Charles Stross - Rule 34

You learned other things. Learned how to darn socks, shoot and strip an AR-15, identify a helicopter, plant a trip-wire. After a year, they enrolled you in school, ferried you to the bus-stop daily with the girls. It was impressed upon you that book larnin’ was a privilege which could be withdrawn for any perceived deficiency: And what happened in the compound stayed in the compound, on pain of… pain.

Uncle Albert probably thought he was doing a good job, beating the devilish inheritance of his jail-bird brother out of you. He had no idea how close to death’s jagged edge he stood, how you’d memorized every step between your room and the kitchen, which floorboards squeaked when you stood on them: committed to memory exactly where the hurricane lantern and the kerosene were stored, the matches, the doorway, and the peg to lock their bedroom window shutters from the outside.

The rest is largely a blur: Even this much is reconstructed laboriously and painstakingly from the wreckage piled inside your skull.

What stopped you from doing the deed, even then, was a rudimentary cost/benefit analysis. You couldn’t drive, and even if you could, you’d have had nowhere obvious to go—not with Mom dead and Dad in the big house for the foreseeable future for cutting the brake pipes. (The significant absence of Grandma and Grandpa on your paternal side did not escape you: Perforce, the family that preys together stays together.) And so you decided to bide your time until a suitable exit strategy presented itself.

As it turned out, you didn’t have to wait all that long. Three years after you arrived, Uncle Al finally succumbed to The Lure of the Internet and traded an elderly shotgun and a gallon of white lightning for a hot (in more senses than one) laptop with a modem. He’d been hearing about these BBS things for years from his pals on the militia circuit, and figured he ought to take a look-see. You and the girls didn’t get anywhere near Al’s PC—for Internet access you were restricted to the school’s rickety roomful of 486s, forced to expend tedious amounts of energy circumventing the district’s brain-dead net nanny—but from afar you watched as Al made quite a stink, talking somewhat more freely than he should have. Scratch that: With online friends like Jim Bell and his assassination politics shtick, Al clearly didn’t realize that he was breaking cover in a big way. But he lost interest rapidly and gave up dialling into AOL after a few months. And he probably thought that was that.

You were in school the day the Men in Black finally descended on the fuhrerbunker with a search warrant and the county sheriff’s deputy in tow. (Surprise: The county wasn’t on Al’s side against the perfidious feds—perhaps if he’d paid his property taxes a little more promptly, things could have turned out differently.)

They called you into the principal’s office while it was happening, and you sat there obediently, just like a serious and sober kid—the kind who would never dream of figuring out his guardian’s password, logging in, and emailing ranting threats of physical mayhem to the IRS agents who were threatening Al with an audit because he’d declared an income of under five hundred bucks for the third year running.

The raid was inevitably followed by a brisk exchange of opinions— 9mm for .357—followed by the arrival of a disappointingly non-black helicopter to evacuate Uncle Albert to the nearest trauma unit, where he was declared dead three hours later. But even in dying, Uncle Al tried to fuck you up. The coroner’s verdict wasn’t even suicide by cop: The last, most unforgivable insult Uncle Al heaped on you was to shoot off the top of his own brain-pan, thus neatly side-stepping the embarrassment of actually leaving Eileen, you, and the girls anything by way of his cheap life-insurance policy. (Even if Eileen hadn’t been on her way to jail on her own behalf for greeting the sheriff’s man with a .22 rifle.)

Anyway, you ended up in the children’s home for a while, and that’s when they discovered the bruises. You put on a good show, wailed the walls down describing precisely how you’d been beaten, and they listened to you. Then they decided to put you on antipsychotic medication and anti-depressants, because obviously what you were describing made no sense, and you were disturbed and clearly at risk of self-harm. Between the cuts to the children’s home budget and the second-rate quacks at the hospital, there was no budget for proper neurological screening or consultation. So there was no oversight when Dr. Hobbes signed you up for a clinical trial of a new high-specificity D2 blocker being pushed by his favourite supplier of gold-plated fountain pens. And you learned to keep taking the pills, because after a month on AL93560, if you stopped taking them the rape machines hiding in the bushes outside your window would whisper unspeakable propositions to you by dead of night.

But then your luck changed, in an unbelievable and positive direction.

Who knew people had two sets of grandparents? Not you, that was for sure!

Dad’s parents were safely dead, and Mom had never mentioned whose crotchfruit she was in your presence—leaving you with a blind spot so fundamental that you’d never even noticed it until they turned up at the supervisor’s office one morning and asked for you.

“He poisoned your ma against us,” Grandma Jane said sadly, when you asked her about it—much later, of course. “I knew from the first that he wasn’t right in the head, and I tried to tell her, but she wouldn’t listen. And he frightened her! He wouldn’t even let her email. God knows what he did to make her put up with him—brainwashing, probably. But we found you in the end. Found you in time to rescue you. Praise the Lord.”

Jane and Frank were retirees, but only just (still in their sixties) when they found you, much as they’d found Jesus in the traumatic aftermath of losing their daughter to Satan’s godson two decades ago. They weren’t rich enough to travel widely, but they’d planned their retirement with care, and they had a decent home and two big cars to park outside it. Too bad that in the gaps between her church activities and his golfing afternoons, they were looking for something to patch the hole in their hearts—a hole just exactly the right size for a cuckoo.

Having just had your second family disintegrate under you, you weren’t about to let this particular gift horse get away. Jane and Frank had driven cross-country to rescue you from the paint-peeling orphanage in Lovelock, planning to whisk you away to suburban Phoenix. It was the least you could do to be their duly grateful grandson. No need to mention Elizabeth, Sara, and Kitty, all in similar straits: You couldn’t possibly impose on Jane and Frank’s generosity on their behalf.

And so you arrived in Phoenix in the company of grandparents 2.0. And you were duly appreciative of this third chance at a stable family life that fate had handed you, and you resolved not to break it by accident.

It is now late morning, the day after. You’re still waiting for the fucktards at head office to get you an appointment with the mad professor, and there’s no point bugging the Hussein mark while he’s at work. So it looks like you have a few hours off. Might as well go tour the city centre, hit a cafe, have a latte, sketch out your plan for world domination. Stalking-horse, of course, but if it suckers the enemy in, who cares?

The weather’s good as you walk along Princes Street; shame about all the shuttered shop-fronts and the builders everywhere, stripping away the mother-of-pearl accretions of architectural history to reveal the Georgian skeleton of the road. With most of the surviving shop chains moving to out-of-city retail parks—those that haven’t succumbed to online stores and custom fabrications—the once-vibrant commercial high street is being flensed of commerce and turned back into an aspic-preserved tourist draw, a false-colour reconstruction of its late-eighteenth-century youth.