Rule 34

by Charles Stross

  Their front door is ajar. As you approach it a fourth police car turns the corner, lights flashing, and double-parks a couple of doors along from you, and as you reach up and ring the doorbell, you hear sobbing from inside, the sound of your mother-in-law losing it wholesale in the kitchen.

  The cop who opens the door is instantly suspicious. “Who are you and what are you doing here?” he demands, scanning you with a small forest of cameras. His free hand twitches in the direction of a beltful of handcuffs. “You can’t come in.”

  Your shoulders slump. “My wife got a call from my mother-in-law,” you say. “Is she alright? Has there been an accident?”

  “What’s your name? What’s your mother-in-law’s name?” He looms over you, overbearing.

  “I, uh, I’m Anwar Hussein. My wife’s mother, Sameena Begum, is she alright?” You blink at him, trying not to cringe away. Your stomach is churning again. The rozzer’s eyes twitch behind his head-up shades, fingers twitching on some kind of air keyboard, then his shoulders relax slightly.

  “Who else lives here?” he demands. “Do you know them?”

  You blink rapidly. “My mother-in-law. And my wife’s brother and sisters. My father-in-law, Uncle Taleb—”

  He shakes his head. “Are you next of kin?”

  Ah. “Yes. What’s happened—”

  “I’m sorry, sir.” Now that he’s pigeon-holed you he switches to the next-of-kin script; unfortunately it’s not the good-tidings one. He’s got that oh shit do I have to tell the family look on his face. Your knees go weak. “I’ll have to ask you to wait here for a few minutes while we finish securing the, the scene. Your mother-in-law is unhurt, but I’m sure she’ll be happy to see you.” So who . . . “My colleagues may need to ask you some questions.”

  Footsteps behind you. You look round and see a man and a woman, both in suits, with something about them that screams “cop.” And now it takes all your will-power to keep your knees from collapsing completely because you recognize the woman; you last saw her face over a video link to the sheriff’s court, laying a comprehensive smack-down on your sins in front of the beak.

  “Good morning, Mr. Hussein. What brings you here?”

  Her smile is bloodlessly professional.

  You have to fight your own tongue to avoid blurting out It wasn’t me, I didn’t do nothing. “My mother-in-law—is she okay? What’s happening?”

  She loses the smile, looks past you at the bastard in black who opened the door. He obviously kens she’s with the filth: funny handshake, raised eyebrows, that kind of thing. “Mr. Hussein.” It’s the cop. “Please come in, no, into the living room, my friend.” It’s all my friend and come in now. He backs up a step to give you room. Looking past you: “Confirmed next of kin.”

  “Oh sh—dear. Where’s Sergeant MacBride? I’m here for his signoff, this is Inspector Aslan, on secondment from Europol—”

  You back into the cluttered living room, managing not to knock over a precariously positioned occasional table, and drop into the overstuffed sofa. You can hear muffled sobbing from the kitchen. The cop is swithering—head twitching from side to side like a hungry pigeon—between you, the bitch in the corridor, and the greetin’ from the kitchen, which is now rising into a high, keening noise not unlike a broken smoke alarm but maybe two or three times as annoying. After a minute, he gives up and stands in the doorway like a human roadblock, relying on his shouldercam to keep an eye on you while he burps heavily acronymic police-speak back and forth with Inspector Butthurt. The other cop, the Easterner from Europol, is clearly kibitzing. You pull out your mobie, discreetly rolling its protective sock back into your jacket pocket, and IM Bibi. AT TALEB’S. COPS HERE. WON’T LET ME SEE SAM. WHATʹS UP?

  The plod pile-up in the hall disintegrates: Inspector Butthurt and her trailer head for the kitchen, while Constable Bouncer stays on door duty. He glances in at you as the doorbell rings. “I’ll explain in a minute, sir. If you don’t mind staying right where you are.”

  The door opens. The pair of snowmen on the front step—that’s your first impression—resolve into cops in white crime-scene overalls, humping battered flight cases full of gear. You’ve seen this shit on telly enough times to know what it means, but seeing it in Uncle Taleb’s house lends it an air of unreality. The wailing continues until you’re digging your fingernails into the frayed fabric of the armrests. You can barely hold yourself down in the seat. It’s as bad as the other day, when she had that funny turn, finding that customer—

  Sweat like ice trickles down your back. “Who’s dead?” you demand, standing up.

  “Sit down, my friend. Take it easy.” PC Bouncer lays a meaty hand on your shoulder. You tense, but you know better than to struggle. They’re trained like guard dogs, to react instinctively to challenges.

  “I want to help,” you say. “That’s my wife’s mother in there.”

  He shoves you back towards the armchair, gently but forcefully. “Who else might be here?” he asks, glancing over his shoulder to confirm that the bods in the bunny suits haven’t left the front door open.

  “Her husband Taleb, Tariq, Parveen, and Fara—they’re my cousins—grandma, and if they’re visiting, there’s Uncle Akbar and his family—”

  PC Bouncer is beginning to go as glassy-eyed as his portable panopticon of cameras and data specs. (White, Scottish: He probably counts his relatives on the fingers of one hand.) “Who would be at home during the day, my friend?”

  He’s getting on your nerves. “You’re not my friend,” you say before you can stop yourself. “I’m sorry,” you add sullenly. “She needs help, listen to her . . .”

  He began winding up when you snapped at him but makes a visible effort to keep his lid on. “Let’s try and keep this polite, shall we, sir. Deep breath, now. I’m going to ask you again: Who should we expect to find here during the daytime?”

  Your mobie vibrates. It’s Bibi’s signature waggle. You keep a tight grip on it as you answer: “Sameena, sure. Taleb if it’s a Friday.” (Today is not a Friday.) “Tariq, he works from his lappie, so he’s home a lot—”

  What emotional defences you managed to reassemble in the wake of the Toymaker’s visit collapse around you.

  No point hiding: He saw your face. “Is it Tariq?” you ask, your voice going all wobbly. “Is he alright?”

  You see at once from his face that your brother-in-law isn’t alright.

  Nor will he be alright ever again.

  Nor can all the king’s horses and all the king’s men put Tariq together again.

  It’s very strange to be sitting side by side with Inspector Butthurt in your father-in-law’s chintz-infested living room, chatting over cups of knee-cap-balanced tea (brought for you, incongruously, by a crime-scene cop dressed from head to foot in white plastic).

  “I’m sorry we keep running into each other under such unfortunate circumstances, Mr. Hussein. By the way, is that your official registered phone?”

  “Yes—” You watch nervelessly as she touches it, blinks a virtual fly away from the corner of her eye, and nods confirmation of some arcane suspicion to herself. Her movements are swift and precise. She’s a tall woman; if she were a man, built to proportion, she’d be about the same height as Constable Bouncer (who is waiting outside)—a terrifying tower of muscular poise. Far scarier than the weedy Eurocop she came with, who is presumably in the kitchen right now, trying to get some sense out of Auntie.

  “Well, that’s a relief. You came here directly from the East End, I see. I’m going to have to image your phone and follow up your cellproximity record to confirm what it says, but unless you’ve turned into some kind of criminal hacker master-mind in the last year it looks like you’ve got a watertight alibi.” The dryness of her tone gets your hackles halfway up before you manage to remind yourself what she is.

  “Alibi for what?”

  “For—” For the first time she looks discommoded. Blinks again, evidently looking something up. “Sorry. Nobody told you?
”

  “Told me—”

  “It’s your cousin, Tariq Shaikh Mohammed. He’s dead, I’m afraid.” She’s watching you. You nod, still not quite believing it. “We received a call from Sameena Begum—”

  “My mother-in-law. His mother.”

  “Oh dear.” She glances away. The wailing has gone, replaced by occasional sobbing. And tea, probably. They’ll have her in another room, you realize. To get her story, and mine. Before we talk.

  “What happened? Was it an accident? Did somebody kill him?”

  “Why do you suppose someone might have killed him?” She leans forward, and for a moment Inspector Butthurt is on your case, mercilessly digging. Your blood runs cold.

  “I don’t suppose,” you tell her. “I have no fucking idea, sorry, I don’t know. Young healthy man though, what’s going to happen to him? Tariq’s a—” You stop. “Did someone kill him?”

  Inspector Kavanaugh looks at you for a while. “It’s too early to say,” she says reluctantly. “Investigations are proceeding.”

  And what the fuck does that mean? She’s talking in cop-speak, the mysterious language the filth use to smear their own version of events over the true story. Familiar from a thousand blog bulletins. You shake your head. “What does that mean? Is he dead, or not?”

  She makes a small noise at the back of her throat. Muted impatience or the beginning of a chest infection. “A couple of questions if you don’t mind. By the way, did your cousin do any house-work? Cleaning, for instance?”

  You stare at her in mute incomprehension. “House-work?”

  “Dusting, washing up, vacuuming? That sort of thing?”

  “Vacuuming?” You shake your head. “No, he’s not the kind. Well, he gets stuff fixed when it’s broken—I was going to ask him to sort out my wife’s onion chopper, she dropped it the other day—” You realize you’re rambling. So does Inspector Butthurt. She makes some kind of notation in her head-up memo, then changes the subject.

  “Mr. Hussein, can you think of anyone who might have wanted your cousin dead?”

  “I’m not sure,” you say numbly. “It’s not impossible. But Tariq was involved in stuff I don’t know about.” You take a deep breath, then hold up your mobie: “On probation, me. Keeping my nose clean. He knows it. Knew it. If he’s doing anything dodgy, he doesn’t want my snitchware anywhere near it.”

  Which is one hundred–per cent true and will show up as such when the police evidence room speech-stress analysers comb over this part of Inspector Butthurt’s on-duty lifelog.

  That’s the thing about talking to the police: You’ve got to tell them the truth, and nothing but the truth—just don’t tell them all of it. They’ve got speech-to-text software and natural language analysers, proximity- and probability-matching tools controlled by teleworkers in off-shore networks—a mechanical turk—to make tag clouds out of everything you say within earshot of one of their mikes. It may not be true AI, but it can flag up inconsistencies if you’re lying. They don’t need that shit for 90 per cent of the job, the routine public-order offences, drunk and disorderly, but you can bet your shirt that everything said within a hundred metres of a suspicious death gets chewed up by the mechanical turk . . .

  “Go on,” she prompts.

  “Tariq’s a smart boy. Runs a dating website: The spin for the old folks is that it’s a virtual dhallal, a marriage brokerage, with chat rooms so the boys and girls can get to talk to each other safely—but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that it’s a knocking shop as well. The parents can register user IDs and track their kids’ conversations, but there are some areas of the site that, well, they’re age-filtered: It’s the twenty-first century, innit? Oh, by ‘kids’ I mean it’s strictly over-eighteens only. Because it’s supposed to be about finding suitable partners for marriage, not one-night stands.”

  You run down. Not that you’re giving her more than the most superficial gloss on how Tariq set up the tagging system and real-time chat to show the old farts a very skewed view of the system; or the block-booked hotel rooms that users can sublet by the hour (at a 500–per cent mark-up for Tariq), or the proximity-matching service for halal doggers—pay your money, enter your preferences, go to this hotel room at that time and a suitable partner will be waiting for you—but Inspector Butthurt isn’t an idiot.

  She nods thoughtfully. “Nobody gets killed because of a dating website. What do you suspect, my friend?”

  She’s pushing your buttons but letting some morsels slip. The deadening fear is back: The man with the empty eyes, his luggage in your attic. The Gnome’s outrageous proposition. Tariq’s memory stick. “I suspect—I don’t know anything for a fact—Tariq was into other stuff, too.”

  “Other stuff? Like what you were arrested for last time?”

  Your mouth is dry. You nod. “I’m out of that, I swear. I’ve got a wife and kids to look after. And this.” You twitch your phone, which chooses that moment to vibrate again. It’s less intrusive than the old leg-tags, but no less an imposition. “And a respectable job.”

  “A job?” She raises an eyebrow.

  “Yes.” You need to rub her nose in it, make her recognize that you’re a man of consequence these days. “I handle the consular affairs in Scotland of the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan. I have diplomatic connections now, you know! I am required to be a man of utmost respect. And so Tariq knows he must leave me out of his madcap schemes.”

  “Wow.” It’s the nearest thing to an admission of surprise you’ve ever heard from Inspector Butthurt. So worldly cynical is she (from dealing with the scum of the earth on a shift-work basis) that it is clearly a test of her self-control. A lesser inspector would be shouting their disbelief in your ear. “Does your probation officer know about this?”

  “Of course he does!” you splutter. She shakes her head, and a very curious expression steals across her face. Respect or what? “You can confirm my credentials with the Foreign Office,” you add haughtily.

  “Ah, that won’t be necessary.” It’s glassy-eyed disbelief, you decide, twitching your security blanket of smugness closer. At last you’ve broken through her shell of assumed white English privilege. But she doesn’t let the moment last. “Back to Tariq. What else can you tell me about him?”

  “He was always too smart for his own good.” You realize abruptly that you’re never going to see him again, never engage in his line of crazy banter, never have to shrug off his sly importuning to get you on board one of his scams. The icy lid on your bottomless well of grief shatters, and you sniff, blinking back tears. You’re unsure whether you cry for Tariq or yourself.

  Kavanaugh touches your shoulder: You flinch. “Better answer your call,” she says, rising. “I’ll be back in a minute. Don’t go away.” And she leaves you alone to face Bibi, who is making urgent demands for reassurance you can’t deliver.

  TOYMAKER: Fucktoy

  Snug as a sphex wasp larva in the belly of a paralysed katydid, you bed down in the Peter Manuel identity. You rent a room in a West End hotel to shower and change your clothes. One brief online session later, you’ve ordered a couple of shirts, a week’s supply of socks and underwear, and a new shaver. Delivery post restante. Over in the Hilton, John Christie’s room lies hollow and empty as a condemned cell. It may already be under active monitoring by the police, but you doubt they’ll put a human-surveillance team on the case—human eye-balls are expensive—and if you don’t interact with the hotel’s digital nervous system they’ll have no way of telling you’re around. But they’re not yet looking for Peter Manuel, and the cost of ambient DNA sequencers is high enough that they’re not yet deployed outside of airports and other class-one security hot spots, and reliable automatic face recognition is right around the corner next week, next year, next decade, just like it’s always been.

  Standing under the monsoon shower, you review the afternoon’s work. Parking your luggage with the dithering Indian guy was a bythe-book move, but maybe not such a bright one. It’s
always good practice to have a secondary safe house prepped and ready when things turn to shit, and you needed to get your commercial sample out of your immediate proximity lest the police decide to pull in “John Christie” for a grilling, but you can’t count on him for more than documents and a mattress, and even that may be pushing a bit too far. He’s a classic mark, easy to dominate but too fragile for heavy-duty work.

  Something about his face brought out the long-forgotten old school bully in you: You wonder what it would be like to punch him until he pleads for mercy, then keep going. Battered, blood dripping down her nose . . . You’re sprouting wood, you realize, but you’ve got a date for the evening and judging by this morning’s chat-up, she’s aiming for the same goal, so instead of reaching for the soap, you step out of the cubicle and towel yourself dry, then pad through into the bedroom and inspect your clothing options.

  Building the new start-up can wait—anything you arrange in the current circumstances will just give the enemy a target. (You pick up a clean pair of boxers, hold them at arm’s length.) On second thoughts, wouldn’t it be a good idea? Draw out the bad guys by giving them a target? (The Straight woman’s a hot dresser. You want to be clubbable, smart casual at least. Flash a bit of class along with the cash.)

  Maybe you should set up a front, let the adversaries home in on it, then capture their assassin and pump them for information. (Suit and tee shirt? Or jeans and a jacket? The former. Armani tee. The Fabrice Gonet watch and the Edwardian silver snuff-box.) Set up a target, to draw their fire. (Hit the drug store for some meow-meow. Or better make that premium coke: She looks old-school.) Who could possibly fill those scapegoat shoes for you?

  Hmm. Maybe you will move in with Mr. Hussein and his family tomorrow. See if he makes a suitable target: If not, that can be fixed.

  (But first, you’re going to make friends with Dorothy.)

  DOROTHY: Safeword