Charles Stross - Rule 34

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.”

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.

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?”

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).

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?

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.