Authors: Charles Stross
And then Jack blows his top.
“What the fuck is
that
supposed to mean? It seems to me that we’ve already been pretty fucking escalated, all the way into a gravel quarry if we hadn’t broken out! Chen was scared shitless—he thought someone was going to try to kill him—and I’ll bet you that if he shows up again, it’ll be in an organ bank. These fuckers aren’t playing games, Mister Spook, sir, in case you’ve forgotten there are several million euros missing—”
You’ve got a very peculiar feeling that Jack is playing some kind of game with Michaels, but you haven’t got a clue what the rules are. And then Michaels shakes his head. “That’s irrelevant.”
You can’t keep your mouth shut at that. “What do you mean, it’s irrelevant? What are we here for, then?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” Michaels breathes heavily. “Are you going to listen?”
“
Fuck
no, I’m trying to tell you you’ve been—” But that’s just the tail-end of Jack’s venting, and he manages to shut himself up before he really puts his foot in his mouth. He’s not stupid, is Jack; unlike some of the geeks you’ve known in your time, he can get a message if you hit him over the head with it hard enough. (He seems to be housetrained, he’s not pushy, and he doesn’t smell bad: If it wasn’t for the tee-shirts and furtive programming runs, he’d have trouble hanging on to his geek licence.) “Go on, please,” he says, with a very odd look on his face.
“Thank you. Let me lay out a few things first, by way of establishing a context. This is about national security, and, if you’re anything like the civilians I’ve dealt with in the past, you’re about to ask what it’s got to do with you. So I’d like to nail that down first so we can skip the stupid questions later. Clear?”
You nod, warily.
National security
is a weasel term that covers a multitude of sins, but you’ll let it pass for now.
Whose national security?
is the next question you’ve got in mind…
“This is the twenty-first century, and we’re in the developed world. You’re probably thinking wars are something that happens in third-world shit-holes a long way away. And to a degree, you’d be right. Modern warfare is capital-intensive, and it hasn’t really been profitable for decades; it was already a marginal proposition back in 1939 when Hitler embarked on his pan-European asset-stripping spree—his government would have been bankrupt by March 1940 if he hadn’t invaded Poland and France—and it’s even worse today. When the Americans tried it in Iraq, they spent nine times the value of the country’s entire oil reserves conquering a patch of desert full of—sorry, I’m rambling. Pet hobby-horse. But anyway: Back in the eighteenth century, von Clauswitz was right about war being the continuation of diplomacy by other means. But today, in the twenty-first, the picture’s changed. It’s all about enforcing economic hegemony, which is maintained by broadcasting your vision of how the global trade system should be structured. And what we’re facing is a real headache—a three-way struggle to be the next economic hegemon.”
Who is we?
That’s the question you’re asking yourself…
“‘We,’ for these purposes, is the intellectual property regime we live in—call it the European System. The other hegemonic candidates are the People’s Republic of China, and India. America isn’t in play—they’ve only got about three hundred and fifty million people, and once we finish setting up the convergence criteria for Russian accession to the Group of Thirty, the EU will be over seven hundred. China and India are even bigger. More to the point, the USA went post-industrial first. Their infrastructure is out-of-date and replacing it, now oil is no longer cheap, is costing them tens of trillions of euros to modernize. Plus, they’ve got all those rusty aircraft carriers to keep afloat. It’s exactly the same problem Britain faced in the 1930s, the one that ultimately bankrupted the empire. But today, our infrastructure—Europe’s—is in better shape, and the eastern states are even newer. They went post-industrial relatively recently, so their network infrastructure is almost as new as the shiny new stuff in Shanghai and New Delhi. So there’s this constant jockeying for position between three hyperpowers while the USA takes time out, and you live in one of those powers, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“I live in Scotland,” Jack points out.
“But Scotland is part of the British Isles Derogation Zone, which in turn is part of the European Union, yes? What I’m trying to make clear here is that what’s good for the EU is good for Scotland, and England. And what’s playing out here is potentially
very bad indeed
, both for the country you live in, and eventually, for you.”
If you let them badger each other indefinitely, you could be stuck in this bunker until Christmas. And that would never do: The instant coffee is bogging, and you can’t check your email. “Okay, so just what
is
going on?” you ask Michaels, smiling as sweetly as possible to conceal your irritation.
“Quantum key exchange!” Michaels snaps. As far as you’re concerned, he might as well have said “abracadabra,” but the effect on Jack is electrifying.
Michaels smiles. “Now that I’ve got your attention…”
Jack nods like a puppet on a string.
“Until about five years ago, progress in electronics was governed by something called Moore’s Law—are you familiar with it? Make a circuit smaller, it dissipates less heat, so it can run faster, and you can cram more components onto a chip of a given size. It began to bottom out in the oughties, when we began hitting the quantum-scale limits to conventional electronics. But at about the same time, scientists began trying to develop so-called quantum processors, and don’t tell me how they work—it’s all gibberish to me. But the long and the short of it is, a quantum processor can do certain types of calculation not simply very fast, but to all intents and purposes
instantaneously
. And among the classes of operations they’re good for, the foremost is code-breaking.”
“But if you use quantum key distribution,” Jack says slowly, “that resets the balance point in the arms race. Doesn’t it?”
This is already about two steps beyond you, but you focus on it intently: There’ll be time to do the homework once you get your mobile back.
“Yes and no. Quantum key distribution”—Michaels looks at you—“lets you secure your regular encryption keys so that there’s no risk of anyone else getting their hands on them, which is what makes them vulnerable to quantum code-breaking. But it’s something you do strictly over secure fibre-optic cable. Our entire mobile communications infrastructure, from 3G on up through 4G and NG and 802.20, is impossible to upgrade to QKD. The next generation system
will
be secure—but right now, we’re wide-open to anyone with a couple of million euros and a bunch of carrier-grade fibre—and a copy of the one-time pad used to secure supervisor access to our core backbone routers. Which, incidentally, is why we’re sitting in a shielded bunker equipped with no communications technology invented after 1940. About the only consolation is that the opposition is
also
wide-open, right now, and that’s why we’re going through the biggest renaissance in HUMINT—HUMan INTelligence—since the Cold War. It’s all mediated through artificial reality and live-action role-playing games like
SPOOKS
, in case you hadn’t guessed: adding the power of electronic information gathering to human espionage. Would you believe it used to cost us ten thousand euros a day to put a full surveillance team on a suspect? Now we’ve got volunteers who’ll pay us to let them do our leg work!”
You shake your head. Michaels is dropping a bunch of random jigsaw pieces on the table in front of you, all shaken up, and expecting you to put them together, and you’re not sure you’ve got the big photograph to work from yet. “What are you getting at?” you ask. “Because I don’t see what this has got to do with us.”
“It’s a lot to take in all at once.” Michaels shrugs self-deprecatingly.
Aw, shucks.
“Let’s just say…I’d like you to imagine that somewhere in the bowels of a shopping mall in Beijing, some game-obsessed otaku types are really getting into a multiplayer game called, oh, something like whatever’s the Mandarin for ‘Global Conquest.’ There’s a whole bunch of them, in two gaming clans: call them Team Red and Team Blue. And somewhere in an office block, some differently game-obsessed intelligence officers working for the Guoanbu have decided that maybe, just maybe, these gaming clans are what the Soviet KGB used to call
useful idiots
, back in the day, and give them their head. The Chinese have a short way with hackers. Time was, they’d end up in pieces in an organ bank: These days it’s cheaper to grow organs, so they’re more likely to get twenty years’ hard labour, but it’s still not exactly something they encourage. But it’s a different matter if the hacking is directed at an enemy of the state. And so these gaming clans, these useful idiots, they’re playing out their game of ‘Global Conquest,’ and, rather than shitting on them from a great height, someone high up in the Guoanbu has given them limited access to one of the quantum processors in the basement of the State Academy of Sciences.”
“And what’s the objective of their game?” you ask.
“As far as we can tell, it’s capture the flag—the first team to take control of the backbone routers of a medium-sized EU member state wins. And guess what? They were all set to succeed, because some bastard—no, I have no idea who it is—leaked them a copy of the backbone authentication pad. They’ve still got it, and they’re running all over our telecoms infrastructure in hobnailed boots, because we don’t dare shut down and reboot everything until we know where they got the keys. And you know what? We wouldn’t have had any idea at all, if one of their low-level grunts hadn’t hatched a plan to make some money on the side. Which is where you come in…”
Two hours after Michaels drops his cluster bomb of revelations, you stumble out of the rabbit-hole under Hayek Associates, exhausted, hungry, and not sure whether to be angry or scared.
At least Elaine looks as coolly imperturbable and spotless as ever: Maybe her suit’s made of Teflon. She glances up at the grey overcast, already spitting fat, isolated rain-drops in preparation for the main program. “Let’s get you home,” she says, and taps her ear-piece with a knowing expression. “We need to talk.”
“You don’t need to,” you say, because it’s the right thing to do, according to the manners gland (which normally reports directly to the mummy lobe, except the mummy lobe is off-line right now, gibbering and sucking its thumb). “We could head back to your hotel.”
“Rubbish.” She looks at you oddly. “You’re at the end of your tether. Which way is the bus-stop?”
“It’s just uphill from the end of the drive…”
Another five minutes, and you’re ensconced in adjacent seats on a two-thirds-empty LRT special, slowly climbing Drum Brae with a whining from its rapeseed-fuelled power pack that bodes ill for the future. It’s electric blue inside, with orange grab rails, and the sky outside the advertisement-obscured windows is a louring slate-grey promise of things to come. Your mind’s spinning like a Scottish Hydro turbine, chasing your own tail from pillar to post. Tracking down the Orcish thieves and their stolen stash of vorpal blades is neither here nor there anymore—what’s important is keeping your head, while all around you other folks are losing theirs to the
snicker-snack
of the twenty-first-century yellow peril.
“Did you buy that line of bullshit?” you ask her.
“You’re tired,” she repeats. She rolls her eyes sideways, and you follow the direction of her gaze, coming up hard against the little black eyeball of a camera.
Oops.
No wonder they call these fuckers Optares—there’re at least eight of them visible, and no telling if they’re broken
or
—“Let’s get home. No chit-chat.”
Paranoid thoughts begin spooling through your mind, following a multiplicity of threads. You’ve just come out of Hayek Associates, with a whole bunch of random fragments and the blinding revelation that Michaels’s operation has been penetrated, and he either doesn’t know, or isn’t going to tell you. Now, let’s suppose that Michaels was right, that one or other of the Beijing clans have their hooks into, well,
everything
. Can you get home safely? They’ve got the buses’ cams—no more fallible video recorders behind the driver’s seat, not after 7/7—and the traffic cams and…but no, HA pointedly
don’t
have any cameras overlooking their car-park, do they? And face recognition off of a camera is notoriously CPU-intensive and not the kind of thing a quantum shoe-box under the server rack will help with, not with the current state of the art.
Good.
If you’d called a taxi, you might be up shit creek again, but buses still have drivers to extract the pocket change from tourists and ne’er-do-wells who don’t have a RiderPass. It’s not anonymous transport—that probably doesn’t exist anymore, unless you go on horseback or ride a bicycle—but it’s the next best thing: Transport with no real-time ID tracking. The bad guys might well know where you live and where HA’s offices are, and make the logical public transport connection…or would they? Who knows? Put yourself in the head of a puppet master in an office in downtown Guanzhou, pulling the strings for an ARG played by foreign devils.
This is not a game.
Which means—
The bus lurches away from the kerb and trundles towards your stop. You reach up and push the button, then stand: Catching Elaine’s eye, you nod at the exit. “Next stop.”
Pervasive game-play.
They’ve got reality by the short-and-curlies, thanks to the cryptography gap Michaels kindly pointed out to you. “It’s not as if this stuff is new,” he explained. “The NSA were doing it years before anyone else, before their recent unfortunate circumstances.” They got Elsie, Michaels tells you—and there’s a big black belly-laugh hanging over a yawning pit of terror you don’t have the guts to think about yet. Michaels hung your virtual alter ego out as bait, and now you and Elaine are
it
, the plot coupon at the heart of the next level of the game that
he
is spinning for the unseen masters of reality in Beijing. If Chen—Team Red’s non-virtual eyes and ears on the ground, a foreign student at large in Scotland—hadn’t fucked up by getting greedy and trying to abuse his access to their key cracker to line his own pocket, you’d all still be flailing around in the dark as opposed to this turbid twilight.
How do you roll up a foreign spy network when the spies don’t even know what they’re doing?
Not to mention your own counter-espionage fools…
You’re on the pavement now, and the rain is splattering around you. You glance, longingly, in the direction of Burt’s Bar, just over the road—good beer and excellent pies—but there’ll be too many people about, too many pairs of flapping ears and unblinking video eyes and mobile phones that double as bugging devices. And you’re feeling bruised and paranoid enough that you need some privacy. “This way,” you tell Elaine, still not quite sure why she insisted on coming home with you rather than having a natter in some coffee shop.
You shamble across the cobbled road at a near trot, turn towards Glenogle and your wee Colonies house, and the heavens open all at once. Suddenly you’re dashing for cover beneath an artillery barrage of water-bombs, Elaine stampeding along behind you—and it’s a couple of hundred metres to go. While you’re both paused at a kerbside to check for traffic, an SUV aquaplanes past, malevolently hugging the gutter and spraying a mucky sheet of water across your legs. Elaine swears quietly behind your back as you cross the road, but then you’re at the right side street, and heading for the cast-iron gate.
She grabs your arm. “Stop,” she hisses.
“But it’s pouring—” You stop. “Yes?”
“This the door?”
You nod.
“Give me your keys, okay? And hang back.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
“I’m not stupid,” you grunt. And you drop into
SPOOKS
mode and scan the hedges and parked cars to either side for signs, eyeballs wide open for watchers and lurking booby-traps. Sidling up your own garden path like you expect to find a ninja hiding in the recycling bin would make you feel like an idiot even without the cold rain dripping down the back of your neck, but you’ve done this often enough in role-play that the tradecraft is almost automatic: And then you’re at your own keyhole, glancing round the door-frame for signs and portents like anonymous black boxes that weren’t there the day before.
Nothing.
And it’s your house. As you stick the key in the lock, you say, over your shoulder, “Is your phone switched off?”
“Whoops.” She’s fumbling in the darkness and the rain as you step inside and turn the hall light on.
“Come on in and close the door, then.”
There’s no rain inside the house except for that which drips off your sodden jacket and trousers and trickles down your hair and into your eyes. You stumble into the hall wearily and shrug out of your soaking jacket. Reaching into the pockets, you pull out your phone—off—and your keyboard (also off, probably terminally so) and glasses. The sound of the cloud-burst fades as Elaine locks the front door and stomps her feet dry on the mat. “I’m soaked. That fucking Chelsea tractor really got me.”
“Me, too. I think they do it deliberately.” Drive with their near-side wheels in the overflowing gutter, just to inundate the automotively challenged who can’t afford the ruinous road tax. You kick your trainers off, stumble up to the bedroom door, and grab the dressing-gown off the back of the door. “Here, make yourself at home. Is your suit machine-washable?”
“Of course.” She looks at you warily, then takes the dressing-gown. “Hey, you don’t need to—”
“It’s no trouble. Look, let me stick some real coffee in the pot, then we can talk.”
“Talk is good.” She looks around the living room, at the tangles of wires plugged into the overloaded ten-way gang in the corner and the bookcase with its middle shelves bowed beneath a stack of old d20 game supplements and graphic novels; then she plants herself in the far corner of the newer of the two IKEA futons that constitute 90 per cent of the soft furnishings and bends down to remove her shoes. You shake your head and duck into the kitchen to grapple with your feelings. It’s smaller than the galley of an Airbus, but you can get the coffee started while giving her a modicum of privacy. And it gives you a chance to gibber quietly for a couple of minutes and try to calm yourself down.
When you emerge again, calm and collected and bearing two reasonably clean mugs full of organic fairtrade espresso, it’s to find a twilight surprise. Elaine is bending over the power hub, systematically following cables from wall wart to blinkenlight. She seems to be trying to turn everything off. She’s wearing your dressing-gown: Her trousers and jacket are an untidy puddle in the middle of the rug. You clear your throat. “Oh, hi,” she says. “Any idea how many gadgets you’ve got plugged in here?”
“Um. Too many?” She’s got you bang to rights. “What are you doing?”
She pushes the off button on the video receiver. “If we’re going to talk, we might as well do it in private. Besides, the lights were bugging me. I counted sixteen before I lost track.”
A moment’s stock-taking tells you that she’s not about to do any damage—everything here’s an embedded appliance except for the household disk farm next to the fireplace. “One moment.” You bend down and rummage for the wall plug, then flick the switch. Everything on the power hub flickers and dies simultaneously. “That do you?”
“Let’s see.” She picks up her phone from the precarious pile of coffee-ringed magazines on the side-table and frowns at it. “Yeah. The snitch is muzzled.”
“Snitch?”
“Spooks Control sent me a bug detector. Something about it reprogramming my phone’s processor to sniff for different emission sources? Does that sound right?”
It sounds like a high-end cognitive radio application, and probably illegal as hell—one that can override the built-in standards firmware and turn a handset into a scanner that can monitor any radio-based protocol its antenna can pull in. (Radio interference, after all, is purely an artefact of buggy receiver design.) Back when you thought
SPOOKS
was a game, it would just have been a prop, but now…“It’s plausible. What does it say?”
“It
said
something in here was transmitting, but it stopped when you pulled the plug.” She closes her phone. “Sound like a bug to you?”
You glance at the streaming media hub, LEDs dark and lifeless.
That’s your musical life, buddy, right there in the corner.
“Might be.” If someone was going to plant a bug on you, where better to put it than in the firmware of a gizmo that’s transmitting all the time? “Coffee?”
“Thanks.” She accepts the mug gratefully. “About your washing-machine—”
“It’ll take about three hours, if you still want to use it. But I can lend you a spare pair of jeans and a jacket if you don’t.”
“You don’t need to, but thanks.” A certain tension goes out of her. “Show me where you keep the machine?” The washer/dryer is under the kitchen work-top. It’s fully automatic, setting its cycle from the RFIDs in her jacket and trousers. Thirty seconds later she curls up on the futon opposite you with her coffee mug, eyes dark and serious in the gloom. (You hadn’t realized just quite how much illumination the various gizmos contributed to your den.) “Okay. What do
you
think is going on?”
“Well—” You stop, half-tongue-tied by the sight of her sitting opposite you, large as life, wearing your dressing-gown. There’s a subtext here that you’d barely allowed yourself to notice, consciously:
Do you suppose she’s here because she likes you?
The mummy lobe wants to kick up a censorious fuss, but it’s at a loss for words: You’re not terribly good at dealing with the rules of the game Elaine seems to be playing, or even recognizing when a game’s in progress, so you retreat hastily in the direction of something you understand.
“I think we can trust Barry about as far as we can throw him. He’s definitely part of
SPOOKS
, and
SPOOKS
ties into the police or intelligence services at some level—otherwise, we wouldn’t have gotten the taxi ride. And he’s fed us a great story-line. Beyond that…”
She stares at you from the darkness. “Your niece, Elsie. You’re…you don’t seem to be worrying about her. Is
that
just a story? Jack?”
The roaring in your ears is like the engine of an on-coming juggernaut on the wrong side of the road, headlights blazing and horn blaring. “I can’t”—
don’t want to
—“face…”
“Jack?” She leans forward, visibly concerned. “What is it?”
You force yourself to take a breath and try to nail down the mess of emotions she’s stirred up. “I can’t…look, trust me on this?”
“Trust you?” She’s still tense.
Another deeper breath. “It’s complicated. I’ll try to explain later. For now, let’s just say there’s stuff Michaels knows about if he’s plugged into the police. And there’s nothing—from here—
I
can do for her.”
“But I’d have thought—” She stops, with a visible effort. “You’re sure?”
You nod, not trusting yourself to say any more. You feel shaky. It’s all true—Elsie is beyond your ability to help—but you don’t like to think about it. It’s just too painful.
Elaine sits back, looking thoughtful. After a moment, she glances away. “You trust Barry to look after Elsie, but you don’t trust his operation as far as you can throw him. Is that right?”
That’s an easy one to catch. “They’ve been penetrated by the other side. And what about the rest of it? That piece of paper? How do we know it’s genuine?”
She shakes her head. You trace the outline of her face against the dim light from the street filtering through the net curtains. “The paperwork’s the real thing. Either that, or the cop who handed it to us wasn’t. And with the lights and the way he bent the speed limit on the way over…no.”