Charles Stross - Rule 34

You glance up. The illumination filtering into the rectangular central hall comes through open doorways, and it has the numinous tint of daylight. You take your picklock card and use its edge to delicately swipe the light switch, leaving no prints.

“Vivian?” you call quietly.

There’s a strong floral stink in the flat, as from one of those fucking air fresheners women like to put in the bathroom to make out that they shit roses.

“Vivian?” you ask again, walking towards the living room. “I got your email. Vivian…”

There’s a scrap of paper on the floor. You frown and bend to pick it up. It’s white, overprinted in mostly green ink (with faint yellow and pink tints), approximately six centimetres by twelve in size. You remember its like from your childhood: It’s a foreign bank-note. “The Royal Bank of Scotland plc PROMISE TO PAY THE BEARER ON DEMAND ONE POUND STERLING, At their head office here in Edinburgh, by order of the board, 30th March 1999.”

Dead words. Dead currency. Dead bank. Broken promise.

Inside the austerely furnished living room, there lies a mattress. It has been cocooned in shrink-wrap plastic, sealed against the elements. The fragile husk of Vivian Crolla forms a mound under the polythene integument, like a pupa bonded to the surface of a leaf. She’s barely one metre fifty in her stockinged feet, grey-haired and thin, as if all the juices of a life unlived have been sucked out of her. She’s neatly dressed in a dark suit and pearl necklace, all present and correct but for a missing shoe and a premature death. There is a rip in the side of the shrink-wrap, a deep gash that plunges into the interior of the mattress, from which irredeemable green-ink promises bleed halfway across the carpet.

( Damn her, why couldn’t she have stuffed her mattress with fifty-euro notes instead of unrecyclable toilet paper? a corner of you thinks irreverently.)

You bend close to her and touch her shoulder through the plastic. She’s cold and stiff. Someone obviously shrink-wrapped her onto the mattress while she was unconscious or already dead. But who, and why? Rising, you stalk through the kitchen, her office, the bathroom. The stink in the bathroom is chokingly thick, almost unbreathable: The electronic air freshener is farting away like a cow with irritable-bowel syndrome.

You lick your dry lips. “This isn’t funny anymore,” you complain, an ironic metacommentary on your internal turmoil. Then the true state of jeopardy slams into you like a railway spike of purest distilled paranoia, and you see, with merciless clarity:

Someone has gotten inside your decision loop.

They’re a rival or an enemy. They’ve identified and killed your chosen COO and CFO, hours or days before you were ready to make them employment offers. They’re sending you a message: Get out of town. Get out of town now . Run away, little business man, while there’s still time.

You can’t get out of town, even if you want to. The Polis have got your DNA on file as belonging to John Christie, a contact of Mike Blair (deceased). You need to dance the John-Christie-is-an-innocent-bystander fandango until you can serve the paper-work to get your samples destroyed, or your usefulness to the Operation will be at an end: and with it, your career.

To make matters worse, you’re here now . Vivian Crolla isn’t going to vanish silently from Scottish society without anyone asking questions: Sooner or later, one of her business associates or relatives or nosy neighbours will crawl whimpering to the public servants, who will break down her door, pinch the bridge of their nose beneath suddenly watering eyes, and call for CID and forensics. And then it’ll be déjà vu all over again, and you’d better hope you’re not shedding flakes of dead skin because if they get a sequence match linking you to both scenes—

You begin to sidle back towards the front door, shuddering beneath the livid caul of rage that has settled over your shoulders, all the while thinking:

Once is happenstance, but twice is enemy action.

Someone’s going to bleed for this. And it’s not going to be you.

Thursday morning dawns moist and miserable. You turn yourself out of bed, scramble two eggs, and remember to bag up the plastic waste for collection on your way out the door. Then—forty minutes before you’re due on shift—your phone pulls on its work personality and rings for you. It’s Moxie. This can only be trouble.

“Skipper?” He screws his face up like a hamster worried you’re going to steal his peanut: “You decent?”

You take your thumb off the camera. “I was about to head in. What’s come up?”

“I think you want to be here half an hour ago; it’s about that wave you were tracking with ICIS? I got a call from a lieutenant in the Dresden KRIPO; he’s trying to get in touch with you urgently about an investigation?” Moxie’s bamboozled befuddlement is not unreasonable—death in Deutschland isn’t a regular bullet point on your daily team briefings.

“I’ll call him as soon as I’m in the office.” You pause. “Anything else?”

“Yes. Uh, Chief Inspector MacLeish wants to see you. It’s about the Blair case. He’s raising a request for research and says it’s priority one.” Screamingly urgent, in other words.

“Well, ping him and tell him I’m in transit.” You hang up and neck your coffee, burn your tongue, swear in an extremely unladylike manner as you grab for a glass of tap-water, then run through your check-list and are out the door in record time. You make it to the end of the road as a minibus trundles away from the stop, swear again, and drop the ghost of a tenner on its icon. For a miracle, it accepts the bid, whines to a halt, and kneels as you run to catch up. The other passengers glare irritably at you as you climb aboard, slightly breathless. You take a seat, then realize you left your hair-brush at home. So: another bad hair day is already underway.

There’s no hurrying the bus as it meanders around the back streets, diverting to pick folks up and drop them off. Sooner or later, your work-subsidized travel pass will get you to the office, but unlike a taxi, there’s no quality-of-service guarantee and no privacy. So you’re left tapping your fingers in frustration, unwilling to log into CopSpace in public (because you’re an inspector, and your work is a wee bit more confidential than J. Random Plod’s notebook: There’s a lot at stake if your desktop leaks). So much for telecommuting. Policing is one of those jobs that will always revolve around a meatspace hub, if only because you can’t build a cellblock in cyberspace.

So it is that you arrive at work at 8:42 A.M., ahead of your start of shift and in a timely manner… but disastrously out of touch with the events unfolding around you.

Your first inkling that this may be something worse than a regular bad-hair day comes as you step down off the bus and walk towards the front entrance in Fettes Avenue. They unwired the police HQ comprehensively back in the teens: Consequently, it senses your approach and it knows how to get your attention. The left arm of your spectacles vibrates for attention, and you instinctively touch your phone in acknowledgment. Blinking arrows glide urgently across the powder-blue furnishings in the waiting area, urging you inward: GOTO ROOM D31: BABYLON BRIEFING TO COMMENCE IN 15.

What on earth… ? You barely have time to wonder, before a blizzard of Post-its spring up, occluding nearly every hard surface in sight, and you see the grisly news: Dickie has added you to the team investigating the Mike Blair murder.

You whistle tunelessly through your front teeth and straighten up, then head towards the meatspace incident room: There’s a list of fifty-odd officers on the case, from constables up to the DCI himself, and probably a super watching over his shoulder and demanding hourly updates for the PR flaks at the Ministry of Justice. As you expected, Mikey’s double-wetsuit misadventure has gone political, on top of the usual three-ring circus that shows up for every murder case. (It’s the one crime for which all the police forces of the former United Kingdom pull out all the stops—but the 95–per cent clean-up rate you take a justifiable pride in comes at a ruinous, multi-millioneuro expense.)