Halting State

you wouldn’t credit such hallucinations, but Inspector Kavanaugh with her sharp suits and her degrees in criminology and social science isn’t so much climbing the greasy pole as riding up it on a personal jet pack; not so much a straight arrow as a guided missile aimed at making chief constable. If she’s going all swivel-eyed on you and muttering about spies and cloak-and-dagger stuff, but hasn’t gone completely off the deep end (and the arrival of Kemal’s bumbling gang of Keystone Kops this morning suggests that if she is nuts, the funny farm should be expecting a bumper crop), then you bloody ought to keep your eyes peeled for secret agents doing the funny handshake two-step down by the water of Leith.

So. What else can you do, beside waiting for the nerd and the librarian to surface? You consult your conscience and realize that: (a) you still haven’t recorded your evidence in the Hastie breaking-and-entering case, (b) you’ve been shamelessly neglecting Bob (who, despite your recent abduction to Liz’s firm, is still your responsibility), and (c) you’ve dead-ended, unless you want to put the Hentai Animatics lead into CopSpace and see where it goes. Which, now you think about it, isn’t a bad idea at all. So you wheech out your personal mobie—the one you usually use to keep tabs on Davey—and phone Bob on his, just on the off chance: And he picks up on the second ring. “Yes?”

“Bob? Sergeant Smith here. You busy?”

“Bus—uh, no, Sergeant! What can I do for you?” He’s like an over-eager puppy: You can see him drooling and wagging his tail while clenching a pair of size ten DMs in his mouth.

“I’ve got a little project, Bob. When you get a chance, I want you to hop along to the nearest library and borrow one of their public terminals. Dig up everything you can find on a company called Hentai Animatics—they run games”—you take time to spell it out to him—“then text it to me. Don’t bother going through CopSpace yet. If you can get it to me by end of shift, I’ll be happy.”

“I’ll do what I can, Sergeant.” You don’t need telepathy to sense the doubt in his voice.

“If you think it sounds flaky, Constable, take it to Inspector Kavanaugh. She’s who I’m working for right now.”

“Oh. Well, if you say so, ma’am! I’ll get onto it right away. Or as soon as Constable Wilson goes on his next coffee break.”

You end the call, shaking your head slightly at the thought of Paul “two lumps” Wilson running Bob ragged: Stranger things have happened, but not recently. On the other hand, that’s your lead taken care of. Now you can piss off back to the station to finally record your statement, catch up with big Mac in case he’s forgotten you used to work for him, and sort out the paperwork that’s been building up since last Thursday. Tomorrow is another day.

ELAINE: Morning After

There’s a subterranean snuffling sound from somewhere under the duvet, then a sense of warmth. You freeze for a moment while the recoil-reflex dies away, then relax into it. An arm slowly reaches across you, an animal comfort—or maybe he can’t quite believe he isn’t alone (and is having second thoughts).

This is not the first time you’ve woken up with the dawn to find yourself in a strange man’s bed. (Well, not a complete stranger—but you’ve known him for less than a week, and what’s that in real terms?) Mind you, on second thoughts, if you’re mutually attracted to someone, a week in close proximity is enough time to figure out what you’ve both got in mind: And no number of extra months will make one whit of difference if one or the other of you isn’t interested. And yesterday was more than a little crazy, which always tends to speed things up. But if you lie awake for much longer staring at the floral Rorschach patterns on the inside of the curtains—where did he get them? or, more realistically, who inflicted them on him and why did they hate him so much?—you’re going to start worrying morbidly about whether it was really a good idea, about whether it was sensible, rather than being what you both needed at the time. And if you start tugging at the loose ends of your self-doubt like that, not only will you bury the memory of comfort under a cairn of buts, you’ll stifle any prospect of continuing to explore this thorny maze of insecurity and need that hems you in…just like you did last time. Trust you to get involved with a man who’s even more insecure than you are.

“Jack?”

He shuffles closer, spooning up to your back. “Mm?”

“Been awake long?”

He pauses for a long time. “Had difficulty sleeping.”

“Well.” You press your back against him. “We’re going to have to face the music later.”

“If there is a later.”

You bite the inside of your cheek. Ah well. “Isn’t there going to be one?” Please don’t tell me he’s bailing out already…

“I’ve been working through what Michaels said—”

You unromantic sod! you think, somewhat relieved.

“—about the implications of a core-router exploit on a national level.”

Oh for fuck’s sake. You resist the urge to elbow him in the ribs. “Yes? Is it bad?”

“Very…especially the worst case. Imagine you can’t get any money out of a cashpoint, even though there’s money in your bank account. That’s annoying, right? Now imagine the entire APACS network goes down. And, oh, the contents of your bank account are randomized, along with everyone else’s. And all the supermarket stock- control databases go down, so they don’t know what’s moving and what’s on the shelves. And all their suppliers’ networks go down, so nobody knows what stock they’ve got, and where it is. And finally, all the Internet service providers and telcos and cellcos go down hard, and stay down—”

You’re fully awake now. “Stop. You’re saying, no communications? No money? No food? What are you saying?”

“That’s the start of it.” His tone of voice is maddeningly reasonable. “No transport, because you can’t trust the remote driver services or the online navigation systems and the road-pricing and speed-control systems are down. Medical services are knocked back to emergency-only because NHSNet is down. The police are forced back to relying on runners and whistles, and as for the fire service…better hope there aren’t any. When people start dying, you can’t even identify them, because the identity register’s been scrambled, too, so the biometrics point to the wrong personal files.”

“That sounds more like an act of war than a hack.” You roll away from him.

“That’s what it would be.” He sounds almost pleased with himself. You don’t see why: It’s not as if Michaels is paying him to do this kind of freelance analysis while he’s in bed, is it? “And that’s the twentieth- century model, what they used to call an electronic Pearl Harbour. Things have moved on since then. More likely, it would be a lot more subtle. Footnotes inserted in government reports feeding into World Trade Organization negotiating positions. Nothing we’d notice at first, nothing that would be obvious for a couple of years. You don’t want to halt the state in its tracks, you simply want to divert it into a siding of your choice. And if a couple of auditors die in a taxi crash, who cares?”

“What—” You stop, feeling cold. Despite your carefully cultivated habit of keeping work and private life separate, he’s got you to put your thinking cap on. Any vague thoughts about a pre-prandial cuddle go out the window. “You’re messing with my head! I need coffee first.”

“You want coffee at a time like this?” You can feel him shaking his head through the mattress.

Fuck him, you think, heavy with regret. Or not, as the case may be. You lift the duvet back and sit up, shivering in the cool air. “Coffee, slave.”

“It doesn’t have to happen,” he says hopefully. “Nobody in their right mind would do such a thing, not short of actual pre-existing hostilities. The Guoanbu for sure doesn’t want to destroy Scotland’s infrastructure—we’re part of the EU, their biggest trading partner. On the other hand, by demonstrating that they’ve got such a capability, they force us to pay attention to it…we’re into diplomacy here, aren’t we?”