Interlude 1
KEMAL: Spamcop
Welcome to the postnational age.
Here you are, sitting in the window-seat of a creaky old Embraer as it makes its final approach into Edinburgh airport, banking over the tidal barrage and the wind farms in the Firth of Forth: It’s been five years since your only previous visit, and not long enough by far.
Eggs and spam.
Back then, you had the glamour and the mojo, the whole Men in Black thing working for you: the Europol supercop from l’Organisation pour Nourrir et Consolider L’Europe, travelling with a tiger team of forensic analysts and a digitally signed email from the Judge d’Inquisition to hand in case you needed to steam-roller your way across the objections of a provincial police force who didn’t realize what they were dealing with. Except things went terribly wrong—the national-security dinosaurs rising from their uneasy sleep, opening the closet doors to draw forth a conga line of dancing skeletons. It still gives you the cold shudders, thinking about the ease with which a couple of teams of coke-fuelled black-hat Shanghainese hackers rooted the network backbones of a pair of peripheral states: And the shit you stumbled into out here on the edge of the North Sea was as nothing compared to what your colleagues had to clean up in Gdansk and Warsaw. Not to mention the chewing out your boss François gave you during your performance eval the following spring. Black marks on the Man in Black’s record. And the rudeness of the Scottish police—that really rankled. Professional respect: Have these people never heard of it?
Eggs, ham, and spam.
The plane’s wings buzz angrily as flaps extend: The wave-crests are an endless tessellation of white triangles below, marred by the wake of a sailboat. Four years in career limbo, reassigned to Business Affairs and buried leech deep in the bowels of the Department of Internet Fraud. Four years spent in a pokey little office in a corner of Madou Plaza Tower, where flies buzz madly beneath the chilly glare of LED spotlights, patiently paging through reams of spam in search of the websites of the idiots who pay to rent botnets by the hour—
Eggs, ham, sausage, and spam.
Some say the Internet is for porn; but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam. As communication technologies got cheaper, the cost of grabbing a megaphone and jamming it up against the aching ear-drums of an advertising-jaded public collapsed: Meanwhile, the content-is-king mantra of the monetization mavens gridlocked the new media in an advertising-supported business model. The great and the good of the Academy have been fighting a losing battle against the Anglo-Saxon hucksterization model for the past thirty years: But the sad truth is that the battle’s lost. The tide of war was turned in Beijing and New Delhi, when the rapidly industrializing new superpowers climbed on the MAKE MONEY FAST band-wagon and gave free rein to the free market, red in tooth and claw—just as long as the sharp bits were directed outwards. And today the entire world is still drowning in a sea of attention-grabbing unregulated unethical untruthful spamvertising.
Spam, ham, sausage, and spam.
The white-noise roar of the cabin air-conditioning is augmented by a new noise, the wind rush from around the open nose-wheel door as the landing gear drops.
Most of the public don’t notice it, but the war on spam goes ever on, and it’s a war on two fronts. One front, your own, is fought by battalions of law-enforcement officers and prosecutors. The most egregious junk sells hard goods—stuff with a physical shipping address—to the vulnerable; fake pharmaceuticals to die by, trashy Tanzanian machine-tool parts, unlicensed herbal supplements from Nigeria, counterfeit designer clothes and handbags and heart valves made of shoe-leather. They show up, you order the goods, backtrace through courier and logistics to the mother-lode, obtain a warrant, pop goes the weasel, round and round the merry-go-round.
Spam, eggs, spam, spam, ham, and spam.
The brigades of system administrators and programmers on the other front tackle the problem from the opposite end, with ever-more-elaborate AI filters that scan message traffic and tell ham from spam. Ninety-five per cent of all human-readable traffic over the net is spam, a figure virtually unchanged since the late noughties. There are dumb filters and smart filters. Dumb filters look for naughty words. Smart filters look for patterns of diction that are characteristic of automatically assembled text—for much spam is generated by drivel-speaking AI, designed purely to fool the smart filters by convincing them that it’s the effusion of a real human being and of interest to the recipients. Slowly but surely the Turing Test war proceeds, as the spammers are forced to invest in ever-more-elaborate AI engines to generate conversations that can temporarily convince the spamcops’ AI engines that they are in fact human beings.
Spam, sausage, spam, spam, spam, ham, spam, potato, and spam.
And still you’re losing.
There’s a bump and rumble, and you’re shoved forward against your lap-belt as the regional jet’s thrust reversers cut in. Welcome to the Republic of Scotland, semi-privatized satrapy of the former United Kingdom and sock-puppet independent vote on the Council of Ministers—soon to acquire the extra clout of a pair of senators, once the tedious ratification treaty completes and the European Parliament upgrades to a fully bicameral legislature. You’re back, and this time you don’t have a posse of high-powered forensic analysts behind you, or diplomatic letters of marque and reprise, or much of anything in fact: just a dossier, a disturbing-to-terrifying trend analysis from a research team in the Sorbonne, and a suggestive pattern of murders smeared bloody-handed across the width and depth of the EU.
Spam, spam, spam, murder, and spam.
Seventy years of research and development into artificial intelligence failed to deliver HAL 9000, but they did provide a huge array of toolkits for tackling complex problems. Today, in the wake of the bursting of the worldwide higher-education bubble, the big funding sources in computational artificial-intelligence research are computer games and cognitive marketing services, from personalized message generation to automated spear phishing. Some say the spammers are pouring more money into Minsky’s inheritors than the US Department of Defense ever imagined. The spamcops retaliate. There’s an arms race in progress, and some experts mutter dark warnings of the Spamularity: the global chaos that will ensue once the first distributed spamming engine achieves human-equivalent sentience. Possibly the only thing holding it back is the multi-tiered nature of the darknet economy: Malware that supports spamware frequently carries virus-scanning payloads that immunize host computers and phones against rival strains of infection. After all, it’s a free-market economy, red in tooth and claw: And if you can’t count on a state to keep the opposition in check, you’ve got to see to your security yourself.
Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked memes, spam, spam, spam, and spam.
This week, for the first time in a couple of years, the machine-generated spew has faltered significantly. Most of the usual darknets are still vomiting forth the gibber fantastic, but their core semantic networks aren’t updating: It’s the same flavour of froth as last week’s, and thereby easier to filter out. No new botnets have surfaced, switching from build-out to broadcast mode: There has been a curious absence of new malware strains. Spam has actually fallen. It would be glad tidings, indeed, if not for the puzzling question of why. And those unsolved killings. Which is what your superiors have sent you to look into in Edinburgh: They skimmed the bullet point in your résumé and mistakenly assumed you’d be at home here, able to work hand in glove with the locals. Truly the jaws of irony are agape!
The battle against spam had grown into a bitter trench war fought on two fronts—and now a new front has been opened. Someone—or more worryingly, some thing—seems to have adopted a draconian approach to the problem you and yours have failed to solve in nearly four decades. And the question that everyone is worrying about is: Whatever next?
Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! Lovely Spam! Nothing but spam!
FELIX: First Citizen
When the First Citizen has a bad n
ight’s sleep, he likes to share.
You have been recalled to the capital on urgent business—certain currency-triangulation transactions require your personal biometric signature, as one of the trustees of the national bank—and so it is no major surprise when your morning starts with the plaintive tweedle of the satphone. It sits on one of the fake Louis Quatorze bedside tables in your hotel suite. You roll over, dislodging the blonde Ukrainian girl from her death grip on the bolster (Why is she still here? Doesn’t she have a bed of her own to go to?), and pick up the handset.
“Colonel Datka, sir? This is Eagle’s Nest.”
“Yes, yes,” you say irritably, trying to focus on the illuminated dial of the alarm clock. It’s four thirty, but when the Eagle’s Nest calls, it is rash to hang up. “What is it?”
“His Excellency is asking for you. Are you presentable? We have a car en route.”
Shit, you think. Is Bhaskar all right? You recognize the voice at the other end of the line: It’s one of the First Citizen’s regular bodyguards, Dmitry something, an ethnic Russian. (Minor reassurance: A stranger’s voice would be worrying.) “I will be ready in five minutes,” you say, and stifle a fear-threaded yawn. “Is there anything I should be prepared for?”
“I don’t think so.” Dmitry sounds uncertain. “He had a very disturbed night. The usual, is all.”
“I’ll be ready,” you reassure the man, and hang up. The brunette has noticed your usual morning stiffening and is rubbing her lips against your manhood, but you have other needs: You shove her face away and clamber across her, pad past the empty champagne bucket towards the en suite bathroom. The solid silver urinal in the shape of a gaping, open-mouthed cherub swallows your steaming piss-stream. “Make yourselves useful and find me some clean underwear,” you grunt at the girls. “I have an appointment with the First Citizen.”
“Yes, Colonel,” they echo, with the precisely correct degree of respect tinged with awe. They’re almost annoyingly well-trained. Say anything you like about the plumbing: The Erkindik Hotel front desk supplies the best whores in Bishkek, if not the whole of Kyrgyzstan.
Ten minutes later, you’re presentable, in the uniform of a colonel in the Army Intelligence Directorate, gold braid and red shoulder tabs and three rows of brightly polished medals—no less than is your due—as you head downstairs to the hotel lobby. (Bhaskar offered to promote you to lieutenant general a couple of times, but only halfway down the vodka bottle: Tact—or prudence—has kept you from reminding him of this when he’s sober. In any case, chief of military overseas intelligence is a colonel’s position in these half-assed times: You don’t want to give General Medvedev cause to think you’re making a play for his job.)
Two black-suited fellows from the presidential security detachment are waiting for you in the lobby. Four more stand on the sidewalk by the beetle-shiny armoured Mercedes. They see you safely on board, and seconds later you’re slamming through the deserted predawn boulevards of the capital in the middle of a convoy of armed pick-up trucks, blue lights flickering off the concrete frontages to either side, your armed guards scanning for threats with gunsight eyes.
The American has weaselled his way into your entourage again. (Let him have his illusory privilege of access: It’s so much easier to keep an eye on him when he thinks he’s keeping an eye on you.) He’s sitting in the middle jump-seat opposite, clutching his pad in both hands like a determined chipmunk who refuses to give up his nut. “What is it this time?” you ask, staring pointedly at him.
“It’s the exchange rate.” Blue fireflies flicker and gleam inside his rimless glasses. “All it takes is a two-point fluctuation, and we lose a hundred million on the exchanges.” He doesn’t smile. How long is it since you could always tell an American by their smile? Good dentistry is expensive: Flashing bright teeth in these straitened times is like wearing a jacket that says MUG ME. “Can you talk him out of it?”
You suppress a sigh. “You seem to think Bhaskar is a tame bullock, to be herded this way and that. He isn’t, and if you persist in this mode of thinking, he will give you a nasty surprise.”
The American’s lips curl. “Who’s running this, you or the Operation?” he asks. “Without our collateral, you’d be—”
You smile without showing your teeth. He stops chittering, gratifyingly fast. Chipmunk-American has seen a pit viper. “We are duly grateful to our investors. Nevertheless, you will refrain from discussing the First Citizen in language more appropriate to cattle. Without his continuing patronage, your operation is nothing. We are not stupid, Mr. White. If you didn’t need our special expertise, you wouldn’t be engaged in this joint venture with, ah, those ‘crazy Kyrgyz.’”
It’s hard to tell if Mr. White blanches in the strobing glow of the street-lamps and the blue LEDs of the lead escort, but your choice of words echoes his own language. Stupid little geek probably imagines you’ve cracked the encryption on his secure VoIP link, forgetting who owns all the bandwidth in and out of both countries—both Kyrgyzstan and the recession-hit sock puppet in the East that he’s using for his little logistics operation. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“Leave Bhaskar to me,” you reassure him. “And leave the currency-stabilization talks alone. Your concerns are noted, and I agree—it would be absolutely deplorable to lose a hundred million euros of your money through inattention. Nevertheless, attempting to micromanage the First Citizen would be unwise. Trust me on this: I’ve known him for more than forty years.” Since you were both in the Young Pioneers together, back in the dog days of the Soviet Union.
You consider saying more to the creep, promising a little something to sweeten the deal and keep suckering him in, but at that point the convoy slows, and the car turns sharply, nosing over a recessed barrier and down a steep ramp into an underground security check-point and parking garage. It’s under the back of the New Wing, across the street from the White House—Bhaskar’s office and bachelor pad, a hideous lump of white marble that looks like a tax office fucking an airport terminal.
You leave the Operation’s representative sitting in the limo as the guards salute and wave you forward across the crimson carpet and into the elevator with the best Korean terahertz radar and explosive sniffers hidden in its walnut-veneered walls. Then it’s into the corridor under the road, and another elevator that whisks you upstairs—then down another corridor that serves as a security firebreak for the guards on Bhaskar’s private quarters to check you out, and finally another elevator. Then the doors slide open, and you’re in Xanadu.
Xanadu is three stories high, ten metres on a side, and occupies about an eighth of the presidential palace’s floor-plan. It’s mounted on shock-absorbers driven into bed-rock and hermetically sealed from the rest of the White House by steel plates embedded in the walls: an insulated bubble of purest lunacy, the personal quarters of the First Citizen of the Republic of Kyrgyzstan. Whoever designed it was clearly channelling Samuel Coleridge on dodgy pharmaceuticals by way of Norman Foster rather than the ghost of Kublai Khan, but beggars—and First Citizens—can’t be choosers: It came to light after you’d finished kicking that bum Adskhan into exile in Prague. Personally, if it had been you, you’d have demolished the thing rather than sleep in it, but after the second assassination attempt, Bhaskar got the message and retreated inside his predecessor’s hermetically sealed pleasure dome.
You find him sitting in the sunken circular seat with the fish-tank floor and pink leather cushions, wearing one of those Japanese dressinggown things and looking morose. There are bags under his eyes, and he has neglected to shave. His big, bony feet splay across the glass, footprints for the rainbow carp to gape and mouth at from beneath. “Is it morning?” he asks hopefully.
“It will be, soon.” You carefully descend the steps—you’ve never trusted that glass floor not to dump you in the water—and embrace, cheek to cheek. “Are you well, brother? What’s troubling you?”
“I can’t sleep.” The First Citizen—you remember playing “
tag” in the woods out behind the apartment block you both lived in—looks despondent. “The pills aren’t helping. I feel like I’m going mad at times, let me tell you. It’s this artificial light: I never see the sun these days. Bad dreams, whenever I manage to get to sleep.” He rubs his index finger alongside his crooked, slightly splayed nose.
“We should get you a woman—” You stop when you see the look in his eyes. He hasn’t been the same since Yelena died. Some men need all the women they can get, but for others, one is all they want for a lifetime. “Or a bottle of vodka? And some dirty videos. When did we last kick back with a good movie?”
Now his shoulders relax. “I’m supposed to tutor a meeting of the All-Republic Commission on Finance this afternoon,” he says quietly. “Most of those fucking peasants wouldn’t know a credit default swap if it bit them on the bell-end. And listen, they aren’t paying me to teach macroeconomics at the state academy anymore. Those bastards, if they were my students, they’d be heading for a ‘fail.’ All they can think of is lining their own pockets. What the fuck do they care about the future?”
“The committee will still be there tomorrow, and the day after,” you point out. “Send a reliable deputy . . .” Now you understand the expression. “What is it?”
“What indeed?” He raises an eyebrow. “It’s the future. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.”
“What?”
“Listen.” The First Citizen glances away. “Suppose I ordered you to arrest the American, the investment agent. No reason given, just shut his little crime syndicate down right now and bugger the big picture. Would you do it?”
“For you, boss? Of course, in a split instant.” You shrug. “Of course, it would make a real mess,” you add, conspiratorially: Subtext, you’d completely fuck over our past two years’ work.
“Right, right.” Bhaskar limply punches the open palm of his left hand, winces slightly from the carpal tunnel syndrome that’s plagued him for decades. “You’d do it, but first you make sure I am fully informed as to the consequences.” (Little does he truly appreciate the real risks involved: It’s your job to protect your unworldly genius of a childhood friend from the real-world consequences of such a whim. To ensure that when it’s time for you to bring the hammer down and Bhaskar to fix the deficit, there are no overlooked survivors with enough money to pay for assassins.) “I’m not asking you to do that. But the point is, at least I know where you stand. You’re not afraid to tell me. But those fuckers on the all-state council? That rat-bag Kurmanbek smiles like a vulture and makes nicey-nicey noises, but do you think he’d lend me a horse if my pony was lamed—”
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