Charles Stross - Rule 34

Oh, he’s one of them . You nod sympathetically, walk over to the trunkful of INSECT-FREE FAIR TRADE ORGANIC BREAD MIX BARLEY-RYE, and pull out a bag. “One of these?” you ask, remembering to breathe through your mouth as you approach him.

“Gimmedat hingmie.” He makes a lunge for the bag, and you pull it away from him. He wears no specs, which is probably a good thing: He doesn’t look like the type to appreciate the panting contents of the leather sling he’s standing in front of in pornspace.

“You know how to use it, right?” You stare at him. “You know about the cofactor. What is it?”

Jaxxie stares at you in confusion. “Whut?”

“The stuff you add to the bread mix when you’re making beer. What is it?”

“Whut? Ayedinnaekenyeraxent, man. Whityurwantin?”

“What. Have. You. Been. Told. To. Add. To. This. When. You. Brew?” You hold the bag up. Jaxxie’s eyes track the bag like a dog hoping for a treat, oblivious to the gamine sailor boy and the pair of huge leather bears making out lasciviously at his feet.

“Ung. Hingmy. Aw that .” He produces a small glass bottle of tablets from somewhere in his Swiss Army jacket. You peer at the label: Selenium. “Gedditat Hollandunbarrut, likesay? Fuckin’ippies.”

“Very good.” You smile ingratiatingly and hand over the bread mix. “Don’t do anything with it that I wouldn’t do.” You wink at the virtual Marine who’s rubbing his crotch on Jaxxie’s leg and show him the door. Dietary supplements, right. The virtual marine is strangling the one-eyed trouser python and making calf eyes at you: Annoyed, you kill the wallpaper and drop back into beige-walled boredomspace. “Fucking hippies.” You sit back down at the desk and go back to reading up on home brewing. Maybe, you reflect, jailhouse recipes aren’t the best way forward.

You are a lucky man in many respects. You have a house (a genuine, authentic house with its own roof! Not a tenement!), an adoring wife with a respectable and moderately lucrative profession, and two bouncing children who squeal with delight when they see you (although of late you could swear that Naseem is holding back a little, in a faint foreshadowing of adolescent male surliness).

You also have two aunts, an uncle, a mother-in-law, six assorted grandparents, a vast and inchoate clan of in-laws and first cousins and nieces and nephews, and other, more distant relations whose precise proximity to your blood line can only be expressed algebraically—

What you don’t have is privacy.

Privacy is a luxury; to buy it you need to be able to buy space and fit locks, to switch off the phone and live without fear of dependency on others. Privacy is a peculiarly twentieth-century concept, an artefact of the Western urban middle classes: Before then, only the super rich could afford it, and since the invention of email and the mobile phone, it has largely slipped away.

Not that you normally need privacy. Your home life is happily lived in the presence of others: It’s not as if you don’t share a bed with your wife or put up with her mother popping round for a bag of rice and a sink-side chat every day. The other corners of your life you discreetly hide away in public houses and public toilets (although to be perfectly truthful, the latter make you increasingly nervous: You’ve begun to pick your partners for their bedroom décor as much as their looks). Still, once in a while, you want to bring something home with you without attracting Bibi’s attention or the bairns’ curiosity. And so, it’s time to go up to the loft again.

When you bought (or, more accurately, inherited) the house, you knew it had a loft—but not much more. When you first got up there, you weren’t impressed, but since then you’ve fitted DIY insulation and nailed it down with boards and carpet tiles so you can walk around. A loft ladder followed, and LED lighting tiles and mains outlets; you’re hoping soon to have enough cash to pay for a dormer window to replace the Velux. Bibi doesn’t come up here (she doesn’t like ladders—gets dizzy), and you’ve told her it’s a storeroom. Which is true up to a point, but you’ve got a chair and some bean bags and a projection TV and a small fridge for the beer. Before the filth collared you, you kept your waterpipe and a stash up here: But you don’t want Mr. Webber to get the idea you’re living a “disorganized lifestyle,” so you’ve reluctantly laid off the skunk. There’s also a tin-can aerial lined up on Cousin Tariq’s roof, an interesting router running firmware he downloaded off the dark side of the net, and a clean pad he gave you to work on when you got out of nick. But you haven’t spent much time up here since you got the new job.

That’s about to change, isn’t it?

There’s a wee hole-in-the-wall shop just off Easter Road, run by a middle-aged white guy with a straggly beard—Cousin Itt would probably grunt ’ippie on sight—that services the home-brew hobbyists. The shop smells of yeast and hot plastic from the fabber he’s got in the back for running up obscure knobbly connectors; most of the stuff he sells is off-the-shelf, though. When you walk in, he’s deep in conversation with a fat middle-aged woman with crimson hair, whose unseasonal shaggy black coat makes her look like a tank in the sheep army.

You spend a few minutes gawping at the gleaming stainless steel machine—it looks like a dissected automatic washer/dryer—that sits in pride of place on the shop counter. It’s some sort of German vorsprungdurch-technik microprocessor-managed brewery in a box—put in raw materials, select program, leave for a month, drink the output—but you don’t have a thousand euros to spare for it. Then you poke around the shelves for a bit, hunting for the items on your shopping list. The shopkeeper’s still yacking to the woman, who seems to be some sort of local beer monster, and pays no attention to you until you get to the throat-clearing toe-tapping stage. “Aye, sir? What can I do you for?”

You ignore the slip of the tongue. “I need these. And, uh, a siphon. And an airlock, I think.” You’ve been doing your homework, but you’re not entirely sure what an airlock looks like until he steps out from behind the counter and produces a transparent plastic hingmy.

“Boiled water goes here,” he says, showing you how. “Then you stick it in the bung like so. If you’re just getting started, you might want one of our starter packs. What kind of beer were you after?”

“Um, I’ve already got one,” you say: “a present.”

“IPA or Lager?” asks the woman, chipping in. “Is it bottom-fermenting or top-fermenting?”

You look at her blankly. The shopkeeper clocks what’s up and none-too-subtly eyeballs the nosy lass to butt out. “It’s okay,” he says quietly, “I’ve got a starter FAQ on the website. In five languages.” He passes you a card. “If you want, I’ve got a friend who can rent you some cellar space—”

“No, no, that won’t be necessary,” you say hurriedly: “I just need the, uh, apparatus?” Obviously he kens the ethnic angle, thinks you’re wanting the opportunity to quaff a wee bevvy at home with no betraying six-packs.

“Well that’s okay, then. Twenty-four ninety-six, please.”

You hand over the cash and flee, then realize once you’re out of the door that you forgot to ask for a bag and you’re going home clutching a huge plastic bucket labelled FERMENTATION BIN and decorated with pictures of overflowing beer glasses. And he forgot to offer you one! Have these people no shame?

Bibi, for a miracle, is in the kitchen when you open the front door. You head upstairs at a dash and hurl the incriminating bucket up the loft steps before she has a chance to see it. You’ve still got to figure out how to get twenty litres of freshly boiled water up to it, and how to keep it warm afterwards, but at least she doesn’t have to know about you conducting your filthy haram experiments under her roof.