Halting State by Charles Stross

Author:Charles Stross [Stross, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin

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

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