Charles Stross - Rule 34

“MacDonald—” You stop yourself. Bits of the jigsaw are slotting together, and you don’t like the pattern they’re making. The earlier plan, to stick Hussein’s head above the parapet to attract enemy fire—sounds like he is the enemy. Or part of it. Working for the enemy. Who have infiltrated the Operation more deeply than you had imagined. “Okay, you want me to give MacDonald an exit interview, then downsize the consul.” Anwar, isn’t it?

“Exactly, son.” Control sounds warmly approving. “You can do that? Afterwards, the world is your oyster. Just saying.”

“I can do that,” you assure him. It’ll be a pleasure. It’s been a long time since you last peeled a frog.

Bhaskar may have his high-rise presidential pleasure dome to squat and gibber in, but it is beholden to you—both in your capacity as chief of overseas military intelligence, and the other hat that you wear—to run your operations from a hole in the ground.

This particular hole in the ground is operated by the headquarters of the Twenty-second Guards Cyberwar Shock Battalion, who inherited it by way of a long and convoluted history of turf warfare and empire building from the former Soviet RSVN, who built it as part of their strategic nuclear dead man’s handle system. It’s buried two hundred metres under a mountain, in a series of rusting, dank, metal-lined tunnels that have long since outlived their original function. Ten years ago, funded by the last gasp of the oil money, your last-but-one predecessor had the nuclear command centre gutted and flood-filled with the latest high-bandwidth laser networking: Today its cheap-ass Malaysian Cisco knockoffs pack a trillion times the bandwidth of the entire Soviet Union at its height, which is to say about as much as a single MIT freshman’s dorm room. Getting that bandwidth hooked up to the public networks on the surface was a herculean task, and has permanently rendered the nuclear bunker unfit for its original purpose—but, as Kyrgyzstan had shipped all its warheads back to Russia three decades ago, you’re not too concerned. You’ve got a nuclearwar command bunker with Herman Miller conference chairs, Mountain Dew vending machines for your tame geeks, armed guards on the airlocks up top, and secure Internet access. A fair definition of heaven, to some.

(Although describing what you’ve got here as “Internet access” is a bit like calling a Bosnian War rape camp a “dating agency.”)

Here is your office: heart of a spider-web, wrapped around a hardused Eames recliner, keyboard sitting on an articulated arm to one side, headset to the other. All the walls are covered in 3D screens except for one, a bare metal surface studded with radiation sensors, air vents, and crossed by exposed pipes and cable trays. There’s a tatty epaper poster gummed across it, sagging in the middle: It shows a constantly updated viewgraph schematic of global bandwidth consumption, fat pipes sprawling multi-hued across a dymaxion projection of the planet, pulsing and rippling with the systolic ebb and flow of data. The screens on the other walls all contain heads, perspectives shockingly preserved as if they are actually there in the flesh, freshly severed.

Teleconferencing, actually.

“How much longer do you propose to keep on stringing them along?” asks the delegate from Maryland. (She’s blonde and thin as a rake and clearly addicted to amphetamines or emetics or both: You wouldn’t fuck her at gun-point.)

“They already realize what is going on!” The delegate from Brussels is clearly irritated by her naïveté. The lip-sync in the teleconference loop is borked: The real-time interpreter net is clearly not keeping up with his waspish tirade. “It is inconceivable that they don’t. Perhaps they use this as an opportunity to diminish their headcount. Or perhaps the short-term financial gain really is worth it to them—”

“Twenty-four hours.” You cut in before his Belgian counterpart manages to crash the software. “That’s all we need for the wrap.”

“Twenty-four hours is too long!” insists the Europol delegate. “We are already have trouble securing for the operation. And these ‘accidents,’ they attract attention. I am hearing reports that are mortifying. What are you doing ? We did not agree to this!”

“What precisely didn’t you consent to?” You raise one bushy eyebrow. “I seem to recall the negotiations over the concordat were exhaustive.”

“This!” A wild hand gesture sweeps into view briefly, providing insight. (The American or Japanese programmers who designed the auto-track for this conference system clearly weren’t thinking in terms of cultures that are big on semaphore.) “The agents your associates have deployed are killing people! That was not part of our agreement. This arrangement was to suck in the assets of organized netcrime for civil confiscation, leaving an audit trail to facilitate prosecution of the perpetrators. Extralegal assassination is, is unacceptable! What are you doing ?”

It’s clearly running out of control, and you try not to sigh. “I am not doing anything: I’m not responsible for these deaths.” You shrug, then lean back in your well-upholstered command chair. “I assure you, they are nothing to do with me.” You look at Maryland. “Is your government… ?”

Maryland looks as if she’s swallowed a live toad. “We’re not in the remote-kill business these days. This isn’t the noughties: Congress would never stand for it.” Ever since Filipino Jemaah Islamiyah hackers pwned an MQ-9 Reaper and zapped the governor of Palawan with USAF-owned Hellfire missiles, the Americans have gone back to keeping a human finger on the trigger: not because a state governor from a foreign country was killed, but because of who was in the armoured limousine right behind him. (The prospect of having to utter the term collateral damage in the same sentence as President of the United States before a congressional enquiry had focussed a few minds.) “Where’s the attack coming from?”

“It’s not part of the original picture.” It’s uncomfortable to talk about. “To make IRIK look plausible, it was necessary to provide a haven for certain undesirable elements. They run botnets, of course, but their customers are… unclear. We had assumed the traditional, of course: spammers, malware vendors, child-labour sweat-shops providing teleoperator control of animatronic sex toys for paedophiles.” You clear your throat. “What we weren’t expecting: cheap grid computing for pharmaceutical companies solving protein-folding problems. A Chinese automobile company using a botnet to evolve the design of their latest car using genetic algorithms fed with data from consumer surveys. Artificial-intelligence researchers renting the same botnets that spammers rely on to train their spam filters. Who knew? It is a, a soup of virtual machines boiling out on the darknet, coordinated through channels that our targets operate from corrupted routers in the State Telephone Company hosting centres in Karakol. I don’t have the resources to trace them, in any event. We will shut them down when we spring the trap and snap their worthless necks, but until we are ready to close the honeypot, I cannot stop the attacks.”

“Twenty-four hours.” This from the delegate from Beijing, whose screen is an opaque black cube. “That is unacceptable.”

“I fail to see why. The operation is proceeding nominally.”

“The operation is out of control, Colonel. Sequestrating the assets of organized crime is acceptable. Creating a honeypot for international cybercrime in order to shut them down is acceptable. But sheltering murderers is not. There have been regrettable excesses. The younger brother of the chairman of a state party branch that I shall not trouble you with. The aunt of a Central Committee member. You must shut it down now—or we will.”