaine, still not quite sure why she insisted on coming home with you rather than having a natter in some coffee shop.

You shamble across the cobbled road at a near trot, turn towards Glenogle and your wee Colonies house, and the heavens open all at once. Suddenly you’re dashing for cover beneath an artillery barrage of water-bombs, Elaine stampeding along behind you—and it’s a couple of hundred metres to go. While you’re both paused at a kerbside to check for traffic, an SUV aquaplanes past, malevolently hugging the gutter and spraying a mucky sheet of water across your legs. Elaine swears quietly behind your back as you cross the road, but then you’re at the right side street, and heading for the cast-iron gate.

She grabs your arm. “Stop,” she hisses.

“But it’s pouring—” You stop. “Yes?”

“This the door?” You nod. “Give me your keys, okay? And hang back.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake. “I’m not stupid,” you grunt. And you drop into SPOOKS mode and scan the hedges and parked cars to either side for signs, eyeballs wide open for watchers and lurking booby- traps. Sidling up your own garden path like you expect to find a ninja hiding in the recycling bin would make you feel like an idiot even without the cold rain dripping down the back of your neck, but you’ve done this often enough in role-play that the tradecraft is almost automatic: And then you’re at your own keyhole, glancing round the door- frame for signs and portents like anonymous black boxes that weren’t there the day before.

Nothing. And it’s your house. As you stick the key in the lock, you say, over your shoulder, “Is your phone switched off?”

“Whoops.” She’s fumbling in the darkness and the rain as you step inside and turn the hall light on.

“Come on in and close the door, then.”

There’s no rain inside the house except for that which drips off your sodden jacket and trousers and trickles down your hair and into your eyes. You stumble into the hall wearily and shrug out of your soaking jacket. Reaching into the pockets, you pull out your phone—off—and your keyboard (also off, probably terminally so) and glasses. The sound of the cloud-burst fades as Elaine locks the front door and stomps her feet dry on the mat. “I’m soaked. That fucking Chelsea tractor really got me.”

“Me, too. I think they do it deliberately.” Drive with their near-side wheels in the overflowing gutter, just to inundate the automotively challenged who can’t afford the ruinous road tax. You kick your trainers off, stumble up to the bedroom door, and grab the dressing-gown off the back of the door. “Here, make yourself at home. Is your suit machine-washable?”

“Of course.” She looks at you warily, then takes the dressing-gown. “Hey, you don’t need to—”

“It’s no trouble. Look, let me stick some real coffee in the pot, then we can talk.”

“Talk is good.” She looks around the living room, at the tangles of wires plugged into the overloaded ten-way gang in the corner and the bookcase with its middle shelves bowed beneath a stack of old d20 game supplements and graphic novels; then she plants herself in the far corner of the newer of the two IKEA futons that constitute 90 per cent of the soft furnishings and bends down to remove her shoes. You shake your head and duck into the kitchen to grapple with your feelings. It’s smaller than the galley of an Airbus, but you can get the coffee started while giving her a modicum of privacy. And it gives you a chance to gibber quietly for a couple of minutes and try to calm yourself down.