Halting State

ELAINE: Game of Spooks

It’s about eight fifteen when you finally get out of Hayek Associates’ offices and summon a taxi to whisk you back to your hotel room. You are, not to put it too pointedly, dog-tired. On the plus side, at least you made some progress. That cop, Sergeant Smith, looks like she’s going to be a useful contact, and Jack is certainly paying his way. When you left him back at the bunker, he was elbow deep in whatever it is that programmers do, oblivious to everything else. Which is kind of annoying, because he’s about the only person up here who you know who isn’t a co-worker, and now you’ve got to face an evening in a strange city on your own, but what the hell. They call this place the Athens of the North—there’s got to be something you can do by yourself on a summer night, hasn’t there?

Well, no.

Back in your room, you have a quick shower, then check the eating-out guide, by which time it’s past nine and you’re half past hungry. You’re not keen on going back to the places you went into with Jack, not on your own, and the room service menu looks okay, so you order up a big green salad in penance for yesterday’s business meeting, then it’s ten, and the hotel gym’s closed, and where the fuck did the day go? It’s even worse than a weekday in London—at least there you can break the commute home in a cocktail bar with some friends.

It’s ten thirty and you’re glumly contemplating an early night and a seven o’clock session in the gym when your phone rings. You look at the display with a sinking feeling: It’s a particularly tedious LARP called SPOOKS, a real-time game in which you’re acting your parts in a shadowy pan-European intelligence agency locked in a struggle for global hegemony with the forces of Chinese military intelligence, the Russian FSB, and, of course, the CIA.

“Yes?” You try not to snap.

“Elaine Barnaby? This is Spooks Control. Are you busy right now?”

You glance around your beautifully decorated and utterly sterile worker cell: “Not particularly. You know I’m in Edinburgh?”

“That’s why we’re calling.” Your nameless Control sounds drily amused. “On behalf of our sponsors.” The spooks at the centre of the organization in the game you play. “Your authenticator is—” He rattles off a string of nonsense words, just to prove he’s got access to your Control file.

“I’m on business…”

“So are we. We were hoping you could do us a small favour while you’re there.”

“How small?” As usual, there’s no face to go with the call, just the eye-in-a-glass-pyramid-in-Docklands logo. If this was a video call, at least you could glare at him. “It’s half past bloody ten!”

“We need a small parcel delivering.”

“A small parcel. What’s wrong with FedEx?”

“Well, as you just pointed out, it’s half past ten at night. The parcel’s sitting downstairs in your hotel lobby. It needs delivering to—” He rattles off a set of Galileo co-ordinates. “That’s about half a kilometre away from where you’re sitting.”

“Humph.” You look at the phone speculatively. “What’s it worth?”

“To you? A twenty-minute walk before bedtime. To the recipient? Priceless.” Control sounds smug. You can picture him sitting in some bed-sit, working through his check-list of in-game tasks in order to convince himself he’s got a life.

There’s no easy way to say no without giving offence, and anyway, you were thinking about doing something before bed—“I’ll do it.”

“Thank you. I’ve been told to tell you, Agent Barnaby, that a hell of a lot depends on this package being in place before midnight local time.”

“Sure.” You hang up, pull your shoes and glasses on, grab your jacket, and go downstairs.

It’s dark outside, and there’s a single tired-looking clerk on reception. You smile at him tentatively. “I understand you’ve got a parcel for me? Barnaby, room 214.”

“I think so, let me just go and see…” He shuffles off into the back office, then returns, holding a DHL package. “If you’d sign here, please?”

“Sure.” You swipe your phone across his reader and thumbprint the signature. “Thanks.”

Outside, the evening air is cool and smells faintly of the cherry blossom that’s piling up in the gutters at the side of the pavement. You pull on a disposable plastic glove then pull the tab on the parcel. This recording will self-destruct in thirty seconds. Rumour has it that the first SPOOKS campaign got the beta-testers arrested and questioned for a week under the Terrorism Act before the police realized it was a game; that’s why you carry a special endorsement on your ID card. The parcel turns out to contain a bland-looking matte black plastic box about the size of an old-time DVD case, and some heavy-duty outdoor bonding pads. There’s also a brief, printed note on paper. “Attach to front of building above eye level facing the street. When attached, initiate pairing with your phone to ‘unnamed device 1142.’ Passcode is 46hg52Q. Once paired, dial ##*49##*, and leave the area. When home, text Control.”

Bloody typical. You pocket the bugging device, or whatever it is, key the co-ordinates into your specs, and let the overlay guide you along the pavement towards the target building. This sort of nonsense is partly why you’ve been thinking of retiring from SPOOKS; it’s almost tediously realistic. Not James Bond swigging cocktails by the pool in Grand Cayman, just “pick up package X, transport to location Y, phone number Z.”

Location Y turns out to be an impressive crescent of Georgian stone town houses. They’ve got flights of steps like stone drawbridges, jutting out over a dry stone moat with windows in the basement—and steps down to them, for these are garden flats. You hunt around for a few minutes until you find the right set of steps, then approach the door. There’s a row of ten buzzers next to the entrance, and right at the top of the row someone has chalked a blue rectangle with your SPOOKS cell warchalk sign. You take out the box and the adhesive pads, position it carefully, and jump through the digital hoops to switch the thing on. (It’s probably just a ten-euro inventory tracking phone and a camera to snap the back of another player’s head as they leave for work tomorrow: but what the hell.) You wait till you’re halfway home before you text Gareth.

You’re just keying in a brief message when your specs vibrate for attention. You glance up: The SPOOKS overlay is active, and it’s telling you TWO-PERSON TAG TEAM DETECTED.

The dictates of the game require you to take it seriously, even though you’re too tired for this shit, and you want to go to bed. Besides, SPOOKS tries to map non-player characters onto real local objects—and you can really live without two strangers trying to follow you. You speed up slightly, not glancing round—that’s your glasses’ job—and mumble quietly, calling up a course into the densely occupied area around the corner of Princes Street and Lothian Road. You change direction, darting into a side street, and behind you the blips on your head-up display turn to follow you.

This isn’t good. “Phone, get me a taxi,” you mutter, and break into a jog. The side street is almost deserted, cars parked on either side of its cobbled quaintness, but you can see lights and hear traffic ahead. There are footsteps behind you, and you accelerate, running—

And a taxi’s headlights show up, swerving in towards the kerb in front of you. “Where to, miss?” asks the driver, as you pull the door shut. “Hotel—” You try to remember. “Hotel Malmaison…”

Behind you, the tail team falls away in the darkness as the taxi carries you back to the illusion of security.