Charles Stross - Rule 34

What you only figured out much later was that it was February, Y2K+1. Dad’s dotcom portfolio had vaped, and he had to steal some more money. And this being Y2K+1, there wasn’t a lot of money in circulation to steal—at least, not from Dad’s friendly circle of day traders and stock-jobbers. So he’d been forced to diversify and got fucked over when someone’s Customs agency intercepted one of the consignments. They didn’t know it was him, but someone in town knew his face, and he wanted some distance. And there may have been something to do with the phone calls at odd times of day and night, and the threatening letters, but that didn’t really signify at the time.

(Or maybe it was the old enemy, even then, plotting their takeover. Spying and hounding your father because they knew they had to yank him out of the picture if they were going to get to you.)

Dad wasn’t stupid: He had a plan. He figured there’d be a lot of infrastructure left over from the dotcom crash, and all he needed to do was stake out some vacant office suite and sooner or later a team of double-domed nerds would show up to refill it (and, by and by, his wallet).

Well, Mom and Alice did the weak-sister thing and cried all the way to the beachfront house, but you were happy enough. School in the big town was boring, and anyway, a bunch of the other kids refused to play with you. The losers said you cheated. So you got to live in the sun-drenched sprawl off El Camino Reale and meet a whole new supply of interesting playmates, and Dad had a bit more time to play ball or take you hiking and do other dad things.

(But then there was the car crash.)

You were away at summer camp at the time. The camp counsellors came and took you aside and watched anxiously as you bawled your eyes out—not that stupid grief shit, but frustration: Who was going to come pick you up from camp now? Camp was getting tiresome. They were big on cooperative activities, nothing where you could score points off the other kids without being too obvious. The threat of being stuck there forever was very real in your going-on-nine mind.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, the next day, a battered SUV pulled up outside the camp office. Half an hour later, the youngest counsellor came for you. “Your uncle Albert’s offered to take you in while your father’s in the hospital,” she explained.

Albert? You’d never met him, although Dad had mentioned his elder brother’s name once. And besides, you were bored with the camp. “Great!” you piped up.

If only you’d known…

You walk home to your snug wee hotel room, whistling happily to yourself. You lock the door, sniff, step out of your clothes and shower vigorously: yawn and crawl naked between the crisp cotton sheets to sleep the sleep of the righteously zoned out.

You wake early and amuse yourself for a while surfing on the hotel’s in-room cable service. News streams bombard you with trivia; unemployment’s up again, projects to retrain service-industry workers aren’t delivering: Sow’s ear into silk-purse futures are tanking. Another large vertical farm is under construction in Livingstone: The planning enquiry into the Torness “E” reactor unexpectedly drags on into a second month. The Scottish Parliament is discussing a bill banning factory farming of pigs on hygienic grounds and cattle on emissions: Farmers are protesting that they can repopulate bovine gut flora with kangaroo-derived acetogen cultures, dealing with the methane menace at source, and that the bill is pandering to vegetarian green voters in the run-up to the election next year…

You make a note. Research current steak consumption and supply-chain issues for black-market meat imports in event of ban. (Prohibition is always good for business, and vat-grown tissue won’t satisfy the more ruthless palate: Stress hormones are excellent tenderizers.) Then you channel-hop while you wait for room service to deliver your continental, surfing past the talking-head Jeezebot prayer breakfast and the traffic accident channel, pausing briefly at the Hitler network before you get to the baroque humiliations of the “So You Think You Want a Job” reality shows.

Job scams: Those are a perennial favourite, just like work-fromhome and you-can-be-rich-too. But they’re not only unoriginal, they’re so old they can vote. Some of the scams are so well-known that the cops have bots looking for them—the half-life to detection is measured in double-digit hours.

Fuck. It was looking so easy when you came here. Commission the illegal breweries to manufacture the feedstock, the back-street fabbers to make the goods, the sweat-shop kids in the Middle Eastern call centres to operate them, the clerks to count the cash, and the footsoldiers to keep the sales flowing—maintain tight communications discipline so that none of them can run the business without you, then find a franchisee and cash out. That’s the basic iMob value proposition, isn’t it? Gangster 2.0 is as much about searching for an IPO and an exit strategy as any other tech start-up business.

But this is semi-independent Scotland (a country with its own parliament, flag, tax law, and passports, but a military and foreign policy wing outsourced to Westminster). On the basis of your experience so far, it’s also the land of the deep-fried battered Mars bar, remotely piloted airborne dogshit patrols, and accountants shrink-wrapped to mattresses. The latter is particularly disturbing insofar as it blows a honking great hole in your original business plan. But needs must. And Scotland has other assets, like Mr. Placeholder Hussein, who you intend to drop into the hot seat and stick in front of a fake organization to attract the attention of the adversaries.

You whip out your disposable pad, haul down your desktop from the botnet-hosted cloud once again, fire up the amusing little VoIP gateway app disguised as a board-game, work your jaw to wake your skullphone, and subvocalize. “Hello, Able November here.”

“Just a second.” (Pause.) “Oh, hello again. Sorry about the delay, sir. Are your medicines helping today?”

What is this, fucking Kaiser? “Yes, I’m much better now, thanks. And I’m using the new identity.” Beast of Birkenshaw my ass: another psychopathic serial killer? Mother-fuckers! What the fuck do they think they’re doing , giving me these names? “I’m calling because I need another minion; the first two broke. Is the denial-of-service situation any better today?”

“I can’t discuss the situation at head office.” She sounds a bit snippy. Then you realize; it’s about two o’clock in the morning back in California. (Assuming that’s where the Operation runs its call centre from.) And she’s the same operator you spoke to yesterday daytime (assuming they’re not using real-time speech filtering). “What do you want, Able November?”

“Like I said, I need a new gofer.” Briefly you outline what you’ve got in mind. “And a new handle—some clever fucker thinks it’s funny to keep giving me serial-killer names. I want that to stop.”

“Please hold. This could take some time.”

You’re on hold for nearly fifteen minutes, as it happens: You amuse yourself with the pad, playing a couple of levels of Jack Ketch while you wait for the callback. Finally, your left ear vibrates. “Hi, Able November. What have you got for me?”

The operator is different this time, male with a Midwestern drawl. “Lemme see if I’ve got this right? Your last two recruits are dead? And you’re still in the field? Why?”

It’s time to poke the bear and see if it snarls, so you extemporize. “The cops got a DNA sample when I looked in on the first investigation. So the John Christie identity is pinned. And, incidentally, that name belongs to a dead serial killer, and so does Peter Manuel—someone’s sticking ringers in your identity portfolio, and it’s not fucking funny. I have to wait while Legal serve an injunction to get my sample destroyed when the investigation winds down—you know and I know that I didn’t kill Blair. The original plan won’t fly, but I figure I can salvage something from the wreckage. It was your Issyk-Kulistan scam that gave me the idea.”