Charles Stross - Rule 34

You rub the back of your head, ruefully. “Not for want of trying.”

“Just so. Tell me, Inspector, what motivational factors do you think we’re looking at here? And where do you think he’ll go?”

You blink, surprised. “We haven’t already… ?”

The frown is back. “Nae fear, it’s a matter of time.”

“Shit.” The drones must have arrived overhead too late to catch his trail. It’s daylight, and the sun’s out, so the heat signature from his footsteps will be washed out, and if he was smart, Christie will have disabled all his personal electronics. “Ahem. Motivation. I’m flailing in the dark here, but even leaving aside the sock-puppet ID, Christie doesn’t sound right to me. He’s from out of town, he’s got diplomatic connections with Issyk-Kulistan, hence the connection to Mr. Hussein.”

“He’s got more than that,” Dickie mutters. “Mr. Hussein has some questions to answer about what we found in his bathroom.”

“What? Drugs? Kiddie-porn?”

“Neither: But we found a bucketful of bootleg replicator feedstock he was busy trying to flush down the toilet.” Dickie looks smug. “Almost certainly the same stuff that’s been turning up in your Saturday night specials down in Leith. I trust we will shake loose where he got it from in due course.”

It’s the feedstock channel you’ve been chasing for months, under-resourced and overworked. Typical of Dickie to roll it up for you as a side-show. Asshole. “Huh. That’s not like Anwar; he’s always been one for the white-collar scams. But you asked about Christie?”

“Aye. What do you think?”

Well, at last . “I think he’s working for some organized crime syndicate or other. I don’t know what he’s doing in Edinburgh, but the ATHENA killings rattled his cage, and he or his took it as a personal attack. Maybe it was a personal attack; what if he turned up on our door-step because he was looking to do business with the victims? Or kill them as rivals, or something.”

“I don’t like coincidences,” Dickie says, almost as if he’s accusing you of rigging the dice. “Why did he run into this girl-friend of yours? Wouldn’t you say that’s a bit of a big coincidence, too?”

You stare at the hologram on the wall. “Yes, you’re absolutely right,” you hear yourself saying. “It’s almost as if we were being nudged into noticing him, or something—”

You stop dead. More dominoes appear in your imaginary hand, slotting neatly into place on the board.

“What? Say what’s on your mind, woman.”

“ATHENA is at the root of this.” Lack of professional courtesy indeed. “ATHENA is all about analysing social networks to reward good behaviour and punish defectors. Moxie—ICIU—was trying to tell me something about it just now, sir. Some kind of central Asian government has been using it to get at netcrime rings, going too far and arranging accidents. What if I’m the accident that’s being arranged for Christie?”

“Huh.” Dickie stares at you. “The cult of the lone gun detective again, Inspector?”

“Give me some credit for not being stupid , sir: You and I both know what gets successful prosecutions, and it isn’t that Life on Mars shit.” (What gets results is an ops room full of detectives working together as a team, with a fully documented work flow and built-in quality assurance. Transparency after the fact, everyone lifelogging to sealed evidence servers and evidence secured under lock and key so that the Procurator Fiscal can prove a watertight case in court. Sherlock Holmes has been superseded by business process refactoring, and success is all about good management.) “But I probably came to ATHENA’s attention via ICIU. I’m one of the nodes on the graph that’s got lots of long-range inputs; I’m an easier inside contact to reach than an officer who doesn’t deal with other netcrime units on a day-to-day basis. And everything ATHENA knows about how we work comes from our external social traffic.”

“So you’re the trigger, or bait, or summat. And ye ken ATHENA’s trying to feed Christie to us. And if ATHENA can noodge you, it can noodge Christie, can’t it? So where’s Christie bound for—” Dickie stops dead. His eyes widen. “Your friend was staying in the West End Hilton, was she not? Let’s go pay her hotel a visit right now ,” he says. And you realize, to your chagrin, that just for once he’s right.

Ants. I am surrounded by fucking ants. Can’t they get anything right?

This is not organized crime. (Organized crime: fucking 1920s shit invented by bootlegging immigrant fucktards in the slums of Chicago and New York and the other big cities with the help of their ’Ndrangheta homies, and so easy that by the 2020s even a bunch of crack-snorting surfer-dude VCs from California could master it.)

Listen, mother-fucker, I expect backup .

I am hanging my ass out here in the wastelands of Scotlandshire, waiting for a fucking bus with a suitcase in my fucking hand that contains a pair of freshly harvested frog-skin gloves—so freshly harvested they’re bleeding all over my briefs, you wanted fucking DNA samples as evidence of delivery, you cunt—and a pre-pubertal fucktoy that talks to me when it thinks I’m sleeping. I demand backup .

This is not an alien invasion scenario, even if the bat-winged drones ghosting above the satellite-dish-infested roof-tops obey the overmind AI crime goddess, and there are robots wearing sportswear on every street-corner. Some of them neck cheap tinnies of Polish lager and look at you as if they’re wondering if you’re dangerous—but they don’t fool you. There are lizards in designer suits in the boardrooms of the skyscrapers of London, planning to harvest the humans…

Five-point-six-two kilograms, damn it. Same weight as the average severed human head. Sole seat of cognition, once.

The thing in the suitcase is the future. It tells me this when it sneaks out in the darkness before dawn and crawls into my bed to suck my juices.

Are you listening , mother-fucker?

“I’m listening. Please carry on.”

A bus hums around the corner, slowing to halt by the stop. The tall man with the suitcase steps aboard, holding the QR-coded ticket he just paid cash for up to the camera in what used to be the driver’s seat. He mutters to himself as he takes one of the vacant priority seats.

I do this shit for you because you tell me there’s a career in it. But I’m not seeing that. I’m not seeing your start-up monkey-dance IPO switch-blade here. I’m seeing the rape machines in the bushes, the gutted ghosts hanging in the trees on ropes flensed from their intestines. Skinned frogs croaking as their blood beads and runs in rivulets across their pale dorsal muscles.

(This batch of drugs isn’t working too well. Stress sometimes does that, or cheap generics or counterfeits. Did you source me cheap generics, mother-fucker? Did you cheap your executive ?)

Look, this is merely another logistics problem.

I have downsized MacDonald, as you requested through the thing in the suitcase. I have given you the ATHENA source code you wanted. The police arrived before I could terminate the squirming toad Hussein, but as I understand it, the lizards have already conquered Issyk-Kulistan; there’s nobody left but screaming skeletons with the flayed meat hanging from their bones eating eye-gouged dogs in the streets as killer robot drones patrol the boiling skies—

Are you listening , mother-fucker?