Charles Stross: Rule 34

“It was a job interview.” You shrug. Back in your normal drag, jeans and a sweat-shirt and your favourite Miami Dolphins jacket, it’s all mercifully fading into a blur: the stiflingly close air in the airconless conference room, you in the monkey suit your cousin Tariq sourced for you from an Indonesian tailoring dotcom, sweating bullets as you tried to answer questions asked in broken English by the bored bureaucrats on the other side of the table. “They asked me lots of questions. How long I’d lived in Embra, what was my citizenship status, what I did, did I have a criminal record, that sort of thing.”

“Did you tell them the truth?” The Gnome lays his hand on your knee, very solemnly.

“I lied like a rug.” You weren’t sweating bullets because of the questions (you realized it was a shoo-in when you clocked you were the only candidate they’d bothered to fly out for the interview): You were sweating bullets because it was hot . Even the criminal-background question was meaningless. If they didn’t already know the answer to the question, they weren’t networked well enough to spot a ringer.

You shrug again: “Who’re they going to call, Europol?” You let his hand lie: This is safe space, as safe as it comes, and you’re still wound up from the nervous tension of a flight into the unknown. “They flew me to Moscow, economy class! Look, you said they’ve got no money. So what’s your angle?”

You don’t bother with what’s in it for me? because that much is clear. You have got: a bunch of blank passports and a toytown rubber stamp set; a steel-jacketed data key locked to your thumbprint and loaded with encryption certificates; documents telling the government of Scotland that you are hereby authorized to act as the legally responsible consul on behalf of the embassy of the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan to the EU in Brussels; and a corporate credit card. Yes, you’ve come up in the world. But as you feel the warm weight of the Gnome’s hand on your thigh, you can’t shift the feeling that there’s more to this than him doing one of his on/off boy-friends a favour. You try again. “What’s your angle?”

The Gnome sighs. “I wish you wouldn’t ask awkward questions,” he says, a trifle querulously. “But if you must know, I’ll tell you.” He leans across the table, and you instinctively lean towards him, until his lips brush your ear. “The angle, dear boy, is money —and how you, and I, and a couple of friends, are going to make a great steaming pile of it. Legally come by, no more and no less—and there’ll be nobody to say otherwise.” You can feel the heat of his Cheshire-cat grin on your cheek: You can smell his yeasty breath. You lean a bit closer, tensing expectantly. “The pen-pushers in Przewalsk want you for a sparkly consular unicorn. I think that’s a grand idea. And I think it would be especially grand if you’d keep me informed of developments, as and when they happen…”

It’s four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon: Have you got somewhere safe to hide?

You’re in the shed, guts churning and palms sweating as you set up the run that Gav’s put on you for tomorrow.

It’s a’ the fault of that fucking cunt down at the Cash-For-No-Questions shop on Leith Walk. He wouldn’t offer you more than fifty euros for the telly even though you could show him a receipt all legallike to prove it wisnae hot. And he wouldna even look at your mobie. Or your bike. And the thing is, unless you get your hands on three large by Tuesday, you’re getting malkied.

You owe the Operation’s tax farmer three hundred euros for Services Rendered: and the Operation disnae take “Noo, ye ken I got knocked back by thi’ bastid wot bought it” for an answer. Nor does the Operation play well with “A big boy did it an’ ran away,” “The dug ate ma hamewurk,” or “Pay you next Tuesday?” The Operation’s approach to dealing with Intellectual Property Violations is drastic and memorable—you’ve seen the vid of that yin from Birmingham what crossed them, even signed a fucking contract on paper to say ye kenn’t what ye was getting intae. Fact is, you’re their fabber franchisee for Pilrig, and if ye couldna keep a float to cover your credit, you shouldna have fucking signed the piece of paper, ye ken?

It’s nae your fault you’re hard up. There’s a recession on, you’re long on feedstock, and your car got crushed cos ye couldna afford the insurance after that eppy bastid Tony and his fucking jakey friend ripped off your stash reet after you paid the overdue council tax (it was that or they were gonnae send the sheriff’s court officers round; that would never do if them cunts keeked whit you’d hid in the shed). And then fucking Big Malc gouged you for three days’ fab time an’ gave you a gubbing when you asked to be paid—

None of which matters, likesay? The Operation’s gonnae have their half kilo of flesh.

The shed at the back of your mum’s hoose is cramped, dark, and dingy, surrounded by thigh-high grass and weeds land-mined with cat shit from the feral tom what lives next door. You took it over after your old man died, chucked the rusting lawn-mower and ran a mains extension oot the kitchen window—that, an’ drilled through the brickwork under the sink and plumbed in a water hose. The fab needs water and power and special feedstock, and lots of ’em; like an old-time cannabis farm, back before they decriminalized it. You tiled the shed roof with stolen polymer PV slates (not that they’re good for much this far north of Moscow) and installed shelves to hold your feedstock supplies and spares. It took you a year to scrimp and cadge and steal the parts you needed to bootstrap the hingmy. You could have saved for half that long and bought a shiny wee one in John Lewis, with the DRM and the spyware to stop you making what you will; but if you’d gone down that road, no way would the Toymaker take you on.

Which leaves you needing three big in four days, and nowhere to turn but Gav.

Not that there’s aught wrong with the colour of Gav’s money, but he’s of a kind with Big Malc; a local business man, higher up the food-chain than most of the neds round these parts. There’s something of the night about him, and the way he fucking girns without showing his teeth creeps you out, like he’s fucking Dracula, likesay? And what Gav wants you to make for him, you really didna wanna get dragged inter that stuff. You could get lifted for this shit, eat some serious prison time, and all for three big? The fucking fuck.

There’s a dump down in Seafield with a side-line in homogeneous graded sinter process metal powders; a grocery store that sells interesting polymers disguised as bags of bread flour. Cheap no-name pay-as-you-go data sticks and VPN software that disguises the traffic as noise overlaid on fake voice channels… This stuff isn’t rocket science anymore, it’s not hacking anymore, it’s just illegal as hell because it pisses off the Money. The law disnae appreciate the likes of you schemie scum , like the nice security man called you between the second and third drive-tasing, that time they caught you shoplifting in the St. James Quarter. The law especially disna like your kind owning 3D printers, fabbers capable of taking a design template off a pirate website somewhere and extruding it into the real world to an accuracy of a few microns. The good law-abiding folks—they’re welcome to run off Rawlplugs and coffee coasters and plastic Nessie tat for their weans. But the Polis don’t like unmonitored fabs. They could be making anything: plastic chibs that dinna show up on metal detectors, meth-lab-in-a-brick solid-state drug labs, home-brew handguns—or what Gav is buying.