Rule 34 hs-2

by Charles Stross

  “You know the Halfway House, on Fleshmarket Close?”

  Of course you know it; it’s one of the Gnome’s favoured hang-outs precisely because it’s half-underground, in a microwave shadow, where mobiles work erratically and GPS doesn’t reach. Stands to reason Tariq would know about it, too. “Sure. See you there in half an hour?”

  Tariq cuts the connection. You switch off the pad and lay it aside, then peer at the beer bucket. The wee transparent plastic hingmy—airlock? But you thought only spaceships had them—farts at you. It smells of yeast and a faint tang of something metallic. You fight back the urge to lift the lid and sneak a look inside (the brewing FAQs were all very insistent that you shouldna do that). “Sleep tight,” you admonish it, then you drop the trap-door and scramble down the ladder and out into the night.

  It’s evening, but you need sunglasses: That’s Edinburgh in late spring/ early summer. The sun’s low, but staying up later and later, and the local pagans will be doing that infidel sex-festival thing that the local Christians get so hot and bothered about on Calton Hill in a couple of weeks. You pull your shoes and suit jacket on and trudge up to the high street, then down the steep and garish shop-frontage of Cockburn Street to the top of Fleshmarket Close. You walk down the steps carefully, clutching the handrail until you come to the landing with the Halfway House. Tariq’s in the back booth, of course, nursing a pint of heavy. You nod at him, then turn to the bar and order a lager. A minute later, you’re squeezing in knee to knee with Cousin Porkie McWideboy. He raises his glass to you cheerily.

  “I didn’t know you drank here,” you tell him. Which is the truth.

  “I don’t drink alcohol.” Tariq wipes suds from his moustache.

  “Neither do I.” You raise your glass to him. “Watch me practice not drinking alcohol.” He looks irritated but responds in kind.

  “Here’s the package.” Tariq slides a wee memory card across the table at you. “There’s a hi-def movie file on this card. Play it, it’s a movie. Change its suffix to dot-exe and run it, and it’ll do something else. Remember to change it back again after you’re done with it of an evening, awright?”

  You eye the card with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. Then you pull out your phone, elaborately remove the Argyle sock, and inspect it carefully. There is, as you anticipated, no signal, so you roll the sock back over it and stare at Tariq pointedly. “I’m still on probation,” you remind him. “I thought you said this was about testing a chat room?”

  “It could be.” Tariq’s noncommittal. “There’s a VM in there, and it’s hosting a web app with a chat room. Nothing else. But you don’t want it to go anywhere near the net. You’re going to stay one hundred per cent off-line while you’re running it, and you keep it that way. Get the picture?”

  You get it alright, and it gives you pause for thought. If Mr. Webber gets the idea that you’re a webmonkey for your cousin, he’ll yell at you because you’re nae supposed to go near a web server while you’re on probation—but as long as it’s legal webmonkey shit, you’re pretty sure you can plead wife-and-two-bairns-to-support and get off with a slap on the wrist and a talking-to. They’re supposed to be trying to rehabilitate you, after all, and Tariq’s not one of the dodgy playmates named in the injunction.

  But only because he was too smart to get caught.

  This doesn’t sound like your regular webmonkey business. There’s no need to take elaborate concealment measures if something’s halal—this business with stegged VMs and sneakernet exchanges in wireless shadows has got to be something else. Just like Colonel Datka’s bread mix.

  “I’m not taking it unless you tell me what it is.” You leave the chip on the table, stranded sober and central between two beer glasses. “Seriously, cuz. A man could go to prison.”

  “Not really. Not unless you fuck up.” His moustache twitches upward at the corners. “The VM contains a web app with a chat-room application and some test data. I want you to unit test the chat room and its templates for browser accessibility, search semantics, the usual shit. That’s all, except I want you to keep your yap shut and make sure you’re off-line while you do it. Five hundred euros, take it or leave it.”

  That’s good money for a webmonkey, and you’re tempted. But. “What’s the payload going to be?” you ask.

  “I don’t know yet. Fresh bluefin tuna sashimi by airmail, fix your speeding tickets, your bank balance is temporarily overdrawn, hello I am the widow of Barrister Nkomo, dearly beloved in Christ can you be sincere, we know what you did last Saturday night. Who the fuck cares? It’s just money. They give me the site, I mess with the chat-room software, you get to test it all works. That’s all. There’s no payload there.” Not yet.

  You watch as your left hand reaches out to cover the memory card. It’s like it’s at the end of someone else’s arm, someone a couple of years younger, someone without a wife and kids to protect, someone who’s never done time in prison. It’s like it belongs to someone stupid and short-sighted. You’re not short-sighted and stupid; you know better than to take on a Joe job—a hijacked copy of a legit website, one that Tariq’s upstream mate is going to turn into a shell for some kind of scam after he finishes busily installing backdoors in the community portal. Knowing Tariq, it’s probably going to host some horrible malware that’s going to recruit unwitting mules to visit the chat room, then infest their phones and empty their bank accounts. But it’s not a Joe job, you hear yourself thinking, if there’s no payload. It might not happen. If the word yet didn’t keep appending itself to that thought, you’d be a happy camper.

  “Relax, cuz.”

  “Five hundred euros,” you remind him, and stand up, leaving your half-full pint: You don’t want to risk your mother-in-law smelling it on your breath and recognizing it when you go home.

  “Five hundred euros for the father of my niece and nephew. Trust me, I wouldn’t be asking you to do this if I thought they might end up growing up without their dad.” Tariq raises his glass. “Just remember to stay off-line while you run it, and nothing can possibly go wrong.”

  When you get home an hour later, you find, to your relief, that Sameena has gone home. Bibi’s in the kitchen, perched on a stool at the breakfast bar, poring over a pad, clearly engrossed. “Hello,” you say, then pause. “Where are the kids?”

  It takes a moment for her to look up. “Naseem’s at PlayPal’s. They’re doing five-a-side football tonight. Farida’s staying with her grandparents for the evening.” Which isn’t so unusual, but then she drops the bomb. “Is there anything we should be talking about?”

  You hate it when Bibi gets like this: nostrils slightly flared, brows drawn in, squinting at you like you’re a bug in a test-tube. You call it her professional face. “What are you reading?” you ask. It looks to be illustrated, but you can’t read English upside down.

  “Oh, just community practice training material,” she says dismissively. “We have to do these revision exercises regularly to stay up to date. Current best practice in identification and clinical management of at-risk groups, communicating infection-control information about STIs to MSMs, that sort of thing.” She rests a hand on the screen. “Where’ve you been?”

  “Out seeing Tariq,” you say. There’s no point concealing it from her. “He’s got a little job for me.”

  “Oh Anwar.” She smiles, eyes narrowing. Then the smile fades, leaving only the set stare. “Tell me he hasn’t talked you into one of his schemes?”

  “I have a perfectly good job!” you protest. “I’m the honorary consul for the Independent—”

  Bibi sighs and taps one of her shoes against the table leg. It begins to dawn upon you that you may be in real trouble here.

  “How much did he promise you?”

  Surrender is inevitable. “Five hundred euros. It’s just a—”

  She interrupts: “I’m going to kill my little shit of a brother one of these days.” Your stomach does a back-flip. Your wife is a nice, quiet, well-brought-up lady who d
oes not interrupt people unless they’re in so deep they need to pause for decompression on the way back up. Right now, she’s exuding more quiet menace than Keanu Reeves in The Godfather remake. “He knows where you’ve been, he knows you’re on probation, and he ought to know better.” Her hands are balled up into fists like walnuts, small and hard as wooden clubs.

  “It’s nothing, he just wants me to test a website,” you protest. “Listen, it’s not malware and there’s nothing shady about it, it’s just that he wants me to test out a chat-room set-up he’s configuring for a friend. He knows I need the work, and I can be discreet—”

  “Really?” Fist on hip, she glares at you. “If you’re so good at being discreet, perhaps you’d like to explain this?” She points, and now you really know you’re in trouble, because the object of her ire is sitting on the countertop beside the sink, looking for all the world like a bag of Produce of People’s Number Four Grain Products Factory of Issyk-Kulistan—

  “It’s, um, bread mix?” Your heart sinks. “Isn’t it?”

  “Quite possibly. Although I don’t suppose it meets EU standards on food safety. Or labelling. Hygiene, for that matter. And I’m curious, oh my husband, as to why anyone would bother shipping prepackaged bread mix from Kyrgyzstan instead of bulk grain, or maybe flour.”

  “Oh, that’s easy enough!” you exclaim with relief. “Colonel Datka’s got his finger in the flour factory and is using the shipments to—”

  “I’m told the going price is sixty euros a bag,” she hisses: “For bread mix. Do you really want Naseem and Farida to grow up fatherless, my husband? Motherless, too, because I swear if you get yourself arrested again, I shall die of shame. But no, you don’t need to worry about me; you just carry on and thoughtlessly follow your own selfish urges without considering the consequences, man.”

  She pronounces that last with such lip-smacking contempt that you recoil instinctively, racking your brain for an explanation. It must be the women’s studies group at the mosque; they’ve clearly got to her. Next thing you know, she’ll be ditching her jeans for a niqab and angrily denouncing the oligo-hetero-patriarchy on marches. The spectre of no more sex on the home front hovers over you, and despite your desire for dick, the idea of losing your wife to a bunch of hairy-legged feminist separatist fundamentalists fills you with horror.

  “Please, Bibi, it’s not like that! I only want what’s best for the bairns. If I don’t work, what kind of role model am I going to be for them? But the idiots in the probation service don’t want me to use my skills—”

  “I think you mean they don’t want you to get yourself slung back inside for breaking the law. And do you know something, oh my husband? Neither do I! If this was just about the dodgy bread mix, I could ignore it. Or maybe if it was just the odd job for Tariq. I can even ignore the other stuff. I’m not blind. I know what our marriage is to you.” She leans towards you and sniffs. “But he’s had you in that pub again, hasn’t he? And you couldn’t even be bothered to hide it! You smell of beer. Mouthwash right now, or you’ll set them a bad example.” Her nostrils flare. “My mother would have a fit.”

  “Sammy isn’t here,” you say defensively. “And anyway, I only had one pint—”

  “Oh yes, just one pint. That’s like being a little bit pregnant, or just one casual sex partner, or just one arrest and criminal conviction. Or just one scam at a time. What does it take to get through to you? You’ve got to learn to think ahead! You’ve got to be more discreet!”

  You blink at her. The anger seems to have ebbed into wide-eyed confusion. She’s really worried, you realize. It’s not just a bad day in the dispensary, so let’s yell at the house-husband (though that’s happened in the past). What’s got into her? Then another thought strikes you. “You said it’s changing hands for sixty euros a bag. Do you know who’s paying that much for it? I know where to get more; we could clean up—”

  That night, you get to bed down on the attic floor, with the burping brew-kit airlock to keep you company as you try to work out exactly what you said wrong.

  Women! Who knows why they do what they do? Certainly not you—and you even married one.

  TOYMAKER: Reality Excursion

  You!

  Yes, you. Who the fuck did you think I was talking to, the Tooth Fairy? (That’s him on the left)—Jesus? No, I’m talking to you, fuckwit. Whoever or whatever you are, watching over me . . .

  I’m an executive, you know. That’s why there’s a chip in my head. The Operation put it there so they could keep track of me. You’ve got to look at it from their point of view; it’s cheap due diligence—couple of dozen terabytes of non-volatile storage, mikes and GPS for metadata—“to deter you from going behind our backs,” they said. It’s not just a recorder, either. They can make LTE chipsets really small, you know? Phone chipset in the head. Maybe it’s transmitting all the time, and you’re sitting in a darkened room listening to my subvocalized thoughts. Or maybe you’re just an AI application, running pattern-matching code on the speech-to-text output, somewhere in the cloud. What if it’s receiving, too, controlling the old meatpuppet? Maybe there’s a bomb in my skull. Learning too much about our employers is a firing expense—they’re said to favour nine-millimetre—but what if they wanted to be sure? Multi-channel redundancy via cognitive radio. Push a button, bounce a signal off the moon, hello, bomb, pleased to meet you! Let’s go out with a splash.

  You only live in my imagination. (I die, you die.) But I can still talk to you. And we have a problem, my invisible friend.

  . . . No. Let me be more precise. I have a problem. Enemies. They’ve iced my primary candidates for COO and CFO before I could door-step them for a pre-induction assessment. To make matters worse, I became a person of interest in the police investigation—purely by coincidence—and they took a DNA sample. I’m pinned down here until we can file a Privacy Redaction Order and get the sample incinerated.

  And for the icing on the shit-cake, my fucking luggage is still missing . Missing!

  . . . That was as of three hours ago. Maybe the cunt on the Hilton hospitality desk has found it. That’d be a shame: I was looking forward to taking it out of his hide, with compound interest on top. (Five point six two kilograms.) Fuck it, my sample was in there. And my meds. I’ve been giving myself a little holiday from the pills recently, giving myself a holiday to remember what it’s like to have a mind of my own. Neurodiverse. (Losing it from the front desk onwards . . . maybe that wasn’t such a good idea?) Guess I just have to hold myself together until I can get my luggage back or I’ll skin Mr. Hospitality in a bathtub full of brine.

  But anyway: I have a phone. I always have a phone, short of brain surgery to separate me from it. Phones are deadlier than guns. I need to talk to the business-support desk. Arms-race death match between the cognitive radio free Internet rebels and the lizards who run the secret world government: We use the rebels’ remixers. And the phone in my head connects direct through the undernet, diving for a nameless server in central Asia—

  “Hello?”

  Look around, my invisible friend, see the park, the mud grey field, and the trees? We have bandwidth here. The council installed routers in all the lampposts, the better to handle the feed from the webcams in all the street-lamps. The lizards want to catch the rape machines, but they’re too cunning. Bushes block the electromagnetic emissions from the lights.

  “Hello?”

  “Uh, this is, is Able November in Edinburgh.”

  You—that is to say, me—use Able November as a code-name when talking to the Operation’s call centre. This is the twenty-first century, and even international crime syndicates and off-shore venture-capital trusts—the two are sometimes hard to tell apart—need offshore call centres. You can’t do business without the right tools, after all.

  (Is that a police reconnaissance drone cruising just below the eaves of the tenements on the other side of the field? Or is it just a very large bat?)

  “Hello, Able November. What is yo
ur situation?”

  “Mike Blair has been murdered. Vivian Crolla has been murdered. My”—fuck shit piss cocksucking—“luggage has gone missing with my meds and I haven’t had any for seventy-two hours. I am”—mother-fucking ANGRY—“losing my objectivity somewhat. Can you help? The meds are the hard part.”

  “I’m putting you on hold. Please wait.”

  You find a wooden bench and sit down, touching it, feeling the dry crumbling grain of decomposing dead lignified hermaphrodite flesh between your fingers. You obey the order to hold on instinctively, clutching the surface with one hand. If you lose your grip, you might fall up into the sky: You’re very light. This is a really fucking shitty time to have an attack, but it’s not so surprising. Every so often you cut back on your meds for a couple of days, re-establish your baseline. Is it just bad luck that when you’re ready to go back on the pills, they steal your luggage and murder your contacts? The police have eyes in the sky, watching and waiting. How can these not be connected?

  “Able November,” says the woman you’re listening to—her voice distorted by the hearing implant in your skull, drain-pipe echo of an encrypted tunnel—“what’s that about your meds? Are you taking them?”

  “No,” you want to shout, but the phone is in your head, and if you yell aloud, someone or something bad might hear. Gently. The mike in your throat hears all. “My meds are in my luggage. My luggage has been missing for two days.” Little white lies shining like baby teeth in a shallow grave.

  “Okay, we can take care of that for you,” says your operator. “I’m going to send your prescription through to the nearest pharmacy for an emergency resupply. Uh, your identity. Is it still clean?”

  “No,” you say. “No, no.” It’s your fault. You told the police to steal my DNA, didn’t you? Mother-fucking ghost-chip-skull-bomb invisible capitalist friends, can’t trust ’em anywhere. “It’s . . .” You realize you’re hyperventilating and force yourself to slow down. “I visited Mike Blair and found a murder investigation in progress.” Cops in ceramic terylene overalls picking tiny fragments of your skull off the bathroom floor . . . “They sampled me as a POI. This identity’s dirty. I need a fall-back.”