Charles Stross - Rule 34

You put your glasses back on. And while your head’s bowed, and you’re looking elsewhere, Anwar opens up.

Two hours later you’re missing your lunch break for the sake of clogging up the meatspace incident room, laying it on the line for the peanut gallery.

“Here’s our Anwar Hussein. On probation, done time for identity theft and fraud—not very smart. He’s a foot-soldier, not a general: retired foot-soldier at that, or so he says. He gets a call from his wife, who got it from the first bystander, Mrs. Begum, to go visit Mrs. Begum and her son, the victim. He arrived on the scene after our first responder and Sergeant MacBride. Because he’s on release, we have his probationware record, and I can confirm that he’s been nowhere near the scene of crime for two days. Subject to confirmation by municipal CCTV, but it really doesn’t look like he did it.

“ However. Our Anwar is a bit of a wide boy, and his first reaction was to clam up. I was eventually able to determine that he’s got a guilty conscience over some work the victim had asked him to do. There might be an issue of possible violation of probation terms here, but Mr. Hussein is eager to assure us that he hadn’t actually got round to doing anything illegal as yet.”

There is much rolling of eyes from the peanut gallery at this point, which you deliver with ironic lack of emphasis— I didn’a mean to put me hand through tha winda an’ take tha wallet, it just sort of happened—so you feel the need to clear your throat. “He coughed to it voluntarily, and more to the point, he handed over the material which he claims his cousin Tariq gave him to work on, along with the device. It’s downstairs in Forensics being imaged right now. If he hasn’t touched it, then it may give us some insight into the murderer’s motivation.” Assuming there is a murderer, something in the back of your mind nudges. Because if you were wrong about there being no such thing as an artificial intelligence, things could get really embarrassing, couldn’t they?

DCI MacLeish—for he is back from the Hussein residence—gives you the hairy eye-ball. “What sort of business was Mr. Hussein involved in, do you know?”

You stare right back at him: “I arrested him three years ago in the course of an ongoing investigation into an identity-fraud ring. He coughed to a variety of charges, including spear phishing, ownership of stolen authentication credentials, unauthorized access to personal account details, and Internet-banking fraud. Came to court, entered a guilty plea, two years in Saughton, cut on appeal to one plus one. Interestingly , Anwar was the only body we bagged on that case; I’m certain he wasn’t working alone, but you know how these Internet cases are.” You tap your forehead.

Dickie’s eyebrows waggle, then he nods deeply, satisfied. (There is stuff you can say and stuff you can’t say on the record—and everything that’s said anywhere in a police station is recorded under rules of evidence these days—but waggling eyebrows and forehead tapping don’t show up in the automatic speech-to-text transcripts. What you just sent via monkeyspace, bypassing CopSpace entirely, is that you know stuff but you don’t want to contaminate the investigation by introducing hearsay or out-of-band intelligence. And Dickie, for once, agrees with you: He doesn’t want you screwing up his investigation either.)

“Three victims so far,” he rumbles. “Inspector Aslan, you have some input?”

Kemal is fidgeting with his glasses. “We have two more,” he says diffidently. “One in Sofia, one in Trieste. That’s all in the past hour. Bringing the running total to eleven.”

Dickie looks simultaneously aghast and almost, in an odd way, hopeful: It’s a clusterfuck, but it’s not his clusterfuck, he’s merely holding up a small corner, a few fragments of fatal fuckuppery. “Evidence.”

A uniform at the back sticks up her hand. “Got one on the Crolla case,” she offers.

“Go ahead.”

“The warrant trawl of the national network monitoring database flagged up some chat-room transcripts. They match input from an avatar associated with an IP address allocated to Vivian Crolla’s broadband connection. Assuming it’s her, she had an, um, vivid fantasy life.”

Ears prick up all round: Nothing gets your attention in a briefing like a drop of special sauce on the great and the good. (Hot sauce, even.)

“A number of enquiries about, uh, bondage practices involving plastic wrap and mattresses full of bank-notes.” Bless her, the freshfaced constable is looking even more rosy-cheeked than usual. “The aforementioned user posted a number of scenarios and, uh, there are some downloads, too. Stories centred on being immobilized and restrained while fully clothed, in proximity to large amounts of money. We’re currently trying to track down some chat-room contacts…”

It’s too much. You hear whackier stories from the twinks at CC’s every Saturday night you go clubbing, but a fair proportion of the assembled officers are of a, shall we say, small-c conservative upbringing. As for the rest, some of them aren’t as hard-boiled as they’d like to think. Muttered disbelief and the odd titter sweep the room.

“Silence!” roars Dodgy Dickie, the veins on the side of his neck standing out. “Ahem.” He sounds surprised at himself. “Sarah, if you’d like to continue?”

“Uh, that’s all I’ve really got right now, sir, until we question her known contacts. Details in the case file…” She flips a reference into the investigation space hovering above the big conference-table.

“The Crolla post-mortem examination report won’t be available until tomorrow,” Dickie announces, “but we have a preliminary. According to the pathologist, it looks like a massive allergic reaction while the subject was restrained. Anaphylactic shock. They’re still looking for the cause—whatever she was allergic to—but suggest it’s something that was introduced into her apartment’s atmosphere while she was immobilized: I gather Iain’s sent the empty air-freshener cartridge in the bathroom for analysis…”

You tap Kemal on the shoulder and jerk your head in the direction of the door. He blinks at you, then nods.

Outside, you march directly—or rather, via a bunch of scuffed and flicker-lit corridors and stairs that resemble a giant hamster maze that’s gone to seed—to your own office in the ICIU. Kemal tags along like your guilty shadow.

“I seem to recall there was a book about it, years ago,” you tell him as you take the fire door into the car-park, then the back corridor past the Air Farce control room—where the pilots sit in their twilit virtual cockpits, alert and ready to dive their stealthed carbon-fibre drones on the heads of any hapless dog-walker who forgets to scoop up the poop their mutt’s just dropped on the Meadows—down past the flammables store, and along the side of the old stables. “About a guy who was into wrapping Roy Orbison in cling-film, uh, Saran Wrap. My mum used it to show me why I should never go with strangers. I had nightmares about kitchenware for years.”

“You think… the accountant…”

You pause on the threshold of the ICIU suite. “I refuse to speculate: It’s unprofessional, and besides, she might have had a perfectly innocent reason for owning a metric shitload of cancelled bank-notes in an obsolete currency. Not that you’d catch me shrink-wrapping myself to a pile of used bank-notes: The stuff’s lousy with germs. People sneeze on it.”

You take a tiny pleasure from Kemal’s expression of cumulatively deepening distaste.

“This is my office, the ICIU. And here’s Detective Sergeant Cunningham. Moxie, this is DI Aslan from Europol. He’s here to help us.” Kemal probably won’t spot the slight emphasis on the penultimate word, but you can be sure Moxie will—and the warning eye-flicker. Your attitude to Kemal has changed somewhat since you departed to collect him this morning (was it only five hours ago?), but Moxie isn’t Mr. Sensitive McNewage and can’t be guaranteed to pick that up. You can quite easily live without him unintentionally reopening hostilities.