Rule 34

by Charles Stross

  “Honey? I’m home . . .”

  It’s like that inevitable, deterministic scene in every horror video you’ve ever lost two hours of your life to: the dawning sense of wrongness, of a life unhinged. From the subtle absence of expected sounds to the different, unwelcome noise from upstairs in the bedroom, all is out of order.

  “Hello?” you call up the stairwell.

  There’s no reply, but you hear footsteps like a herd of baby elephants on the landing. Angry footsteps. Your stomach clenches. They are Bibi’s angry footsteps, and now you know what is wrong: All that remains is to find out why.

  You tiptoe past an obstruction in the hall and look up the stairs. “Is everything alright?” you call.

  There’s a muffled thud, a wail of pain, and some most unladylike swearing. Then there’s another thud, louder. Bibi hauls into view on the landing, leaning to one side, the big yellow suitcase dragging at the ends of her arms like a boat anchor. Her glare of effort silences you as she levers it onto the top stair-tread. It must be full, to be so heavy. The suitcase is a hundred-litre monster, sized for that month-long family excursion to Lahore that never came. Ever since, it has lurked under Naseem’s bed like a bright plastic chrysalis from which someday a holiday will hatch. It’s nearly bigger than Bibi, and for a heart-stopping moment, you think she’s going to be crushed by it. But no: It rocks heavily on the stair, then she’s behind it, gripping it by the tow handle and leaning backwards as she lowers it towards you like a juggernaut of wrath. Finally, it hits the hall carpet and sits there, and Bibi pushes it past you, breathing heavily.

  “What are you doing?” you ask.

  “What does it look as if I’m doing?” There’s an odd, lilting note in her voice, almost devil-may-care.

  “Is it your mother?”

  “No, Anwar, it’s you.”

  “I don’t—” You’re about to say understand, but for a cursed moment your tongue freezes. “Where are the children?”

  She pushes the heavy bag past you, forcing you to step back against the wall. She’s on the other side of it, using it as a shield. “What’s in the bucket?” she asks tensely. “Where did you get that suitcase?”

  She’s been up the ladder.

  Oh shit.

  “I, I can explain! It’s work—a man from head office, from the Foreign Office, he is coming to stay, just for a couple of nights—”

  “Shut up, Anwar.”

  You focus on her nostrils, on the tip of her nose. They’re flared wide, as if she smells something awful, something vile. She’s shaking slightly. Fear? Anger? You’ve always found it hard to read Bibi. The long silences, the elliptical comments, the woman’s expectation of insight, as if you’re expected to read and parse the invisible code written on the inside of her eyelids. Contempt?

  “What’s wrong?” you ask.

  “I’m leaving,” she says, as calmly as if announcing she was going to work.

  “What?”

  While you stand, perplexed, back up against the wall, she shoves the suitcase past you to stand beside the smaller bag that obstructs the hallway.

  “When are you coming back?” you ask, feeling lost.

  She grabs the smaller bag by the handle. “That’s up to you.” She drags it up to the open front door, then stops, straightens up, and glares at you. “Get rid of that stuff. Get help. Then you can email me.”

  “But what—what stuff?” None of this makes sense. “I don’t understand.”

  “No, you don’t.” Her contempt is withering. “I’ve put up with a lot of not understanding from you, over the years. Not understanding what it is about obeying the law, Anwar. Not understanding that you’re going to get caught if you carry on. And I’ve been giving you a lot of not understanding in return. Not understanding about the pubs and the late nights. Not understanding about your boy-friends and the condoms. I could even manage to not understand your brewing experiment in the attic, or the dodgy business deals. But the other thing? I can’t not understand that. Promise me you’ll get help, and we can talk. Chat. IM. I won’t tell the police.” Her shoulders are shaking. “But. If I catch you near the kids, I’ll tell everyone.” She turns away.

  “Tell everyone what?”

  But you’re talking to a receding back, hunched under the weight of too much baggage. You blink against the daylight, mouth hanging open, unable to grasp what’s happening. There’s a sour taste in your mouth and a ringing in your ears, and a terrible tension in your head: the injustice of it all! If you were a real man of your father’s generation, you’d chase after her and drag her back and thrash her soundly. (If you were a real man of your father’s generation she’d call Social Services on you.) Where’s the honour in this? What does she think you have done, to be so offended?

  The bucket. The suitcase. Oh God.

  The front door slams closed behind you as you scamper for the staircase as if all the hounds of hell are chasing you. (She’s been upstairs. And it’s not the bucket.) You pull down the loft ladder and scramble up it, gasping for breath, surface in the attic like a mole in a lawn suddenly come face-to-face with a roller.

  The bucket is where you left it, but Peter Manuel’s suitcase sits open on the floor, in the middle of the puddle of daylight admitted by the dormer window. Bibi must have forced the lock, you realize. A small, pale-skinned arm rests just over the zippered rim, as if a wee bairn is sleeping inside. Then the arm twitches, flailing for a grip.

  A little girl, about three years younger than Farida, sits up in the suitcase. Blonde tousled hair and button nose: blue eyes and puppy fat. But there’s something wrong with her. Her face is expressionless and paralyzed, her mouth gaping so wide you think for a horrid moment that her jaw is dislocated—her skin doesn’t seem to fit properly. And she’s naked. Naked, and in a suitcase.

  Then she looks at you with undead eyes and speaks without moving her mouth:

  “Will you fuck me, Daddy? I want you. I’ve been so lonely without you . . .”

  LIZ: Dominoes Fall

  You don’t normally come out of an interview with a material witness blinking at the light and wondering which way up your world goes; twice in twenty-four hours is something of a personal record. Nevertheless, you take one look at Kemal’s face and feel a twinge of recognition. You step aside for a stranger entering the building as the grimy glass door swings shut behind you, distracted by the need to marshal your thoughts. “Did you get anything out of that?” you ask.

  Kemal shakes his head, not in negation but in weary acknowledgment. “The future is here today, unevenly distributed,” he misquotes. “I do not think the doctor is a murderer. Not a knowing one, of course.”

  You keep your thoughts to yourself for a moment as you look around for the car. It’s missing. “Hold on.” You ping the front desk back at head office: “Where’s our ride?”

  Sniffy McSluggard takes her own sweet time getting back to you: “CID telled it it was needed elsewhere, Inspector. You’ll be wanting to charge for a bus ride.”

  Which is just bloody typical. “Come on,” you tell Kemal, and head down Buccleugh Street towards the short-cut through to South Clerk Street. “What makes you think the doctor’s in the clear?”

  “I do not think he’s innocent,” Kemal admits. “His speech stress is uneven. He hides something, yes. And the spam connection, and the, the cognitive engine, the use of distributed networks—that is significant. But I don’t think he’s a killer.”

  “Why not?” you needle.

  “He is a coward.” Kemal pauses next to a rack of council recycling bins. “That is a technical term,” he adds. “He is a thinking man and an overplanner. He anticipates hazards before they emerge, and avoids them. Risk-averse.”

  “That’s how I pegged him,” you aver. So why did Dodgy Dickie want you to interview him? “I think we should do some more digging. If someone is using ATHENA to locate targets, that would fit . . .” You trail off. There’s that nagging sense of déjà vu. You know Dr. MacDonald from
somewhere, you’re sure of it. One or other of the pubs and bars in the pink triangle? Or a Pride march in years past, when you were managing the Lothian and Borders booth? That’s as may be, but it’s not relevant to the case in hand. “Let’s find out who he talks to. Let’s see what Moxie can find out about his connections.”

  Back on South Clerk Street you hijack a microbus with the aid of your company debit card and bid handsomely to divert it halfway to Dean Village. There’s some jerk on the top deck who counterbids and it ends up ramping to twenty euros, but fuck it—two DIs, on a murder investigation: Doc will square it for you. You walk the last stretch and are back at HQ by eleven.

  The MacDonald interview has preceded you—uploaded in real time, it made it into the BABYLON intel feed and promptly bamboozled everyone on the team who was paying attention. As you walk through the shielded doors, a blizzard of virtual Post-it notes descends on you, terminating in a terse SEE ME, signed DCI MacLeish. It’s like being back in grammar school again. You give Kemal the eye-ball. “Got to run, make yourself at home in ICIU.”

  You barely walk through the door to D31 before Dickie is on your case. Face like thunder, beetling brows, he rushes you. “This way,” he growls, striding towards a confessional cubicle—beige fabric walls, antisound damper poised overhead like a metal mantis. He barely waits to get into the cone of silence before he launches on you. “I don’t know what you fucking think you’re doing, Kavanaugh, snooping around on your off shift and sticking your nose in—”

  “Hey, what the fuck are you—”

  “No, don’t you start! I should take this up the chain reet now. You’re a loose cannon. This report on the Straight woman is the final straw—”

  You snap. “Fuck off.”

  “Whit?”

  His expression is a picture in peach, slowly ripening towards plum. You ken you’ve got about five seconds before he really explodes, so you go for the throat “She came to me, sir. Because, you know, outside of work I have this thing called a life, and Dorothy is one of my friends. Friends, Dickie, you’ve heard of them? Jesus fucking Christ, have you never had a friend come to you with a question about the law? Come on. Tell me. Have you?”

  “I’ve nivver had a so-called friend cough a fucking POI in a murder investigation in my lap!”

  “Well neither have I, but there’s always a first time. And I bet you’ve never had a girl-friend cough to a date-rape situation either, have you? But that’s what friends are for.”

  The “R” word gets his attention. “Rape, did you say?”

  You make a cutting gesture: “I didna think there was a case to answer, or I’d have had her down the clinic before her feet touched the floor. Questionable sex, with a side order of sociopathic manipulation involved. Her word against his, no drugs or threats of violence, it gets murky fast. But no, sir. The reason I filed the report was this John Christie sock puppet is in play, and I figured you might want to talk to him. About what he was doing visiting our friend Mr. Blair. Ahem.” You don’t add, instead of adding two plus two to make 16.7 and threatening me with a disciplinary. That’s understood. But his expression begins to droop from bullish to sheepish, and the choleric colour is fading.

  “Jesus, Liz.”

  You’ve won, you see, but you’re still pissed off at him for losing his rag in the first place. Probably best to let him know about it, both barrels in the face: Dickie’s not terribly perceptive when it comes to subtleties of interpersonal relations. “We are on the same team, sir. I really do not appreciate this hard-on you’ve got for me. I am attempting to discharge my duty as efficiently as possible, and you keep dumping on me. When I stumbled over a lead by pure chance, I sent it your way because that’s the right thing to do: I do not expect to catch shit by return of email. If you’d be happier with me off the case, then just say so: I’ve got a patch of my own to cultivate. But some professional courtesy would be appreciated around here.”

  The red spots on his cheeks come back, but he visibly bites his lip—and nods. It’s just a quiver of acknowledgment, but it’s the real thing. Suck it up, asshole. To his credit, he nods again. “It would seem that I owe someone an apology,” he admits.

  Don’t be too fast with that: You could poke somebody’s eye out. You confine your response to a minutely calculated nod. “About Dr. MacDonald—”

  “No,” says Dickie, and something about his tone alerts you, puts you on notice that he’s forgotten for a moment that he hates you.

  “No?”

  “Summat you said.” He frowns frumiously, an expression that comes easily to the front of his wrinkled noggin. “Stumbled over a lead by pure chance. So you say. D’ye really think that’s plausible?”

  “What are you implying?” Your hackles are still raised.

  “I’m not implying . . . anything . . . about you. What I’m saying is, it’s a verra convenient coincidence. And if there’s one thing ye ken I dinna trust, it’s coincidences. And there’s too goddamn many of them in this ay mess.”

  “Coin—” You stop. “Dr. MacDonald. His whole social-network-analysis thing?”

  Dickie fixes you with one cold blue eye and nods slowly, beneath the cone of silence.

  You begin to come down from the adrenaline spike of career-terminating rage when you arrive back at the door to the ICIU. Inside, all is as it should be: The ever-rotating pool of uniformed porn monkeys are whining for release from the vomitorium, Moxie is forted up in the second office behind a stack of giant monitors and discarded munchie boxes, and Kemal is propping up the wall behind him, looking bored behind his shades.

  “Hey, skipper.” Moxie leers at you over a browser full of—you look away quickly. “What can I do you for?”

  “Dr. Adam MacDonald, Ed Uni, CS department. What have we got on him?”

  “How deep do you want to go?” Your ferret is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed: Moxie likes nothing better than a good chase.

  “Public sources first? Nothing I have to sign for at this time.”

  “Well.” Moxie twitches his fingers at a couple of tabs. “It’s funny you ask that, skipper. He’s got an article on wikipeople, you know? And the social networks, what’s not friends-locked. A couple of singlesign-ons will vouch for him, and he posts in chat rooms all over the place.” He pulls a face. “Nothing saucy—well, nothing much. He’s divorced, one ex-husband—he’s heterosexually challenged and hangs out in the usual places.”

  Kemal is head down over a pad, evidently brainstorming something—you can see lots of mind-map bubbles floating in an ochre soup of murky possibilities. “Okay. Let me authorize a trawl of CopSpace links under BABYLON’s authority.” You don’t have the authority to pull up random citizen’s CopSpace records on your own, but MacDonald’s on BABYLON’s radar as a POI, and you’re on team as an inspector, so your signing authority will cover it. You lean over Moxie’s terminal and stick your thumbprint on the reader, as required. It’s very fast and streamlined these days, the hierarchical delegation of surveillance authority under RIPA statutes: police-intelligence access via social network. “Let’s see who the good doctor has been talking to lately . . .”

  Kemal catches your eye. While Moxie is busy, you follow him outside into the bright sunlight. The drive is occupied; someone’s parked a bunch of the force’s riot barrier trailers there, lined up as if there’s an up-coming derby. “What is it?” you ask.

  “Your boss must really hate you.” To your surprise, he pulls out a packet of cigarettes and glances around. “Do you mind?”

  “Um . . .” You shake your head. “Yes, he does. Five years ago I was in line for the job he’s in now, and he knows it. I’m the skeleton in his closet.” Lothian and Borders is officially a non-smoking force, but Kemal’s just visiting, and you’re outside and more than ten metres from a doorway. “Is that legal?”

  His cheek twitches in something like a smile. “I have given up giving up.”

  You step sideways to stand up-wind of him: “Any thoughts?”

&n
bsp; He gets the thing lit and inhales deeply, frowning. After he lets the smoke out, the set of his shoulders relaxes somewhat. “I have been reading this morning’s reports. More fatalities. One of them is a computer scientist in Boston. The usual methodology applies: a misdirected package. This man, though, was a full professor. Not a spammer. He listed project ATHENA as one of his research areas.”

  “You think that’s why Ops sent us to see MacDonald?”

  “I think so.” He nods, then sucks at the cancer stick again. “Also”—he shrugs tiredly—“the information-crimes angle.”

  You get that hint instantly. ICIU is the red-headed stepchild of CID and IT Support, the spotty teenager with the suspect habits whose bedroom nobody willingly cleans for fear of what they’ll find under the bed. It’s the same everywhere. Most police work boils down to minimizing the impact on society of stupidity; of the remainder, the overwhelming majority is about malice and deliberate evil, but it’s still almost all stupid. Smart cops hate smart crimes, because they take ages to nail down and in the meantime your clean-up metrics tank. And the crime here—assuming there’s anyone to charge with it—is so high concept that it’s making your nose bleed. “What kind of scenario do you think we’re looking at?”

  Smoke trickles from his nostrils. “We have bodies, linked in life by a social network, linked in dying by weird coincidences. We have software for scanning social networks and making deductions about the people in them. We have researchers discussing active countermeasures. The question that remains is, did a human being order the software that is conscious to start taking such measures? Or is it an accident?”

  “Different charges, either way.” He stubs the cigarette out on the sole of one shoe and pockets the butt, staring at you. For your part, you stare at the roofline of the intelligence building, feeling numb. “If someone gave the order, well, there’s your mens rea and a tidy wrap-up. If nobody did so, then we’re into murkier waters: negligent homicide, maybe.”