Halting State

ELAINE: Alone in the Dome

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.