Halting State

When you emerge again, calm and collected and bearing two reasonably clean mugs full of organic fairtrade espresso, it’s to find a twilight surprise. Elaine is bending over the power hub, systematically following cables from wall wart to blinkenlight. She seems to be trying to turn everything off. She’s wearing your dressing-gown: Her trousers and jacket are an untidy puddle in the middle of the rug. You clear your throat. “Oh, hi,” she says. “Any idea how many gadgets you’ve got plugged in here?”

“Um. Too many?” She’s got you bang to rights. “What are you doing?”

She pushes the off button on the video receiver. “If we’re going to talk, we might as well do it in private. Besides, the lights were bugging me. I counted sixteen before I lost track.”

A moment’s stock-taking tells you that she’s not about to do any damage—everything here’s an embedded appliance except for the household disk farm next to the fireplace. “One moment.” You bend down and rummage for the wall plug, then flick the switch. Everything on the power hub flickers and dies simultaneously. “That do you?”

“Let’s see.” She picks up her phone from the precarious pile of coffee-ringed magazines on the side-table and frowns at it. “Yeah. The snitch is muzzled.”

“Snitch?”

“Spooks Control sent me a bug detector. Something about it reprogramming my phone’s processor to sniff for different emission sources? Does that sound right?”

It sounds like a high-end cognitive radio application, and probably illegal as hell—one that can override the built-in standards firmware and turn a handset into a scanner that can monitor any radio-based protocol its antenna can pull in. (Radio interference, after all, is purely an artefact of buggy receiver design.) Back when you thought SPOOKS was a game, it would just have been a prop, but now…“It’s plausible. What does it say?”

“It said something in here was transmitting, but it stopped when you pulled the plug.” She closes her phone. “Sound like a bug to you?”

You glance at the streaming media hub, LEDs dark and lifeless. That’s your musical life, buddy, right there in the corner. “Might be.” If someone was going to plant a bug on you, where better to put it than in the firmware of a gizmo that’s transmitting all the time? “Coffee?”

“Thanks.” She accepts the mug gratefully. “About your washing-machine—”

“It’ll take about three hours, if you still want to use it. But I can lend you a spare pair of jeans and a jacket if you don’t.”

“You don’t need to, but thanks.” A certain tension goes out of her. “Show me where you keep the machine?” The washer/dryer is under the kitchen work-top. It’s fully automatic, setting its cycle from the RFIDs in her jacket and trousers. Thirty seconds later she curls up on the futon opposite you with her coffee mug, eyes dark and serious in the gloom. (You hadn’t realized just quite how much illumination the various gizmos contributed to your den.) “Okay. What do you think is going on?”

“Well—” You stop, half-tongue-tied by the sight of her sitting opposite you, large as life, wearing your dressing-gown. There’s a subtext here that you’d barely allowed yourself to notice, consciously: Do you suppose she’s here because she likes you? The mummy lobe wants to kick up a censorious fuss, but it’s at a loss for words: You’re not terribly good at dealing with the rules of the game Elaine seems to be playing, or even recognizing when a game’s in progress, so you retreat hastily in the direction of something you understand.

“I think we can trust Barry about as far as we can throw him. He’s definitely part of SPOOKS, and SPOOKS ties into the police or intelligence services at some level—otherwise, we wouldn’t have gotten the taxi ride. And he’s fed us a great story-line. Beyond that…”

She stares at you from the darkness. “Your niece, Elsie. You’re…you don’t seem to be worrying about her. Is that just a story? Jack?”

The roaring in your ears is like the engine of an on-coming juggernaut on the wrong side of the road, headlights blazing and horn blaring. “I can’t”—don’t want to—“face…”

“Jack?” She leans forward, visibly concerned. “What is it?”

You force yourself to take a breath and try to nail down the mess of emotions she’s stirred up. “I can’t…look, trust me on this?”

“Trust you?” She’s still tense.

Another deeper breath. “It’s complicated. I’ll try to explain later. For now, let’s just say there’s stuff Michaels knows about if he’s plugged into the police. And there’s nothing—from here—I can do for her.”

“But I’d have thought—” She stops, with a visible effort. “You’re sure?”

You nod, not trusting yourself to say any more. You feel shaky. It’s all true—Elsie is beyond your ability to help—but you don’t like to think about it. It’s just too painful.

Elaine sits back, looking thoughtful. After a moment, she glances away. “You trust Barry to look after Elsie, but you don’t trust his operation as far as you can throw him. Is that right?”

That’s an easy one to catch. “They’ve been penetrated by the other side. And what about the rest of it? That piece of paper? How do we know it’s genuine?”

She shakes her head. You trace the outline of her face against the dim light from the street filtering through the net curtains. “The paperwork’s the real thing. Either that, or the cop who handed it to us wasn’t. And with the lights and the way he bent the speed limit on the way over…no.”

“Bugger.” You take an experimental sip of coffee. “Okay. So SPOOKS is basically a tool that permits an electronic intelligence agency to run a metric shitload of unwitting human intelligence agents, weekend spies. They trained us, and now we’ve been activated to deal with a threat. The alleged threat, the one they say they want us to look at, is a different kind of gaming gambit: a botnet attack on a small European state, where the zombies are obedient human gamers who think they’re just having fun and the director is a procedural content generator—”

“Huh.” The tip of her nose crinkles slightly when she frowns. “I’m not a gamer, you’ll have to define your terms.”

“Terms?” You back-track, trying to work out what confused her. “Procedural content?” She nods. “Content is, well, the map of the dungeon, location of treasure, where the monsters live, what the wallpaper looks like. Any game is full of the stuff, and it’s expensive to do by hand—you need tile illustrators, narrators, musicians, programmers, a whole bunch of skills. So over the past couple of decades the industry’s put a lot of effort into procedural game design—AI tools that can design a virtual-reality environment on the fly for players to explore. It’s not just multiplayer games like Avalon Four; there’s been work on ARG—artificial reality games—that can take a set of starting hints and design a conspiracy to drop on top of the players. You know, generate scripts for phone calls, order up custom gadgets to be planted at certain locations, hire actors…?”

She looks blank, the same way she did right before you hit on your spreadsheet-as-programming metaphor, but this time you can’t quite see a way around it. “Artificial reality?”

“Yeah! SPOOKS is a variant on it, heavily mediated via the net, but you get ones in which there are actors and sets—you sign up to be inside the story. Like I LOVE BEES—that was the first one to go large—or DARK DESIGNS.”

“Pay to be inside the story.” She looks distant. “So, uh. Suppose someone’s set up a content generator to try and hijack a country. Bribe police constable A to ignore game-player B—who thinks it’s a game—to carry bomb C (which is a firework, modified by a pyrotechnics geek who thinks they’re building it for a special effects outfit) into a parliament building where useful idiot D will install the detonator. That sort of thing. Right?”

“Something like that.” You take another sip of coffee. “They’re exploiting our shitty wide-open crypto infrastructure, of course. Everything, phones, Internet, the lot, runs over TCP/IP these days—blame some really stupid decisions back in the oughties. They should have known better; it’s hackable as hell, so, in an attempt to lock things down, the government decreed that access to the national-level routers, the boxes that manage all the traffic, would be secured using a code called a one-time pad. OTP codes are great—they’re totally unbreakable if you don’t have a copy of the key—but they’ve got a big drawback: You need a copy of the key, a long sequence of random numbers, at each end-point. And if someone who’s not supposed to have a copy of the key gets hold of it, the whole thing is blown wide open. Anyway, what Michaels was telling us was, someone leaked those keys to Team Red. As the actual connections between routers are secured using symmetric cyphers that are easy to crack if you’ve got a quantum processor, it means they can snoop on anything. The National ID