Charles Stross - Rule 34

“Mr. John R. Christie. If you could just sign here?”

McAndrews thrusts a tablet at you. Bastard.

“I’ll see you this evening, John.” She turns and is gone.

You take your luggage up to your room and go through it with shaking hands. Here’s the sample merchandise, occupying half the case: You plug it in to charge, just in case a demo is called for in the next couple of days. Here’s your “sterile” pad—still in the box it came in from PC WORLD—and here are your spare clothes. Toothbrush. Shaver. Meds. Bling case. You carefully arrange the small items on the desk in their correct order. Then you put the pad online and tell it to download its work personality from the cloud while you have a scalding-hot shower and change your clothes.

Of course you can’t stay here. But you must stay here. Or rather: “John Christie” has to stay where the police expect to find him during their investigation. You can be someone else, somewhere else. And your sample merchandise had better be somewhere else, lest the police find it in your custody. That would totally suck.

Luckily, there’s a magical mystery tour in your phone that’ll take you out of John Christie’s panopticon-enforced sheep’s clothing and give you a new suit and a second shot at lift-off. But the sudden shortage of candidate executives for your business plan is disturbing: Finding two of them dead is not a coincidence. You need backup before you start digging for the killers. And you’re going to get very little of it until the Operation cleans up after that DoS attack.

A plan begins to come together in your mind. You’ll renew your room for the rest of the week, but you won’t be there: You’re going to set up shop elsewhere. You’re going to go and buy new luggage and pick up your new papers, like Operation support told you to. Leave your old luggage with the sample merchandise parked with a useful idiot, just in case the police come snooping. Forward all calls, sanitize the room with a brisk spritz of sports stadium DNA, and all that’s left is the legal wrap-up: “John Christie” will still be staying in your hotel room, but you’ll be gone. Meanwhile, tonight there’s dinner—and hopefully baka sekusu with the Straight bitch for dessert.

You’ve had better days, but this one is showing signs of improvement.

The pad finishes downloading. You rename some files, point the browser at a malware site, and allow it to infect the machine, scrambling certain files to provide you with deniability if anyone searches it. Then you shove it in the room safe, pick up your meds, bling, and keyring, pull on a pair of glasses, pick up your case (with fully charged sample merchandise), and head out the door.

Once you pair them with your skullphone, the glasses steer you across the main road and down a picturesque path that meanders through Princes Street Gardens, out of sight of the trams, around the base of the huge granite butt-plug on which the castle squats. The skullphone’s display is austere, basic: You can only cram so much intelligence into a gram of glucose fuel-cell-powered silicon leeching off your blood sugar and dissolved oxygen. A third of a mile later, you cross a bridge across the buried railway station, then through a slightly tatty subterranean shopping mall where you spend half an hour hunting for the necessities to replace your regular luggage. Half the storefronts are shuttered, victims of high-street flight. Climbing the Waverley Steps you pause, then turn right and cross the intersection with North Bridge. According to the messages queued in your chip, your new identity documents can be obtained from an office on the third floor of the huge pile of Gothic limestone within whose windows you can just see an eerily glowing glass cube.

You walk through the revolving door and cross the lobby of the old post-office building to the glass-walled lifts that slide silently up and down within the echoing atrium. There’s a transparent airlock in front of the lift doors. “John Christie, for the honorary consul of the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan,” you say, as the outer door closes behind you. There’s a puff of air from the explosive detectors below, a beep, and the lift door opens before you. Thirty seconds later, you’re standing in a narrow corridor, outside a glass door and an entryphone. You push the buzzer. “Mr. Christie? Please come in, it’s the second office on the left,” says a Scottish-accented voice.

You silently repeat your line as you walk along to the second door and arrive as a thirtyish British-Asian man in a cheap suit pulls it open and looks up at you with a peculiarly bovine expression. “What can I do for you?”

“Colonel Datka sent me.” You can see the key turning in the lock behind his petrified eyes. “I’m here to collect some papers. And I have a little job for you.”

Welcome to the postnational age.

Here you are, sitting in the window-seat of a creaky old Embraer as it makes its final approach into Edinburgh airport, banking over the tidal barrage and the wind farms in the Firth of Forth: It’s been five years since your only previous visit, and not long enough by far.

Eggs and spam.

Back then, you had the glamour and the mojo, the whole Men in Black thing working for you: the Europol supercop from l’Organisation pour Nourrir et Consolider L’Europe, travelling with a tiger team of forensic analysts and a digitally signed email from the Judge d’Inquisition to hand in case you needed to steam-roller your way across the objections of a provincial police force who didn’t realize what they were dealing with. Except things went terribly wrong—the national-security dinosaurs rising from their uneasy sleep, opening the closet doors to draw forth a conga line of dancing skeletons. It still gives you the cold shudders, thinking about the ease with which a couple of teams of coke-fuelled black-hat Shanghainese hackers rooted the network backbones of a pair of peripheral states: And the shit you stumbled into out here on the edge of the North Sea was as nothing compared to what your colleagues had to clean up in Gdansk and Warsaw. Not to mention the chewing out your boss François gave you during your performance eval the following spring. Black marks on the Man in Black’s record. And the rudeness of the Scottish police—that really rankled. Professional respect: Have these people never heard of it?

Eggs, ham, and spam.

The plane’s wings buzz angrily as flaps extend: The wave-crests are an endless tessellation of white triangles below, marred by the wake of a sailboat. Four years in career limbo, reassigned to Business Affairs and buried leech deep in the bowels of the Department of Internet Fraud. Four years spent in a pokey little office in a corner of Madou Plaza Tower, where flies buzz madly beneath the chilly glare of LED spotlights, patiently paging through reams of spam in search of the websites of the idiots who pay to rent botnets by the hour—

Eggs, ham, sausage, and spam.

Some say the Internet is for porn; but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam. As communication technologies got cheaper, the cost of grabbing a megaphone and jamming it up against the aching ear-drums of an advertising-jaded public collapsed: Meanwhile, the content-is-king mantra of the monetization mavens gridlocked the new media in an advertising-supported business model. The great and the good of the Academy have been fighting a losing battle against the Anglo-Saxon hucksterization model for the past thirty years: But the sad truth is that the battle’s lost. The tide of war was turned in Beijing and New Delhi, when the rapidly industrializing new superpowers climbed on the MAKE MONEY FAST band-wagon and gave free rein to the free market, red in tooth and claw—just as long as the sharp bits were directed outwards. And today the entire world is still drowning in a sea of attention-grabbing unregulated unethical untruthful spamvertising.