Halting State

JACK: In the Box

You’re watching over Elaine’s shoulder to see if she’s got the hang of riding the horde of zombie griefers you’ve just unleashed, which is why you’re puzzled in the extreme when she zips out of the game interface and flips over to the laptop’s other screen to start messing with some other application. “What are you—” doing? you begin to say, as the door opens and you look round expecting to see Sergeant Smith or her big goon of a trainee, and instead find yourself looking at Marcus Hackman, who is staring at you with an expression of concentrated loathing that is rendered even more frightening by what he’s pointing at you: an extremely illegal black-market automatic pistol.

“Don’t move,” he says. “Keep your hands where I can see them. Both of you,” he adds, as Elaine begins to turn round to see what’s going on—her back is to the door. He steps sideways, out of the doorway, and kicks it shut, keeping his back to the wall.

What the fuck? you think, a sick, sinking sensation loosening your guts. A lot of things come into abrupt focus. Hackman is wearing his usual expensive suit, but he hasn’t shaved recently, and his normally lacquered hair-style is giving way to minor chaos, strands and tufts out of place. His left shoe, highly polished, has a scuff mark on its toe. And the gun, a Yarygin PYa if you’re any judge of such things (and you swallowed the Zone Weapons Bible whole during your probationary period, lo those many years ago, as young men are wont to do) has seen better days since it fell off the back of a Russian army lorry and into the hands of some blacknet-connected mafiya scumbag.

“Mr. Reed. If you don’t do exactly as I say, I shall shoot Ms. Barnaby. Ms. Barnaby, if you disobey an instruction, I shall shoot Mr. Reed. If you understand what I’m saying, you may nod.”

You swallow and make like a parcel-shelf ornament. After a momentary hesitation, Elaine does likewise. The small of your back is chilly with perspiration.

“Very good,” says Hackman, as if he’s speaking to a small child. “Where’s your phone, Ms. Barnaby? Quickly.”

“In my hip pocket,” she says, again hesitating slightly.

“Good. Ms. Barnaby, when I finish talking, I want you to take Mr. Reed’s phone—there on the desk—and without standing up I want you to drop it in the trash can.” The bin is under the desk, between your right leg and her left. “Do it.”

Shit. You watch as she reaches across you with her left arm and takes your mobie from where it’s sitting next to the laptop and slowly moves it over the bin. Double shit. Of course it can’t recognize her, so she can’t speed-dial the distress number even if CopSpace was working—

Clonk.

“Good. Now, Mr. Reed, when I finish talking, you will reach over and take Ms. Barnaby’s phone from her pocket and put it in the bin. Without standing up.”

“But it’s—”

“Shut up,” he snarls, and you put a sock in it fast. “Ms. Barnaby may rise slightly to give you access. She will keep both hands on the table as she does so. If she takes either hand off the table or moves either foot while she is standing, I will shoot you. If you understand, nod.”

You feel yourself nodding. This can’t be happening, can it? He’s about three metres away, too damn far to try and get to him—he’d shoot one of you first. If it was just you, you might try something (poor impulse control said Miss Fuller in elementary fourth, a damning diagnosis of potential heroism), but he’s aiming at Elaine, and just the thought of him putting a bullet in her makes your heart hammer and turns your vision grey at the edges.

“Do it,” he says. “Ms. Barnaby first.”

Elaine puts her hands on the table and tenses, rising out of her chair slowly. She’s got her head cranked round, looking over her shoulder with an expression of profound apprehension (or is it calculation?) on her face. You reach out and slowly slide your fingers into her pocket, finger the warm soap-bar shape of her mobile, and retract. “In the bin, Mr. Reed. Now.”

Clonk. And a faint sigh as the gas strut under the chair takes Elaine’s weight again.

“Take your glasses off and put them in the bin. Then put your hands behind your neck. Stay away from the keyboards.” Hackman is stripping you naked—not of clothing, but in a more significant way: stripping you of the right to volitional speech, stripping you of the ability to communicate, stripping you of identity. But he hasn’t reached your skin yet—if Sergeant Smith comes back…“Now turn round to face the door. Slowly.”

“What do you want?” Elaine asks, getting the words out in a hurry.

Hackman twitches. “Shut up.” He glances at you. “If I don’t call a certain number in sixteen minutes, your niece dies. Do you understand?”

You nod, your heart in your mouth. You understand all too well: Hackman’s got hold of Barry’s crock of shit about Elsie, and now you know he’s lying. But he probably doesn’t know he’s lying, not if he’s going through Team Red—there’s no reason for any of them to know the truth about your family. Or for Elaine to know, for that matter. Which puts an uncomfortable complexion on things. Because if Sue Smith isn’t coming back, if Hackman’s used Team Red’s favours to lure her away, thinking Elsie is at risk from his friends could stop Elaine getting away. Inconvenient, and then some. You’re going to have to bite a bullet, if not take one for a team you never asked to join.

“Why?” you croak.

“Shut up. I’ve got a car downstairs, round the back. Auto-drive. We’re going for a little ride into the borders, then you’re going to spend an uncomfortable twenty-eight…no, twenty-seven…hours locked in a cellar. Then I’ll be in the clear, and you’ll be free. Do you understand?”

Elaine is shaking her head. “Why?”

“Follow the money, stupid.” He looks angry, and a bit bewildered now. “It was working fine until you showed up.” If it wasn’t for you pesky interfering kids, I’d have gotten away with it…

“How much money?” Maybe, you think, you can convince him that you’re venal enough to switch sides to an obvious liar.

“Twenty million in put options hedged against Hayek going down the tubes within two months of IPO, bought through a blind trust.” His cheek twitches. “I’m into covering my bets. Barry and Wayne were just way too confident. The writing’s been on the walls for months.”

You realize your jaw’s gaping wide open. “You’ve been betting on your own company failing?”

“You youngsters.” His expression is coolly cynical: “You were still in short pants during the first dot-com bubble, weren’t you? Fucking amateur get-rich-quick schemes. I made my first fortune and lost it before you were even out of school. I know the signs.” He twitches the gun barrel towards you, then back to Elaine. “Seen it before, twice over. But this time I was ready. All it takes is a couple of million and the right suit, and you can buy in, and be out before the starry-eyed optimists notice what’s going on.”

“But you can’t…be…” Elaine is almost stuttering with surprise. And you can tell what’s going through her head. You were onto a winner! Chief executive of a Potemkin corporation, backed by the security services! Just lie back and let the money roll in! “I don’t believe it.”

“Is that your bag?” Hackman asks, deceptively casual, with a nod towards the duffel bag and its cylindrical protuberance, where it sits beside the window.

“Yes.” Elaine nods.

“Stand up, slowly. Slowly now, go and stand beside it. You’ll notice I’m pointing my gun at Ms. Barnaby, Mr. Reed, so don’t do anything silly, or I shall have to shoot her.”

Realizations crystallize in parallel as you see Elaine slide sideways towards the bag. Like: Hackman is a fruitcake. And: He doesn’t know you know about Wayne. And: Wayne’s dead, and who the hell do you think killed him? “Are you working for Team Red?” you ask.

“Shut up. I’m working for myself.” So he’s been going through the blacknet, not knowing who’s on the other side of it, also tapping it for what it can give them. And he’s still pointing the gun at Elaine. Oh shit. Elaine is tense: She glances at you wide-eyed, like a woman about to stick her head in a hangman’s noose. You can read her expression, clear as day—I’m doing this for Elsie. And that’s what triggers the honesty attack as the mummy lobe, hitherto catatonic with fright, finally takes over your tongue:

“Elsie died six years ago, Hackman. Your blacknet friends are lying to you.”

And it’s true, and the confession rips you back to that horrible morning in the mortuary down south where they showed you the photographs, then waited while you got a grip on yourself and blew your nose and wiped your eyes—you didn’t throw up until later, after the sixth pint of the evening—and were very sorry, sir, to put you through this, but we need to know, we need to know who was in the car because after it came out from underneath the articulated lorry you had no family at all, you had no life, and that was when you began paying the Absent Friends subscription, because even the simulacrum of your sister and nieces gives you something to talk about, it’s better than nothing at all. People instinctively know when a member of the herd is the last of their kind, and you can’t live with the sympathetic glances, and you can’t live with the isolation, either, and how were you to know? It’s just your reality, these days, an embarrassing ghost you’ve dragged around with you ever since the accident. A bodyguard of ghosts.

The ghosts surround you as you stand up and take a step away from Elaine, away from the desk where the zombie-haunted laptop is co-ordinating the automatic mop-up operation to a war Hackman doesn’t even know is happening, a second step to widen the gap and close with Marcus as the gun barrel turns to track you and shoots.

BANG.

You didn’t know it could be that loud: It’s not just a noise, like in the games, it’s a solid force hammering on your eardrums and punching at you. But you take another step and reach for the gun.

BANG.

This time you feel something like a punch in the ribs. But you’re close enough to grab at Hackman’s arm, now, even though your legs don’t seem to want to work properly. It’s very odd: You’ve almost got your hand on the gun-barrel, but it’s getting farther away, and what’s the ceiling doing? Something hits you appallingly hard in the back, and then your head’s in agony as you whack it on the floor, and the gun is still pointing at you, with Hackman’s face behind it, snarling like a shark that’s scented blood on the boardroom carpet and is about to bite your throat out—

Then Elaine takes a brisk step forward, straightening up from where she’s grabbed something from her bag with both hands, pivots smartly on her left ankle, and swings a huge sword over him in a motion like the windscreen wiper from hell. Through your ringing ears you hear a crunch of bone. And the last thing you see is Hackman, a surprised expression on his face, toppling towards you, as Elaine staggers with the effort of halting the instinctive backstroke that would take his face off.

Restart:

A white plastic ceiling above you, lights, and a green shape hunched over your face. Some kind of mask. Whatever you’re lying on jars painfully as the wheels ride over speed pillows. And you wish they’d turn off the siren.

Been here before. Didn’t like it any better the first time. “Looks like he’s coming round.”

Nope, sorry.

Restart:

You’ve been shot in the chest, in case you hadn’t guessed. Twice—once wasn’t enough for you? So you had to go and be a hero, because you knew what Hackman didn’t know you knew, which is that his friends on the other end of the anonymously remixed blacknet link, Team Red, had already tried to kill you a couple of times over: And to make things better, Hackman had already iced his partner in insider trading, Wayne Richardson, and it therefore followed that he wasn’t about to leave you or Elaine behind to point the finger at him. Because that’s what blacknets are good for: buying illegal handguns, arranging executions, raising dirty money at insane short-term interest rates to invest in a gamble that your own corporation is going to tank within weeks.

And you’d been meaning to tell Elaine about your lack of a real life sometime, anyway.

But getting yourself shot wasn’t clever, was it? It hurts. It’s down to a dull ache now—either you’re dying, or they whacked you full of morphine—and you can breathe, but there’s something annoying in your nose. Maybe opening your eyes would be a good idea, although they’re hot and gummy, and you feel almost as fuzzy as that time in Amsterdam, sitting in a burning chair by a canal and a broken shop window.

(Burning? Why did you think the chair was on fire?)

You manage to crowbar your eyelids apart. It’s a huge effort, but it’s rewarded by a worried face, blurred but recognizable, a ferret sniffing over its prey as if unable to decide whether to bite or groom it. “Jack?” She squeezes your hand. “Jack?”

“Grrrrumph.” That’s a highly compressed shorthand version of are you alright? Did Hackman get away? Where are the police? And what’s happening? Unfortunately, your throat didn’t work too well, so you cough and try again: “’Laine?”

She squeezes your hand so hard you’re afraid she’s going to crush it. “Don’t you ever do that to me again!” Then she lets go abruptly, as if she’s suddenly realized what she’s doing and got self-conscious. “For fuck’s sake,” she bursts out suddenly. “You really scared me!”

I scared you? you think, but it’s too much of an effort to say that. “Hackman?”

She sniffs, misunderstanding. “Untrained handgun versus trained sword at that range? I was just waiting for a chance to draw on him.” She’s still holding your hand. There’s steel in those fingers, you realize. “Good thing for his sake it was blunt when I went into krumphau on him, or he’d be missing both hands.”

Well, duh. You blink, feeling stupid. She told you she was into mediaeval sword-fighting, didn’t she? What did you expect?

“Sorry. You scared the crap out of me, Jack.” Pause. “How do you feel?”

Your throat feels like it’s on fire, and there’s definitely something wrong with your chest: It makes odd crackling noises when you breathe, and you can’t quite get enough air. “Water,” you say hopefully. You’re too tired to worry about anything else. Besides, she’s here, and she’s in the chair by your—hospital bed?—so she must be okay. “Phone?”

“I phoned Sophie,” she says. “After they rebooted the phone system.” She looks apprehensive: that same facing-the-noose expression you saw earlier, back when…

“You know, then.”

She nods. “They told me everything.”

The mummy lobe—what’s left of it—closes your eyes, out of embarrassment, or respect for the dead, or something. “I couldn’t handle it back then. Not six months after Mum died. I just couldn’t handle being on my own.” The mummy lobe is tired, too: tired of holding you together through lonely years of death-march work and playing at real life, tired of emulating the society you’ve been so cut off from for so long.

“But to try blackmailing you—” She breaks off.

“How were they to know that Sophie wasn’t real? They were sub-contracting hands-on stuff to a local blacknet. Probably gave it to some local muscle down south who’s laughing his rocks off. Like the story about the police who send this guy a photograph of his car, speeding, and a fine: So he sends them a photograph of a cheque. And they send him back a photograph of a pair of handcuffs…”

Cold little fingers insert themselves into your hand, kneading. “But you don’t need to be alone, if you don’t want to,” she says hesitantly. “You do know that, don’t you?”

“I do now.” You squeeze her fingers, as hard as you can, which is about drowned-rat strength right now. “Game over.”