Rule 34 (7 page)
Authors: Charles Stross
That one’s easy. “Nothing.” You take a cautious sip of your coffee and wince: It’s bogging. “That is, I didn’t take the call—I think you’ll find it was Sergeant”—
Elvis
—“Sorensen? When Jase called for supervision, I was coming to the end of my shift, so I decided to visit the site in person before heading home. When I got there, Jase told me that PC Berman took the initial contact and yanked his chain. When he got to the scene, he pulled me in. So I was the third on scene.”
Elvis
—“Sorensen? When Jase called for supervision, I was coming to the end of my shift, so I decided to visit the site in person before heading home. When I got there, Jase told me that PC Berman took the initial contact and yanked his chain. When he got to the scene, he pulled me in. So I was the third on scene.”
“And then you called me immediately.” Dickie nods, his expression grim. “May I ask why you didn’t file it as an accident?”
“Sure.” Your cheek twitches: You take another mouthful of the bitter gunk from the bottom of the cafetière. “I’ve had dealings with Mr. Blair before—in fact, we go back a way. He’s a fine upstanding pillar of the underworld. If he’d fallen downstairs and clouted his head, I probably wouldn’t have rattled your cage, but the manner of his passing was such poetic justice, so to speak . . .”
“You think it’s a hit.”
This is treading close to dangerous ground.
Change the subject.
“Let’s just say, if this was my investigation, I’d want to rule that out. Did SOC do a work-up on the, er, fluid? Like I suggested?”
Change the subject.
“Let’s just say, if this was my investigation, I’d want to rule that out. Did SOC do a work-up on the, er, fluid? Like I suggested?”
He glares at you. “How did you
know
?”
know
?”
“Know what?” you ask. Then you cotton to the work flow he’s fingering in CopSpace, and grab hold of it for yourself. It flips open in all its wikified hypertextual glory, full of long medical terms that fail to signify, beyond the words “Sildenafil” and “Ritonavir.” “Um. Bear with me a moment while I come up to speed? I need to look this up—”
Dickie snorts. “Don’t bother. Sildenafil’s better known as Viagra. That’s nae going to do for anyone on its lonesome, but Ritonavir—that’s an old HIV anti-viral drug—apparently it messes up Viagra when you mix them, makes it ten times as strong or something. And enema fluid. Apparently it’s
all the rage
.”
all the rage
.”
You’ve run across the enema thing before, for alcohol and other drugs, but this is a new one on you. “Did he add the drugs himself, or is it a set-up?”
“He’s HIV-positive, and had blood-pressure issues on top. He’s on Ritonavir and a bunch of blood-pressure meds. There’s a bunch of open packets of capsules in the bathroom cabinet; but they’re none of them administered by enema. The patient information for the HIV drug is full of warnings about Viagra, not that most eejits bother reading the leaflet. And there’s a bunch of empty capsule shells in the bathroom bin.” And there, in a nutshell, is the veiled accusation:
murder most foul
. “We got a core temperature reading that suggests he was lying there since midnight the day before. I’m still waiting on the post-mortem report, but my money’s on the first option—someone who knew about Laughing Boy’s dangerous habit spiked the cocktail. That machine . . .” He points at a 3D projection of the death scene, floating atop one of the surfaces. “It’s a collector’s piece.”
murder most foul
. “We got a core temperature reading that suggests he was lying there since midnight the day before. I’m still waiting on the post-mortem report, but my money’s on the first option—someone who knew about Laughing Boy’s dangerous habit spiked the cocktail. That machine . . .” He points at a 3D projection of the death scene, floating atop one of the surfaces. “It’s a collector’s piece.”
You zoom on the thing, click through to its notes, and boggle slightly. “It belonged to
who
?”
Who
is apparently some VIP called Nicolae Ceauşescu, who was . . .
Dictator of Romania prior to the revolution and his subsequent execution in 1989 . . .
“That’s crazy!” The wiki goes on to say that the President for Life acquired a deathly fear of germs while in prison during the Second World War, and consequently never wore the same clothes twice. He started every day with an enema. Hence the Soviet spa equipment, which your friend Mikey subsequently acquired at auction and used for . . . “Oh my. Talk about your hidden depths.”
who
?”
Who
is apparently some VIP called Nicolae Ceauşescu, who was . . .
Dictator of Romania prior to the revolution and his subsequent execution in 1989 . . .
“That’s crazy!” The wiki goes on to say that the President for Life acquired a deathly fear of germs while in prison during the Second World War, and consequently never wore the same clothes twice. He started every day with an enema. Hence the Soviet spa equipment, which your friend Mikey subsequently acquired at auction and used for . . . “Oh my. Talk about your hidden depths.”
Dickie remains dour. “I ken this is new to you, but when ye’ve finished giggling, we have a job tae do?”
You wave it off. “No, it’s alright. I’m done now.” You take a deep breath. “Oh my. Yes, you’ve . . . You’ve messaged Sally in Press Relations, haven’t you?”
He nods lugubriously. “It’s all in process, and as soon as the post-mortem’s in, I’m escalating. Liz—ye kenn’t the subject. Care to venture any speculation?”
What he’s asking you for is strictly against the spirit of intelligence-led policing, but you’re willing to cut him a lot of slack; he’s thirty-six hours into a solid candidate for fucked-up homicide of the year, and he wouldn’t be shooting the breeze with you if he had any leads. “Sorry; it’s all ancient history. I haven’t had anything to do with Mikey since we put him away, and I don’t know who his current contacts are. Have you pinged Probation yet? Is—was—he under any supervision orders? Do we have a handle on his social networks?”
“Yes, no, and no, Liz. Well, it was worth the ask. I’ll be thanking you for dropping by, and feel free to look in if you remember anything.” He steers you doorwards, and you go gracefully. It wouldn’t do to be cluttering up the ops room when he nails down the probable cause of death and officially escalates the investigation to Murder One. And so you proceed in the general direction of your team’s office, almost regretting that this is the last you’ll have to do with the case.
Famous last wishes . . .
Welcome to exile.
You get to your team’s office through a maze of twisty passageways and a short-cut across one corner of a car-park, then in through a wooden gate set in the stone wall of what used to be the police stables. Lothian and Borders maintained a mounted unit right up until independence—at which point, the drop in demand for royal escorts sent the nags to the knackers and the budget to the UAV squadron. At which point the old stables were refurbished as accommodation for whoever lost the toss-up, meaning you and yours.
The former stables are picturesque but not really fit for office work. There are no windows (except those in walls that face in on the grassy courtyard), they’re cold in winter and stifling in summer, and the stone walls are a royal pain in the ass for wireless and cable ducting. On the other hand, you’ve got
esprit
up to here—everybody’s got something in common to grumble about.
esprit
up to here—everybody’s got something in common to grumble about.
Rather than a big, open-plan briefing room with surfaces and signal strength up to five bars, you’ve got a confusing, pokey maze of thick-walled rooms lit by LED down-lighters hanging from the overhead beams. And you’ve got a confusing, pokey maze of misfits to work with. Your department, the Innovative Crime Investigation Unit, has four permanent staff and another eight part-time bodies. For your sins in a previous life you’re the inspector in charge, reporting to Chief Inspector Dixon, who wears two hats—CID and U Division, IT. It’s not your only job, but it occupies a good 80 per cent of your working hours. Working under you are Sergeants Cunningham and Patel, aka Moxie and Speedy, and Constable Squeaky: And they in turn train and supervise an indeterminate and ever-changing population of porn monkeys in uniform.
Welcome to the Rule 34 Squad.
“Morning, skipper.” It’s Moxie, squirreled away in the centre of a nest of archaic flat-panel displays, nursing a blueberry-and-mint latte and a ring Danish as he twitches at the incoming feeds and waves rolling up his screens. “ ’Ad a good holiday?”
“Not really.” It’s your turn to suppress a twitch. “Seen Speedy today?”
“Rest break.” A stream in one window freezes and zooms front and centre for his attention. “Uh.” He forces his attention back to you, and you stifle your exasperation: “What was the question?”
The rest of the force uses ICIU as a dumping ground for the weird ones. It’s always like this with your team of crack ADHD poster children and borderline aspies.
“Meeting. My office, ten thirty. I haven’t scheduled it yet, so consider this your one-hour reminder.”
“Okay!” He frowns slightly, eyes flickering as he saccades between your face and the conflicting priority interrupt on screen two. “Um. I think.” Whatever he thinks, he thinks better of it and stops. You lean past his shoulder and glance at his screen.
“This is about the anomalous short-tandem repeat hits on the used cartridges in the Stockbridge recycling bins, right? You think you’ve found something?”
He makes up his mind. “Mebbe, skipper, but it’s really fucking
out there
, know what I mean?”
out there
, know what I mean?”
Now
you let out your exasperated sigh. “Meeting, ten thirty, remember? Have an informal report ready for me.” You straighten up. “Be seeing you.” And you beat a retreat to your office (for unlike the sergeants and constables in their cubes, you rate a solid wall of your own to bang your head against).
you let out your exasperated sigh. “Meeting, ten thirty, remember? Have an informal report ready for me.” You straighten up. “Be seeing you.” And you beat a retreat to your office (for unlike the sergeants and constables in their cubes, you rate a solid wall of your own to bang your head against).
Rule 34: If you can imagine it, there’s pornography about it on the Internet. “It” is the generic “it”—cars, mobile phones, two girls/one cup—grotesquery knows no limit. Originally a throw-away gag in a web comic, popularized by the denizens of 4chan, Rule 34 has come to dominate your life: Because if you turn it on its head and start looking at the net.porn, sooner or later you have to ask,
Is whatever is depicted here happening on my beat?
Is whatever is depicted here happening on my beat?
ICIU isn’t about porn (the war on porn is long since lost, though none dare admit it) so much as it’s about Internet memes—random clumps of bad headmeat that have climbed out of their skulls to go walkabout on the web. Often they’re harmless—a craze for silly captions on cute cat photographs—but sometimes they’re horrendous: And fuckwits see this stuff and think it’s cool, so they imitate it. It was bad enough back in the noughties when it was just happy slappers posting videos of muggings on YouTube; these days a meme can migrate from some cam-wearing pervert’s head in the Philippines and have local copy-cats slashing prostitutes in Leith and Detroit and Yokohama the same day.
And when you mix memes with maker culture, you have something even weirder: everything from counterfeit pharmaceuticals through to design patterns for nightmares. Things that escape from the darker reaches of cyberspace and show up in suburban dungeons, eldritch fads and niche cultures that have zero local history until they detonate suddenly, leaving a pile of traumatized and bleeding civilians on your door-step.
Your job is to police all this stuff, to chase it down from both ends—the online supply of designs and the meatspace supply of materials that turn those designs into physical artefacts. Because of resourcing constraints, you mostly focus on the former. But it’s the latter that worries you most.
You log in to your surface, send out the short-notice meeting reminder to all concerned, and splat up the conference flows on all three walls around you. Then you lean back in your chair and speed-read as you try to catch up with a day out of the blogosphere.
A decade and a half ago, blogging—whether writing your own or reading them on the job—would pull you a formal disciplinary hearing. Now it’s part of the work-load, and they grade you according to how many comments your postings get. You—and about three thousand senior ICIS professionals in other jurisdictions around the planet—share the work of monitoring the net and tracking the spread of disturbing new trends. You pool the stuff your tame porn monkeys throw up, and they do likewise. There are mailing lists and chat rooms and regular face-to-face international conferences for meme cops to attend. Every week—or more frequently, if necessary—you send out a bulletin for CID and U Division and everyone who needs to be aware of the latest nasty surprises. Several times a day you field puzzled enquiries from officers trying to get their heads around something that
just disnae make sense
; and you’ve got your own investigations to run, nosing into anything ICIS dredges up that looks like it originated in your town.
just disnae make sense
; and you’ve got your own investigations to run, nosing into anything ICIS dredges up that looks like it originated in your town.
CopSpace is all-encompassing these days, with gateways into the sprawling Interpol and Europol franchises. And your occupation is very atemporal, very post-post-modern. So your first real job of the day is to set up a query agent to look for case files containing Viagra, spammers, homicide, and enemas in close proximity. Then you add a personal note to a co-ordination wave, asking if anyone else has seen anything relevant; tweedle a brief announcement of the facts of the case (suitably blinded) in case any of your colleagues in other jurisdictions have useful suggestions: and on your public blog, ask if any MOPs who were in the vicinity of Mikey Blair’s demesne would like to drop by for tea and a chat. Only then do you get to start sifting through your regular inbox and prioritizing the day’s routine work-load.
Item: There’s a Person of Repeated Interest in Pilton who’s just turned up at the Royal Infirmary with forty sutures in his lower back, a nasty case of MRSA, and a missing kidney. Question from CID,
Do we have an organlegging problem or is this just punishment surgery?
Do we have an organlegging problem or is this just punishment surgery?
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