Rule 34 hs-2

by Charles Stross

  Less reclusive than some, Al and Eileen sent the kids to school, dealt with the devil under duress—Al did gun shows, trading and fixing partially deactivated weapons: He even filed tax returns now and then—meanwhile they hunkered down, waiting for the storm. There was no Internet and no television in the bunker. There was always plenty of work to fill idle hands, and a beating as final punctuation for insolent questions.

  You learned what was expected of you very quickly after the first day. No back-chat, a “yessir” or “yes, ma’am” to Uncle Al or Aunt Eileen’s orders, and keep your thoughts to yourself. The beatings fell off, became a random threat, a necessary dominance ritual. Al and Eileen treated their girls no less harshly, and Sara for one was always in trouble, unable to keep her yap shut: You remember the time Al broke her arm, and went on whacking her while she hollered with pain until Eileen realized what was wrong and scolded him into splinting it. Elizabeth, older and sneakier, was the snitch: You learned that fast.

  And then there was Kitty, the youngest, aged six. You figured out how to use little Kitty to get what you wanted: Al and Eileen seemed to approve of their girls helping you out, helping you fit in, never quite realizing that their training cut both ways—they’d taught the girls to obey, out of fear, anyone stronger than they were. Including you.

  You learned other things. Learned how to darn socks, shoot and strip an AR-15, identify a helicopter, plant a trip-wire. After a year, they enrolled you in school, ferried you to the bus-stop daily with the girls. It was impressed upon you that book larnin’ was a privilege which could be withdrawn for any perceived deficiency: And what happened in the compound stayed in the compound, on pain of . . . pain.

  Uncle Albert probably thought he was doing a good job, beating the devilish inheritance of his jail-bird brother out of you. He had no idea how close to death’s jagged edge he stood, how you’d memorized every step between your room and the kitchen, which floorboards squeaked when you stood on them: committed to memory exactly where the hurricane lantern and the kerosene were stored, the matches, the doorway, and the peg to lock their bedroom window shutters from the outside.

  The rest is largely a blur: Even this much is reconstructed laboriously and painstakingly from the wreckage piled inside your skull.

  What stopped you from doing the deed, even then, was a rudimentary cost/benefit analysis. You couldn’t drive, and even if you could, you’d have had nowhere obvious to go—not with Mom dead and Dad in the big house for the foreseeable future for cutting the brake pipes. (The significant absence of Grandma and Grandpa on your paternal side did not escape you: Perforce, the family that preys together stays together.) And so you decided to bide your time until a suitable exit strategy presented itself.

  As it turned out, you didn’t have to wait all that long. Three years after you arrived, Uncle Al finally succumbed to The Lure of the Internet and traded an elderly shotgun and a gallon of white lightning for a hot (in more senses than one) laptop with a modem. He’d been hearing about these BBS things for years from his pals on the militia circuit, and figured he ought to take a look-see. You and the girls didn’t get anywhere near Al’s PC—for Internet access you were restricted to the school’s rickety roomful of 486s, forced to expend tedious amounts of energy circumventing the district’s brain-dead net nanny—but from afar you watched as Al made quite a stink, talking somewhat more freely than he should have. Scratch that: With online friends like Jim Bell and his assassination politics shtick, Al clearly didn’t realize that he was breaking cover in a big way. But he lost interest rapidly and gave up dialling into AOL after a few months. And he probably thought that was that.

  You were in school the day the Men in Black finally descended on the fuhrerbunker with a search warrant and the county sheriff’s deputy in tow. (Surprise: The county wasn’t on Al’s side against the perfidious feds—perhaps if he’d paid his property taxes a little more promptly, things could have turned out differently.)

  They called you into the principal’s office while it was happening, and you sat there obediently, just like a serious and sober kid—the kind who would never dream of figuring out his guardian’s password, logging in, and emailing ranting threats of physical mayhem to the IRS agents who were threatening Al with an audit because he’d declared an income of under five hundred bucks for the third year running.

  The raid was inevitably followed by a brisk exchange of opinions— 9mm for .357—followed by the arrival of a disappointingly non-black helicopter to evacuate Uncle Albert to the nearest trauma unit, where he was declared dead three hours later. But even in dying, Uncle Al tried to fuck you up. The coroner’s verdict wasn’t even suicide by cop: The last, most unforgivable insult Uncle Al heaped on you was to shoot off the top of his own brain-pan, thus neatly side-stepping the embarrassment of actually leaving Eileen, you, and the girls anything by way of his cheap life-insurance policy. (Even if Eileen hadn’t been on her way to jail on her own behalf for greeting the sheriff’s man with a .22 rifle.)

  Anyway, you ended up in the children’s home for a while, and that’s when they discovered the bruises. You put on a good show, wailed the walls down describing precisely how you’d been beaten, and they listened to you. Then they decided to put you on antipsychotic medication and anti-depressants, because obviously what you were describing made no sense, and you were disturbed and clearly at risk of self-harm. Between the cuts to the children’s home budget and the second-rate quacks at the hospital, there was no budget for proper neurological screening or consultation. So there was no oversight when Dr. Hobbes signed you up for a clinical trial of a new high-specificity D2 blocker being pushed by his favourite supplier of gold-plated fountain pens. And you learned to keep taking the pills, because after a month on AL93560, if you stopped taking them the rape machines hiding in the bushes outside your window would whisper unspeakable propositions to you by dead of night.

  But then your luck changed, in an unbelievable and positive direction.

  Who knew people had two sets of grandparents? Not you, that was for sure!

  Dad’s parents were safely dead, and Mom had never mentioned whose crotchfruit she was in your presence—leaving you with a blind spot so fundamental that you’d never even noticed it until they turned up at the supervisor’s office one morning and asked for you.

  “He poisoned your ma against us,” Grandma Jane said sadly, when you asked her about it—much later, of course. “I knew from the first that he wasn’t right in the head, and I tried to tell her, but she wouldn’t listen. And he frightened her! He wouldn’t even let her email. God knows what he did to make her put up with him—brainwashing, probably. But we found you in the end. Found you in time to rescue you. Praise the Lord.”

  Jane and Frank were retirees, but only just (still in their sixties) when they found you, much as they’d found Jesus in the traumatic aftermath of losing their daughter to Satan’s godson two decades ago. They weren’t rich enough to travel widely, but they’d planned their retirement with care, and they had a decent home and two big cars to park outside it. Too bad that in the gaps between her church activities and his golfing afternoons, they were looking for something to patch the hole in their hearts—a hole just exactly the right size for a cuckoo.

  Having just had your second family disintegrate under you, you weren’t about to let this particular gift horse get away. Jane and Frank had driven cross-country to rescue you from the paint-peeling orphanage in Lovelock, planning to whisk you away to suburban Phoenix. It was the least you could do to be their duly grateful grandson. No need to mention Elizabeth, Sara, and Kitty, all in similar straits: You couldn’t possibly impose on Jane and Frank’s generosity on their behalf.

  And so you arrived in Phoenix in the company of grandparents 2.0. And you were duly appreciative of this third chance at a stable family life that fate had handed you, and you resolved not to break it by accident.

  It is now late morning, the day after. You’re still waiting for the fucktards
at head office to get you an appointment with the mad professor, and there’s no point bugging the Hussein mark while he’s at work. So it looks like you have a few hours off. Might as well go tour the city centre, hit a cafe, have a latte, sketch out your plan for world domination. Stalking-horse, of course, but if it suckers the enemy in, who cares?

  The weather’s good as you walk along Princes Street; shame about all the shuttered shop-fronts and the builders everywhere, stripping away the mother-of-pearl accretions of architectural history to reveal the Georgian skeleton of the road. With most of the surviving shop chains moving to out-of-city retail parks—those that haven’t succumbed to online stores and custom fabrications—the once-vibrant commercial high street is being flensed of commerce and turned back into an aspic-preserved tourist draw, a false-colour reconstruction of its late-eighteenth-century youth.

  That’s all it’s good for, of course: If it was up to you, you’d bulldoze the lot of it, stick in a link road between the M8 and the A1(M), and a shopping mall featuring a thirty-metre-high pink marble statue of yours truly buggering a lizard. But these effete pseudo-Brits have never been too clear on the importance of thinking big, or the grand gesture for that matter. There’s that bloody stone-spike memorial to a writer, of all things—and the statues of philosophers! What the fuck is all that about?

  You people-watch as you walk, ever alert for the alien menace. A police drone buzzes dismally above the high-speed rail terminal below the castle; closer to home, an arsehole in a kilt makes cat-strangling noises with the aid of a sack of pipes, squawking every time he changes note. These are street performers, constructing the dialectic of urban civilization—the watcher and the self-consciously watched. Here’s a human robot in silver spray paint and make-up, twitching to archaic German synthrock. There’s a white-faced girl in a pouffed-up wedding dress standing on a plinth, pretending to be a statue because if you can’t dance and can’t sing, what fucking use are you? If they had any kind of audience, you’d be tempted to practice the lightfinger tricks you taught yourself at high school, but alas, the crowd’s not thick enough—and anyway, you’ve got bigger targets in mind than a careless tourist’s wallet.

  You stick to the shuttered shops on the built-up side of the street, keeping to the far side of the tram tracks from the gardens—too many bushes, hiding-places for the enemy abduction machines. The battlements of the castle loom blindly above the seething insectile urban hive, the sash-windows and solar-powered street-lamps, the slippery slate roofs and the sandstone bricks of the eighteenth-century town houses creeping back into view as the ants scurry and chop away at the retail-age encrustation.

  You’ve come a long way from Phoenix, from the dying suburbs and the empty houses, gouged-out windows staring like eye-sockets across the Astroturf lawns the despairing Realtors laid before them: well-dressed corpses awaiting resurrection, secure in their faith in cheap gas and a Horatio Alger-esque resurgence in global competitiveness.

  You didn’t realize at first that Jane and Frank were rescuing you for a castaway adolescence in a city where the price of housing had crashed 70 per cent in ten years. Phoenix wasn’t dead like Detroit; the climate made it a natural for snowbirds, put a floor under the ailing economy. Geography made it a natural for immigrants from the south. But white-middle-class flight driven by the soaring price of gas and power left the schools half-shuttered and decaying, the malls semiempty and desolate. Your pallid skin marked you out as alien, so after a few unfortunate early incidents, Jane and Frank plugged you into the homeschooling network. It was safer than entrusting your lily-white ass to the razor wire and watch-towers, metal detectors and Taserarmed guards on all the schoolrooms; the school board were determined to train the children of the future majority appropriately for a lifetime of providing gainful employment for jail guards. So you spent half your life in hikikomori retreat with your computer and distance-learning coursework, and the other half running wild. Jane and Frank didn’t much mind. As long as you kept your room clean and called them sir and ma’am, they thought the world of you.

  At night you flensed lizards and pinned the twitching bodies out on posts to warn the rape machines off. Some afternoons, you’d take off on your bike, pedalling out past the empty suburbs into the graves of aborted communities, where the dirt was gridded out for houses that never came. Beneath the summer sun, you’d shoot imaginary schoolmates with your BB gun, and later with Frank’s old .22 rifle. You had to be careful with the latter: Once or twice the noise attracted cops, like a swarm of flashing blue and red hornets converging on a dropped sandwich. But they never caught you: You were wary, and Uncle Al’s training stood you in good stead.

  You made up for the lack of schoolyard socialization in other, darker ways. There were squatters in some of the half-abandoned suburbs, embryonic favelas and hippy communes growing like mushrooms on the corpse of the middle-class dream. The ones that survived more than a few weeks or a single visit from the Border Patrol were on the net and wired to the future: There were business opportunities here, an informal economy to raise money for bribes. Invisibility was expensive. And that in turn meant business opportunities for kids like you. Your peers were mostly dumb, ignorant fucks who didn’t understand the risks and couldn’t imagine what could go wrong. You? Not so dumb, alarmingly precocious in your ability to take on responsible tasks—and utterly conscienceless. It was a combination that appealed to Riccardo, with his regular consignments of cocaine: And later on it appealed to Ortiz, with his far-more-valuable incubators full of unregulated A-life cultures, and Jerome, with the botnet and the fast-switching domains and the kidsnuff websites starring dumb, ignorant drifters whose luck had run out.

  Over the course of another three years you came to the attention of the Operation, who offered you a scholarship and a signing bonus and, best of all, co-founder equity if you’d let them guide your talents and find you a suitable start-up to run.

  Which brings you back to Edinburgh, and a sunlit morning in the New Town, and the phone in your head buzzing for attention.

  “Yo.” You lick your lips as your eyes drift past a couple of cottontops to strip-search a MILF: “Able November.” It’s about 4:00 A.M. in California. This ought to be good.

  “Afternoon, son. This is Control. Listen, I got the memo. I like the way you think, and if things were different, I’d say go for it. But right now our top priority is this MacDonald dude. We thought we had an arrangement, but we have some fresh intel this morning about what else he’s doing with his ATHENA project, and it is disturbing. We think he is shorting us. So I’m going to IM you his address, and I want you to go there right now. I’ve got a list of questions we want answers to and, and then you need to, uh, downsize him.”

  You nearly trip over a loose paving slab. “I’m already on a police investigation’s radar! Are you trying to burn me?”

  “Uh, no—” Control, Wendy’s boss, splutters for a moment. “We’re gonna hang the frame on the bad guys who are attacking us. After downsizing, I want you to go to your fall-back position—you got one, aintcha?—go to that mattress. They’re spreading so much shit that nobody’s going to notice another body when this goes down. We’ll get you out of Scotland in the back of a truck or a boat if we have to. Your DNA sample—there are ways of getting it cross-linked to another record, muddy the waters. Listen, I appreciate this sucks. It’s your operation, the business reboot, and it’s fucked before it got started, but, listen to this, if you do what we need here with MacDonald, we’ll make it worth your while. We gotta hold off ATHENA while the Issyk-Kulistan op winds down and you, you’re inside I.K. now, like it or not. We want you to tie up the loose ends in Edin-burg. Which means talking to Dr. MacDonald, then paying off that consul guy.”

  “The honourary consul?” You inadvertently make eye contact with a small child: It cringes away, grabbing onto its oblivious mother’s hand for dear life. You hadn’t mentioned the mark in your report: It’s always best to keep your bolt-holes private. “What
does he have to do with it?”

  “Mid-tier distribution hub, son. He’s seen too much—the footsoldiers and the general both. He may not know what he’s seen, but if he spills his guts, someone else might put it all together. Plus, MacDonald recruited him.”

  “MacDonald—” You stop yourself. Bits of the jigsaw are slotting together, and you don’t like the pattern they’re making. The earlier plan, to stick Hussein’s head above the parapet to attract enemy fire—sounds like he is the enemy. Or part of it. Working for the enemy. Who have infiltrated the Operation more deeply than you had imagined. “Okay, you want me to give MacDonald an exit interview, then downsize the consul.” Anwar, isn’t it?

  “Exactly, son.” Control sounds warmly approving. “You can do that? Afterwards, the world is your oyster. Just saying.”

  “I can do that,” you assure him. It’ll be a pleasure. It’s been a long time since you last peeled a frog.

  FELIX: E-commerce

  Bhaskar may have his high-rise presidential pleasure dome to squat and gibber in, but it is beholden to you—both in your capacity as chief of overseas military intelligence, and the other hat that you wear—to run your operations from a hole in the ground.

  This particular hole in the ground is operated by the headquarters of the Twenty-second Guards Cyberwar Shock Battalion, who inherited it by way of a long and convoluted history of turf warfare and empire building from the former Soviet RSVN, who built it as part of their strategic nuclear dead man’s handle system. It’s buried two hundred metres under a mountain, in a series of rusting, dank, metal-lined tunnels that have long since outlived their original function. Ten years ago, funded by the last gasp of the oil money, your last-but-one predecessor had the nuclear command centre gutted and flood-filled with the latest high-bandwidth laser networking: Today its cheap-ass Malaysian Cisco knockoffs pack a trillion times the bandwidth of the entire Soviet Union at its height, which is to say about as much as a single MIT freshman’s dorm room. Getting that bandwidth hooked up to the public networks on the surface was a herculean task, and has permanently rendered the nuclear bunker unfit for its original purpose—but, as Kyrgyzstan had shipped all its warheads back to Russia three decades ago, you’re not too concerned. You’ve got a nuclearwar command bunker with Herman Miller conference chairs, Mountain Dew vending machines for your tame geeks, armed guards on the airlocks up top, and secure Internet access. A fair definition of heaven, to some.