Rule 34 hs-2

by Charles Stross

  There was a time when, after working hours, you’d be off to the gym or auditing a distance-learning course or some other worthy pursuit. But these days, it’s hard to see the point anymore.

  The sad truth, which only dawned on you after you were fifteen years down this path, is that it doesn’t mean anything. Your job, your vocation, your life’s calling—you’re like a priest who awakens one day and realizes that his god has been replaced by a cardboard cut-out, and he’s no longer able to ignore his own disbelief. And, like the priest, you’ve sacrificed all hope of a normal life on the altar of something you no longer believe in.

  Heaven knows, it’s not as if the job doesn’t need doing. Fifteen years in the force has taught you more about the stupid, petty, vicious idiocy of your fellow humans than you ever wanted to know. (It’s also startled you—very occasionally—with their generosity, intelligence, and altruism. Very occasionally.)

  But policing, crime prevention and detection, is a Red Queen’s race: You have to run as fast as you possibly can just to stand still. You can collar criminals until the cows come home, and there’ll still be a never-ending supply of greedy fuckwits and chancers. It’s like there’s a law of nature: Not only is the job never done, the job can never be done.

  And then you hit your career derailment, passed over for promotion and sidelined into running the ICIU. And that’s even worse. The movies playing inside people’s heads every day are a million times nastier than what’s out on the streets. Your colleagues have got no fucking idea what people day-dream and fantasize about: It’s some kind of miracle you’re not dealing with a thousand Hungerford massacres a day, going by what ICIU shows you. The sad fact is, the actual crimes that are committed are a pale shadow of the things people fantasize about. Even the poor-impulse-control cases who clog up the holding cells at the sheriff’s court mostly have some rudimentary inhibitions that hold chaos at bay, most of the time.

  But for the past couple of years, it’s been sapping your will to live, never mind your ability to believe in the job.

  You’re just about thinking about retreating to the bedroom—a lonely end to a boring evening—when you get a text. It’s from Dorothy. How old-school, you think.

  YOU HOME? she asks.

  YES.

  CAN I COME ROUND? She capitalizes and uses correct written grammar, as formal as the way she dresses. NEED COMPANY.

  Your heart flip-flops at the promise of company. SURE, you send, trying not to sound over-excitable, and tag it with your address and directions. Check the time: It’s ten thirty, for heaven’s sake. Doesn’t she have to go to work tomorrow? Don’t you have to go to work tomorrow? Your heart flip-flops again, and suddenly you feel hot and bothered; but a cool, collected part of you asks, Didn’t you have a date for Saturday? Dorothy’s the planning kind. Why so sudden?

  BE RIGHT ROUND, she texts again. NEED TO TALK.

  You shove your tablet away hurriedly, start to run fingers through your hair, then stop. You’re a mess, and there’s no time to do anything about it. “Shit.”

  Precisely eight minutes and forty-two seconds later, the doorbell rings. It’s her, as you knew it would be. Swearing quietly, you buzz her up. The bed’s made, the sofa cushions are plumped, there’s coffee waiting in the cafetière in the kitchen if you need it, fuck knows what this is about but . . .

  You open the door. It’s Dorothy. She looks at you with red-rimmed eyes, steps forward into your open arms—and begins to weep.

  ANWAR: Sleep-walk

  The cops don’t so much let you go as politely direct you to the door with a stern admonition to keep out of their hair. There’s a crossed wire somewhere; they don’t seem to know whether to treat you as a victim of crime (Subtype: next of kin) or person of interest in ongoing investigation (Subtype: old lag).

  You’re numb inside by the time Inspector Butthurt finishes dragging the sorry story of Tariq’s business out of you. You ken you probably didn’t incriminate yourself overmuch, and as she pointed out, it’s a murder investigation—they don’t care about your probation as long as you’re not plotting any bank robberies—but after you finished spilling in her lap, she wheeled in her colleague, Chief Inspector McHaggis, who is an entirely different species of arsehole, with his radge attitude and aggressively bristling moustache. He glared at you like he’d found you stuck to the bottom of his size-twelve para boots and curtly told you that he’d be in touch and in the meantime please do something about your mother-in-law (who is still wailing up a storm in the kitchen whenever she remembers).

  Speaking of remembering, you remember phoning Bibi, who tells you to phone Imam Hafiz, so you phone the imam, who agrees to call your father-in-law, then come right round, and you wait on the street-corner for him to show up as, meanwhile, everyone in the local community wanders by, casually checking out the scene with their phonecams and occasionally pausing to tut-tut and share furtive condolences with you, all the time wondering if you are in fact some kind of serial killer and waiting for the police to come and arrest you. It is truly mortifying. And so, some hours later—when Bibi has efficiently squirreled numb-faced Taleb and his grieving bride away in one of the hotels on Lothian Road and organized a rota of hot-and-cold-running daughters-in-law and nieces to sit and keep them company through the long night—you tiptoe away to a certain pub on the far side of Calton Hill, where the Gnome is waiting for you with a warm pint and a quizzical stare.

  He glances at your face and shoves the beer in front of you. You take it wordlessly and chug most of it straight back. The Gnome looks concerned. “What kind of way is that to treat a pint?” he asks, then pauses, laboriously taking note of your face. “Ah, I see. Would you be in need of another?”

  You nod. He makes himself scarce in the direction of the bar (despite those stumpy legs, he can shift when he needs to) and you put the remains of your first pint down on the table and try to shove away the enormous hollowness behind your breastbone. It won’t budge. You glare at the pint. There’s maybe an answer of sorts to your dilemma hidden in the glass, but you’re not sure how to frame the question. To get blootered, or not to get blootered? (Bibi’ll scream at you if you come to bed legless and stinking of alcohol, but right now you don’t really care about that: plenty of time to shrug it off as an aberration later.) The real question is—why?

  A new glass, clone of the old one, appears under your nose. You nod. “Thank you.”

  “What’s the story?” the Gnome asks, not ungently.

  “My cousin Tariq’s dead,” you tell him, wanting the words to sting.

  Instead, the Gnome perks up. “Was it you who killed him?” he asks with pseudoprofessional cheer.

  “The Polis think it was murder.” You finish the first pint. The Gnome deflates, humour hissing away.

  “Oh, lad . . .”

  “I had a visit from one of Colonel Datka’s people this afternoon. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.”

  “Shite.” The brass-necked gears are turning behind his eyes. “What makes you say that?”

  “Tariq gave me a little job yesterday.” You take a first mouthful of the second pint. Your lips feel comfortably numb. “Testing a chunk of a web app, off-line.”

  “That’s no kind of connection, lad.” He pauses. “Coincidences happen.”

  You feel like punching him for a moment: “Coincidences like someone murdered him? Right after he gave me a wee job? While I have the attention of our friends from Bishkek?”

  You have the distinct sensation that Adam is giving you the hairy eye-ball. Wondering if you’re reliable. “What do you think the web app’s part of?”

  “Honey trap, front end for a botnet, something like that.” You take another sip. “Grow your penis, cheap off-license gene therapies for that annoying melanoma, holidays in the sun with added drivethru liver transplants, the usual.” In other words, it’s the same the usual that put you inside Saughton for a year.

  “And now Tariq’s dead? What happened?”

  �
��I don’t know. Got a call from Bibi, who heard it from Aunt Sammy, who found him. When I went round, I walked into a cop convention. They figured out soon enough it wasna me what did it.” You ken where this is going. “Don’t worry, I didn’t breathe your name. I had to cough to working on the side for Tariq, but I figure what he gave me isn’t majorly incriminating, and anyway, it’s a murder investigation. They won’t be blabbing to Mr. Webber.”

  The Gnome turns an even whiter shade of fish-belly pink than is his wont. “I’ll thank you for doing that much.” He raises his glass and drinks deeply. “Do you know how Tariq died?”

  “No.” The ignorance burns your throat. “They wouldn’t tell me anything, except that—except—” You can’t bring yourself to finish it.

  He leans forward. “Tell me about Colonel Datka’s man.”

  Adam is treating the shrapnel of your life like some kind of puzzle game, you realize, just like Inspector Butthurt. The momentary flash and sizzle of resentment nearly throws what’s left of your beer in his face. But what stills your hand is knowing that he’s trying to help, in his slightly askew borderline aspie way. Help: You need it. So you tell him.

  “He scared the shit out of me—even though he was polite. Eyes like a detective, you know? Only with a drum of unset concrete instead of handcuffs if you fucked him off.”

  “I do believe fear reveals your hitherto-unplumbed poetic depths.” The Gnome is scrutinizing you like he’s got you under a microscope. “What did he want?”

  “A padded envelope from the office safe. And a bag of bread mix.” You shiver. “He opened the envelope—there was a baggie in it, with a passport. Other papers. And he gave me a suitcase to take home. It’s got a combination lock. Said he may need to stay with me for a couple of days from tomorrow.” You shudder again. Those eyes.

  “Well, you’re in it now,” the Gnome observes calmly.

  “In what?”

  “That remains to be seen.” He leans forward. “But I’ve got a fair idea it means the end game is in train. Listen, can you lay your hands on five grand? Put it on credit if you have to, but you won’t be able to pay it back for a month.”

  “What has that got—”

  “It’s time to cash out.”

  “Eh?” You think fast. There’s the two grand you staked Uncle Hassan a couple of years ago, back before everything caught up with you—he’s probably good for at least one. Maybe more. You’ve still got your credit card, but in these deflationary times, you can only draw five hundred in cash against it. You could pawn some of Bibi’s jewellery to cover the rest, but she’s bound to notice, and she’ll want to know what you’re doing with the money. And hurrying right behind the hamster wheel spin of your financial calculations is your native suspicion of anyone asking you to cough up cash on the barrel for something too good to be true. “Why now, Adam? What’s the sudden hurry?”

  “The sudden hurry, dear boy, is that your employers didn’t go out looking to hire honorary consuls at not-inconsiderable cost on a whim; they obviously had a purpose in mind, and with a purpose goes a plan, and with a plan goes a time-table. I’ve been waiting for a sign that they were getting ready to go to the end game, and the arrival of your colonel’s man means things are about to get too hot for you to stay in the bathtub—you’ll be wanting out while the water’s still clean enough that the Polis aren’t taking an interest. So it’s time to cash out.”

  “And how precisely am I going to do that?”

  Adam bares his teeth at you. “You’re going to do as I tell you and short a particular national bank’s bonds. Trust me, you’ll make a killing . . .”

  There is no solace to be had in getting stinking drunk with the Gnome. So you take your less usual route home, up the hill and through the graveyard in search of a casual shag.

  There is a younger man up there, short-haired and heavily accented: a small-town incomer, escaping from the usual, but with his feet under him enough to know the places to haunt. You make brief small-talk before he leads you round the back of an overgrown crypt, then it’s hard up against the lichen-encrusted stone, tongues grappling hungrily and his hand down your trousers, squeezing your cock. He tastes of stale roll-ups and sweat, and when you go down on him, he washes away the memory of the day’s horror with furtive joy.

  After he sucks you off in turn, you stumble away in disarray, drained and feeling curiously vacant. You’re late, and you feel like a complete fraud. Some family man you are, with the touch of another’s lips on your bell-end. But at least Bibi isn’t there to stare at you in silent irritation or chide you for drinking again.

  When you get home, it’s quiet and empty. Your wife is off auntsitting and has taken the kids to run errands or something. There’s an uneaten portion of rice sitting in her fancy rice-cooker, and she’s left some daal in the karai, to go cold for you in silent reproach. You fumble through the kitchen drawers until you find what you’re looking for—a pair of plastic chopsticks (Bibi likes a Cantonese take-away once in a while)—then climb the stairs with heavy tread, pull down the attic hatch, and ascend, wondering what you’re going to find.

  Adam’s slid a dagger of curiosity between the slats of your misery and paranoia. Investment opportunities aside, it’s time to find out what the little fuck’s playing with.

  Your den is suffocatingly over-warm from the summer evening sun, and you feel ill at ease, as if your personal space is under siege. The stranger’s suitcase squats in the corner like an enemy garrison, a forbidding reminder of ill-advised treaties. Tariq’s old pad sprawls out from behind the fridge. You stretch the metaphor until you see the fallen tombstone of a forgotten soldier and shiver despite the heat. The brewing bucket lies where you left it, under the beam of early-evening sunlight sluicing through the Velux: There’s a yeasty smell in the air like rising bread dough, and the wee airlock thingy sticking up from the lid burps an alien curse as you stare at it.

  It’s a fab of sorts, the Gnome told you. A new kind of fab, or a really old one, depending on your perspective. Transmutation, liquid bread, water of life, al-kuhl. Not like the desktop fabs Tariq and his mates are using to run off air-guns and sex toys these days.

  This is about using yeast cells as a platform for synthetic biology. As the Gnome explained it to you at great length—there will be an exam later, Anwar—in normal cells there’s DNA, which is transcribed into RNA, which in turn is used as a punched-card template by protein-manufacturing machines called ribosomes. Each three words of DNA data—codons—correspond to a single amino acid out of a palette of twenty-one; the ribosomes read the codons, grab amino acids bound to carrier molecules out of the soupy intracellular medium, and glue them together to form new proteins or enzymes.

  But in these cells there’s a whole new biology. It uses four codons to represent a much wider range of amino acids, many of which are entirely artificial. Some of them code for the protein components of the molecular assembly line that replaces the boring Nature 1.0 ribosomes in the mechanosystem; others code for enzymes that synthesize the exotic new amino acids the synthetic biochemistry runs on. There’s bootstrap code written for old-style ribosomes to get the new system up and running: That’s what the health-food supplement switched on. Once it’s running, the yeast cells are redundant, just a convenient platform for servicing the nanosystem.

  Not that this is about shiny Star Trek nanites. Oh no, we’re not that advanced. Nanotechnology is the shiny new magic dessert topping /floor wax/pixie dust of tomorrow, and always will be. This stuff is just synthetic biochemistry, with some funky new tools for handling buckytubes and exotic amino acids. Nothing strange about it at all, except that it’s bubbling away in the bucket in the corner of your den and it smells like money, which is always enough to secure your exclusive attention.

  What’s in the bucket, Anwar?

  Adam gave you some helpful pointers. If it’s full of yellow crystalline sediment, back away slowly—but no, that’s not so likely. You glance over your shoulder at the intr
uder’s suitcase, but it just sits there, eyeless and unspeaking. Too many ideas are jostling in your head, seeking attention. Bread Mix. Colonel Datka’s man. Tariq’s chat room. The stuff you didn’t tell Inspector Butthurt about: Tariq’s unhealthy interest in making sure his chat-room environment wasn’t as well guarded against malware as it looked, his secret VPN access to the webcrime bulletin boards, plausible deniability. And then there are the dark suspicions you don’t dare voice even to yourself as yet: How accidental is all this? Where did Adam hear about the Issyk-Kulistan gig?

  Thoughts fermenting in your head, you lever up the rim of the bucket lid and look inside.

  The bucket smells of old socks and the broken promises of a hostile future, musty and somehow warm. You peer in and see only dirty greybrown water, a scum adhering to its surface, bubbles forming at the edges: It’s slightly iridescent, as if you’d spilled a drop of diesel oil on top. Is that all? you think, disappointed, and dip the chopsticks in it.

  The kitchen utensils don’t spontaneously catch fire, or dissolve, or morph into brightly coloured machine parts. You stir the scum on the surface around a bit, and it crinkles and crumples against them; then you pull them out again. A rope of congealed filmy scum sticks to the chopsticks, dribbling water back into the bucket.

  “Yuck.” You raise the chopsticks, and the floating sheet dangles from them, mucilaginous, like an elephant-sized snotter. You cast them aside, and they curl together, landing on the carpet in a stringy mass under the window. You clamp the lid down on the bucket of spoiled whatever-it-is and shake your head. Probably you’ll have to take it downstairs, pour it down the toilet—hope the Environmental Health wardens don’t have surveillance robots lurking in the sewers. It’d be just your luck to be busted for possession of an illegal chemical factory. Assuming the thing hasn’t died or been infected by sixty kinds of bacteria.