Charles Stross - Rule 34

“Was that all you wanted?” you ask him, trying to keep your voice from wobbling.

“I have to work now.” He turns to look at you irritably. “Don’t you have a room to go to?”

“Fish,” you say. Then, uncertainly: “Safeword.”

“Go away.” He turns back to the screen.

Next.

You’re standing with your back to the closing door, in the corridor. You slide your feet into your heels and shudder with an emotion you can’t name: Then you turn and walk with exaggerated self-control towards the lifts. Bastard. Try not to think about him. What might have happened in there. The afterglow is shredded and faded to rancid rags that smear a greasy patina across the memory of pleasure. You have a nauseating awareness that you’ve been used: But you went in there meaning to use him for your own ends in turn. It’s not as if you’re a stranger to ass-play. So why do you feel so wrong ? As you go back to your room and deadbolt the door behind you and run a long, hot bath, you’re haunted by a simple question.

If you’d used the safeword on him, would he have stopped?

After you get rid of the bitch, you take half an hour to catch up on some admin work. You left the pad in here just in case: You pull your VM down from the cloud and write up a brief summary of your thoughts about what’s going on and your revised business plan, and send it back to the Operation’s servers. Doubtless next time you check in, there’ll be some helpful notes from Control.

Factory-wiping the pad, you shove it back in the hotel safe and pull your clothes on again. You weren’t planning to stay the night here anyway, and the Straight woman’s presence makes it all the more important to move out. So you leave the room, walk to the fire stairs, and descend to the ground floor.

It’s still daylight outside—the sun never seems to set on this fucking city—but you feel drained. It’s some combination of the dour stone architecture, the weird Scottish people, a smidgen of your own paranoia, and the fact that a fucking murderer is stalking your start-up: It’s getting you down. Perhaps you should’ve hit the meow-meow and taken the bitch clubbing first, taken the time to relax: But you’re not planning on hanging around, and anyway, she was tedious. You’ve met her type before, needy thirtysomething singles: Thinks she’s a swinger, but if you take the effort to keep her hot, the next thing you know she’ll be making cow eyes at you and expecting an engagement ring. They get desperately serious when all you want is a fuck (and why are all these Anglo hotels so uptight about room service?). The hell with that.

You walk across the plaza in front of the hotel—a barren flagstoned plinth—towards the round theatre on the other side of the road. There are some bars clustered behind it: In your Rough Guide overlay, they’re helpfully tagged as “the pubic triangle.” Maybe you should have gone there instead of scouring the hotel for desperate would-be housewives.

Five minutes’ walking brings you to a corner where yet more of the desperately grey stone shit looms over you—they have houses with fucking battlements here, stone cannons carved into the eaves—haven’t these people heard of earthquakes? You’re still a bit nervy-scratchy from the day’s events, so rather than piss around outside, you nod amiably at the bouncer and duck through a brass-trimmed door into a venue that promises two hundred kinds of whisky and beer besides.

You order an Irish and Coke, then look around for the darkest corner you can see and go hide in it. There’s a secure note-pad app on your skullphone, works with your shades. You fingertwitch under the table, working out your priorities:

Get your DNA off the police incident database. It’s not vital, but if you can’t manage it, you’re going to have to go to extremes—find someone who’s died and get the records corrupted—do-able, but very costly.

Find out who’s after your people and where they’re getting their information from.

The latter… you’d bet good money that there’s a leak inside the Operation. Otherwise, how else do they know who you’re targeting? So you’re going to set up a target. Mister family man diplomat seems like a suitable option; fat, happy, and dumb. (Move in with him, put word up the line that he’s your new COO, wait for someone to try to whack him, grab the killer, and extract names.) You do not commit this latter plan to your note-pad. You’ve got to assume that anything in your skullphone is being monitored by Control, and that Control is leaking information to the—no, they don’t exist . There are no killer lizards bleeding through from the other side of reality, the side that’s all washed-out and grainy gray and suicidal. That’s just a delusional fantasy, a side-effect of bad headmeat. And you’re not delusional, are you?

Halfway down your drink, you notice a couple of low-lifes giving you the eye-ball from across the bar. You don’t move your head, but you study them back from behind your glasses. Skinny, short hair, bad skin, track-suit-and-hoodie stereotypes: One of them’s staring and muttering to his mate, who’s nodding and not looking at you. You’re acutely aware, of an instant, that you’re wearing the Gonet on your wrist. Conspicuous consumption indeed. Shit, part of you registers, the part of you that remembers your time at school and the special education your uncle Al gave you: The rest of you feels a pulse or squeeze of momentary happy anticipation of release, not unlike what you felt with the woman. Sex and violence are all cross-wired at a low level in the brain, anyway. That’s what they say.

You finish your glass, stand, and walk out of the bar with your back straight, not looking back. You slide the glasses into their case and pocket them. There’s some movement behind you. You turn a corner and cut uphill through a grey stone canyon between windowless buildings. It’s twilight now, and there’s movement behind you, a scuffing noise like a rat in a hurry and a breath of air as you spin round.

There’s only one of them and it’s Sweaty McTracksuit, and the back of your head is no longer in front of his fist when he tries to deck you. Instead, your left heel is stamping on his right instep, you’ve got a lock on his arm, and you’re twisting as he drops the home-fabbed knuckle-duster that probably came off one of your clients’ machines and claws at your eyes with his left hand.

A second later, you’ve faceplanted him on a paving stone. Quick scan: Two’s company . For a moment, you wonder if the enemy sent him, but no—he’s just a fucking low-life mugger who’s taken you for a tourist, gone after your watch and your wallet. You can’t be having that. So you kick him sharply in the ribs, pick up the ultrahard plastic knuckles while he’s struggling to draw breath, hold down his right hand against the concrete, and use them to ensure he’ll never play Guitar Hero again.

Ants. I am surrounded by fucking ants. Can’t they get anything right? Even a fucking mugging?

Evidently not. It looks like Peter Manuel will have to teach the burghers of Edinburgh a lesson.

A lesson they won’t soon forget.

Mr. Hussein is pretty much right at the bottom of the list of all the people you ever expected to be doing the Victim Response Officer tap-dance for. It is, in fact, typical of how fucked-up this week has become that you find yourself sitting knee to knee with him over a cup of tea, commiserating (for tenuous values of commiseration).

Anwar is as bent as a three-euro note: just bright enough to think he’s smarter than everyone around him, just stupid enough not to realize that they’ve got his number. He’s a walking poster-boy for the Dunning-Kruger Effect: If he says he’s going straight, it probably means one of his idiot friends told him shoplifting is legal. However, his lack of insight is a two-edged sword; it’s glaringly obvious that he’s worried sick about his cousin, who is lying dead in an upstairs bedroom while the SOCO team pin down the scene, but he’s too dumb to actually help you. So you’re supposed to treat him like any other victim… or potential source of material evidence in what is rapidly shaping up to be the mass-murder enquiry of the century. Hence the house-work questions.