Rule 34 hs-2

by Charles Stross

  Kurmanbek is the vice-president—or rather, the ethnic Uzbek counterweight in the ruling coalition Bhaskar presides over: in other words, Nuisance Central. And, of course, Bhaskar’s right: If he asked Kurmanbek the time, the answer would be whatever was most convenient for the veep. “Is the committee’s immediate agenda critical?” you ask. “Because if not—why not send Kurmanbek to deputize? I’ll have someone listen in”—you’re talking about bugging a state committee—“and compare the minutes to what actually gets said. Worst case, you skip class. Best case, Kurmanbek hands you some live ammunition. But either way, you need a couple of days off, boss. Kick back with a couple of bottles and some decadent Iranian musicals. Maybe a game—when did you last go on an epic quest?”

  The First Citizen brightens. “You’re right, Felix. I should skip school more often!” You nod, encouraging.

  It’s got to be a horrible life, trapped here in a hermetically sealed bubble inside a presidential palace, unable to go out in daylight without a platoon of soldiers with fixed bayonets on all sides, children grown up and wife dead of a stroke these past three years. Not to mention that fucking annoying Georgian extradition warrant floating around Interpol like an unexploded bomb—you know Bhaskar didn’t order the guards to fire on that crowd; it was a horrible fuck-up by an idiot second lieutenant—but the upshot is he’s stuck here in the middle of Bishkek, not even able to go to the casinos in St. Petersburg for an evening at the roulette table. (Or whatever it is that he enjoys: Knowing Bhaskar, given the choice he’d probably disguise himself as a professor, sneak into the university campus, and teach a seminar on the history of monetarism. If all the Republic’s previous presidents’ vices were as recondite as his, Moscow would be coming to you for loans.)

  You’ve had a ringside seat, seen what it’s doing to your childhood friend, watched him reduced to fishing for assurances that he’s still loved, shuffling around his carpeted pleasure-prison in the dark. If any smiling bastard tried to convince you to front a coup, you’d shoot him yourself, you think, just to stay out of the presidential padded cell.

  Then the First Citizen puts a friendly arm around your shoulder and drops you in it head first:

  “But tell me now, how is the Przewalsk business coming along? I’ve been fielding questions from the EU ambassador’s office, but they’re becoming more insistent, and that whining louse Borisovitch in State is starting to give me back-chat . . .”

  THE OPERATION: Blofeld Blues

  There is no sabre-scarred monocle-wearing bullet-headed bad guy stroking a white cat at the centre of this conspiracy.

  Nor are there any tropical-island bases patrolled by Komodo dragons, assault-rifle-toting boiler-suited henchmen, or stolen nuclear weapons.

  The wildest conspiracies are the quietest.

  This one started out as a venture-capital partnership that has opted for mutual unlimited liability in lieu of filing certain important papers that the Internal Revenue Service would be very interested in seeing.

  In this decade, the United States faces a cumulative gross budget deficit of around 30 trillion dollars—or about 16 trillion euros, or 20 trillion renminbi. It’s the hangover from a century of imperial overstretch, the flip side of the butcher’s bill from trying to force the world to play by the conqueror’s rule-book for too long. The IRS is grabbing every bent cent they can find these days, trying to outrun the law of compound interest. However, their intrusive banking compliance regime doesn’t reach as far as it did a decade or more ago because foreigners aren’t terribly scared of Uncle Sam anymore. For the rising powers of the BRIC, helping the US government balance its books is not exactly high on the agenda of realpolitik. So while most Americans get to tighten their belts and swallow a painful prescription from the IMF, the few, the lucky—those who invested their assets overseas, before the money supply exploded in the wake of one banking crisis too many—are stranded, facing a 90–per cent marginal tax rate if they try to repatriate their wealth.

  Hence, the Operation. Invest overseas, invest efficiently, invest for maximum growth, and who gives a fuck about collateral damage? They’re foreigners. They got us into this mess, and now they’re holding our heads underwater by debasing our currency. Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke!

  The Operation is nominally headquartered in California.

  To the IRS—and anyone else who enquires—it appears to be a small, somewhat lackadaisical investment partnership, with a software subsidiary who maintain the expert systems its strategic planning runs on. A couple of successful companies huddle close to the parent organization’s feet: a small ISP, a private management college (not that anyone’s paying for MBAs this decade, when they could be training as plumbers or auto mechanics instead), and an off-shore secretarial bureau. As VC firms go, the only thing distinguishing the Operation from its peers is how undistinguished it looks. Its managers seem to have poor judgement, funding too many second-rate entrepreneurs who drop out of sight after a couple of months. It’s almost as if they don’t want to make a profit, don’t feel the visionary’s urge to set the world ablaze.

  Komodo dragons, nuclear missiles, and island bases are all high-maintenance overheads. They’re inefficient. And the Operation values efficiency above all else.

  The Operation proactively recruits executive-calibre material from among the unfairly-discriminated-against neurodiverse. It provides a supportive and caring environment in which these battered souls can grow and be all that they want to be. The hate-word “psychopath” conjures up visions of knife-wielding maniacs, but that’s a far cry from the reality of the Operation’s entrepreneurial spirit. In reality, it’s an unacknowledged truth that amidst the cut and thrust of boardroom politics, a touch of antisocial personality disorder is an asset—the Operation merely makes the best of its human resources, polishes and trains them to keep their natural impulsive drives harnessed to the wagon of success. Their classes in corporate and managerial ethics really are first-rate: By the time they graduate and leave the nest, the new entrepreneurs know exactly what they must do to succeed.

  One of the dirty little truths of organized crime is that for the most part its management is incompetent. No business exists in a vacuum, and no enterprise—criminal or otherwise—can succeed unless its clients and suppliers trust each other. Unreliable, incompetent, greedy, grasping, poor impulse control—these traits drag down and dismember the management of ’Ndrangheta, cripple the profitability of the Yakuza, and hamstring the Russian Mafiya. They’re slow learners. Even as late as the early noughties, organized crime had barely begun to absorb the lessons of modern management; as for innovation, Al Capone would have recognized most of their business models on sight.

  The Operation knows one thing, and knows it well—how to set up and manage a business for maximum growth until it’s time to negotiate a successful sale and cash out. They have single-handedly dragged the management of vice into the late twentieth century, if not the twenty-first: a monumental, if questionable, achievement.

  But now they’re under attack.

  The Operation’s business is at its most effective when it can tap new audiences, gain new customers, expand markets—reach out to new sources of profit. Lack of brand awareness is the biggest obstacle to establishing any new sales channel (legal or otherwise), and you can’t advertise counterfeit goods or illegal services through regulated media. Consequently, the Operation is highly dependant on all kinds of spam, from shoutcasting on in-game voice channels to the old search engine optimization racket.

  Over the past three days, more than fifty individuals have died in unlikely and frequently messy manners—electrocuted by miswired domestic robots, hearts stopped by improbable prescribing errors, driven off the edge of multi-story car-parks by malfunctioning car autopilots, shot by police in raids on the wrong address. Most of these people are not actual affiliates or employees of the Operation. They are, however, all involved at one level or another in the unregulated network-marketing sector.
/>   Something must be done.

  Part 2

  LIZ: Mote, Eye, Redux

  There is one good thing about being seconded to run interference for Dodgy Dickie’s murder investigation, and it is this: CID always get allocated the best cars, right after Traffic. They get the same priority as the regular community patrols, and that’s a hell of a long way up the pecking order from ICIU.

  When you show up at the transport desk this time, you don’t have to grovel for a segway: Instead there’s an unmarked Chinese Volvo waiting for you, silver-grey luxury on wheels. As you slide behind the wheel and orient yourself with the controls, you see it’s got a console full of extras on the passenger side—traffic data terminal, ANPR cameras, external laser projector, the works. So this is how the other half drive, you think enviously as you thumb the airport short-stay car-park into the autopilot and hit the GO button. A moment later, the car reverses out into the station yard and turns towards Queensferry Road in eerie silence: You’re halfway to Turnhouse before it fires up the diesel generator under the bonnet.

  Self-driving cars are a mixed blessing. Right now, you miss the bad old days when you needed to keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road: It’d be a welcome distraction. But current health and safety regulations say that only officers assigned to ongoing pursuit and patrol driving duties—and the training that goes with them—are allowed to actually operate vehicles. It’s something to do with the force being liable for damages if you run over any civilians. So you use the spare quarter hour to dig into the CopSpace image of Dickie’s incident room and try to familiarize yourself with who’s doing what (and how far they’ve got so far).

  The car parks itself in a police-only bay near domestic/EU arrivals, at Terminal One. You head for the meeting point adjacent to Customs with a sinking heart. CopSpace at the airport is congested, full of security warnings and immigration tags as well as the usual detritus: criminals on probation, minicab drivers with unpaid licenses, and the like. But after a minute, your specs lock onto someone and flicker for attention. You see a vaguely familiar face in the crowd, towing a neat carry-on bag as he stands in front of the exit, scanning—

  Yes, that’s him. You start forward. Medium height, dark eyes, Middle Eastern skin, sharp suit. He’s looking around, but he hasn’t clocked you yet. He’s alone this time, no mob of super-cop extras in tow. His head turns. “Kemal Aslan, I presume,” you say, pre-empting him. “Welcome back to Scotland.”

  His expression of annoyance is so quickly masked you can’t be sure it even exists—is it your imagination?—and he extends a hand. “Ah, Inspector Kavanaugh.” You take it and shake. His palm is cool and dry. “I hope you’re well.” He ducks his head. It’s a long way from the arrogant confidence he exuded the first time you saw him, five years ago.

  “Well enough.” You gesture towards the exit: “I’ve got a car. How long are you here for?”

  “As long as it takes.” You head for the doors; he follows. “If you wouldn’t mind stopping en route, I need to check in at my hotel? Then we should talk.”

  You stop. “I’m not entirely clear on what you think there is to talk about,” you snap, and he recoils as if you’ve just bared your teeth at him. “We’ve got a sensitive time-critical investigation to run, and unless you’ve got some insight to contribute, something that we should know, you’re just not that high a priority.”

  To your surprise he nods. “I appreciate that,” he says softly. “But it is not the only investigation in progress. I am here to help—all of them. On my previous visit, we started out badly. I will apologize, if that is what you desire. But afterwards, we must work together. It is very important.”

  You manage not to gape at him, but you’re momentarily at a loss: He delivers his spiel with a dead-pan sincerity that leaves you scrabbling for a handle to hang your anger on. Finally, you manage to say: “In the car. We can discuss this later.” Then you start walking again, so wound-up that you’re as jerky as a marionette.

  The car is halfway to his hotel—a boutique establishment in Haymarket—before he speaks again. “Has there been any progress in your investigation?”

  “I need to get you signed on and authorized before I can disclose intelligence material.” You’re already working out a shortest path in your head, a circuit of the necessary offices: You need to drag Kemal past the super’s office door for pro forma approval, then your own desk to verify that authentication of his credentials is already in the channel via Europol, then up to Doc, who can tell one of his sergeants to give him external consulting access to the virtual incident room. His eagerness to get started ahead of the formalities is grating and borderline-toxic. (But then, you ask yourself, What would you do in his shoes?) “Can you tell me what’s going on from your end of things?”

  “It is a massacre,” he says simply.

  For a moment you think you misheard. “A what?”

  “A massacre.” He stares out through the ghost of the head-up display as the tidy shop-fronts of Corstorphine slide past. “We have linked eight deaths to the, the atrocity, already. They all occurred within a six-hour period. But the incident is ongoing: I expect more to come to light.”

  It’s a really good thing the car’s driving itself; otherwise, the force would probably be looking at an out-of-court settlement, and you’d be looking at the inside of an ambulance. “What? Where’s this coming from?”

  “The victims all died within the same period. They died at home, in circumstances superficially resembling domestic accidents. They were all—all—involved in online marketing activities of questionable legality. Some of them were found immediately, others took time to be discovered. We are currently examining a number of other deaths over the same period. I expect the number to rise, sharply.”

  Eight murders? You find the figure implausible, comically ludicrous. That’s more murders than Edinburgh gets in a year—a really bad year at that. It puts you in mind of stories you heard at Uncle Bert’s knee, from his time in the RUC during the Troubles. A faint inkling begins to dawn on you. “Tell me this isn’t political? More of that shit, like five years ago—”

  Kemal is shaking his head emphatically. “It’s not political.” That’s hard to argue with. What kind of regular terrorist would target spammers?

  The car cruises past a gaggle of uniformed school-children on the pavement: That’s an extra half million in damages in the parallel universe where you’re supposed to have your hands on the wheel. “So who do you think it is?” you ask him.

  “Not who but what.” He clams up, jaw shut.

  “Uh-huh.” Does not compute. “In my experience, crimes usually have perpetrators.”

  “But this is not a normal crime,” asserts Kemal. “It is a cluster of anomalous deaths, distributed geographically but sharing a common je ne sais quoi, and occurring nearly simultaneously. This is not the, the symptom of normal criminal activity, no?”

  “Oh, bullshit. Next thing you’ll be telling me, it’s aliens or artificial intelligence or some other science-fictional nonsense.”

  He’s looking at you intently. “It all depends on what you mean by artificial intelligence.”

  You blink rapidly. “How many kinds could there be?” The ocular tic sets CopSpace in a tizzy, flashing through stacks of overlays that flicker across the staid stone-fronted houses: prevalence of porn downloads, undischarged ASBOs, unclosed burglary tickets. “Has someone been building HAL 9000 in their basement, then?”

  The car slows, then turns into a side-street. “Not to the best of my knowledge.” Kemal looks unhappy. “But I have been spending too much time tracking fraudsters on the Internet,” he adds elliptically. “The spammers, they are ingenious. The programmers have a saying, you know? ‘If we understand how we do it, it isn’t artificial intelligence anymore.’ Playing chess, driving cars, generating conversational text that can convince humans it’s an old friend and please to click on this download link.” He clears his throat. “You use Internet
search engines, don’t you?”

  “What, like Google?”

  “The programmers have another saying: ‘The question of whether a machine can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.’ The search engines, they are not artificial intelligences, synthetic consciousnesses. They don’t need to be. Perhaps we overestimate consciousness? After all, the spam filters everyone uses—you may not think you’re using one, but your service providers handle the job on your behalf—are very good at telling human beings from bots. And the bots are good, too: They get better and better at emulating human communication, insinuating themselves into our conversations, all the time. For the past three years, they have been able to pass a noniterative Turing Test administered by human beings more often than real human controls. We can’t distinguish spam from ham—not as reliably as our filters. And the filters are still fallible even though they are learning all the time.”

  You’ve had enough of this bullshit. “With respect, Inspector Aslan, I don’t see what this has to do with our culpable homicide investigation. Spam fil—software didn’t reach out of the net and spike Mr. Blair’s enema fluid: There’s a human agency involved at some level, and that’s what we’re going to find. Now I will grant you”—you catch yourself on the edge of finger-wagging, and issue yourself a cease and desist (just like the persuasion counsellor warned you to)—“someone may be using spam filters to track and to trace criminals involved in the bulk advertising industry, but you’re not going to convince me that there’s some, some murderous piece of software that’s out to kill—” You’re almost spluttering, and that’s even more of a C&D situation when it comes to influencing people: So you make yourself stop.