Rule 34 hs-2

by Charles Stross

  “Okay, don’t worry. I’m putting you on hold again.”

  You hold, while the police RPV ghosts across the park on silent ducted fans, searching the bushes for rape machines—no, rape machines don’t exist. Crazy childhood phantasms that lurk into adulthood: They’re less real than this phone in your skull, the life-line to the Operation’s soothing dream of control. Once you get on your meds again, the bad stuff will all go away. The same cannot be said of all the other shit. You say paranoia, I say surveillance state. Worried about being tracked by hidden cameras, stealthy air-borne remotely piloted vehicles, and chips implanted in your skull? You’re merely a realist.

  The twenty-first century so far has been a really fucking awful couple of decades for paranoid schizophrenics. Luckily, you’re not paranoid—you just have these little breakdowns from time to time. A medication side-effect—a side-effect of coming off your meds, that is. Usually at the least convenient time—like now. Something is watching you from the trash can alongside the footpath. Then it moves. A starling. (They’re making a come-back from the brink of extinction.)

  “I’m going to text a route to a local pharmacy to your handset. I want you to go there immediately, they know you’re a tourist, and it’s urgent. Don’t leave until you’ve got your pills. Do you understand?”

  You nod happily, glad that someone is there to catch your fall. Not a lizard—lizards never catch. “Yes.” They want to brainwash you and make a good little worker-robot-slave out of your flayed soul.

  “Okay. You’re to stop using your current identity immediately after you get your prescription. There’s a new background waiting for you, and I’ll send you the collection details in the next message. Clear?”

  “Yes.” You swallow. Your throat is unaccountably dry. This always happens when the firewall in your head springs a leak. “What else?”

  “We can’t help with your contacts,” she says abruptly, sibilants buzzing like an angry hornet just behind your left ear. “You’re not the only founder-executive with problems today. We’re busy fighting off denial-of-service attacks on all fronts. Marketing/Communications are experiencing severe functional ablation, and it’s degrading our ability to comply with our service-level agreements. Basic medical and identity services are running normally, but unfortunately as a Tier Two executive, you may experience delays in fulfilment of your general support requests. If you can find out who exactly killed your contacts, you are to let us know immediately.”

  Is it the lizards—your loyal lips are frozen shut. The operator does not need to hear about the lizards. (She’s not the only one. Most people don’t believe in the lizards and react badly if you try to tell them: It’s the brainwashing.) The operator sounds tense and tired. She doesn’t need any more worries. If you make her worry that you are losing it, talking about shape-changing lizards, she may push that button and bounce that signal off the moon and hello, Mr. Brain-Bomb, good-bye Toymaker. So you do not say one word about the lizards. Like the rape machines, they’re imaginary haunts—except, an edgy feeling tells you, they’re not.

  “I’ll do that,” you reassure the operator.

  “Okay, go get your meds.” And a moment later the phone in your wallet vibrates and a couple of numbered tags show up on its map of the city, along with a helpfully walkable route.

  You have a mission. You’re going to get your meds, pick up your new identity documents, then look into replacing your luggage and finding somewhere safe to stay. That’s all you can do right now. Maybe when you’re back in familiar headspace, you can make plans for whittling down the number of your enemies; but that’s not a job for this afternoon.

  The nearest pharmacy turns out to be inside a red-brick Tesco superstore, the shiny green glass cylinder of a government-run vertical farm rising from the former parking lot behind it. You sidle up to the counter and make yourself known to the government employee behind the counter. She bustles off into the back room, and the pharmacist comes out. She’s a pretty, petite woman, thirtysomething Anglo-Indian. “Mr. Christie?” she asks. It’s an alias—it’s your alias, for the next hour at least. “May I see some proof of identity?”

  You show her your entirely authentic driving license and she reads it with dark, unreadable eyes then scans your thumbprint and verifies it. “Thank you,” she says. Into the back, then back out again with a bag: “You’ve had this prescription before?”

  You nod, eagerly. It’s a selective metabotropic glutamate agonist, sturdy and well-understood, a neuroleptic firewall proof against the rape-machine fantasies and mind-control issues you’ve had ever since the disastrous clinical trial they put you through during your teens. “My luggage went missing. I, uh, I really need this.” You reach out, watching the minute tremors in your hand as if from a great distance.

  “I’ll say you do.” She hands the box over with a curious expression on her face. “There’s no charge: You’re in Scotland, we still have a National Health Service. That’s you, then. Have a nice day.” They have a working health-care system here, don’t they? You nod jerkily, then back away.

  Outside the shiny socialized factory farm, post office, pharmacy, and general-purpose omnistore, you gulp down two tablets—one of the doctors at the clinic told you how to do that, pump-priming, years ago—and stand there shaking for a minute. Grey streets, tall buildings looking down on you with eye-socket windows. Bats glide overhead, or pigeons, or RPVs with terahertz radar eyes, vigilant for the deviant. You shiver. You need to get under cover before they come for you . . . give the meds time to cut in. You haven’t had an attack this bad since . . . since . . .

  Don’t think about it.

  You are the Toymaker’s avatar in this nation-state. You’re the executive: strong, and determined, and entrepreneurial, and skilled. You’re not some kind of paranoid-schizophrenic personality-disorder case, stoned on his own brain chemistry. There really is a chip in your skull, monitoring and controlling and stabilizing on behalf of the conspiracy for which you work. There really is someone or something watching over you, controlling from afar. The hallucinations are going to go away, then you’re going to take this reality by the throat and twist it until it crackles under your fingers like . . . like . . .

  The replacement prescription sits heavy in your pocket, reassuring, a chemotaxic anchor pulling you closer to the harbour of high-functioning quasi-sanity. Just knowing it’s in your system makes you feel better. So you walk back along the main road towards town, taking your time (and avoiding the nosy buses and their intrusive cameras). About half a mile later you pass a hole-in-the-wall diner, where you pause to order a mixed meze and a plate of falafels. The bored Middle Eastern guy behind the bar spends his time between serving you hunched over an elderly pad, handset glued to his ears, evidently talking an Alzheimer’s patient through replying to an email: “No, look, at the top, it says get mail, write, address book, reply, tap reply—no, not the red dot, below the red dot, what do you see?” His despairing half-duplex monotone soothes your rattled nerves, reassuring you that he’s not remotely likely to be spying on you.

  When you leave the restaurant, the day has brightened considerably. There are no bushes for concealment, no sinister shapes flitting past overhead—an unmanned police segway rolls up the hill, cameras panning in all directions, but even the neurotypical can see that.

  Another fifty minutes of walking sees you back in the West End, approaching the marble-fronted monolith of the Hilton. You are relatively calm, at peace with what it is you are about to do. It’s true they have misplaced your luggage, and with it your sample merchandise. However—let us retain a sense of proportion—this is not the worst thing that has happened to you today, is it? Once you have unpacked your 5.62 kilograms of home and bolted the hotel-room door you’ll be safe. It just depends on whether the fool on the hospitality desk has found—

  Your march across the polished floor of the lobby comes to an abrupt halt. There’s a well-dressed woman waiting beside the desk, but nobody behind it
. You can feel your arousal level rising: You need your bag; your commercial sample is sleeping in it; are they playing with you? The woman is watching you with elaborate inattentiveness, carefully avoiding eye contact. “Do you work here?” you demand.

  “No.” Now she looks at you. A wry twist of the lips. “They’re trying to find my parcel. I had it sent poste restante—FedEx say they delivered it this morning, but the hotel know nothing.”

  The very idea! Suddenly it strikes you. You shipped your luggage via Yamato, a takuhaibin logistics company, and they simply don’t lose things. But if this woman’s package went missing, and she used FedEx—“My luggage is missing, too,” you confess. “Think they’ve got a problem?”

  “I’d say so.” She nods. “Mr. MacAndrews says they’ve been having network trouble all day. That’s usually a euphemism for malware, in my experience.”

  An upswing in cybernetic infestation isn’t your problem, but it puts the hospitality manager’s attitude in a different light. Maybe he’s not actually trying to fuck with you—

  And here he comes, scurrying back out from a locked door with a box in his hands. He sees you and does a double-take, but goes straight for your companion: “Ms. Straight? We found it! They’ve got the computers working again, and it was sitting in our loading area along with the other inbound consignments.” He looks at you directly. “Mr. . . . Christie? Your luggage was missing, too, wasn’t it?” Cheeky sod. You nod. “I’ll just go see if it’s turned up as well, now we’ve got our logistics working again.”

  He turns and rushes off, leaving your companion looking at her box. “Humph. I thought he was supposed to get some proof of identity before handing items over,” she says disapprovingly.

  “Well, that’s his problem, isn’t it?” you say, and smile at her. You focus on her properly for the first time, taking in: red hair, carefully styled; lips and eyes emphasized, but not heavy on the slap; wearing a green dress with a low neckline that’s kept on the business side of sexy by a black jacket. Mature but rootable, in other words, and if she isn’t on the pull, you’re a cactus.

  You haven’t had any action for a couple of weeks now. You don’t know where the local cruising grounds are, and here in the dour puritan anglosphere the hotel front desk doesn’t provide room service. You have certain needs—exacerbated now you’re coming down from your little reality excursion. You posted an ad on a swinger aggregator a couple of days ago, but no joy yet. The idea of her plumped wasp-sting lips wrapped around your cock appeals: You take conscious control of your smile and widen it.

  “I suppose so.” She catches your eye and smiles back. “I’ll just have to wait.”

  Interested but coy: You’ve met this attitude before, and it bugs the living fuck out of you. Why don’t these sheeple admit that it’s pointless and drop the pretence that they care? Oh, but I’d feel guilty, they say if you ask them why they tipped the waiter/returned the excess change they were given/didn’t pad the insurance claim/turned down the zipless fuck—even though there’s absolutely no chance that anyone would catch them. You smile back at her and nod.

  “Are you staying here for long?” you ask.

  “Oh, just checking in for a few nights.” She raises an eyebrow. “Yourself?”

  “The same,” you say honestly. “Here on business, just checking in, gone tomorrow. At a loose end, really.”

  Her pupils dilate slightly, and there are some other cues: You’ve studied this shit, looked into NLP, and you focus on emitting the right signals, mirroring her subconscious arousal. “That’s a shame,” she says. “What line are you in?”

  That’s off-script, but not too far off-script. “I’m in toys,” you say. It’s even true. “Re-establishing a local supply-chain subsidiary that’s been neglected for too long.” The door is opening: The irritating Mr. McAndrews is on his way back. “Busy by day, totally at a loose end by night. I don’t suppose you’d be interested in dinner?”

  Two out of three times, they say no at this point: If she says yes, you’ve got about a 40–per cent chance of finding out if she swallows. McAndrews is busy with the telescoping handle of what out of the corner of one eye you recognize is your case. You keep your eye-balls pointed the right way (which is not at Ms. Straight’s face or tits).

  “Sure,” she says, her smile medium-flirtatious. “Meet here, eight tonight?”

  “Glad to,” you say, mirroring her expression and carefully concealing your satisfaction. Then you break contact deliberately, slewing towards Mr. McAndrews, who is wrestling your suitcase to a halt in front of you. “Ah, excellent. By the way, Ms. Straight here—”

  “—Dorothy—” You glance back at her, let your smile widen, nod slightly.

  “—was expecting you to ask for some ID—”

  “Ach, yes, but you see, we have a record.” McAndrews twitches at the discreet camera dome overhead. “Nobody would steal from us.”

  Dorothy is raising an eyebrow at you. “John,” you volunteer.

  “Mr. John R. Christie. If you could just sign here?”

  McAndrews thrusts a tablet at you. Bastard.

  “I’ll see you this evening, John.” She turns and is gone.

  You take your luggage up to your room and go through it with shaking hands. Here’s the sample merchandise, occupying half the case: You plug it in to charge, just in case a demo is called for in the next couple of days. Here’s your “sterile” pad—still in the box it came in from PC WORLD—and here are your spare clothes. Toothbrush. Shaver. Meds. Bling case. You carefully arrange the small items on the desk in their correct order. Then you put the pad online and tell it to download its work personality from the cloud while you have a scalding-hot shower and change your clothes.

  Of course you can’t stay here. But you must stay here. Or rather: “John Christie” has to stay where the police expect to find him during their investigation. You can be someone else, somewhere else. And your sample merchandise had better be somewhere else, lest the police find it in your custody. That would totally suck.

  Luckily, there’s a magical mystery tour in your phone that’ll take you out of John Christie’s panopticon-enforced sheep’s clothing and give you a new suit and a second shot at lift-off. But the sudden shortage of candidate executives for your business plan is disturbing: Finding two of them dead is not a coincidence. You need backup before you start digging for the killers. And you’re going to get very little of it until the Operation cleans up after that DoS attack.

  A plan begins to come together in your mind. You’ll renew your room for the rest of the week, but you won’t be there: You’re going to set up shop elsewhere. You’re going to go and buy new luggage and pick up your new papers, like Operation support told you to. Leave your old luggage with the sample merchandise parked with a useful idiot, just in case the police come snooping. Forward all calls, sanitize the room with a brisk spritz of sports stadium DNA, and all that’s left is the legal wrap-up: “John Christie” will still be staying in your hotel room, but you’ll be gone. Meanwhile, tonight there’s dinner—and hopefully baka sekusu with the Straight bitch for dessert.

  You’ve had better days, but this one is showing signs of improvement.

  The pad finishes downloading. You rename some files, point the browser at a malware site, and allow it to infect the machine, scrambling certain files to provide you with deniability if anyone searches it. Then you shove it in the room safe, pick up your meds, bling, and keyring, pull on a pair of glasses, pick up your case (with fully charged sample merchandise), and head out the door.

  Once you pair them with your skullphone, the glasses steer you across the main road and down a picturesque path that meanders through Princes Street Gardens, out of sight of the trams, around the base of the huge granite butt-plug on which the castle squats. The skullphone’s display is austere, basic: You can only cram so much intelligence into a gram of glucose fuel-cell-powered silicon leeching off your blood sugar and dissolved oxygen. A third of a mile later, you c
ross a bridge across the buried railway station, then through a slightly tatty subterranean shopping mall where you spend half an hour hunting for the necessities to replace your regular luggage. Half the storefronts are shuttered, victims of high-street flight. Climbing the Waverley Steps you pause, then turn right and cross the intersection with North Bridge. According to the messages queued in your chip, your new identity documents can be obtained from an office on the third floor of the huge pile of Gothic limestone within whose windows you can just see an eerily glowing glass cube.

  You walk through the revolving door and cross the lobby of the old post-office building to the glass-walled lifts that slide silently up and down within the echoing atrium. There’s a transparent airlock in front of the lift doors. “John Christie, for the honorary consul of the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan,” you say, as the outer door closes behind you. There’s a puff of air from the explosive detectors below, a beep, and the lift door opens before you. Thirty seconds later, you’re standing in a narrow corridor, outside a glass door and an entryphone. You push the buzzer. “Mr. Christie? Please come in, it’s the second office on the left,” says a Scottish-accented voice.

  You silently repeat your line as you walk along to the second door and arrive as a thirtyish British-Asian man in a cheap suit pulls it open and looks up at you with a peculiarly bovine expression. “What can I do for you?”

  “Colonel Datka sent me.” You can see the key turning in the lock behind his petrified eyes. “I’m here to collect some papers. And I have a little job for you.”