Rule 34

by Charles Stross

  Poor fucking Anwar. It begins to make a bit more sense, and you don’t like it one little bit. His dodgy cousin—now deceased—and his phishing sideline: He’d have been planning on hosting his phishing website on a bunch of rented zombie smartphones, wouldn’t he? Leaving exactly the kind of spoor in his communications that ATHENA would be looking for, with drastically re-weighted tit-for-tat metrics in the morality code . . .

  You’re on Larry’s contact list, and Anwar’s. From Anwar to what’s-his-name, the dead cousin, is another hop. Three degrees of separation. From ATHENA’s perspective, $DEAD_COUSIN might as well be a research affiliate. Or worse: Larry—and you—might be suspected of affiliation to the botnet herders $DEAD_COUSIN was paying.

  You stand up, unsteadily, and go through to Reception. “I’m going out for a walk,” you hear yourself telling Laura, as you pass her desk: “I may not be back for some time.”

  Then you go downstairs, out into the bright cold daylight, to try and convince yourself that you’re jumping at shadows and the panopticon singularity does not exist.

  Part 3

  DOROTHY: Breakdown

  Earlier:

  You’re scalding yourself under the hotel shower, trying to wash the feel of his fingers off you, when you hear the telltale chirp of an incoming text from your phone.

  The finger-feel is everything: You tense as you massage your abrasions, trying to brush off your own awareness of how little you meant to him—not even the joyful sharing of sex with a near stranger—but the real world is outside the curtain, buzzing on the sink side like a lonely vibrator. It’s someone on your priority list: It won’t shut up. So after another minute or so, you turn off the shower and clamber out of the tub. You towel off briefly, then when your hands are dry, you carry the phone through into the bedroom, caressing it until it calms down.

  BORED. It’s from Liz. Your throat swells: You sit down on the end of the bed and give in to the sniffles for a couple of minutes.

  My life is shit. That’s a given. For a well-adjusted bi poly femme, you’re having remarkably bad luck. Stranded up here in Edinburgh, dumped by Julian—your primary—you let Liz’s insecurity drive you into . . . into . . . nothing good. But being a victim is a state of mind, isn’t it? (Isn’t it?) You shiver and glance at the door, dead-bolted and with the additional security of a barbed carpet wedge you bought on eBay. He’s out there, in Room 502, two floors up and one corridor over. You can feel him—or maybe it’s just the weight of your own queasy awareness pressing down on you. Pull yourself together. It’s not like he’s going to break in and rape you, is it? He’s just a nasty wee shite, as they say hereabouts, a misogynistic pick-up artist who’s too cheap to use a tissue.

  Keep telling yourself that, Dorothy.

  There’s another muted buzz from your phone, in a cadence that tells you it’s a work message. But you really aren’t in the mood for the office on-call tap-dance: you’re disturbed, lonely, and very pissed-off—partly at yourself for not spotting the sleazebag in advance, but mostly at him for being . . . what? (You don’t blame a scorpion for stinging: It’s in his nature. Instead, you deal—with bug spray and boot-heel and extreme prejudice.) You feel like an idiot because—admit it—you wanted a bit of excitement rather than a nice hot cup of cocoa and Liz. Liz isn’t exciting. She’s a bit clingy, and what’s left over from her compartmentalized cop-life is boringly normal: civil partnership, not swingers’ club. So you went looking for excitement, nearly overran your safeword, and now you’re projecting all over the other. Way to behave like a grown-up . . .

  The phone buzzes again. Work is calling. It’s the backside of ten o’clock, according to the hotel clock radio. Responsible grown-ups who get work calls at that time of night check to see if it’s important. The hotel comps guests a yukata, so you drop the towel and wrap the robe around yourself, then wipe your eyes and grab a hair-band before you answer: With customers all the way out to the Pacific North-west, there’s always the risk of an incoming teleconference. But when you put your specs on and glance at the log, it’s just a priority-tagged wave. URGENT CASE REVIEW REQUESTED.

  Oh for fuck’s sake—you follow the link, which leads into the agency’s human-resources back-office cloud. There’s an employee profile; they’re asking you to fill out an anonymized interpersonal ethics evaluation. Snitcheriffic, you think, and open it, expecting to be asked to crit one of the eager-beaver banking IT managers you were meeting with this afternoon.

  Instead, it opens on a mug shot of John Christie, and a quiz that, after a second of dumb-struck confusion you recognize as the PCL-R psychopathy check-list.

  Hot and cold chills mesh with nauseated recognition. You cancel out of the form frantically, racking your brain for a connection. Head office booked you into this hotel, didn’t they? What did Christie say—here on business? Did someone put him here? But how would they know—the front desk. Your luggage problem. His luggage problem. They put the frighteners on you to drive you out of your comfort zone, then banged you together with him. Emphasis on bang.

  They? Who?

  It stinks. You worked for McClusky-Williams for three years before they were taken over by Accenture, and three years since—as an independent division—and there’s no way anyone at head office would pull a stunt like that. It’d be a Section Four Fail for starters, with five or six other ethical violations on top, and the consequences for an ethics-compliance group of failing a moral-standards audit start with drastic and go rapidly downhill—

  Reluctantly, you open up the wave and follow the link back to the snitch wizard. Yes, it’s him all right. You try to cross-reference to find his employer, but there’s nothing in the system. Digging diligently, you get nowhere except that bloody wikipedia true-crime article about his long-since-hanged namesake. There’s no job number or contract associated with this job, it just came up in the system. Your skin crawls as you think about what it means. You prod your way through the snitch wizard, following the script: glibness/superficial charm, check. Cunning/manipulative, check. Promiscuous sexual behaviour—now hang on a minute: The psych text betrays an implicit polyphobic bias—reluctantly: check. Your stomach clenches as you work down the list. You should have seen this coming for yourself—it was all there in front of you, wasn’t it? Christie is a poster child for narcissistic personality disorder, and you walked straight into it.

  The quiz vanishes, to be replaced by another inventory questionnaire, this one more mundane: It’s an appraisal that evaluates key personality traits in an executive-founder. Private-equity outfits and VCs use it to filter their trained start-up monkeys. The target is—your heart sinks—John Christie.

  “What the fuck?” you mumble to yourself, just as your phone vibrates again. It’s your private personality module. You glance at the touch screen, leaving the quiz floating open in your specs. It’s Liz again: ARE WE STILL ON FOR SATURDAY?

  You flip the phone out of work personality.

  YOU HOME? you text.

  YES.

  CAN I COME ROUND? After a moment, you reluctantly add: NEED COMPANY.

  There’s nothing for a minute. Then a tag pops up, showing an address book entry and a handy route map. Your heart flip-flops. All of a sudden a cup of emotional cocoa with Ms. Clingy is looking—well, you’ll get restless eventually, but right now you’re halfway to totally creeped-out and in need of hugs and reassurance.

  BE RIGHT ROUND. NEED TO TALK. Then you go hunting for clean underwear.

  Embarrassingly, excruciatingly, the panic attack you’ve been bottling up washes over you like a drenching cold ocean breaker just as you reach the end of Liz’s leafy alley-way. You catch yourself and lean against a mossy stone wall, shuddering with fear, eyes clenched shut, twitching at the sound of every passing vehicle. It’s dusk, and there are no other pedestrians around, which is a small mercy. The lane’s cobblestoned, with century-old trees lining the pavements and lending the air a damp, greenish odour—there’s a faint sound of running water from the
stream beyond the dead end of the alley. It’s mortifying. What if, your subconscious nudges you, what if Liz can see through you? What if she doesn’t take you seriously—

  You force yourself to stand up, afraid of smearing lichen on your jacket. Something flitter-buzzes overhead: a bat, perhaps, or a Council drone checking for broken paving-stones. What if she thinks you fucked Christie to get at her—everything’s bubbling up from the depths of your subconscious, like methane clathrates bursting from an overheated ocean floor. You freeze, unable to make your traitor feet move towards her door. But then you remember what lies behind you in the dusk-haunted corridors of the hotel. Can’t go forward, can’t go back: It’s the existential dilemma in a nutshell, isn’t it? You’re scared of what Liz will think of you, that’s a given, but the flip side of the coin is that you’re scared of what Christie could do to you. That makes things a lot clearer, for which you are duly grateful. “Hi, dear, do you mind if I borrow your futon for the night? I just fucked a psychopath, and I’m afraid he’s stalking me via my employers.” It’s not much of a script, but at least it’s there. Your left foot slides forward, almost against your will, then your right. It’s going to be all right, you think.

  Until you climb the six stone steps to the wee front door of the colony flat and ring the doorbell, at which point you lose it again.

  LIZ: It’s Complicated

  Later:

  It’s morning, and you’re on the beat: High pay grade, brightly polished boots—but boots, nonetheless. That’s what it always comes back down to, boots directed by BOOTS, the Bayesian Objective Officer Tracking System, an expert system by any other name, to tell you which street to walk down.

  You can’t do policing without boots (whether physical lumps of leather or virtual chunks of software). It takes boots to track down and interview the witnesses, boots to comb the incident scene for debris and clues, boots to define a territory and remind the trolls who the streets belong to, boots to do the necessary social-work clean-up duty after hours on a Saturday night, BOOTS to do the personnel task assignments and match capabilities to needs, BOOTS to take a series of jobs and parcel them out as efficiently as possible. Boots are an integral part of the process.

  It’s not like the brass don’t know this, even though they’re always looking for an alternative: surveillance drones in the sky, peepers on segways rolling alongside the gutters, social-networking Crimestoppers and anti-alcoholism initiatives. Boots are labour-intensive, they take training and command and control resources, and they don’t—can’t—give you scalable efficiency improvements. So they’re unpopular with the buzzword-wielding consultants who keep coming back to shape your political masters’ outlook an election or two after they got booted the last time for costing too much.

  This morning you started by going straight to the shift-change Babylon briefing, your head still a-churn from the late-night encounter with Dorothy. And lo, Dickie’s got a job for you. “Liz, we’ve got one that’s right up your street.” The moustache twitches in something between a smile and a snarl: “a possible expert witness for you to interview here—a Dr. Adam MacDonald, of the university informatics department.” He flicks a tightly knotted bundle of mind-mapped notes at you. “He’s an expert on the emergent behaviour of distributed oracular systems—whatever they are—and I want you to go pick his brains.” A sniff. “One of your Europol contacts raised it this morning, and BOOTS fingered you to talk to him. Some pish about research into using social networks to distribute subtasks contributing to a fatal outcome. Ye ken it bears on that line about sabotaged dish-washers and back-street fabs ye’ve been pushing.”

  You’re too tired to raise an eyebrow at the fact that Dickie’s actually been paying attention to anything you minuted. “Wouldn’t that be a Common Cause charge if we find them . . . ?”

  “Aye, it might be. Or it might not, if the participants dinna understand what they’ve been set to doing.” Dickie twitches. “Well?”

  “I’ll get right onto it. Anything else?”

  Dickie shakes his head. “Next agenda item . . .”

  There has been little progress overnight. The promised lead on Mikey Blair’s wild ride came forward voluntarily but turns out to be a rent boy who knows nothing about anything. They’re still looking for Vivian Crolla’s embalming expert, but much digging reveals that she has something of a reputation on the local fetish scene. Half an hour in the right pubs, and you could probably have figured that much out for yourself.

  So it is that you and Kemal (who you pick up in the ICIU annexe, where he’s talking to Moxie about something—fitting in too well by half, you think) end up visiting Appleton Tower.

  It’s not quite that fast, of course. You’re still somewhat freaked by yesterday’s late-night developments (Dorothy being an emotional wreck in need of support is unexpected: And the rest is just plain disturbing), so you’re not paying one hundred–per cent attention to the job. Which is why Kemal brings you up short as you’re scurrying in circles trying to do three things at once. “What exactly are we being sent to do?” he demands.

  “I—” You stop dead, caught in the act of rifling through Speedy’s in-tray to see what Moxie left unfinished at shift change. “That’s a good question.” You pull up the stack of notes Dickie passed you and sign Kemal onto it. “Let me finish here, then we can go grab a coffee and read this stuff.”

  And so you go find the nearest Costa’s in a wee shop unit on Raeburn Place, and get your heads into the backgrounder that turns out to be a committee report from Karl in Dresden, Andrea in New York, Felix in Bishkek, and a bunch of other ICIU cops around the world.

  You read fast. “This is amazing.” While you were off shift, the intelligence team working behind the scenes on Babylon have been busy. It looks like they traced the repaired vacuum cleaner, and then some: For a miracle, they’ve been sharing their research with their overseas counterparts, and they’ve been pooling results. “All the parts come from cheap generic-design storefronts.”

  “Who set them up?” asks Kemal.

  “Good question.” The storefronts all take PayPal, and investigation traces them to a variety of servers in the Far East. Most of which, upon further examination—where possible—turn out to be part of one of three botnets.

  “People are dying in domestic accidents,” you tell him, still skimming ahead through the notes. “A vacuum cleaner shorts its battery out into a bath, or a non-standard cartridge in a spa machine contains contaminated fluid, or a sun bed’s safety interlock is disabled. In each case, the machine has been repaired in the past year. Whoever carried out the repair saved money by using an OEM part template bought over the net and printed on a local machine. The part is physically a correct fit, but compromised: The vacuum’s hose contains an electrical connection and links to the power supply, the sun-bed latch . . .”

  Kemal shakes his head. “Very strange.”

  “It’s completely crazy, isn’t it?” You skim another summary. “I don’t see how it’s possible—we’re up to fourteen murders now? Then they’d need a lot of different sabotaged appliances, at least fourteen, probably more—”

  Kemal nods grimly. “Many more. More than two per target, perhaps more than five. You should search the homes of your local victims, tear everything apart and see what else comes to light. There may be many more. I think we may be mistaking the elephant’s tail for a bell-pull.”

  “But who’s designing the things?”

  “Ask this academic?” Kemal sounds disturbed.

  “Got any ideas what to ask about?”

  He pulls his specs on and points. “How about task distribution? And where the designs come from?”

  “Huh. That side of it—I’ve been looking into this. The Chinese government began prioritizing design twenty years ago in their universities. India, more recently. The recycling initiative”—Make Do And Mend is big this decade—“and the Internet combine to give them ready access to markets, and the spread of cheap fabbers allows th
em to export bespoke design patterns. WIPO are trying to do something about the generics, but design and trade-secret laws are not universally harmonized. Not like copyright and patent regulations.”

  It’s part of what you’ve been tugging on from the other end, the supply of feedstock to the grey-market fabs—you’ve been looking at demand for counterfeit or contraband goods, and the supply of raw materials and designs feeding them. This is clearly related, but not in a way you can put your finger on just yet.

  Kemal picks up his coffee cup. “The problem is not to, to design replacement parts that have lethal flaws. The problem is not even to insert them in the victims’ households—true, some will live large, not repair or recycle domestic appliances, but most will be vulnerable somewhere: an exercise machine at their gym, a brake assembly in their car. No, the problem is how to coordinate the operation.” He looks you in the eye. “It is scary, yes?”

  It’s not so much scary as incomprehensible: This murder’s MO stands in relation to a normal homicide as a super-jumbo to a Cessna. “Murder I can get, but why do it this way? It’s positively baroque! Who would do such a thing? It’s inhuman!”

  “You’re absolutely right,” Kemal says, pushing his cup aside. “It is inhuman.”

  “You’re not going on that AI trip again,” you say wearily.

  Kemal shakes his head. “Precisely who is sending us to interview this academic?”

  “Tricky—” You stop. BOOTS fingered you to talk to him. “BOOTS,” you say. An expert system for matching personnel assignments to tasks. “Huh.” You finish your coffee. “But it’s just human-resources software.”

  “If we know how it works, it isn’t Artificial Intelligence,” snarks Kemal. He stands up. “Shall we go?”