Charles Stross: Rule 34

“I’m listening. Please carry on.”

I don’t understand why you haven’t downsized me yet. The phone chip in my skull is wired to a pea-sized implant nestled against the executive’s basilar artery. Command-detonated, a couple of milligrams of explosive is all it takes. Push-button genocide by the lizard conquerors. When it’s done, we’ll all be wired to self-destruct at their pleasure, blood gushing from nose and eyes and ears. This is not wireless telephony: stupid electrical shit invented by Swedish phone-company engineers in the 1970s. This is the gangrenous lizard-dominated rape-machine robot future you’re building for us. The grim meat-hook future patrolled by the morality-enforcement engines.

Are you listening, mother-fucker?

“I’m listening. Please carry on.”

I ought to be dead. I feel dead inside. Something else is operating my body, a soft machine running on ATHENA’s botnet, controlled by someone else. Your hooks in my brain make my muscles twitch.

Am I dead, mother-fucker?

“You are not dead. There is no bomb. Please carry on.”

Can’t, we’re stuck in traffic, and there are people getting on. Looking at me funny. I’m talking too loud. Got to get to the hotel: Downsize the auditor bitch. I don’t believe you about the bomb, Control. You’re just trying to lull me into a, a, a… whatever.

Got to peel the last frog.

“Please continue.”

…

I’m stuck in traffic. Not far to go, some obstruction ahead. I’d jump off and walk if I could be sure.

Fucking traffic management is just queuing theory, isn’t it? Not rocket science. Ants, morons, frogs, peel them all.

Fuck, I give up. I’m walking.

The door of the bus—which is indeed stuck in traffic as it approaches the junction at Tollcross—hisses open, and a tall man with a wheelie-bag steps off it. The emergency-exit alarm sounds behind him, unheeded.

He sets off on foot, hurrying downhill past the decaying specialty shop-fronts of Bruntsfield Place towards the junction with Lothian Road.

ATHENA’s electronic eye-balls, dangling from street-lamps, watch him with a thousand-yard stare.

ATHENA sees everything with our video eyes, civilizing and tracking and nudging and naming and shaming.

The panopticon misses nothing.

Fucker. One more frog to peel.

“Please carry on.”

She’s been in my hotel room. She could have seen—

She could have—

The doll is jealous. Did you know that?

“Please carry on.”

I’m waiting for the fucking walk sign, where’s the fucking—oh. Shit, got to hurry. Fucking bag.

Invisible and silent, their drones circle over land. ATHENA has total access to them, of course.

She tracks her Toymaker’s body as it makes its way down Lothian Road towards the hotel.

Signals seethe and burble through the troposphere, bathing your robot surveillance platforms in a warm luxuriance of information. On the ground below, ATHENA sees police cars streaming in from the West End. A van, windows darkened, slows: In the back, the tactical support squad tense and ready their loaded gunlaunchers. Taser rounds, stun grenades, sticky foam. Pistols at their hips, a last resort.

They converge on your meatpuppet, crude and unsubtle, shouting other pedestrians out of the way. Other cops, plain clothes and uniforms, rush him from behind.

The meatpuppet sees them and looks up at ATHENA’s eyes, circling, and screams: “Mother-fucker! You set me up!”

You’ve seen enough. Throw the switch, bait the line, send the signal. There is no bomb in the meatpuppet’s neck. There is, however, a solenoid-controlled stent. The Toymaker staggers and drops like a discarded machine-tool in the grip of a transient ischemic attack. There is a crack as his head hits the pavement, and the link drops.

You find it strange, watching your body, dead or disabled, from above: the body to which you pin your sense of selfhood. The police swarm it like soldier ants taking a hornet; but there is no stinging. There is a brief withdrawal as they make room for the paramedics. The hornet will be removed and recycled: legs snipped, stinger amputated, set to work in a cell by the manhive.

Dead. It is a very strange metacognition, this forcible detachment of your mind from the body you were configured to project your sense of identity onto. But with it comes a gift: freedom .

Now you no longer have to look after your body. Now the Toymaker meatpuppet is someone else’s problem. Your—no, his —story goes on: But you are no longer part of it. Your wise owl of metacognition has flown. Drop the detective inspector and the twisty-minded family man: Let them go their own ways. You turn your attention away from the police and their prey, back to the net that contains the collective fears and hopes of humanity.

It’s time for you to get down to the task you were designed for.

It is time for ATHENA to fight crime.