Halting State

“A little.” Traffic lights change: Cars drive past. “Look at the cars. They’re a little bit different, more melted- looking, and some of them don’t have drivers. But most of the buildings—they’re the same as they’ve ever been. The people, they’re the same. Okay, so fashions change a little. But how’d you tell you weren’t in 1988? As opposed to ’98? Or ’08? Or today?”

“I don’t—” She blinks rapidly, then something clicks: “The mobile phones! Everyone’s got them, and they’re a lot smaller, right?”

“I picked 1984 for a reason. They didn’t have mobies then—they were just coming in. No Internet, except a few university research departments. No cable TV, no laptops, no websites, no games —”

“Didn’t they have Space Invaders?”

You feel like kicking yourself. “I guess. But apart from that…everything out here on the street looks the same, near enough, but it doesn’t work the same. They had pocket calculators back then, and I remember my dad showing me what they used before that—books of tables, and a thing like a ruler with a log scale on it, a slide-rule. Do you have a pocket calculator? Do you use one to do your job, your old job?”

“No, of course I—” She waves at the book-shop opposite. “I’m a forensic accountant! What use is a pocket calculator?”

“Well, that’s my point in a nutshell. We used to have slide-rules and log tables, then calculators made them obsolete. Even though old folks can still do division and multiplication in their heads, we don’t use that. We used to have maps, on paper. But these are all small things.” The traffic lights sense your presence and trigger the pedestrian crossing: You pause while she catches up with you. “The city looks the same, but underneath its stony hide, nothing is quite the way it used to be. Somewhere along the line we ripped its nervous systems and muscles out and replaced them with a different architecture. In a few years it’ll all run on quantum key-exchange magic, and everything will have changed again. But our time-traveller—they won’t know that. It looks like the twentieth century.” (Bits of it look like the eighteenth century, for that matter: This is Edinburgh, and you’re deep in the World Heritage Conservation Zone.) “Nothing works the way it used to, exactly. And knowing how it works now is the edge we’ve got over Michaels.”

You lead her up through the pubic triangle (which is not a patch on Amsterdam’s famous red light district, but sleazy enough for a cheap shiver if you’re so inclined) and onto Lothian Road (tame by daylight, wild West End by night). “We can catch a bus from here,” you suggest, and she looks slightly pained, but nods. And so you do, taking the hit for paying cash: And ten minutes later you step off the bus nearly opposite the West End Malmaison hotel. “Do you know where you are now?” you ask her, trying not to pay too much attention to the police vans parked outside.

“How the hell should I—” She catches your expression. “Oh. Right.”

“They don’t know either, because we’ve been off-line for over an hour,” you point out. “So let’s grab the laptops and go to work where they won’t be expecting us!”

“Do you have somewhere in mind?” She raises an eyebrow.

And now you feel yourself smiling. “Right here. Why do you think we’ve been off-line for half an hour?”

The hotel is surrounded by cops. It’s not an obvious cordon, there are no crowds of uniforms with riot shields drawn up—but as you cross the road you notice a couple of police motor-bikes drawn up outside the power tool emporium opposite the hotel car-park. And there’s a van parked up a side street. A couple of officers are standing at the corner by the hotel entrance, looking around, their eyes invisible behind heavy goggles and their jaws working as they subvocalize. If you weren’t actively looking, you might not notice more than a couple at any one time, but when you add it all up, there’s a heavy presence on the street. You squirm as you open the heavy glass door for Elaine: It’s the same reflex you get when walking past guard dogs—they’re unpredictable, capable of attacking. You can cope with them in ones or twos—a homeopathic dose of policing, so to speak—but this heavy cordon sanitaire is awakening the old phobia, even before you take into account your current state of unease.

“Come on!” Elaine nudges you impatiently. “What are you waiting for?” She heads towards the lifts.

“A pony.” You follow her—this is her territory, you don’t generally do plush hotels—up to the second floor, then into a conference room that opens to her thumbprint. “Laptops?” You raise an eyebrow.

“Go on.” At least they’re still here, and so are the cheap backpacks you stuck on top of the purchase nearly three infinite days ago. “Where are we going to go?”

“Nowhere, yet.” You sit down at the desk and unfold your machine’s display. It’s chunky and old-fashioned but vastly faster than your phone and glasses: You log on to the hotel’s network, bounce into Zonespace using the passwords Russell gave you, and proceed to take your bear for a romp around the tourist sites. “I suggest…go get your stuff from your room, anything you may want later, as if you’re checking out: I’m going to make damn sure Team Red know where I am. Alright?”

“Got it.” She studies your screen, which is repeating the display on your glasses. “That’s not Avalon Four. Where are you?”

“On the high plateau of Leng. That’s where the Pabodie expedition came adrift: There should be some Old Ones hereabouts if the rampaging hordes of Antarctic explorers haven’t been through since they last reset the shard. They’re guarding some loot I need to get my hands on.” About a quarter of a million lines of source code, squirreled away among the skeletons and treasures guarded by a fearsomely large shoggoth; if you want to keep some data secure, there’s nothing quite like sticking it in a record in a holographic distributed database that’s guarded by Lovecraftian horrors. And it’s not as if you took the intellectual property with you when you left LupuSoft, is it? This is just a backup copy, buried in one of their own databases. One that it’s just possible for a random stranger to get his hands on if he knows exactly where the body’s buried and the correct ritual for digging it up.

“Riiiight.” She sounds sceptical. “So, let’s see. You’re deliberately drawing attention to yourself, and getting your hands on something you stashed earlier. And you want me to grab my bags. What exactly are you planning on doing?”

You stretch your arms above your head, lace your fingers together, and yawn widely. “I want to look like I’m the bait in Barry’s trap that he asked for. Do you trust the police?”

“I trust Inspector Kavanaugh to find your niece, that’s about it.” You give her a long look. Should have expected her to say something like that. Lowering your arms: “Why?”

“Just asking. Barry wants us to flush someone out of the woodwork. A distraction, probably—some nuisance to attract the cops’ attention, something they can’t ignore. When that happens, we can expect things to get hot. Question is, do we duck and run when that happens? Or do we stay here?”

“It depends. What do you mean by hot?” The ferret is back: She’s not taken in by the line you fed Michaels. Well, you figure she’s in this with you, and she deserves to know.

“Barry’s wrong.”

“Wrong about…?”

“He thinks this is a game of spooks, that he’s up against the Guoanbu, who are professionals. He figures that when he rolls up their network and serves the ASBO, they’ll just pack up their kit and go home.” (The hoard is just around the corner of this icicle-lined tunnel into hell, once you sweet-talk its guardian into going to sleep and letting you through. So you hit the PAUSE key.) “He’s as wrong as a very wrong noob can be. We’re not playing against the Guoanbu, we’re playing against Team Red. They’re a gaming clan, and by all the evidence a fucking hot one, and they’ve got the technical backup from hell. The Chinese gamers, they’re vicious. I’ve gone up against those fluffy bunnies before, and they play for keeps and they co-ordinate really well. And they, they don’t really believe we exist. We’re pale ghosts, trapped on the other side of a screen for their amusement. They’re going to grief us hard, and if they’ve got access to the sort of kit Barry’s talking about, they could have done all sorts of…stuff.”

It’s more than a decade since a bunch of crackers—who nobody ever identified—managed to sneak password and credit card sniffers onto the core Cisco routers at MAE-East; things have gotten far worse since then, in the covert war of sysadmin on hacker that the public don’t get to hear about. Entire telco companies have been compromised with no one the wiser until months afterwards. The public, with their wee fingerprint-authorized smart cards to supply them with the response to their e-commerce challenges, don’t really have a clue what’s going