Halting State

now?”

You begin walking towards the looming arch where North Bridge vaults across the Cowgate, perpetually confusing tourists who think that if two roads intersect on their moving map it should be possible to cross between them without abseiling. “What did you pick up there?”

“He’s scared, very scared. And he knows more about your Elsie than he’s letting on.”

You keep going, legs pumping, arms swinging, even though you want to stop and have a good scream at the underside of the stone bridge. That’s what you’d concluded, too—but grabbing Michaels and trying to throttle the truth out of him seemed inadvisable. And besides, you have three different hypotheses—and only the sheer terror of finding out that they’re all wrong keeps you from making the final phone call. That, and the little problem that you’re in too deep and you’d have to tell Elaine about—no, let’s not go there now. There’ll be plenty of time later.

You fumble around for a conversational token. “Were you serious about quitting your job?”

“Are you kidding?” She catches up beside you as you sidle past the puddles under the bridge, the loading bay for the night-club ahead on the left. “Look, Barry’s desperate. And…long-term, his operation needs us. What does that suggest to you?”

“I really don’t know where you’re going there.” You shake your head.

Small fingers force their way into your hand. After a moment you relax your fist and try to slow down to her pace. “There’s the cover story, and there’s the truth. Everybody here’s playing games, Jack, everyone but you—the game developer.”

“Huh? How do you figure that?” She’s wrong, as it happens, but it’s an interesting mistake. The buildings are opening out ahead, towards the homeless shelter and the weird little shops that cluster on the edge of the Grassmarket.

“Michaels—I’m pretty sure he’s responsible—made damn sure I stayed up here after Maggie and Chris and the rest of the home team scuttled back to London with their tails between their legs. He wanted an auditor present, someone to act as a disruptive influence—but not to keep the place crawling with strangers. I was containable. So I have to ask, why me?”

You can play this game straight, and that seems to be what she wants, so: “Why you?”

“Nobody else at Dietrich-Brunner plays games. No RPGs, no LARPs, no re-enactment, no ARGs. Doesn’t that strike you as slightly strange, in this day and age?”

“Strange?” It’s downright freakish, but you decide to play it straight. “Wow. What were you doing there?”

“I’m not sure. But now I think about it, I wonder if the real reason I was there wasn’t the reason I thought I was there at all.”

“Try me. Why did you think you were there?”

“Why the hell do you work anywhere? I was sending out job applications, and they offered me a job, straight out of university with a golden handshake to cover my tuition fees and professional registration. The only question is whether that’s all there ever was to it. I don’t know…I’ve got a feeling I was set up. Maybe it was a long-term thing: If SPOOKS is a pilot project, maybe they figured that if they went into widespread deployment, they’d eventually need a way of guaranteeing their own transactional integrity? Wanted: one forensic accountant, trained in HUMINT field-work, with gaming experience and security clearance, for counter-penetration duties. They don’t exactly grow on trees, do they?”

“So what am I doing here?” You look around, then cross the road quickly. There’s a shop selling beautifully unearthed fossils opposite the site of the old gallows, then a straight uphill march past the most dangerous run of second-hand book-shops in town.

“That’s obvious: You were being groomed to join the SPOOKS dev team. Or SPOOKS 2.0. Then the shit hit the fan, and Michaels decided to use you as bait in his little trap instead.”

How reassuring, you tell yourself. “So we’re lost in a maze of shiny little mirrors, all alike, spies to the left of us, spooks to the right. And you quit your day job?”

“Tripling my pay, and…Michaels is scared, Jack. So am I, to be perfectly truthful—what happened to Wayne is no joke. The sooner we call time on the bastards, the safer I’ll feel.”

“Oh yes?” You slow down to a dawdle and look sidelong at her focussed expression. When you first met her, you thought: librarian on crystal meth. Now you think: ferret. Then she breaks the effect by smiling hesitantly at you, and it messes with your head because there’s no way a mustelid could make you feel warm and fuzzily protective like that.

“There’s what Barry wants us to know, and there’s what the situation really is as Barry and his core intelligence group understand it, and there’s the truth. I’d draw you a Venn diagram, but it’s more like peeling a hyperdimensional onion—not all the layers that look like they’re concentric spheres actually enclose one another. We can peel it ourselves and risk uncovering something that’ll make us cry…or we can play by his rules. And he’s rigged the game to keep us in it—you with Elsie, and by the way, have you called your sister to check that it’s not just a crock of lies he’s feeding you?—and me with—” She stops. “You haven’t called your sister. Why not? Is it just your…record?”

You really don’t want to have to explain the truth about Elsie, and your sister, and the rest of your non- standard family arrangements, so you endeavour to tiptoe around the elephant in the living room without actually making eye contact with the pachyderm. “You know about Schrodinger’s cat? The superposition of quantum states? Michaels has put my niece in a box, and I’d rather not know for the time being who’s more ruthless—the other side, or the bastards we’re working for.” Because Team Red might have done something, like Barry says, or Barry’s cell might be running a really nasty Augmented Reality game against you to secure your co-operation. And neither possibility is pleasant to contemplate. “I pointed Inspector Kavanaugh at it. Hopefully, she’ll tell me to stop wasting police time.” Or maybe she’ll find out who’s pushing your buttons—whether it’s Team Red or Michaels.

Elaine lets go of your hand. A moment later you feel her hand on your shoulder, pulling you close. “That wasn’t a bad choice.”

“Believe me, I know all about bad choices.” You’re conflicted. You crave her touch, but feeling her hand on your shoulder, in front of all the cameras…in the end, you don’t shake it off. “Real life isn’t a game, there’s no undo, no reload. I’ve played too many games: Real life scares me.”

“Is it much farther?”

“We’re nearly halfway.” Which is a little white lie, but with her phone turned off, she’s capable of being deceived—she’d actually be lost, without your local knowledge. And hopefully so will be anyone who’s tracking her location, or your location. You can discount face recognition, despite all those cameras surreptitiously filing away your misdemeanours for later (like back when you were fifteen and stupid) because it’s CPU-intensive as hell, but your mobie is a tracking device par excellence, and you’ve got to assume that Team Red know who you both are, by now. “Let’s stay off-line until we get to the hotel.” By which point, Team Red won’t have a fucking clue where you are, which is exactly how you want things to be.

“I hate being lost,” she mutters.

“Really?” You’re taken aback. “It used to be normal.”

“Lots of things used to be normal. No indoor plumbing and dying in child-birth used to be normal. Where are we?”

“We’re on, um, the road that leads from the Grassmarket to Lothian Road, dammit. I can’t remember.” It’s an itch you can’t scratch, like not being able to check a watch or pull up the news headlines. “Just think, it used to be like this for everybody, just twenty years ago!”

“I suppose.”

“Imagine you were a time-traveller from the 1980s, say 1984, and you stepped out of your TARDIS right here, outside, uh, West Port Books.” (Which tells you where you are.) “Looking around, what would you see that tells you you’re not in Thatcherland anymore?”

“You’re playing a game, right?”

“If you want it to be a game, it’s a game.” Actually it’s not a game, it’s a stratagem, but let’s hope she doesn’t spot it.

“Okay.” She points at the office building opposite. “But that…okay, the lights are modern, and there are the flat screens inside the window. Does that help?”