Rule 34

by Charles Stross

  I am not principal investigator. Suggest you contact DCI MacLeish (profile attached) for further information. Tell him I noted circumstantial similarity.

  (Bye.)

  At which point you could wash your hands of the whole affair and consider your duty done—but that’s not enough, is it? You stare at Karl’s note for a full minute, letting it all percolate together, trying to quantify your sense of déjà vu.

  Item: $PERP is a spammer.

  Item: $PERP is found dead, in a weird and improbable accident, at home.

  Item: rogue domestic appliances are implicated.

  Item: so are inappropriate intoxicating substances.

  Naah, that never happens, not in real life, outside of the movies. Does it?

  “Dickie will think I’m off my trolley,” you mutter to yourself. Then you pick up your phone, shake it, and speed-dial.

  “Chief Inspector? If I can have a moment . . . ? Really? That’s too bad . . . Listen, I don’t want to add to your work-load, but I have a possible lead from—it’s a long shot—Germany. Yes, it’s intelligence-led. They’ve got a circumstantially similar case on their hands in the past twenty-four hours. No . . . Not exactly the same, but I spotted at least four points of similarity. So far, no, no, they’re still treating it as accidental-but-weird. No, I know. I told him I’m not the lead, gave him your details. Yes, I—I’m sorry, but in my judgement there’s something very fishy about it, and I think you need to talk to the man. No I—no. Look, you know what I do, don’t you? I’m here to watch for—well shit.”

  You put the phone down carefully, in case it explodes. Or maybe in case you explode. Anger management is one of those compulsory people-skills hingmies they put you through on a regular basis; clearly Dickie’s overdue for his next refresher.

  You can fully appreciate how busy he is, and how he’s got the brass breathing down his neck—Scotland as a nation gets about a hundred murders a year, but Edinburgh accounts for less than a tenth of that—and you know this is but a circumstantial what-the-fuck? indicator, most likely a coincidence. But there’s no call to bite your head off. If Dickie disnae want to carry it, he can always fob you off on one of his minions. There is absolutely no fucking call to swear at a fellow officer like that, much less a sometime classmate, and it is indicative of a distinct lack of respect and professionalism, and you have half a mind to—

  No, scratch that. Leave the formal complaint for some other time, when he isn’t being shat on from above and trying to juggle a murder investigation and his regular case-load. Now is not the time to go nuclear, whether or not Dickie deserves it. You’ve had years of practice at swallowing this shit. Often as not, they don’t even realize they’re dishing it out: coming from a macho subculture, gobbling pints and proton-pump inhibitors to keep their stomachs from exploding with all the bile and suppressed rage that goes with the job—no. Just no. Bottle it up for later.

  And speaking of bottling it, you put in three and a half hours of overtime yesterday, it’s forty minutes to end of shift right now, and if you don’t claw back some personal space, HR will notice and send you on a mandatory work/rest chakra-rebalancing course again (because the new-age hippie counselling shit is cheaper than paying for stress-related sick-leave).

  Anyway, haven’t you got a date?

  It’s time to go home and shower, then off to the wine bar to see what Dorothy wants—whether it’s you, or just a familiar face in a strange town. And to maybe bring down the wall and get comfortably numb for a few hours before you climb back into the broken hamster wheel of your career and scamper round again and again . . .

  Maybe you didn’t know it at the time, but you and Dorothy have been friends for, oh, ever so long. Since maybe back before you were in primary two and Miss Simpson started in on the utterly bowdlerized sexed coursework, which was all they were allowed to hand out back then. Back in the early nineties, in the dog days of Section 28—the part of the Local Government Act that banned local councils and education authorities from admitting that homosexuality even existed, much less allowing teachers to tell isolated kids that being destined for the Adam and Steve alternative didn’t mean they were pariahs or perverts—back then, even aged eight, you’d figured out for yourself that this stuff was all wrong. You’ll never get me to do that with a boy. Well, maybe—but why bother? It’s an awful lot of hard work—and no little mess—for something that doesn’t look much like anything you’d call fun.

  On the other hand, that was before you hit your teens—and ran into crushes and BFFs and all the weirdly incomprehensible playground politics that never really made sense to you. Because your crushes were all wrong, and you were afraid to talk about them: Is she a lesbo? was about the second worst thing they could say about anyone, and you knew that if you gave them even a hint about what you dreamed about, about what made you wake flushed and sweating in the small hours, it’d be the absolute end, utter humiliation for the rest of your life.

  So you giggled along with them, and learned to lie, didn’t admit to watching and rewatching Xena on video until the tapes chewed themselves up, and made a point of going to church so that when you said you believed in no-sex-before-marriage, they believed you and forgot to ask the obvious follow-on question: So who’s the lucky boy, then? You even did the Alpha course when you were eighteen, and lied enthusiastically right up until the speaking in tongues bit (which caught in your throat).

  But then it was time for university. Where you met your inner Dorothy and got to know her . . . quite well.

  Learning who you are is something every teenager goes through: But if your identity isn’t an identikit match for any of the role models on offer, it can take quite a while and take you up some strange paths on the way. You figured out you wanted to be a cop quite early—maybe it was Uncle Bert’s fault (even though he never bothered taking the sergeant’s exam), and maybe it was connected to the hard-shell uniformed image: self-sufficient, justified, not taking shit from ignorant assholes. You wanted that, you wanted it badly, and you believed in rules and telling the truth and punishing bullies. But maybe there was something else going on as well, something you didn’t understand at the time.

  When you got your A-level grades and that place at university and broke away from the home-town claustrophobia for the first time, you didn’t bother joining any wishy-washy clubs and societies: You signed up for Archery and SCUBA Diving rather than the Feminists Society or LGBT Soc. You did your drinking in a pub on the wrong side of the tracks, where you unconsciously felt safe, not realizing that you were missing out on all the torrid flesh-pots of academia; and it was from the local bears that you learned about gay culture at second hand. Learned their jokes, learned their slang, learned “friends of Dorothy” as archaic code for the love that dared not speak its name (once upon a time).

  You never realized that the Feminists Society was the bed-hopping club of your dreams; or that if you’d hung out in the Student’s Union on campus, you could have had your pick from the conveyor-belt sushi buffet of dungaree-wearing baby dykes in LGBT Soc.

  (At least, until they learned you were studying to be a cop.)

  Mary was the turning point. Portsmouth, Pompey: a naval town, going back hundreds of years—and where you get warships, you get sailors. Some of whom—you can imagine Kylie in Lower Sixth hissing it in disbelief—were lesbians. Who did not hang out around the university campus but were certainly willing to take a gawky post-teen with aspirations towards a uniformed service under their wings and teach her stuff about herself that would be a source of nostalgia many years later. Mary was blonde and friendly and brisk, and for a while you’d been her girl in port: which was good while it lasted (Twelve months? Eighteen?) and left you on a tide of tears, clutching a much better understanding of who you were going to be when you grew up.

  All of which is fifteen years and more in your past, but goes some way towards explaining how you got a bona grip on Polari before anybody told you that you were the wrong kind of femini
st; why you sigh whenever you see a navy ship in the waters of the Firth; and how come you think it’s hilarious that your on-again off-again will-she-orwon’t-she nuisance lover is called Dorothy Straight.

  ANWAR: Office Worker

  You smell hot oil and cardamom as you walk through the front door: “Hi, Bibi, I’m home!”

  She’s in the kitchen. “Yes, dear,” she calls distractedly. “Have you seen Naseem? I sent him round to Uncle Lal’s for a bunch of methi, and he’s not come back. I think he’s playing with his English friends again”—in Bibi’s world English is a wild-card ethnicity: It could equally mean Scottish or Lithuanian—“and he’s forgotten, the little scamp . . .”

  “No, haven’t seen him.” You suppress the urge to grump at her (What am I, his nursemaid?) as you close the front door and hang your jacket up. The boy will be fine; you can locate him on GPS just as soon as you take the sock off your phone . . . “I’ve been looking for an office. I think I’ve found one.”

  “Oh, good! Hey, come and be a dear and help peel these onions? You know they make me . . .” cry, you mentally autocomplete, suppressing a snort and heading into the kitchen. It’s one of Bibi’s stranger foibles: Despite the day job, she insists on cooking, but she can’t, absolutely can’t, peel and chop onions. (You said “no” and watched her try, just the once, years ago: The memory of what it did to her eyes is still enough to make you wince. Now she’s got a German gadget to chop them up, but getting the outer skin off first is a man’s job . . . where is that boy?)

  You join Bibi in the kitchen, where she’s frying up spices, and take a knife to the offending onions. (It’s probably her contact lenses. Why can’t she just wear spectacles while she’s cooking?) “Your auntie Sameena called round earlier, you know? She was wanting to know all about this mystery job of yours, but I told her it was none of her business until you are good and ready to tell everyone. Trade secrets. That hushed her up, I can tell you. She watches too many trashy spy soaps from Karachi; she thinks you’re still secretly a black-hat hacker . . .”

  You wordlessly pass her the bowl of onions. She stuffs them into the German gadget, closes the lid, and stares at you significantly as she puts some serious arm action into the handle. It’s a sign that she expects you to read her mind—she’s a firm believer in male telepathy, and you’ve never quite had the nuts to break it to her that she’d do much better at silent communication if she simply stuck to jerking your dick in Morse code. You waggle your eyebrows at her. “What is it?”

  She pauses, then looks up at you. “What is this mysterious job that you need to rent an office for, oh my husband?” She’s using this oddly stilted excuse for a private language she picked up from fuck-knows-where—some Bollywood musical version of domestic married bliss perhaps—she’s even batting her eyelashes. You may be telepathically deaf, but even you can figure out that this is the feminine equivalent of boldface and double-underlined capitals.

  You lean close, put an arm around her shoulder, and ask her: “Can you keep a secret, oh my wife?”

  She leans against you, seeking contact, which is nice (for once, there are no kids present). “If you ask me to, nicely . . .”

  You kiss the top of her head. “Alright. But please don’t tell your mother; she’ll get too excited.

  “It’s all to do with that job interview I had last week. The one the Gnome sent my way—”

  “I knew it!” She tenses angrily. “That rat!” She doesn’t pull away, but you can feel her quiver with indignation, and something inside you locks up tight.

  Bibi doesn’t know your exact relationship with Adam, but he’s been around occasionally, and she doesn’t like or trust him: She knows he’s a business associate, and that’s bad enough for her—the kind of business associate whose company landed you in Saughton, she thinks. Nonsense: It was just a spot of bad luck. But needs must, and ruffled feathers need smoothing: “No, love, it’s not something I’m doing for him; it’s just something he was able to point my way. It’s not big, but it’s useful, and there’s money in it, and more importantly, it’ll convince the social workers that I’m getting my life straightened out.”

  “Is it legal?” she asks, pointedly.

  “It’s more than legal: It’s for a government.”

  “Well then.” That shuts her up for a moment, but not for two: She’s not stupid. “What government? The Scottish—”

  “Hsst, no.” The current administration is a hive of snake-fondling Christians, in league with the Wee Frees; luckily it looks as if they’re going to go down hard at the next election. “You see, the job interview wasn’t in London, and I didn’t get the sleeper train: I had to fly all the way to Przewalsk! And I got the job. I’m going to be”—you savour the moment as you prepare to tell her—“the honorary consul in Edinburgh for the Independent Republic of Issyk-ouch!”

  You were about to say Kulistan when your loving, obedient wife dropped the German gadget on your foot. “Oh!” She ignores your injury and scrabbles around on the floor in pursuit of the onion compartment, which has taken on a life of its own and is rolling enthusiastically towards the table. You stifle a rude word—being German, the gadget is over-engineered and surprisingly heavy—and instead bend over and pick up the detachable handle. The plastic collar where it fits onto the onion eviscerator (or whatever it is called) has broken, and there is a smell of burning—worse, of hot metal—from the frying pan.

  Bibi stands up, snorting deeply like an angry heifer as she clutches a clear plastic tub of finely chopped onions: Her chest rises and falls fetchingly under her blouse as she stares at you in disbelief. “Honorary what? You’re making shit up again, you worthless sack of—” Then she blinks and lunges past you in the direction of the cooker: “Oh, my pan! Oh no! This is a disaster!”

  Right at that moment the front door opens with a fanfare of brassy pre-teen boys’ voices, and everything gets a little vague. You are not sure how the plastic-collared German onion-destroying gadget’s handle ends up in the frying pan, or why the turmeric ends up in the bowl of gram flour and the whole mess ends up on the floor, or where the smell of burning plastic is coming from, because the smoke detector has gone off its little electronic trolley and is screeching loud enough to wake the dead: But you beat a hasty retreat from the self-deconstructing kitchen.

  “Go and help your mother,” you sternly tell your son, who is clutching a paper bag and chattering excitedly about something football-related that he and his friend Mo have done. Then you tiptoe away with a sinking heart. Bibi will blame you for setting the kitchen on fire, and she’ll make you go chase after a template for the broken part of the German gadget and repair the thing. Why do your attempts to do good for her always seem to end up this way?

  Your hard work has paid off. In the process of examining commercial properties you stumbled upon some most remarkably posh digs at a knock-down price for your consular mission. It’s in one corner of a modernist glass cube that is embedded like a gestating alien larva within the bowels of the former post office headquarters on North Bridge. The Gothic architraves of Scottish Baronial limestone pulse with an eerie green radiance after dusk; passers-by who peer between the sandstone window casements can see the cleaning robots casting long shadows across the cube’s windows as they skitter hither and yon. It’s supposedly haunted by the ghost of a Microsoft sales rep who hanged herself in the central atrium a couple of decades ago. Some of the Ghost Tours from the Royal Mile have taken to stopping by late at night.

  Admittedly, your stipend does not stretch to anything particularly plush: Your wee niche in the former Microsoft HQ is a three-metre-by-four room in a shared office suite. It’s half-filled by a scratched-up pine desk and a pre-owned Aeron chair the management threw in as a sweetener. The rest of the suite is overrun by programmers from a local gaming corporation who rent two entire floors above you. They’re working on some kind of Artificial Reality project—you made the fatal mistake of asking one of them, and your eyes glazed over befo
re he reached the fourth paragraph of nerdspeak without stopping to draw breath. But at least you’re not hot-desking, or hanging out your shingle above Rafi’s phone-unlocking and discount-print shop on Easter Road. No, indeed. You’ve come up in the world, you have an office of your own, you wear a suit and tie to work, and people respect you.

  (Well, we’ll soon see about that.)

  Mr. Webber was certainly taken aback at your last interview. “Representing a consortium of central Asian commercial interests in the Midlothian region?” He doodled a note on his tablet. “Well, Anwar, you never cease to surprise me. A family connection, I assume?” You grinned and refrained from blabbing, but produced the documentation when he asked to see it. The smug bastard really raised an eyebrow when you showed him the letterhead. He’s going to check it out, but the beauty is that it will check out. Which means your future sessions with him will be reduced to thirty-second ticky-boxes rather than real probation interviews. Going straight doesn’t get much straighter than wearing a suit and working for a foreign government.

  Actually, there’s fuck-all work in it. You’ve set up your office and your desk just so, and you’ve skimmed the helpful handbook they’ve prepared for honorary consuls. The first IBAN draft hits your bank account with a thud, and now you’re sitting pretty. Cousin Shani’s handling your tax—she’s an accountant—and you’re in credit and in employment. But after the first few days of scurrying around filling out online forms, it’s a bit boring. As the Gnome surmised, few natives of Issyk-Kulistan pass through Scotland. In fact, it’s a lot boring. There isn’t even any email to answer.