Rule 34

by Charles Stross

  Trucks deploy through Bishkek, parking outside office blocks and hotels. Troops, gendarmes, police deploy inside, crowding elevators and marching up to receptionists. They maintain total communication silence—smartphones switched off or physically disabled, battle-field radios stowed back at headquarters—as they march on their targets.

  (This network makes an association: The phone on Colonel Datka’s desk rang within minutes of a police officer in Scotland starting a distributed search for information about . . . Colonel Datka?)

  ((Evidently a trap has been sprung.))

  Traffic cameras (known to the network) follow a group of trucks across town to the Erkindik Hotel. When they draw up, a platoon of special forces soldiers deploy around them—Spetsnaz anti-terrorism troops. Then a clump of officers climb down from the second-to-rearmost vehicle. Colonel Datka is among them. They enter the hotel behind a vanguard of Interior Ministry troops, two of whom disappear into the offices behind the reception desk.

  (The hotel network switch goes down. The hotel primary router goes off-line. The hotel backup router goes off-line. The LTE picocells go off-line, one on each floor, followed by the LAN bridges and wifi repeaters. The fire alarm and security alarms . . . off-line. This network can no longer observe events inside the hotel, with one or two exceptions.)

  (One of the exceptions is a suite on the eleventh floor. Its occupant, an American investment analyst, has brought his own satellite phone and a compact generator. His webcams, deployed around the lounge/ conference area to provide motion capture for teleconferencing, are still transmitting through a ruinously expensive thin pipe.)

  ((This network can monitor these transmissions.))

  Mr. White is clearly not expecting company. He’s half-dressed, slouched on the sofa with an open bottle of white wine and a pad loaded with Iranian amateur pornography. When the door buzzer sounds, he jerks guiltily and looks round, then slides the pad face-down on the occasional table and goes to grab a towelling bath-robe.

  The buzzer does not sound again. Instead, the door opens. “Hey, what are you—”

  “Mr. White.” Colonel Datka follows his soldiers into the room. “You are under arrest.”

  Mr. White gapes dumbly. “Uh?”

  “Sit down,” says the colonel. He points at the sofa. “Do not touch your pad.”

  “But I, what the fuck are you, hey.” Mr. White’s eyes take in the spotty post-adolescents in uniform, their guns clenched tight in whiteknuckled fingers, their eyes determined. His movements slow abruptly. “Wait a minute. What about the contract? Are you planning on defaulting on us?”

  “Sit. Down.” The colonel’s finger will not be argued with. Mr. White sits down. The colonel continues, in Kyrgyz, to his troops: “Handcuff him.”

  “Hey, wait . . . ! You can’t do this!”

  “I can, and I am.” The colonel watches as his men lay hands on Mr. White. “By the way, these men were selected specifically because they do not speak English.”

  “You don’t want to go down this road, Felix, you really don’t. The board have a strict tit-for-tat policy in dealing with defaulters.” Mr. White swallows. “What’s the problem? Is this an attempt to up-negotiate your options?”

  The colonel shakes his head. “We are terminating Issyk-Kulistan’s independence, John. With effect from tomorrow morning, once the bonds are redeemed. You, and your Operation, are going to take the fall for it. This has been decided.”

  “But—the—you can’t be serious!”

  “Bhaskar tells me we have sold 18 billion euros’ worth of CDOs, John.” The colonel’s smile is unspeakably smug. “Seventy-four per cent of which have been purchased by off-shore investment trusts, slush funds, sovereign-wealth funds operated by sock puppets, and for cash deals in dark alleyways. We are interestingly leveraged: The national debt of Issyk-Kulistan is less than 16 billion. And Issyk-Kulistan is not going to default. On the contrary—tomorrow, the people’s chamber of deputies will call for a repudiation of the vote for independence, which as you know was shamelessly irregular—and vote itself into liquidation. The national debt is paid down, thanks to the oversold CDOs. We will, of course, honour those derivatives that have been purchased by entities adhering to international accounting transparency standards . . .”

  “They’ll kill you,” Mr. White says flatly.

  “No they won’t.” (In Kyrgyz:) “Take him away.” To Mr. White’s receding back, as the soldiers frog-march him down the hotel corridor: “You are under arrest for complicity in murder, for financial crimes too long and tedious to recite from memory, for treason against the government and people of Kyrgyzstan, for tax evasion against the government of the United States of America, for violation of their organized crime and racketeering act—we’re considering handing you over to the FBI to save the cost of trying you ourselves—for creation of an unlicensed artificial intelligence: Oh, and there is an enquiry from Scotland about the import of illegally mislabelled food products . . .”

  (Colonel Datka sounds indecently pleased with himself as his voice fades out of range of the Operation executive’s phone.)

  DOROTHY: 2.0

  The day passes in a blur. First off, you’re late for work. Not your fault, but figuring out how to get from Liz’s bijou flat to the Gyle involves a not-terribly-magical mystery tour around Edinburgh’s spatchcock public-transport infrastructure. Your hotel’s on the tram network, twelve minutes out—but Liz might as well live in Newcastle given the frequency of the bus service, and after most of an hour, you end up paging a taxi.

  Then, when you’re on-site, your attention is shot. You just can’t focus properly. By late morning, you’re working up your nerve to go talk it out with Human Resources—write off the day’s work so far against goodwill in return for an unscheduled early exit—when you get an IM from the police. It’s not wholly unexpected, but still you find your hands clammy with sweat. You call HR anyway and find them surprisingly receptive: “I have to go and give the police a statement about a crime I witnessed,” you tell the man on the screen. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take, so I’m clocking off for the day.” He nods and says something diplomatically non-committal: There, you did it. Relieved, you leave.

  The afternoon passes in a blur, most of it spent in a drab waiting room, some of it in front of a discreet webcam and a sympathetic detective constable. She takes you through the night before, not prompting but clearly already aware of most of what you’re saying: She seems to mostly want to know about Christie, everything you can remember about him that you weren’t paying attention to. Sex, even bad sex, does strange things to your memory. You are, you think, discreet about your precise relationship with Liz. “A friend,” you describe her, “one of your colleagues.”

  Finally, you’re free to go. Free, empty, drained of memories. You go outside, under the sky that is cold and blue, streaked with thin clouds high overhead. Your phone, emerging from the station’s shielding, gibbers to itself for a few seconds as a bunch of messages come in. You read them with increasing disbelief and disgust. Most of them are work-related, but only Liz’s message makes any sense, and she’s just asking if you have any dinner plans.

  You text her back: CAN I STAY TONIGHT? You don’t examine your motives too closely; whether you’re tacitly offering to play by her rules, or just looking for any port in a storm, you don’t want to spend another night in that hotel. Minutes later, as you walk towards Stockbridge, you get a reply: SURE. Which tells you what to do next—bid for a microbus back to the hotel to pack your bags and clear your room.

  LIZ: Debrief

  By the time you get back to HQ, a log-jam has broken.

  The first sign you get, sitting in the back of an ambulance as a paramedic checks your pupils, is an excitable voice call from Moxie. “Skipper, you’re going to love this! It’s crazy! There’s been a revolution in someplace I can’t pronounce in Asia, and it turns out the government’s been running a scheme to use AI tools to go after spammers? Only, se
e, they screwed up the training they gave their cognitive toolkit, and it began arranging accidents—”

  You tune him out as irrelevant background noise, devoid of content. Your head hurts, your back aches, and you’re increasingly pissed-off with yourself. I’m getting too old for this crap. The honorary consul for Issyk-Kulistan, indeed. And some random psycho who’s arranging staged suicides when he’s not peeling the skin off his victim’s hands? It’s too damn much, that’s what it is. The fire-hose of seemingly disconnected data is drowning you. At times like this you can see where Tricky Dickie is coming from, with his hankering for a simpler time—even if it’s not your simpler time, even if it’s a time when you and yours were not welcome and not legal.

  They make you sit on your arse for half an hour while they confirm there’s no concussion. A couple of messages come in on your phone’s private personality: YES, you tell Dorothy, YOU CAN STAY OVER. A few seconds later she responds: I’LL GET MY BAGS. Unresolved fragments of your untidy life are sliding towards an uncertain resolution. Eventually, you get yourself signed off and go back inside the madhouse, where a couple of car-loads of uniforms are busy poking around in search of traces. There’s no sign of Anwar, but Dickie is waiting for you in the over-furnished living room, pacing back and forth beneath a kitsch gilt-framed hologram of the Ka’bah. “Why?” he demands. “Why here?”

  This is promising. “Social-network analysis, intelligence driven. ICIU has a mandate to track the international side of this investigation. After interviewing Dr. MacDonald, Inspector Aslan and I concurred that he wasn’t telling us everything we needed to know. I authorized a search of his public friends lists, and came up with a close personal connection to Mr. Hussein, via a particular social site. As Mr. Hussein was already noted in proximity to one of the ATHENA victims, once I’d confirmed that Dr. MacDonald was indeed the victim at Appleton Towers, I decided to visit Mr. Hussein and see what I could shake loose.”

  You can see Dickie winding up again, but he bottles it up for once. “Why did you not see fit to file a report with BABYLON?” he asks, his voice uncharacteristically soft.

  “Ah, well, I did. But there’s so much intel going into the funnel on this one that, on reviewing the situation with Inspector Aslan, we agreed that there was a high risk of its not being prioritized. And as you can see, even with blues and twos, we only just got here in time . . .”

  “Aye.” Dickie’s glower fades to a calculating frown: He’s probably spinning the PR angle, considering how it’ll look in the newsfeeds. Detective saves victim from psycho killer in the nickof time always plays well. “But you lost this Christie character.”

  You rub the back of your head, ruefully. “Not for want of trying.”

  “Just so. Tell me, Inspector, what motivational factors do you think we’re looking at here? And where do you think he’ll go?”

  You blink, surprised. “We haven’t already . . . ?”

  The frown is back. “Nae fear, it’s a matter of time.”

  “Shit.” The drones must have arrived overhead too late to catch his trail. It’s daylight, and the sun’s out, so the heat signature from his footsteps will be washed out, and if he was smart, Christie will have disabled all his personal electronics. “Ahem. Motivation. I’m flailing in the dark here, but even leaving aside the sock-puppet ID, Christie doesn’t sound right to me. He’s from out of town, he’s got diplomatic connections with Issyk-Kulistan, hence the connection to Mr. Hussein.”

  “He’s got more than that,” Dickie mutters. “Mr. Hussein has some questions to answer about what we found in his bathroom.”

  “What? Drugs? Kiddie-porn?”

  “Neither: But we found a bucketful of bootleg replicator feedstock he was busy trying to flush down the toilet.” Dickie looks smug. “Almost certainly the same stuff that’s been turning up in your Saturday night specials down in Leith. I trust we will shake loose where he got it from in due course.”

  It’s the feedstock channel you’ve been chasing for months, under-resourced and overworked. Typical of Dickie to roll it up for you as a side-show. Asshole. “Huh. That’s not like Anwar; he’s always been one for the white-collar scams. But you asked about Christie?”

  “Aye. What do you think?”

  Well, at last. “I think he’s working for some organized crime syndicate or other. I don’t know what he’s doing in Edinburgh, but the ATHENA killings rattled his cage, and he or his took it as a personal attack. Maybe it was a personal attack; what if he turned up on our door-step because he was looking to do business with the victims? Or kill them as rivals, or something.”

  “I don’t like coincidences,” Dickie says, almost as if he’s accusing you of rigging the dice. “Why did he run into this girl-friend of yours? Wouldn’t you say that’s a bit of a big coincidence, too?”

  You stare at the hologram on the wall. “Yes, you’re absolutely right,” you hear yourself saying. “It’s almost as if we were being nudged into noticing him, or something—”

  You stop dead. More dominoes appear in your imaginary hand, slotting neatly into place on the board.

  “What? Say what’s on your mind, woman.”

  “ATHENA is at the root of this.” Lack of professional courtesy indeed. “ATHENA is all about analysing social networks to reward good behaviour and punish defectors. Moxie—ICIU—was trying to tell me something about it just now, sir. Some kind of central Asian government has been using it to get at netcrime rings, going too far and arranging accidents. What if I’m the accident that’s being arranged for Christie?”

  “Huh.” Dickie stares at you. “The cult of the lone gun detective again, Inspector?”

  “Give me some credit for not being stupid, sir: You and I both know what gets successful prosecutions, and it isn’t that Life on Mars shit.” (What gets results is an ops room full of detectives working together as a team, with a fully documented work flow and built-in quality assurance. Transparency after the fact, everyone lifelogging to sealed evidence servers and evidence secured under lock and key so that the Procurator Fiscal can prove a watertight case in court. Sherlock Holmes has been superseded by business process refactoring, and success is all about good management.) “But I probably came to ATHENA’s attention via ICIU. I’m one of the nodes on the graph that’s got lots of long-range inputs; I’m an easier inside contact to reach than an officer who doesn’t deal with other netcrime units on a day-to-day basis. And everything ATHENA knows about how we work comes from our external social traffic.”

  “So you’re the trigger, or bait, or summat. And ye ken ATHENA’s trying to feed Christie to us. And if ATHENA can noodge you, it can noodge Christie, can’t it? So where’s Christie bound for—” Dickie stops dead. His eyes widen. “Your friend was staying in the West End Hilton, was she not? Let’s go pay her hotel a visit right now,” he says. And you realize, to your chagrin, that just for once he’s right.

  ATHENA: Meatpuppet

  Ants. I am surrounded by fucking ants. Can’t they get anything right?

  This is not organized crime. (Organized crime: fucking 1920s shit invented by bootlegging immigrant fucktards in the slums of Chicago and New York and the other big cities with the help of their ’Ndrangheta homies, and so easy that by the 2020s even a bunch of crack-snorting surfer-dude VCs from California could master it.)

  Listen, mother-fucker, I expect backup.

  I am hanging my ass out here in the wastelands of Scotlandshire, waiting for a fucking bus with a suitcase in my fucking hand that contains a pair of freshly harvested frog-skin gloves—so freshly harvested they’re bleeding all over my briefs, you wanted fucking DNA samples as evidence of delivery, you cunt—and a pre-pubertal fucktoy that talks to me when it thinks I’m sleeping. I demand backup.

  This is not an alien invasion scenario, even if the bat-winged drones ghosting above the satellite-dish-infested roof-tops obey the overmind AI crime goddess, and there are robots wearing sportswear on every street-corner. Some of them neck cheap tin
nies of Polish lager and look at you as if they’re wondering if you’re dangerous—but they don’t fool you. There are lizards in designer suits in the boardrooms of the skyscrapers of London, planning to harvest the humans . . .

  Five-point-six-two kilograms, damn it. Same weight as the average severed human head. Sole seat of cognition, once.

  The thing in the suitcase is the future. It tells me this when it sneaks out in the darkness before dawn and crawls into my bed to suck my juices.

  Are you listening, mother-fucker?

  “I’m listening. Please carry on.”

  A bus hums around the corner, slowing to halt by the stop. The tall man with the suitcase steps aboard, holding the QR-coded ticket he just paid cash for up to the camera in what used to be the driver’s seat. He mutters to himself as he takes one of the vacant priority seats.

  I do this shit for you because you tell me there’s a career in it. But I’m not seeing that. I’m not seeing your start-up monkey-dance IPO switch-blade here. I’m seeing the rape machines in the bushes, the gutted ghosts hanging in the trees on ropes flensed from their intestines. Skinned frogs croaking as their blood beads and runs in rivulets across their pale dorsal muscles.

  (This batch of drugs isn’t working too well. Stress sometimes does that, or cheap generics or counterfeits. Did you source me cheap generics, mother-fucker? Did you cheap your executive?)

  Look, this is merely another logistics problem.

  I have downsized MacDonald, as you requested through the thing in the suitcase. I have given you the ATHENA source code you wanted. The police arrived before I could terminate the squirming toad Hussein, but as I understand it, the lizards have already conquered Issyk-Kulistan; there’s nobody left but screaming skeletons with the flayed meat hanging from their bones eating eye-gouged dogs in the streets as killer robot drones patrol the boiling skies—