Rule 34

by Charles Stross

  You only live in my imagination. (I die, you die.) But I can still talk to you. And we have a problem, my invisible friend.

  . . . No. Let me be more precise. I have a problem. Enemies. They’ve iced my primary candidates for COO and CFO before I could door-step them for a pre-induction assessment. To make matters worse, I became a person of interest in the police investigation—purely by coincidence—and they took a DNA sample. I’m pinned down here until we can file a Privacy Redaction Order and get the sample incinerated.

  And for the icing on the shit-cake, my fucking luggage is still missing . Missing!

  . . . That was as of three hours ago. Maybe the cunt on the Hilton hospitality desk has found it. That’d be a shame: I was looking forward to taking it out of his hide, with compound interest on top. (Five point six two kilograms.) Fuck it, my sample was in there. And my meds. I’ve been giving myself a little holiday from the pills recently, giving myself a holiday to remember what it’s like to have a mind of my own. Neurodiverse. (Losing it from the front desk onwards . . . maybe that wasn’t such a good idea?) Guess I just have to hold myself together until I can get my luggage back or I’ll skin Mr. Hospitality in a bathtub full of brine.

  But anyway: I have a phone. I always have a phone, short of brain surgery to separate me from it. Phones are deadlier than guns. I need to talk to the business-support desk. Arms-race death match between the cognitive radio free Internet rebels and the lizards who run the secret world government: We use the rebels’ remixers. And the phone in my head connects direct through the undernet, diving for a nameless server in central Asia—

  “Hello?”

  Look around, my invisible friend, see the park, the mud grey field, and the trees? We have bandwidth here. The council installed routers in all the lampposts, the better to handle the feed from the webcams in all the street-lamps. The lizards want to catch the rape machines, but they’re too cunning. Bushes block the electromagnetic emissions from the lights.

  “Hello?”

  “Uh, this is, is Able November in Edinburgh.”

  You—that is to say, me—use Able November as a code-name when talking to the Operation’s call centre. This is the twenty-first century, and even international crime syndicates and off-shore venture-capital trusts—the two are sometimes hard to tell apart—need offshore call centres. You can’t do business without the right tools, after all.

  (Is that a police reconnaissance drone cruising just below the eaves of the tenements on the other side of the field? Or is it just a very large bat?)

  “Hello, Able November. What is your situation?”

  “Mike Blair has been murdered. Vivian Crolla has been murdered. My”—fuck shit piss cocksucking—“luggage has gone missing with my meds and I haven’t had any for seventy-two hours. I am”—mother-fucking ANGRY—“losing my objectivity somewhat. Can you help? The meds are the hard part.”

  “I’m putting you on hold. Please wait.”

  You find a wooden bench and sit down, touching it, feeling the dry crumbling grain of decomposing dead lignified hermaphrodite flesh between your fingers. You obey the order to hold on instinctively, clutching the surface with one hand. If you lose your grip, you might fall up into the sky: You’re very light. This is a really fucking shitty time to have an attack, but it’s not so surprising. Every so often you cut back on your meds for a couple of days, re-establish your baseline. Is it just bad luck that when you’re ready to go back on the pills, they steal your luggage and murder your contacts? The police have eyes in the sky, watching and waiting. How can these not be connected?

  “Able November,” says the woman you’re listening to—her voice distorted by the hearing implant in your skull, drain-pipe echo of an encrypted tunnel—“what’s that about your meds? Are you taking them?”

  “No,” you want to shout, but the phone is in your head, and if you yell aloud, someone or something bad might hear. Gently. The mike in your throat hears all. “My meds are in my luggage. My luggage has been missing for two days.” Little white lies shining like baby teeth in a shallow grave.

  “Okay, we can take care of that for you,” says your operator. “I’m going to send your prescription through to the nearest pharmacy for an emergency resupply. Uh, your identity. Is it still clean?”

  “No,” you say. “No, no.” It’s your fault. You told the police to steal my DNA, didn’t you? Mother-fucking ghost-chip-skull-bomb invisible capitalist friends, can’t trust ’em anywhere. “It’s . . .” You realize you’re hyperventilating and force yourself to slow down. “I visited Mike Blair and found a murder investigation in progress.” Cops in ceramic terylene overalls picking tiny fragments of your skull off the bathroom floor . . . “They sampled me as a POI. This identity’s dirty. I need a fall-back.”

  “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 vi
brates 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.