Rule 34

by Charles Stross

  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.

  (Although describing what you’ve got here as “Internet access” is a bit like calling a Bosnian War rape camp a “dating agency.”)

  Here is your office: heart of a spider-web, wrapped around a hardused Eames recliner, keyboard sitting on an articulated arm to one side, headset to the other. All the walls are covered in 3D screens except for one, a bare metal surface studded with radiation sensors, air vents, and crossed by exposed pipes and cable trays. There’s a tatty epaper poster gummed across it, sagging in the middle: It shows a constantly updated viewgraph schematic of global bandwidth consumption, fat pipes sprawling multi-hued across a dymaxion projection of the planet, pulsing and rippling with the systolic ebb and flow of data. The screens on the other walls all contain heads, perspectives shockingly preserved as if they are actually there in the flesh, freshly severed.

  Teleconferencing, actually.

  “How much longer do you propose to keep on stringing them along?” asks the delegate from Maryland. (She’s blonde and thin as a rake and clearly addicted to amphetamines or emetics or both: You wouldn’t fuck her at gun-point.)

  “They already realize what is going on!” The delegate from Brussels is clearly irritated by her naïveté. The lip-sync in the teleconference loop is borked: The real-time interpreter net is clearly not keeping up with his waspish tirade. “It is inconceivable that they don’t. Perhaps they use this as an opportunity to diminish their headcount. Or perhaps the short-term financial gain really is worth it to them—”

  “Twenty-four hours.” You cut in before his Belgian counterpart manages to crash the software. “That’s all we need for the wrap.”

  “Twenty-four hours is too long!” insists the Europol delegate. “We are already have trouble securing for the operation. And these ‘accidents,’ they attract attention. I am hearing reports that are mortifying. What are you doing? We did not agree to this!”

  “What precisely didn’t you consent to?” You raise one bushy eyebrow. “I seem to recall the negotiations over the concordat were exhaustive.”

  “This!” A wild hand gesture sweeps into view briefly, providing insight. (The American or Japanese programmers who designed the auto-track for this conference system clearly weren’t thinking in terms of cultures that are big on semaphore.) “The agents your associates have deployed are killing people! That was not part of our agreement. This arrangement was to suck in the assets of organized netcrime for civil confiscation, leaving an audit trail to facilitate prosecution of the perpetrators. Extralegal assassination is, is unacceptable! What are you doing?”

  It’s clearly running out of control, and you try not to sigh. “I am not doing anything: I’m not responsible for these deaths.” You shrug, then lean back in your well-upholstered command chair. “I assure you, they are nothing to do with me.” You look at Maryland. “Is your government . . . ?”

  Maryland looks as if she’s swallowed a live toad. “We’re not in the remote-kill business these days. This isn’t the noughties: Congress would never stand for it.” Ever since Filipino Jemaah Islamiyah hackers pwned an MQ-9 Reaper and zapped the governor of Palawan with USAF-owned Hellfire missiles, the Americans have gone back to keeping a human finger on the trigger: not because a state go
vernor from a foreign country was killed, but because of who was in the armoured limousine right behind him. (The prospect of having to utter the term collateral damage in the same sentence as President of the United States before a congressional enquiry had focussed a few minds.) “Where’s the attack coming from?”

  “It’s not part of the original picture.” It’s uncomfortable to talk about. “To make IRIK look plausible, it was necessary to provide a haven for certain undesirable elements. They run botnets, of course, but their customers are . . . unclear. We had assumed the traditional, of course: spammers, malware vendors, child-labour sweat-shops providing teleoperator control of animatronic sex toys for paedophiles.” You clear your throat. “What we weren’t expecting: cheap grid computing for pharmaceutical companies solving protein-folding problems. A Chinese automobile company using a botnet to evolve the design of their latest car using genetic algorithms fed with data from consumer surveys. Artificial-intelligence researchers renting the same botnets that spammers rely on to train their spam filters. Who knew? It is a, a soup of virtual machines boiling out on the darknet, coordinated through channels that our targets operate from corrupted routers in the State Telephone Company hosting centres in Karakol. I don’t have the resources to trace them, in any event. We will shut them down when we spring the trap and snap their worthless necks, but until we are ready to close the honeypot, I cannot stop the attacks.”

  “Twenty-four hours.” This from the delegate from Beijing, whose screen is an opaque black cube. “That is unacceptable.”

  “I fail to see why. The operation is proceeding nominally.”

  “The operation is out of control, Colonel. Sequestrating the assets of organized crime is acceptable. Creating a honeypot for international cybercrime in order to shut them down is acceptable. But sheltering murderers is not. There have been regrettable excesses. The younger brother of the chairman of a state party branch that I shall not trouble you with. The aunt of a Central Committee member. You must shut it down now—or we will.”

  You grit your teeth. Your stomach churns: “It continues for twenty-four hours, and no more. The operation will conclude tomorrow, at twelve hundred hours, universal time, and not a second earlier.” Maryland and Brussels are opening their mouths: “We’ve got to let it run its course! If we don’t, the CDOs won’t be fully vested—the targets will not be bankrupted, but they will be annoyed with us.”

  “They’ll be annoyed with you.” Brussels looks smug.

  “Ah, no, I can see you misunderstand me. They’ll certainly be annoyed with me, but also with you, François, and you, Lorna, and you Li”—you stab a finger at Beijing—“because if any of you pull out of your side of the agreement prematurely, I will see to it that full details of this operation are published on the Internet, with all identifying names attached.” Your smile tightens. “Thank you for your help.” You stab a finger hard on the CALL TERMINATE icon before any of them have time to frame a reply, then curse them all for a donkey’s illegitimate get. “Fuck me, when will they learn?” You roll your eyes. “Fucking amateurs.” Jumped-up crime-control bureaucrats with delusions of special-operations grandeur.

  You glance at your clock. It’s almost four in the afternoon, and the latest auction of national-debt futures leveraged against Issyk-Kulistan are due to close in an hour. The inflow is tapering off, as expected, but as long as the gangsters keep paying, there’s no reason to weld your wallet shut and go to the end game.

  Eagle’s Nest had fucking better be pleased with this day’s work. You’re not sure how much more bullshit you can take.

  ADAM: LOLspammers

  You should have known it was too good to be true.

  With twenty/twenty hindsight, the alarm bells should have started ringing three years ago, when Larry gave his presentation during that BOF breakout session on Network Assisted Crime Prevention at the Fourth International Conference on Emergent Metacognition. You can see him now if you put on your specs and tell your lifelog to retrieve him: enthusiastic, lanky, Midwestern.

  “Realistically, we’re trapped between a rock and a hard place,” he explained to the room, hands moving incessantly as he spoke: “The trouble is, there are too many crimes. Three and a half thousand new offences were created in just ten years under one British government. The US Code is even worse—something like a third of a million distinct activities can lead to felony charges by some estimates. Nobody can be expected to keep track of that; it’s inhuman. But with the kind of filtering we’re having to apply to keep the communication channels open and relatively spam-free, it’s more than possible to envisage agent-based monitoring for signs of criminal intent.”

  They’ve been keyword-filtering email for decades, looking for terrorist needles in a haystack. But what Larry proposed was different: trawling for patterns of suspicious behaviour online. Take, say, a disgruntled employee bitching about how they hate their boss online. That’s one thing. But if they start hunting the blacknets for templates for machine pistols and downloading VR training materials, that’s another.

  “But what if we go a step further?” asked Larry. “Subjects who exhibit signature behaviours online pointing to potentially violent outbursts may not provide law enforcement with sufficient evidence to justify an arrest. But that’s no reason not to provide an agent-based intervention in the online space. Once ATHENA has a sufficiently large corpus of interaction patterns, we can use it to do behavioural targeting and apply inputs weighted to divert high-risk subjects towards less damaging outcomes. Or to indirectly flag them for police attention.”

  Your typical disgruntled employee is a fizzing human bomb for some time before they go postal. Their social contacts are fraying, inhibitions against violence decaying: They’re muttering to strangers in bars, reading about serial killers and fantasizing bloody revenge by night. The police will never know until they explode with murderous intent. But the spam filters monitoring their communication channels will have everything they need to diagnose the downward spiral: From their increasingly disjointed mutterings to the logs of their incoming web surfing, the pattern’s all there. And with enough data, all correlations become obvious. But what Larry was proposing . . .

  “We’ve had behavioural targeting ever since the nineties: ‘If you like product X, you’ll love product Y,’ because that’s what everyone else with tastes like you bought. We can configure ATHENA to apply the same sort of recommendation nudge to behaviour to bring the subject’s outputs back towards baseline. ATHENA’s already pretty good at discriminating human-content communications from non-metacognitive signals; can we take the discrimination further, reliably, and derive objective data about internal emotional states?”

  You lean back in your office chair—it squeaks angrily under your weight—and stare at the dusty display case on the opposite wall.

  “Say that again,” you say.

  “I’m sorry, Dr. MacDonald; it’s been a big shock to all of us here . . . can’t quite believe it. The funeral’s going to be held next Thursday morning. I’m sure everyone will understand if you can’t make it—it’s a long way to come—”

  Your fingers move, eyes unseeing, to open the log of your last discussion.

  ADAM@Edinburgh GMT +01:00: I didn’t adjust the preferential weightings in the naive morality table. Did you?

  LARRY@Cambridge MA GMT +05:00: Not me.

  VERA@Frankfurt GMT -01:00: Do we have hysteresis here? There is feedback from the second-order outcomes-triggering network.

  SALLY@Edinburgh GMT +01:00: I’ve been trying to get my head around the second-order table dependencies, and I really don’t understand them.

  I think there’s some redundancy, but the weighting obscures it. You need to iterate to figure out what’s going on in there.

  LARRY@Cambridge MA GMT +05:00: Could be there’s feedback. ATHENA keeps reweighting its own tables to comply with the changing parameter space. That’s the problem with self-modifying code: It doesn’t sign itself.

 
CHEN@Cambridge GMT +01:00: the bias in tit-for-tat activation is 0.04.

  Yesterday it was 0.032. I checked. There’s nothing in the commit log, so it must be internal.

  ADAM@Edinburgh GMT +01:00: Maybe ATHENA is just getting annoyed at the spammers for taking all her CPU cycles.

  LARRY@Cambridge MA GMT +05:00: LOLspammers. Caught between a rock and a hard AI.

  He’s dead now, and it’s not fucking funny anymore. “How did it happen, do you know?” you ask aloud.

  “The police are still crawling all over us, and the FBI are involved, too. They won’t say much, but rumour is, the package was misdirected. It was meant for someone in the applied proteomics group—looks like some animal-liberationist crazy sent it in and it ended up in Larry’s office. It’s all a horrible mistake—”

  There is a chill in your blood and ice in your bladder as you make yourself reply carefully, lying: “I agree: Of course it’s a horrible mistake. I hope the FBI catch whoever did it quickly before they”—are duped by ATHENA into sending more packages by whatever stimulus/response tuple the weighted network has identified as most efficient in returning Larry’s communication outputs back towards baseline—“kill or hurt anyone else.”

  Sally stays on the call a while longer, seeking reassurance: When you end the connection, you sit and stare at the pulsing green icon with the silhouette of an old-style rotary-dial telephone for several minutes, shaken and unsure whether you trust your own instincts.

  Poor fucking Larry. You don’t know for sure, but you don’t need to know for an absolute fact when inference is enough: Three days ago he was getting alarmed at the rate of creep in ATHENA’s morality tables, and now he’s dead, courtesy of a misdelivered letter bomb.