Charles Stross - Rule 34

Access to CopSpace—an augmented-reality overlay that maps a view of the criminal-intel knowledge base across the physical world in front of your eyes—doesn’t make police stations with control centres and briefing rooms obsolete. Quite the contrary. It’s not so long ago that you and your colleagues were plunged into the collective nightmare of a total breach of network security and had to fall back to prepaid supermarket mobies and passing around notes printed on manual typewriters . Maintaining a physical command centre is vital. Policing requires systematic teamwork, which means communication; and even when they’re working, online conferencing systems just aren’t quite good enough to make face-to-face meetings obsolete. Working teleconferencing is right around the corner, just like food pills, the flying car, and energy too cheap to meter.

There’s a scrum in the corridor outside D31, so you hang back a bit and wait for it to disperse. Then Moxie shows up. “Skipper.” He nods—sketchy acknowledgment—and you nod back.

“What’s the story?” you ask him.

Moxie’s gaze flickers sidelong, taking in the neighbours. He clears his throat. “Lieutenant Heyne from Dresden really wants to talk about his suspected homicide, skipper. So I—”

“Homicide?” you ask. “I thought the victim was in hospital.”

“Died overnight.” Moxie shrugs uncomfortably. “There’s also a Sergeant Nobile from the Gruppo Anticrimine Tecnologico in Rome who wants to bend your ear. Urgently.”

Oh Jesus. You rack your brains: “What force is he with?”

“Wait a sec.” Moxie’s looking it up in the directory. You could have done it yourself, you just thought he might have done the leg work already. “It’s part of the Guardia di Finanza, the national financial, customs, and economic police?” He looks slightly boggled, eyes twitching as he saccades through the infodump. “They also do cybercrime, he’s on the Europol R34 distribution, says it’s about the homicide in Dresden and, uh…” He nods at the front of the queue, which is beginning to shuffle into Mac’s briefing. “An associated murder in Trieste. There’s more. That feedstock you were looking for—”

“It’ll have to wait.” There’s the usual pre-caff mumbled meet and greet in the doorway, then you’re in and looking for a free seat near the back. Not fast enough; MacLeish is waiting just inside and makes eye contact.

“Inspector.” He nods. Subsequent words flow like grit through engine oil. “You were right; thanks for forwarding me that case.”

You show him your best botox face: It’s a moment to take home and treasure, but you’re not going to waste your brownie points gloating in the middle of a murder investigation. “I gather a bunch more contacts have come in overnight.”

“Aye, well… this is really fucking abnormal, if you’ll pardon my French. Never seen anything like it.”

“Me neither,” you concede. “What do you need from ICIU?”

“All your Bing and Google mojo, and a pipe into Europol. Oh, and anything you know about grey-market fabber feedstock. Why don’t you sit in the front row?”

After that, there’s no escape.

“Morning, peeps.”

Dodgy Dickie stands before a plain white wall bearing the Lothian and Borders logo, and below it a new name: Operation Babylon. The atmosphere in the room is expectant, and just a little angry: one-third suits, one-third boots, and a mashup of civilian support specialists.

“We’ve got a murder. Not your normal ned-on-ned stabby, unfortunately: This one’s got legs. We’re out of the golden forty-eight”—he means the first two days of the investigation—“and to make matters worse, DI Kavanaugh, who first clocked it as a culpable homicide, has drawn some really disturbing parallels with at least two other killings and an ongoing investigation into contraband supplies.”

What? you wonder, puzzled. Then an IM sidles into your specs. It’s Moxie. SORRY SKIPPER MAC ASKED ABOUT GREY FABS AND INCOMING CASES.Well, that tears it: Dickie is ahead of you on your own portfolio. You’d turn and glare at your sergeant, only he’s wisely decided that discretion is the better part of valour and staked out a corner at the back. Great.

“Here’s the situation.” The wall behind Dodgy Dickie does a wipe to reveal Mikey’s bathroom death scene. “Note the victim is taped and gagged. It’s set up to resemble an accidental autoerotic fatality: The thing he’s plumbed into is a mid-1960s colonic irrigation machine, a collector’s piece formerly owned by the late Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu—apparently he insisted on daily enemas. Ahem. Note the evidence of sexual stimulation. The enema fluid contains a borderline-toxic concentration of a medicine usually prescribed for impotence, but that’s not what killed him. Mr. Blair is HIV-positive and on multidrug maintenance. He also has hypertension, and is on meds for that condition. Pathology tells us that one of the protease inhibitors he’s on interacts very badly with Viagra. And the full work-up DI Kavanaugh ordered tells us that what he had in his system at the time was his prescription cocktail and a buttload of Viagra. But again, that’s not what killed him.”

Mac glances at you, his face unreadable. “The proximate cause of death was cardiac arrest. So we ordered a full work-up on the enema fluid, so pathology went trawling for known pharmaceuticals.” They can do that, these days: They’ve got lab-on-a-chip analysers that can identify thousands of drugs in microgram quantities. Or so they told you on the last re-cert course you did on organic forensics.

“What they found was his prescription meds and the Viagra, and one last thing—the enema fluid was loaded with grapefruit juice.” Grapefruit juice? You see winces going round the audience. Dickie continues: “I’m told that grapefruit juice is a catastrophe waiting to happen if you’re on certain types of blood-pressure medicine—it interferes with them, just as badly as Viagra interferes with protease inhibitors. What we’ve got is a cocktail of drug interactions: Viagra and ritonavir, which massively increased the effect of the Viagra, which depresses the user’s blood pressure, and grapefruit juice doing much the same to his ACE inhibitor.”

He looks at his notes. “I’m told the grapefruit juice alone would have had the effect of causing a severe drop in blood pressure lasting a few hours. Add a cocktail of Viagra and ritonavir, and Professor Davies is of the opinion it’d be enough to push him over the edge.” As chief pathologist, Professor Davies ought to know. “What’s interesting is, who knew about Blair’s prescription, and worked out precisely what to slip in his happy juice? And who helped Mr. Blair into his underwear. We’d really like to know the answer to that one… but it’s not the only lead I want us to follow up.”

You’re doing your best to keep your botox face in place. Otherwise, your eyebrows would be halfway to merging with your hair-line. Dodgy Dickie MacLeish is solid, unimaginative, and methodical: If he’s haring off in search of a homicidal pharmacist, then either somebody’s slipped him a Mickey Finn or all simpler explanations have already been ruled out. Which is very bad news.

“SOC did a complete sweep of the premises,” Dickie continues. “In the process, they found these.” He flicks up a picture of a wooden shelf bracketed to a whitewashed brick wall—a cellar, of course. There’s a neat row of sealed black canisters along it. You swear under your breath: You’ve seen their like before, fly-tipped in on-street recycling bins all over town. “Fabber cartridges. Unchipped, cheap knockoffs of the official product. These ones are all full of high-temperature thermosetting granules, presumably bound for a contraband factory somewhere in Edinburgh. They’re untraceable and illegal, and their presence suggests a connection to an ongoing investigation of DI Kavanaugh’s.”