Charles Stross - Rule 34

As you have doubtless realized by now, the Operation’s products are all illegal; this imposes certain regrettable cost externalities on us—you can’t buy insurance and police protection for your business if what you manufacture ranges from MDMA labs to clitoridectomy kits.

We have learned over the years that it is necessary to take a stern but honest line with junior franchisees who ask for business-development capital loans, then default on their line of credit. In our world of unregulated free-market enterprise there is no “society” to off-load business externalities like insurance onto, no courts to settle disputes equitably, and no presumption of goodwill.

We have given Jaxxie every opportunity to pay off his debt on time. We even steered business his way—when he was too lazy to get on his bike and look for work—by way of our local salesman, Gav. Despite having a suitable contract dropped in his lap, Jaxxie still managed to drag defeat from the jaws of victory. This is the point at which our patience would normally be exhausted: We are not a welfare scheme, and we cannot afford to continually make allowances for incompetence when it impacts the bottom-line.

But Jaxxie’s debt is not substantial. Furthermore, we are aware that he is willing and eager to repay it, and would certainly have done so on time had not “the dug ate ma hamewurk.” We are therefore pleased to announce that we are going to exercise the prerogative of mercy on this occasion.

Jaxxie: We hope you will take this punishment, which is intended to teach you a valuable lesson, in the spirit in which it is intended. It may strike you as unpleasant and draconian—but consider the alternatives! We have a franchise relationship model to defend. As it is, your punishment will not hurt much. You’ll make a full recovery. And it won’t even impair your ability to continue in your chosen profession.

Just don’t fuck up and make us come for your other kidney.

Wednesday morning starts out moist and grey in that way Edinburgh gets in summer, when the haar comes boiling up from the Firth and fills the streets with a humid Whitechapel haze, misting your specs and clogging your lungs like a stifling blanket.

You find yourself thinking about work over breakfast (a couple of cereal bars and a half litre of apple juice). Work is both a relief and a distraction; it beats sitting and staring at the walls, aimlessly surfing the net, or grocery shopping (all activities that leave you twitchy and numb, vulnerable to the little existential doubts that nibble at your will-power when you don’t have a focus). Besides, you’ve got a nice little bundle of puzzles on your desktop: your own investigation case-load plus trouble tickets escalated by your team because they’re not amenable to a five-minute clean-up. If you lose yourself in the in-tray, time passes that bit more quickly.

So it is that after breakfast you pull on a clean suit, grab your bag, and head for the gym; and after a brisk half-hour work-out and a shower, you catch a microbus to the station. While you’re waiting at the bus-stop (expect five minutes between vehicles, according to the flickering sign—more like ten if you account for traffic jams) you put on your specs and log in to the daily news flow. Surprise—Dodgy Dickie MacLeish has got an ops room up and running for last night’s case, and he wants you to check in.

Kibitzing on a Charlie Hotel investigation (Culpable Homicide, CH to its friends) is not exactly going to contribute to your own team-performance metrics, but it’s a higher-priority job than most, and it’s a whiff of the unusual: So you hurry on down to briefing room D31, grabbing a coffee on the way.

Police briefing rooms haven’t changed much over the years. They retain the same scuffed white paint, checkerboard-fading LED panel lighting, and cheap furniture: the spoor of an institution focussed on results, not appearances. The centre of the room is dominated by a horseshoe of battered active surfaces for the collaborative push-pull noodling. CopSpace is crammed full of Post-its, work flows, time-line charts, and urgentproject waves. When you arrive, Dickie’s chatting to a knot of suits, but he clocks your availability sharpish and breaks off. “DI Kavanaugh.” He nods. “In bright and early, I see.” You register his glower but cut him some slack: File it under up all night with no sleep . The first law of detection is the longer you leave it, the harder it is to collar the culprit ; 80 per cent of cases are solved within forty-eight hours, after which the probability of a clear-up drops drastically—and Mac is well aware of this.

“I was already past shift end when the call came in,” you reply automatically. “What’s turned up?”

“I was hoping you could shed some light on the initial contact.” His manner’s abrupt. “The log here says first contact was Jase McDougall and PC Berman, sent to a priority 3 by Control responding to a call from a MOP, Mrs. Begum. The home help. You were in Control when the call came in—what did they tell you?”

That one’s easy. “Nothing.” You take a cautious sip of your coffee and wince: It’s bogging. “That is, I didn’t take the call—I think you’ll find it was Sergeant”— Elvis —“Sorensen? When Jase called for supervision, I was coming to the end of my shift, so I decided to visit the site in person before heading home. When I got there, Jase told me that PC Berman took the initial contact and yanked his chain. When he got to the scene, he pulled me in. So I was the third on scene.”

“And then you called me immediately.” Dickie nods, his expression grim. “May I ask why you didn’t file it as an accident?”

“Sure.” Your cheek twitches: You take another mouthful of the bitter gunk from the bottom of the cafetière. “I’ve had dealings with Mr. Blair before—in fact, we go back a way. He’s a fine upstanding pillar of the underworld. If he’d fallen downstairs and clouted his head, I probably wouldn’t have rattled your cage, but the manner of his passing was such poetic justice, so to speak…”

“You think it’s a hit.”

This is treading close to dangerous ground. Change the subject. “Let’s just say, if this was my investigation, I’d want to rule that out. Did SOC do a work-up on the, er, fluid? Like I suggested?”

He glares at you. “How did you know ?”

“Know what?” you ask. Then you cotton to the work flow he’s fingering in CopSpace, and grab hold of it for yourself. It flips open in all its wikified hypertextual glory, full of long medical terms that fail to signify, beyond the words “Sildenafil” and “Ritonavir.” “Um. Bear with me a moment while I come up to speed? I need to look this up—”

Dickie snorts. “Don’t bother. Sildenafil’s better known as Viagra. That’s nae going to do for anyone on its lonesome, but Ritonavir—that’s an old HIV anti-viral drug—apparently it messes up Viagra when you mix them, makes it ten times as strong or something. And enema fluid. Apparently it’s all the rage .”

You’ve run across the enema thing before, for alcohol and other drugs, but this is a new one on you. “Did he add the drugs himself, or is it a set-up?”

“He’s HIV-positive, and had blood-pressure issues on top. He’s on Ritonavir and a bunch of blood-pressure meds. There’s a bunch of open packets of capsules in the bathroom cabinet; but they’re none of them administered by enema. The patient information for the HIV drug is full of warnings about Viagra, not that most eejits bother reading the leaflet. And there’s a bunch of empty capsule shells in the bathroom bin.” And there, in a nutshell, is the veiled accusation: murder most foul . “We got a core temperature reading that suggests he was lying there since midnight the day before. I’m still waiting on the post-mortem report, but my money’s on the first option—someone who knew about Laughing Boy’s dangerous habit spiked the cocktail. That machine…” He points at a 3D projection of the death scene, floating atop one of the surfaces. “It’s a collector’s piece.”