Rule 34 (40 page)
Authors: Charles Stross
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—
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.
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.
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?”
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.
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.”
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?”
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 them 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.”
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.”
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?”
Edinburgh University isn’t built around a campus: Its buildings are scattered through the south side of the city centre, sandwiched between the Old Town and the Meadows, rubbing shoulders with charity shops and cheap apartments and fast-food joints. Its reputation for academic excellence, combined with geographical dispersion, has stood it in good stead in these harsh times—unlike many rival institutions, it’s still in business, although two-thirds of its students this decade have never set foot in Scotland in their lives.
You
went to university and did the whole halls-of-residence, livingoff-student-loans thing, back in the day. You did your Master’s in Policing, Policy, and Leadership on day release with distance learning—no faculty within a couple of hundred kilometres offered it as a part-time residential—and you got a taste of the chill wind that was even then beginning to blow through the halls of academia: a wind that’s since then risen to a howling tornado blowing shards of razor-sharp glass, stripping staff and student bodies to the bone as the whole structure of higher education changes. And you’re paying for that sheepskin to this day. Was it worth it? Who knows?
went to university and did the whole halls-of-residence, livingoff-student-loans thing, back in the day. You did your Master’s in Policing, Policy, and Leadership on day release with distance learning—no faculty within a couple of hundred kilometres offered it as a part-time residential—and you got a taste of the chill wind that was even then beginning to blow through the halls of academia: a wind that’s since then risen to a howling tornado blowing shards of razor-sharp glass, stripping staff and student bodies to the bone as the whole structure of higher education changes. And you’re paying for that sheepskin to this day. Was it worth it? Who knows?
One thing’s for sure: University isn’t what it used to be.
Some things remain. The old buildings, for example. Appleton Tower is every bit as much a crass brutalist statement on the edge of the Old Town as it ever was, if a bit more crumbly about the edges than when it was last refurbished nearly twenty years ago. It’s a listed building: the concrete bones of a different era, tempered in the white heat of Wilsonian techno-optimism and remodelled in the late teens. But there’s no desk-bound receptionist waiting to greet you behind the grime-streaked glass lobby doors that once handled a stream of students; nor will the door open when you push it.
Perplexed, you pull up a voice call. “Hello? Is that Dr., uh, MacDonald? I’m Inspector Kavanaugh. We have an appointment? I’m downstairs right now—how do I—okay, thanks, bye.” You hang up and glance at Kemal, who is looking around with wrinkled brow, as if he’s just smelled something bad. “Dr. MacDonald will come down and let us in,” you tell him. “There’s an access-control system.” Now you know to look for it, the discreet box by the door tells you all you need to know. Receptionists are too expensive for universities in these straitened times.
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