Rule 34

by Charles Stross

  Behind his Eurocop-standard specs, Kemal’s eyes are tired. “Was the Blair murder scene like this?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. Haven’t examined this one yet.” But you’ve got a good idea what to expect. Otherwise, why the IM asking you to ask Mr. Hussein about domestic appliances?

  You knock on the bathroom door, ignoring the yellow warning icons buzzing around it like angry hornets. “Hello inside?”

  The door doesn’t open, but a chat window drops front and centre. SGT MADDOX, SOC: WHATSUP?

  “Sitrep,” you call.

  You hear a muffled voice: “Just a mo.” Then a huge and grisly multimedia dump with about six gigabytes of metadata hanging off it drops across your view like a luminous crime-fighting jellyfish. In the middle there’s a doorway-framed view of the bathroom. You zoom on it: It’s live; someone’s had the good taste to hang a webcam from the hook on the back of the door, so you’ve got the equivalent of X-ray specs.

  Your view is partially obstructed by Maddox and her co-workers, who are dancing the dance of the forensic bunnymen within a much smaller stage than that afforded by the bad-taste palace of the late Michael Blair—but the focus of their attention is broadly similar. No dead Warsaw Pact dictator’s colonic irrigation machine here, just a vacant-eyed skinny guy slumped half-out of the bath . . . but what in James Dyson’s name is the vacuum bot doing?

  You don’t have one of the things—your wee flat’s too small to need it—but you get the picture: It’s supposed to bumble around the house sucking on the rugs and scaring the cat, periodically retreating to its wall wart to recharge and hork up a cricket-ball-sized sphere of compacted fluff and household dirt. This is an upmarket jobbie, with two sets of wheels so it can walk up stairs and a couple of extension hoses so it can stick its knobbly nose into crevices where the sun don’t shine. It features an especially big battery—which is currently one hundred–per cent discharged, having shorted out through the bathwater in which the very dead Tariq is marinating.

  There’s a big evidence bag laid out beside the robot. And you don’t need to be a technical genius to figure that cracking this case hinges on fingering whoever fitted a live wire down its snout and programmed it to go drinkies while Tariq was in the tub.

  If someone’s tampering with domestic appliances with murder in mind, the blogosphere is going to have a cow and a half. But that’s the least of your worries right now.

  You turn to Kemal. “You got that?” you ask redundantly.

  “Was the other case like this?” he repeats.

  “A bit.” Shit, who are you trying to kid? You surrender to the inevitable and place the call. “Chief Inspector?”

  Dodgy Dickie grunts. “What’s up?”

  “I’m afraid we’ve definitely got another one.” You’re registered on scene here, so you can add him to the access list. “Moderately bent business man in Bruntsfield, dead in the bathtub where his vacuum cleaner decided to electrocute him. I’ve got his cousin downstairs—former client of mine, not currently under suspicion—sweating bullets and trying not to incriminate the deceased. The MO is a dead ringer for Babylon.” That the deceased was in the loop on repairing broken appliances—see also: back-street fabbers—you leave for later. It’s certainly a suggestive avenue for enquiries.

  Mac’s initial response is unprintable. Then, “Hold the fort, I’ll be reet round. This client of yours—dinna let him leave.” He hangs up immediately, and his contact status, hanging in the corner of your vision, changes to mobile.

  Dickie is showing worrying signs of succumbing to hands-on mode, the besetting cognitive error of any senior officer confronted by too much data—the illusion that if they just take hands-on control in the field, they can make everything come up roses. It leads to brigadiers focussing on a single infantry squad, and chief inspectors interviewing suspects instead of concentrating on running the hundred-headed murder team. (And, of course, if you try to point this out to him . . . just don’t go there.)

  You hot-shoe it downstairs and back to the living room, which is becoming hard to get to—the hall is filling up with uniforms, stomping on each other’s German-Army-surplus paratroop boots and trying to make themselves useful. You really want an opportunity to get Kemal alone and pump him, or failing that, to get Mr. Hussein to spill the beans on his cousin (assuming there are any beans to spill). But once Dickie arrives . . .

  “Anwar.”

  He’s sitting in the armchair, shoulders slumped beneath the weight of an invisible storm-cloud. And he looks guilty, which will never do.

  “In a few minutes, my boss on this investigation is going to arrive. He’ll want to ask you a few questions.”

  Dickie is very old-school, inclined to go off like a shaped charge in the direction of the first plausible suspect who comes to his attention. This is not unreasonable: 90 per cent of the time, it’s the right thing to do in an investigation, because 90 per cent of the time, the first plausible suspect is the right one. But you will eat your warrant card if Anwar is smart enough to arrange a scene like the one in the bathroom upstairs—much less to have orchestrated Mikey Blair’s demise.

  In the absence of a better target, Dickie’s nostrils will start twitching in exactly the wrong direction, and he’ll get all distracted and focussed on the nearest Saughton graduate because it’s easier than acknowledging how non-linear this investigation is going. And you don’t want him to do that because, despite the ongoing bad blood between you, you are horribly aware that there’s a repeat killer at large, and it would really suck if Dickie got hung up on Anwar, leaving the killer free to strike again.

  “I am not officially cautioning you, and you are not under arrest, my friend. But it would be really helpful if you could tell me anything you know about any criminal activities your cousin was engaged in.”

  The slumped shoulders rise infinitesimally, then fall again. Oh, it’s like that, is it?

  You take your glasses off and, very deliberately, slide them into your pocket. “Anwar.” You pause. (What you’re about to say might break your career, if it comes out in the wash. If you’ve got any career left to break, that is.) “This is a murder investigation. Intelligence goes in, it doesn’t come out. As long as you don’t cough to any arrestable offences, we have no reason to lay a finger on you. And I can guarantee that anything you say that isn’t a confession about an arrestable offence won’t reach your probation officer’s ears if that’s what you’re worried about. Maintaining security on a murder investigation is much more important to us than telling your social worker whether you’ve been saying your prayers before bed. So I’m going to ask you again: Do you know anything that we should know, to help us find your cousin’s killer?”

  You put your glasses back on. And while your head’s bowed, and you’re looking elsewhere, Anwar opens up.

  Two hours later you’re missing your lunch break for the sake of clogging up the meatspace incident room, laying it on the line for the peanut gallery.

  “Here’s our Anwar Hussein. On probation, done time for identity theft and fraud—not very smart. He’s a foot-soldier, not a general: retired foot-soldier at that, or so he says. He gets a call from his wife, who got it from the first bystander, Mrs. Begum, to go visit Mrs. Begum and her son, the victim. He arrived on the scene after our first responder and Sergeant MacBride. Because he’s on release, we have his probationware record, and I can confirm that he’s been nowhere near the scene of crime for two days. Subject to confirmation by municipal CCTV, but it really doesn’t look like he did it.

  “However. Our Anwar is a bit of a wide boy, and his first reaction was to clam up. I was eventually able to determine that he’s got a guilty conscience over some work the victim had asked him to do. There might be an issue of possible violation of probation terms here, but Mr. Hussein is eager to assure us that he hadn’t actually got round to doing anything illegal as yet.”

  There is much rolling of eyes from the peanut gallery at this point, which you deliver wi
th ironic lack of emphasis—I didn’a mean to put me hand through tha winda an’ take tha wallet, it just sort of happened—so you feel the need to clear your throat. “He coughed to it voluntarily, and more to the point, he handed over the material which he claims his cousin Tariq gave him to work on, along with the device. It’s downstairs in Forensics being imaged right now. If he hasn’t touched it, then it may give us some insight into the murderer’s motivation.” Assuming there is a murderer, something in the back of your mind nudges. Because if you were wrong about there being no such thing as an artificial intelligence, things could get really embarrassing, couldn’t they?

  DCI MacLeish—for he is back from the Hussein residence—gives you the hairy eye-ball. “What sort of business was Mr. Hussein involved in, do you know?”

  You stare right back at him: “I arrested him three years ago in the course of an ongoing investigation into an identity-fraud ring. He coughed to a variety of charges, including spear phishing, ownership of stolen authentication credentials, unauthorized access to personal account details, and Internet-banking fraud. Came to court, entered a guilty plea, two years in Saughton, cut on appeal to one plus one. Interestingly , Anwar was the only body we bagged on that case; I’m certain he wasn’t working alone, but you know how these Internet cases are.” You tap your forehead.

  Dickie’s eyebrows waggle, then he nods deeply, satisfied. (There is stuff you can say and stuff you can’t say on the record—and everything that’s said anywhere in a police station is recorded under rules of evidence these days—but waggling eyebrows and forehead tapping don’t show up in the automatic speech-to-text transcripts. What you just sent via monkeyspace, bypassing CopSpace entirely, is that you know stuff but you don’t want to contaminate the investigation by introducing hearsay or out-of-band intelligence. And Dickie, for once, agrees with you: He doesn’t want you screwing up his investigation either.)

  “Three victims so far,” he rumbles. “Inspector Aslan, you have some input?”

  Kemal is fidgeting with his glasses. “We have two more,” he says diffidently. “One in Sofia, one in Trieste. That’s all in the past hour. Bringing the running total to eleven.”

  Dickie looks simultaneously aghast and almost, in an odd way, hopeful: It’s a clusterfuck, but it’s not his clusterfuck, he’s merely holding up a small corner, a few fragments of fatal fuckuppery. “Evidence.”

  A uniform at the back sticks up her hand. “Got one on the Crolla case,” she offers.

  “Go ahead.”

  “The warrant trawl of the national network monitoring database flagged up some chat-room transcripts. They match input from an avatar associated with an IP address allocated to Vivian Crolla’s broadband connection. Assuming it’s her, she had an, um, vivid fantasy life.”

  Ears prick up all round: Nothing gets your attention in a briefing like a drop of special sauce on the great and the good. (Hot sauce, even.)

  “A number of enquiries about, uh, bondage practices involving plastic wrap and mattresses full of bank-notes.” Bless her, the freshfaced constable is looking even more rosy-cheeked than usual. “The aforementioned user posted a number of scenarios and, uh, there are some downloads, too. Stories centred on being immobilized and restrained while fully clothed, in proximity to large amounts of money. We’re currently trying to track down some chat-room contacts . . .”

  It’s too much. You hear whackier stories from the twinks at CC’s every Saturday night you go clubbing, but a fair proportion of the assembled officers are of a, shall we say, small-c conservative upbringing. As for the rest, some of them aren’t as hard-boiled as they’d like to think. Muttered disbelief and the odd titter sweep the room.

  “Silence!” roars Dodgy Dickie, the veins on the side of his neck standing out. “Ahem.” He sounds surprised at himself. “Sarah, if you’d like to continue?”

  “Uh, that’s all I’ve really got right now, sir, until we question her known contacts. Details in the case file . . .” She flips a reference into the investigation space hovering above the big conference-table.

  “The Crolla post-mortem examination report won’t be available until tomorrow,” Dickie announces, “but we have a preliminary. According to the pathologist, it looks like a massive allergic reaction while the subject was restrained. Anaphylactic shock. They’re still looking for the cause—whatever she was allergic to—but suggest it’s something that was introduced into her apartment’s atmosphere while she was immobilized: I gather Iain’s sent the empty air-freshener cartridge in the bathroom for analysis . . .”

  You tap Kemal on the shoulder and jerk your head in the direction of the door. He blinks at you, then nods.

  Outside, you march directly—or rather, via a bunch of scuffed and flicker-lit corridors and stairs that resemble a giant hamster maze that’s gone to seed—to your own office in the ICIU. Kemal tags along like your guilty shadow.

  “I seem to recall there was a book about it, years ago,” you tell him as you take the fire door into the car-park, then the back corridor past the Air Farce control room—where the pilots sit in their twilit virtual cockpits, alert and ready to dive their stealthed carbon-fibre drones on the heads of any hapless dog-walker who forgets to scoop up the poop their mutt’s just dropped on the Meadows—down past the flammables store, and along the side of the old stables. “About a guy who was into wrapping Roy Orbison in cling-film, uh, Saran Wrap. My mum used it to show me why I should never go with strangers. I had nightmares about kitchenware for years.”

  “You think . . . the accountant . . .”

  You pause on the threshold of the ICIU suite. “I refuse to speculate: It’s unprofessional, and besides, she might have had a perfectly innocent reason for owning a metric shitload of cancelled bank-notes in an obsolete currency. Not that you’d catch me shrink-wrapping myself to a pile of used bank-notes: The stuff’s lousy with germs. People sneeze on it.”

  You take a tiny pleasure from Kemal’s expression of cumulatively deepening distaste.

  “This is my office, the ICIU. And here’s Detective Sergeant Cunningham. Moxie, this is DI Aslan from Europol. He’s here to help us.” Kemal probably won’t spot the slight emphasis on the penultimate word, but you can be sure Moxie will—and the warning eye-flicker. Your attitude to Kemal has changed somewhat since you departed to collect him this morning (was it only five hours ago?), but Moxie isn’t Mr. Sensitive McNewage and can’t be guaranteed to pick that up. You can quite easily live without him unintentionally reopening hostilities.

  “Great, skipper, I could use some help. It’s been one damn thing after another this morning. I’ve got six pending RFIs from some big intelligence investigation CID are running—”

  Your heart sinks. “Is it Operation Babylon?” you ask.

  “How did you know?” Moxie does his best hamster nose-rubbing imitation at you.

  “Meet Operation Babylon’s Europol liaison.” You point at Kemal, who is looking around with an expression that speaks volumes in monosyllables. His gizz turns especially glassy as he spots Moxie’s animated Goatsedance digiframe. (For which you make a mental note to bollock him later: Visiting brass could get entirely the wrong idea.) “It’s a black hole, Moxie, coming to swallow us. What have you got in your queue?”

  You settle Kemal down with a seat and a pad, then spend the next ten minutes with Moxie dissecting: a request for information about shrink-wrap fetish clubs in Midlothian; demands that someone in IT Support decode the charge sheet you filed against one Mr. Hussein, A., back in the day (“Conspiracy to Bamboozle the Police,” suggests Moxie, identity-theft charges being confusing to officers more normally accustomed to breach-of-the-peace and public-order offences); an urgent enquiry for a backgrounder on spam filters (you boost that one to Priority A and sling it at your own job queue); a query from the desk sergeant at Gayfield Square as to whether he can arrest someone for running a home-brew fabricator (that’ll be a “no,” then—not without probable cause, and fuck knows how that one slipp
ed into the Babylon queue); and a query about identity theft and a person of interest claiming to be Mikey Blair’s boy-friend who left a DNA sample and a junk identity trail.

  (Which is just peachy, because if you dig anything up on the random Mr. Christie and present it to Dickie, he really will have a coronary on the briefing-room floor.)

  Kemal clears his throat.

  “Yes?”

  “I have an update from the office. They have a causal chain for one of our fatalities.”

  You would expect the man to look smug at this point, but he doesn’t: haunted, more like. “What?”

  Kemal shakes his head. “Vito Morricone. Dead in Palermo. A yahoo-yahoo boy. He died in a kitchen accident.”

  Moxie shakes his head. “A kitchen accident?”

  “Yes. He was electrocuted by a deliberately miswired food processor.” (You wince: You’ve had cooking incidents like that.) Kemal continues: “It was a high-end machine, able to heat or chill as well as mincing and mixing. Programmable, networked, you can leave cold ingredients in it and switch it on before you leave work, even change recipes remotely. His partner says that it broke eight months ago, and Morricone took it to a back-street repair shop, where they fixed it for him. The case is stainless steel. A replacement part—” He shakes his head.

  “What kind of replacement?”

  “The report does not explain this thing. But the local investigators report that the fixer bought the replacement-part design online from a cheap pirate shop, not from the manufacturer’s website. It came with installation instructions, which he followed. Once installed, the machine could be remotely induced to short its input power supply through the case.”

  You give a low whistle of appreciation: Moxie claps, slowly. “Murder. Smoking gun.”

  “Yes, but.” Kemal looks troubled. “The fixer does not appear to know anything. Who supplied the sabotaged component design? And why? The investigating magistrate connected to the same pirate design site and bought the same part: It is apparently harmless. And who sent the signal to activate it? We don’t know yet.”