Authors: Charles Stross
You’re still eating your breakfast the next morning when you get an IM from Liz:
SHIT DUE TO HIT FAN AT 0915 MEET ME AT INGLISTON
. It’s so unexpected you blow orange juice bubbles through your nose, much to the wee one’s amusement, then end up swearing at the pain in your sinuses. You don’t have a car today, but you get your move on anyhow, and you make sure you’re on the tram out to the airport in time for Liz’s promised faeco-ventilatory intersection.
It’s the tail-end of the morning commuter rush. Liz is stalking up and down outside the entrance to the shiny new terminal on what used to be the highland show-ground, her face pinched and tense: She’s smoking a cigarette, which surprises you—you didn’t think she was the type. When you approach her, she drops it, pulls a face, and grinds it into the tarmac. “You’re late.”
“I don’t have a car.”
“You don’t? Ah—shit.”
You blink back red overlays—the airport is a kaleidoscopic blur of too much information in CopSpace—and focus on her. She looks tired, as if she’s been up since too early in the morning. “What’s going on?”
“Visitors from Europol,” she says absently, shoving her specs up her nose. “Some kind of special operations team from Brussels. Here, have a look.” A huge, indigestible dollop of something descends on the centre of your desktop, and you just have time to read the title of the opening page before she adds, “Didn’t mean to bite your head off. Looks like they’re here.”
She turns and marches into the concourse, and you hurry to keep up, trying not to go wall-eyed as you skim the summary. Corpus juris, Europol agreements, bilateral treaty of secession arrangements for justice, law, and order—it’s all bullshit. What it boils down to is—
Six men and women in dark suits and dark glasses marching towards you from the EU arrivals exit: the heavy mob converging from London and Brussels with stainless steel briefcases and secure identities. “Inspector Kavanaugh,” says their leader, not extending a hand. “Our cars are waiting. Who’s this—ah, I see. Good morning, Sergeant Smith. You will come with us.”
A fleet of driverless BMW SUVs appear, bouncing slowly over the traffic pillows, and pull in next to you, flagrantly ignoring the red route markings and security notices. They’ve got diplomatic plates. Doors spring open, and you find yourself gently inserted into the empty driver’s seat of the third vehicle as Liz and the leader of the hit squad slide into the back. The steering wheel twitches hesitantly, then as the doors click shut it spins hard over and the yuppiemobile accelerates fast. You try not to shudder: You hate the whole idea that some bored drone pusher in a remote driving centre has got your life—and half a dozen other lives—in his hands. At least on the motorways the cars steer themselves, that’s within the capabilities of today’s AI. “Please switch off your personal electronics,” says the man in dark glasses. “The car is shielded, but this is to go no further.” His English is as perfect and accentless as an old-time BBC presenter’s.
You peel off your glasses and hit the Judas switch on your phone, then the antiquated TETRA terminal, and finally—when he clears his throat impatiently—your cameras and biomonitors. “Which department are you with?” asks Liz.
“Officially, you’ll find the plaque on our door reads ‘
Organisation pour Nourrir et Consolider L’Europe.
’” Your watching the Man in Black in the driver’s mirror, and his cheek doesn’t twitch. Behind him, in the jump-seat in the cargo area, his companion is opening up a Peli briefcase and exposing an array of hardware that you’re really not supposed to fly with. “It’s our little joke—the only one. We’re not the Man from UNCLE, and this isn’t a game.”
Liz, and you’ve got to give her credit for keeping a level head, is having none of it. “Then you’d better tell me
precisely
who you are and what the hell you think you’re doing here. Because right now you are on my patch, and you are breaking the speed limit, violating at least three different firearms regulations, and if you don’t pull over on my request, I’ll have to add kidnapping two police officers to the charge sheet.”
You carefully move your left hand to your belt and make sure there’s nothing in the way of your wee tinny of whooping gas. Because if the skipper puts it like that…
“You have nothing to worry about,” says the spook. “My credentials.” He pulls out a passport with a white cover, then a fancy ID badge. Liz takes them.
“You know damn well I can’t verify these while I’m off-line,” she snaps. “The name’s right, but how do you expect me to confirm you’re the real thing? Tell me,
Kemal
, assuming that’s your real name, where are you taking us?”
The man in the back finishes screwing the stock onto his weapon—it looks like a cross between a sawn-off shotgun and a paintball gun—and puts it down on the case.
“It relates to your current case, unfortunately. We’re going to visit a warehouse in Leith,” says the head spook. “My colleagues have already instructed your SO6 to seal off the area while we raid it. You are here to witness and act as local liaison because you are already familiar with this case. My colleagues in the next car”—he nods at the vehicle immediately behind you—“are going to proceed to a collocation centre in the Gyle in order to shut down the main backbone between here and the south. The fourth car is going to visit the emergency control centre and serve a crisis note. Their job is to shut down all communications in the target area. Finally—”
“You’re going to
what
?” Liz explodes.
“Finally, the Royal Danish Air Force have kindly consented to let us use one of their E7C aircraft, assigned to ERRF for infowar duties and counter-terrorism support. In case the target is defended.”
By this point your jaw’s hanging open; you’ve just about forgotten the can of Mace, or your indignation about being more or less kidnapped. “What’s in the warehouse?” you ask.
Kemal—if that’s his name—leans back. Now
he’s
the one who looks like he’s had a sleepless night. “Your investigation into the disappearance of Mr. Nigel MacDonald, and the report of your findings in his apartment, attracted our attention. Have you identified the body in your ongoing murder investigation from the graveyard on Constitution Street yet?”
“No.” Liz looks grim. “If you know something—”
“I am sorry I cannot identify the body for you, but I can
definitely
assure you that it does not belong to Mr. MacDonald. And your speculation about a blacknet, possibly owned by the Moscow
mafiya
, has been noted.”
“You’d better explain.”
“The equipment you discovered in Mr. MacDonald’s apartment was cloned by your ICE officers. When they logged the details of what they found on NCIS, we were alerted. We cannot tell you what the equipment was for, but two similar installations have been recovered in Prague and Warsaw in the past four months. The installation appears to be operated by a non-state actor for illegal purposes—”
“Are you talking terrorism here?” Liz interrupts.
Kemal’s expression is stony. “Life would be a lot simpler if we were dealing with a cell of simple-minded religious obsessives with a grudge against the modern world. I’m afraid it may be something much worse—”
“Because this is my city you’re talking about, and I happen to have a duty to protect its inhabitants and uphold the law.
Is public safety at stake?
I need to know!”
“Not”—Kemal pauses as the car speeds up, hurtling uphill to merge with the morning traffic heading for the city by-pass—“hmm. That question is difficult to answer. I think it’s safe to say that there is no immediate threat, and there are no biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons involved; but failure to isolate the warehouse and impose a
total
communications blockade will, at the very least, allow some extremely dangerous information to escape. There is also some uncertainty as to whether the warehouse is occupied, and if so, whether the people inside it are armed. Our worst-case scenario is that we are facing a foreign Special Forces unit with emplaced defences and demolition charges—but if that’s the case, we’re fucked anyway.”
“Who’s fucked? Us? Your department?”
“No, Inspector: the European Union.”
Either the car’s air-conditioning is fierce, or your skin’s crawling. “Why are you dragging us into this, then?” you demand, your voice rising. “We’re the Polis, not Mission bloody Impossible!”
“You’re already involved, and we want to keep this as quiet as possible,” Kemal explains. “You will need these phones and glasses, please put them on immediately.”
“Why—”
“Your CopSpace has been compromised. So has your TETRA network, but at least you can dispatch backup by voice control. Please? This has already been arranged for. We need you tied into our grid before the operation commences.”
He passes you a pair of heavy, black-rimmed military spectacles and a ruggedized phone. You make eye contact with Liz, in the mirror, and she nods, minutely: You put the glasses on and boot them. There’s a brief flicker as they check your irises against their preloaded biometrics, then the world outside the BMW is drenched in unfamiliar information all the way to the horizon. You glance to your left, out to the north, where a green diamond is orbiting above the Kingdom of Fife. A quick zoom shows you that it’s real, a lumbering wide-body airliner in military grey, the knobbly outlines of high-bandwidth antennae studding its flanks like barnacles on a whale. Or at least, these goggles have been programmed to
think
it’s real. Once you accept someone else’s augmented reality, there’s really no telling, is there? For all you and Liz can tell until you’re plugged back into the comforting panopticon of CopSpace, this might just be some kind of elaborate live-action role-playing game.
The convoy is past the gyratory and heading towards Queensferry Road way too fast, probably racking up speeding tickets at a rate best measured in euros per second. All the traffic lights are switching to green in front of you as the steering wheel twitches from side to side: Red info bubbles above anonymous grey roadside boxes inform you that they’ve been 0wnZ0red by the Royal Danish Air Force. You rest your hand on the wheel, and it shivers like a live animal. “What do you expect to find?” asks Liz. “And who is the adversary?”
“Hopefully, just a warehouse full of servers. Maybe a satellite dish or two.” Kemal is soothing. “I’d like nothing more than for this to be a false alert. In which case, we shall make our apologies, pay our speeding fines, and be on our way without further ado.”
Liz snorts. “That’ll be the day.” She reaches for her phone: “Now I’ve got to call the chief—”
“Not until we arrive. As I said, your terrestrial trunked radio network has been penetrated.”
Despite the late-night chase through the darkened streets of the New Town, you sleep like a log and awake refreshed and ready to face a new day. You spend a brisk half-hour in the health suite, then shower and hit the hotel restaurant for some breakfast. Chris and the others have cut and run back to the big smoke already: Well, tough. You’ve got Jack and his magic code to give you some leads, and you’ve got access to Hayek’s offices, which is enough to be getting on with.
You’ve still got the office suite that Chris paid for, so you go down there and start going through the backlog of office email and project notes that have been building up since last Friday, when reality got put on hold for the duration. By twenty past nine your mood is sinking, and you’re mildly annoyed when you realize that Jack is late. So you text him, and get no reply—and no delivery notification.
Odd
.
With Jack off-line—and therefore no access to the results of his overnight trawl—you’re at a loose end. So you go out into the mezzanine and attempt to convince the coffee machine to give you something drinkable, and while you’re waiting for the bubbling and clanking to stop, you get an incoming call. From Jack, of course.
“Where’ve you been?” you demand.
“Sorry—I had to go to the police station. I got another nastygram, this time on paper: They wanted to examine it and look for prints.”
Oops.
You wince even though he can’t see you. “Oh. Where are you now?”
“Stuck in traffic, but I should be with you in about five minutes. I thought I should call ahead, though. The overnight run was mostly a success, and it found something interesting. There’s a likely-looking auction going on in one of the clearing-house sites; the stuff on sale looks to be an exact match for some of the stolen magic items. What makes it interesting is the ping latency to the current owner of the items—he’s in Glasgow. If we can get Hayek to twist Kensu’s arm into disclosing their customer contact details, we may be able to pay them a visit.”
“Oh, that’s
good
news.” You’re slightly startled to discover how eager you are. “IM me what you’ve got, and I’ll get onto Wayne immediately. What do you suggest we do?”
“Don’t know yet. See where the lead goes, I suppose…” Twenty minutes later you’re holed up in the office with Jack on the line, a couple of half-empty coffee cups and some half-baked theories. Wayne is being a pain: His phone insists he’s in a meeting and refuses to put your call through. But at least Jack’s got his lead. “The insurance claim request got fifty-one responses before I kicked back last night. I fed them in and set the spider running on the two largest auction sites that handle cross-game Zone trades. Twelve of the items turned up immediately, in a single stash that KingHorror9 is trying to shift. KingHorror9 is currently logged as active in Forgotten Futures, and a quick ping test suggests they’re local—latency is under ten milliseconds. So I think if we can get their name and address, we can go collar them immediately.”
“
If
they’re local,” you warn him. “Because—”
Your phone butts in: “Mr. Richardson is holding. Do you want to talk to him?”
“Yeah, put him through.”
“What do you want now?” he begins. “Because I’m in a meeting—”
“We’ve got a lead on the stolen goods,” you tell him before he can wind up to hang up on you. “I need to pull the registration details of a user called KingHorror9, their true name and street address and so on. If you can you do that, we can go and pay them a visit right now.”
“Oh, let me just open a new stickie…”
Suddenly Wayne turns helpful. A minute later you’re off the phone with the distinct feeling that Progress is being Made, or at least an order has gone in to the production department, who are thinking about setting a delivery date sometime next week. A minor miracle…
The door opens as you get to the bottom of your coffee cup. It’s Jack. He’s remembered to shave, but his tee-shirt is even more faded than yesterday’s. “Morning.” He plants himself in the other office chair and turns the laptop sitting on his side of the desk to face you. “You might find this interesting.”
“Uh, what?” He’s grinning.
“I logged in before I got here.” He points to a big aerial photograph of a city, something like a spy satellite image. “While I was stuck on the bus, I wrote a plug-in to map the IP addresses of the auction site users into an overlay for Google Earth. I figured that being able to visualize where they were would be…well. It’s not guaranteed accurate—they could be tunnelling in from elsewhere, or covering their trail in some other way—but what I found was interesting.” He flicks a couple of commands at the air, and the pointer tracks across the screen as the image zooms in until you’re looking at a gleaming metal building that looks like a gigantic wood-louse. “Glasgow SECC—the conference centre.” A bunch of green triangles appear, clustered heavily around one end of the building. “That’s where the local hot spot is. There’s another stash here”—he zooms out, dizzyingly, the city dwindling to a pimple on the side of Scotland, then the entire British Isles receding towards the horizon of a curved sphere, spinning round and zooming in again somewhere near the northern end of the Bay of Bengal—“but I figure Glasgow’s easier for us to get to than Dhaka.”
“Glasgow? You sure about that?” It doesn’t entirely make sense to you.
“Yeah.” He twitches over to another window. “The hot spot of auction offers is hanging off the centre’s local switch. That’s where they’re selling their loot. There’s a lot of game activity there, looks like”—he’s blinking and twitching behind his glasses—“there’s a gaming con there. It’s a bank holiday on Friday, isn’t it? But midweek, that doesn’t make sense unless…”
“What’s the con-convention?” you ask, trying to sound only appropriately interested. Not that you know much about such things—you’ve done a few re-enactment events, but hotels and hucksters and hordes of socially inept fanboys don’t tempt you.
“Let’s see.” He Googles for a minute. “Oh, right—yup, it’s a business convention. Sponsored by blah, foo, and Kensu International, oh what a surprise. Hmm. Today’s a public day. Tickets are fifty euros.”
Your mailbox whistles for attention: A note from Wayne has just come in. “First things first. Phone, get me Sergeant Smith.” You wait expectantly for a few seconds, but it dumps you into a voice mailbox. “Oh. Hello, Sergeant. Elaine from Dietrich-Brunner here—can you call me when you get this? I believe we’ve got a lead for you on the items that were stolen from Hayek Associates. Bye.” You disconnect, then turn back to Jack. “Alright. You’re the local—how do we get to Glasgow from here?”
Glasgow turns out to be a fifty-minute train ride away from Edinburgh. Worse, the SECC isn’t next door to the station—it’s a trek out of the centre, several stops away on the toytown model underground system. So after spending a futile ten minutes trying to scrape various badly designed railway company websites, Jack suggests taking the first available connection, then catching a taxi at the other end if necessary. The train turns out to be your usual tired old nag of a commuter service (the shiny new maglev doesn’t open for another two years), and by the time you’re halfway there—staring out of the windows at an implausibly damp landscape outside Falkirk—you’re beginning to wish you’d simply flashed the company Amex and hired a helicopter.
Jack, for his part, sits head down in the seat opposite, rattling his fingertips on a virtual keyboard, so oblivious to the real world that you have to poke him on the shoulder when you want to ask what he’s doing. “Adding another plug-in for Sativa,” he says, as if that’s an explanation. So you go back to skimming the dump of Hayek’s monthly statements that Chris and the gang dug out of them before the incursion, looking for suggestive anomalies. Of which there are many, especially in the petty cash—what on earth is an economics consultancy buying voodoo dolls for? Or paintball guns?—but they’re not the
right
kind of suggestive to ding your bell.
Eventually the train rolls through a grim landscape of warehouses and high-rise apartments, before diving into some kind of tunnel and surfacing in a huge, vaulted Victorian station. You find yourself in a strange concourse, facing a curved wall that seems to be carved out of a cliff of red sandstone; there are inward-looking windows set in it, and gargoyles about to take flight hunch their wings beneath the cast-iron buttresses that support the arching roof. For some reason there’s a small gingerbread town perched on the platform, entire buildings complete with roofs and gutters untouched by rain. “What the hell is that?” you ask in disbelief.
“Glasgow Central.” Jack positively beams. “Let’s get a taxi!”
Ten car-sickening minutes later (Glasgow seems to be built on a grid system dropped across a bunch of hills, and its roads are populated exclusively by automotive maniacs), the driverless taxi drops you in a concrete wilderness near a river. Before you, a huge glass wall fronts a fifty-year-old concrete groundscraper. Someone’s unrolled a grubby cherry-coloured carpet onto the platform, and put out a notice-board.
INTERACTIVE
18 flashes across it in gold letters: and
PUBLIC WELCOME
below, in a somewhat more subdued font. There are people visible inside—greeters and business types in smart-casual drag—and booths.
You were having misgivings about this trip because it seemed to have all the ingredients of a wild goose chase except for the goose: But you’re here now, and it can’t be helped. You square your shoulders and follow him in. “Two public day passes,” Jack tells the bored attendant on the desk.
“That’ll be fifty euros each, or you can fill in these surveys for a free, complimentary pass,” she tells you in an accent so thick you could use it as a duvet.
You glance at the survey: It’s the usual intrusive rubbish, so (with a malign sense of glee) you answer it truthfully. No, you don’t buy any RPGs or subscribe to any MMOs. Yes, you’re a financial services industry employee. Yes, you make buying decisions with an eye-watering bottom line. Then you change your sex, age, date of birth, and name, just to be on the safe side before you hand it in and accept your free, complimentary (thanks for the market research data) badge.
Inside the wide concourse, everything looks like, well, the kind of trade show that attracts the general public. There are booths and garish displays and sales staff looking professionally friendly, and there are tables with rows of gaming boxes on them. There’s even a stray book-store, selling game strategy guides printed on dead tree pulp. “Check what it looks like in Zone,” suggests Jack, so you tweak your glasses, and suddenly it’s a whole different scene.
The concourse is full of monsters and marvels. A sleeping dragon looms over a pirate hoard, scales as gaudy as a chameleon on a diffraction grating: It’s the size of a young Apatosaurus, scaly bat-like wings folded back along its glittering flanks like a fantastic jet fighter. Beyond it, a wall opens out into the utter darkness of space, broken only by the curling smoke-trail of a nebula and the encrusted flanks of a scabrous merchant spaceship trolling the final frontier for profit or pleasure. Half the sales staff have morphed into gaudy or implausible avatar costumes, from caped and opera-hatted Victorian impresarios to swashbuckling adventurers. “How are we going to find anyone in this?” you ask helplessly, as a whole company of wolves trot past a booth where a group of sober-looking marketers are extolling the virtues of their firm’s reality development engine.
“Check your email…”
He’s right. There’s a note from Wayne, giving you name, rank and serial number on the elusive KingHorror9. It’s probably not strictly legal—there are data protection and privacy laws to tap-dance around—but then, what KingHorror9 is doing isn’t strictly legal, either. And they’re here somewhere. You look around. Then it occurs to you that if there’s a whole bunch of Zone servers running here, and you’ve got a Zone character, you might as well use it. So you tell your phone to load Avalon Four, log yourself in as Stheno, and look around again.
The dragon’s still there, but the gaggle of Victorian maidens in big frocks have vanished, replaced by a huddle of warty-skinned kobolds; the walls have morphed from concrete to the texture of damp granite, and the huckster tables and booths have been replaced by broken-down wooden shacks and brightly painted gypsy carriages. The developers’ booth has decayed into a mausoleum occupied by a grisly vanguard of skeletons and zombies, who hang on the every word of the livid witch-king who stands before the sacrificial altar. Somebody has spray-bombed one side of it with a big neon arrow (it really
is
glowing) and the words,
AUCTION IN FOUR MINUTES
. “Ah. I get it,” you say. There’s no reply. When you glance round, Jack’s vanished.