Charles Stross - Rule 34

“But—the—you can’t be serious!”

“Bhaskar tells me we have sold 18 billion euros’ worth of CDOs, John.” The colonel’s smile is unspeakably smug. “Seventy-four per cent of which have been purchased by off-shore investment trusts, slush funds, sovereign-wealth funds operated by sock puppets, and for cash deals in dark alleyways. We are interestingly leveraged: The national debt of Issyk-Kulistan is less than 16 billion. And Issyk-Kulistan is not going to default. On the contrary—tomorrow, the people’s chamber of deputies will call for a repudiation of the vote for independence, which as you know was shamelessly irregular—and vote itself into liquidation. The national debt is paid down, thanks to the oversold CDOs. We will, of course, honour those derivatives that have been purchased by entities adhering to international accounting transparency standards…”

“They’ll kill you,” Mr. White says flatly.

“No they won’t.” (In Kyrgyz:) “Take him away.” To Mr. White’s receding back, as the soldiers frog-march him down the hotel corridor: “You are under arrest for complicity in murder, for financial crimes too long and tedious to recite from memory, for treason against the government and people of Kyrgyzstan, for tax evasion against the government of the United States of America, for violation of their organized crime and racketeering act—we’re considering handing you over to the FBI to save the cost of trying you ourselves—for creation of an unlicensed artificial intelligence: Oh, and there is an enquiry from Scotland about the import of illegally mislabelled food products…”

(Colonel Datka sounds indecently pleased with himself as his voice fades out of range of the Operation executive’s phone.)

The day passes in a blur. First off, you’re late for work. Not your fault, but figuring out how to get from Liz’s bijou flat to the Gyle involves a not-terribly-magical mystery tour around Edinburgh’s spatchcock public-transport infrastructure. Your hotel’s on the tram network, twelve minutes out—but Liz might as well live in Newcastle given the frequency of the bus service, and after most of an hour, you end up paging a taxi.

Then, when you’re on-site, your attention is shot. You just can’t focus properly. By late morning, you’re working up your nerve to go talk it out with Human Resources—write off the day’s work so far against goodwill in return for an unscheduled early exit—when you get an IM from the police. It’s not wholly unexpected, but still you find your hands clammy with sweat. You call HR anyway and find them surprisingly receptive: “I have to go and give the police a statement about a crime I witnessed,” you tell the man on the screen. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take, so I’m clocking off for the day.” He nods and says something diplomatically non-committal: There, you did it. Relieved, you leave.

The afternoon passes in a blur, most of it spent in a drab waiting room, some of it in front of a discreet webcam and a sympathetic detective constable. She takes you through the night before, not prompting but clearly already aware of most of what you’re saying: She seems to mostly want to know about Christie, everything you can remember about him that you weren’t paying attention to. Sex, even bad sex, does strange things to your memory. You are, you think, discreet about your precise relationship with Liz. “A friend,” you describe her, “one of your colleagues.”

Finally, you’re free to go. Free, empty, drained of memories. You go outside, under the sky that is cold and blue, streaked with thin clouds high overhead. Your phone, emerging from the station’s shielding, gibbers to itself for a few seconds as a bunch of messages come in. You read them with increasing disbelief and disgust. Most of them are work-related, but only Liz’s message makes any sense, and she’s just asking if you have any dinner plans.

You text her back: CAN I STAY TONIGHT?You don’t examine your motives too closely; whether you’re tacitly offering to play by her rules, or just looking for any port in a storm, you don’t want to spend another night in that hotel. Minutes later, as you walk towards Stockbridge, you get a reply: SURE. Which tells you what to do next—bid for a microbus back to the hotel to pack your bags and clear your room.

By the time you get back to HQ, a log-jam has broken.

The first sign you get, sitting in the back of an ambulance as a paramedic checks your pupils, is an excitable voice call from Moxie. “Skipper, you’re going to love this! It’s crazy! There’s been a revolution in someplace I can’t pronounce in Asia, and it turns out the government’s been running a scheme to use AI tools to go after spammers? Only, see, they screwed up the training they gave their cognitive toolkit, and it began arranging accidents—”

You tune him out as irrelevant background noise, devoid of content. Your head hurts, your back aches, and you’re increasingly pissed-off with yourself. I’m getting too old for this crap. The honorary consul for Issyk-Kulistan, indeed. And some random psycho who’s arranging staged suicides when he’s not peeling the skin off his victim’s hands? It’s too damn much, that’s what it is. The fire-hose of seemingly disconnected data is drowning you. At times like this you can see where Tricky Dickie is coming from, with his hankering for a simpler time—even if it’s not your simpler time, even if it’s a time when you and yours were not welcome and not legal.

They make you sit on your arse for half an hour while they confirm there’s no concussion. A couple of messages come in on your phone’s private personality: YES, you tell Dorothy, YOU CAN STAY OVER. A few seconds later she responds: I’LL GET MY BAGS.Unresolved fragments of your untidy life are sliding towards an uncertain resolution. Eventually, you get yourself signed off and go back inside the madhouse, where a couple of car-loads of uniforms are busy poking around in search of traces. There’s no sign of Anwar, but Dickie is waiting for you in the over-furnished living room, pacing back and forth beneath a kitsch gilt-framed hologram of the Ka’bah. “Why?” he demands. “Why here?”

This is promising. “Social-network analysis, intelligence driven. ICIU has a mandate to track the international side of this investigation. After interviewing Dr. MacDonald, Inspector Aslan and I concurred that he wasn’t telling us everything we needed to know. I authorized a search of his public friends lists, and came up with a close personal connection to Mr. Hussein, via a particular social site. As Mr. Hussein was already noted in proximity to one of the ATHENA victims, once I’d confirmed that Dr. MacDonald was indeed the victim at Appleton Towers, I decided to visit Mr. Hussein and see what I could shake loose.”

You can see Dickie winding up again, but he bottles it up for once. “Why did you not see fit to file a report with BABYLON?” he asks, his voice uncharacteristically soft.

“Ah, well, I did . But there’s so much intel going into the funnel on this one that, on reviewing the situation with Inspector Aslan, we agreed that there was a high risk of its not being prioritized. And as you can see, even with blues and twos, we only just got here in time…”

“Aye.” Dickie’s glower fades to a calculating frown: He’s probably spinning the PR angle, considering how it’ll look in the newsfeeds. Detective saves victim from psycho killer in the nickof time always plays well. “But you lost this Christie character.”