Rule 34 hs-2

by Charles Stross

  You climb downstairs wearily and head for the bedroom. It’s been a long day, what with the visit from Colonel Datka’s man and the unspeakable event at Taleb’s. At least Bibi’s taking care of the kids, you think.

  Interlude 2

  TOYMAKER: Happy Families

  When you were eight, your dad taught you the correct way to peel a live frog.

  You seem to recall him teaching you lots of things, but mostly he succeeded in annoying the hell out of you. It wasn’t his fault: He was in therapy for most of your childhood, and it damaged him. Then you were in therapy, and it gets vague real fast.

  One of the things he taught you early is that ants can recognize an intruder from another colony; they smell the strangeness and respond by chewing its legs off, immobilizing it until the soldiers come with jaws the size of legs and bite through its neck.

  Humans are not dissimilar.

  Dad was diagnosed, but never let it get in his way. He learned to cover up by copying, passing for another worker ant. But he wasn’t very good at it.

  “Look,” said Dad, holding down the slimy, frantically gulping bull-frog, “it’s simple. Just one cut here and—” He demonstrated. A flip of the fingers and inside out it goes. You laughed excitedly as the skinless amphibian flailed away at the bleeding air. “Looks real funny, doesn’t he? Just like a little man. Now you try.” And he handed you a frog and a knife.

  In retrospect, you know exactly what Dad was doing: He was testing you to see if you were like him. Mom or Alice would puke their guts up if he did something like this in front of them, but Dad was curious. Did you share his unusual quirk, or were you doomed to go through life as just another soft-headed mark? So you got to peel frogs one happy summer afternoon with Dad, and it was true: They looked just like little skinned-alive men.

  Father-son bonding experiences among the neurotypically diverse: putting the “fun” into “dysfunctional.” You didn’t realize it at the time, but Dad was teaching you stuff you weren’t going to learn anywhere else: stuff like what you were, how to look “normal,” how to pass among the ants, how not to get found out. All Mom gave you was your looks and good manners. (She had a great ass, though: Dad had good taste.)

  You cling to the memory of that afternoon: Unlike most of your history, it remains vivid and fresh, not fading into the cloud-banks of the imagination. You didn’t have many afternoons like that: Dad was always busy at work, buying and selling shit. He did it from an office suite just off Wall Street, and you and he and Mom and Sis lived in a fancy uptown condo overlooking Ninth Avenue when you were in Manhattan. Or maybe he had a room above a shop on Threadneedle Street and the maisonette was in Docklands? It’s hard to be sure. You do remember there being a nice beachfront when you were vacationing on the West Coast, and a house on Long Island for weekends, and lots of plane trips. Mom did the stay-at-home thing and looked after you and Alice; and there was an old woman who kept the condo clean when you weren’t there, and an ever-changing supply of kindergarten friends to torment experimentally. And Bozo the Cat (until he went away).

  But that was before the car crash turned everything to shit.

  You were nine. One day a year earlier, Dad came home early and pulled your mom into the kitchen and shut the door. There were words, loud words. Later, your mom came out to talk to you. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and her make-up was smeary. “Your daddy and I have agreed,” she said, with a funny little twitch. “We’re moving to California, to Palo Alto. He needs to be nearer where the money comes from.”

  This was cool with you, as long as there was beachfront and sun and other kids to score off. Mom didn’t seem too happy when you said so. She got a bit too excited and shouted at you and cried because she liked the big city, Singapore or Hong Kong or wherever it was. Well, silly her.

  What you only figured out much later was that it was February, Y2K+1. Dad’s dotcom portfolio had vaped, and he had to steal some more money. And this being Y2K+1, there wasn’t a lot of money in circulation to steal—at least, not from Dad’s friendly circle of day traders and stock-jobbers. So he’d been forced to diversify and got fucked over when someone’s Customs agency intercepted one of the consignments. They didn’t know it was him, but someone in town knew his face, and he wanted some distance. And there may have been something to do with the phone calls at odd times of day and night, and the threatening letters, but that didn’t really signify at the time.

  (Or maybe it was the old enemy, even then, plotting their takeover. Spying and hounding your father because they knew they had to yank him out of the picture if they were going to get to you.)

  Dad wasn’t stupid: He had a plan. He figured there’d be a lot of infrastructure left over from the dotcom crash, and all he needed to do was stake out some vacant office suite and sooner or later a team of double-domed nerds would show up to refill it (and, by and by, his wallet).

  Well, Mom and Alice did the weak-sister thing and cried all the way to the beachfront house, but you were happy enough. School in the big town was boring, and anyway, a bunch of the other kids refused to play with you. The losers said you cheated. So you got to live in the sun-drenched sprawl off El Camino Reale and meet a whole new supply of interesting playmates, and Dad had a bit more time to play ball or take you hiking and do other dad things.

  (But then there was the car crash.)

  You were away at summer camp at the time. The camp counsellors came and took you aside and watched anxiously as you bawled your eyes out—not that stupid grief shit, but frustration: Who was going to come pick you up from camp now? Camp was getting tiresome. They were big on cooperative activities, nothing where you could score points off the other kids without being too obvious. The threat of being stuck there forever was very real in your going-on-nine mind.

  But that didn’t happen. Instead, the next day, a battered SUV pulled up outside the camp office. Half an hour later, the youngest counsellor came for you. “Your uncle Albert’s offered to take you in while your father’s in the hospital,” she explained.

  Albert? You’d never met him, although Dad had mentioned his elder brother’s name once. And besides, you were bored with the camp. “Great!” you piped up.

  If only you’d known . . .

  You walk home to your snug wee hotel room, whistling happily to yourself. You lock the door, sniff, step out of your clothes and shower vigorously: yawn and crawl naked between the crisp cotton sheets to sleep the sleep of the righteously zoned out.

  You wake early and amuse yourself for a while surfing on the hotel’s in-room cable service. News streams bombard you with trivia; unemployment’s up again, projects to retrain service-industry workers aren’t delivering: Sow’s ear into silk-purse futures are tanking. Another large vertical farm is under construction in Livingstone: The planning enquiry into the Torness “E” reactor unexpectedly drags on into a second month. The Scottish Parliament is discussing a bill banning factory farming of pigs on hygienic grounds and cattle on emissions: Farmers are protesting that they can repopulate bovine gut flora with kangaroo-derived acetogen cultures, dealing with the methane menace at source, and that the bill is pandering to vegetarian green voters in the run-up to the election next year . . .

  You make a note. Research current steak consumption and supply-chain issues for black-market meat imports in event of ban. (Prohibition is always good for business, and vat-grown tissue won’t satisfy the more ruthless palate: Stress hormones are excellent tenderizers.) Then you channel-hop while you wait for room service to deliver your continental, surfing past the talking-head Jeezebot prayer breakfast and the traffic accident channel, pausing briefly at the Hitler network before you get to the baroque humiliations of the “So You Think You Want a Job” reality shows.

  Job scams: Those are a perennial favourite, just like work-fromhome and you-can-be-rich-too. But they’re not only unoriginal, they’re so old they can vote. Some of the scams are so well-known that the cops have bots looking for them—the half-life to detection
is measured in double-digit hours.

  Fuck. It was looking so easy when you came here. Commission the illegal breweries to manufacture the feedstock, the back-street fabbers to make the goods, the sweat-shop kids in the Middle Eastern call centres to operate them, the clerks to count the cash, and the footsoldiers to keep the sales flowing—maintain tight communications discipline so that none of them can run the business without you, then find a franchisee and cash out. That’s the basic iMob value proposition, isn’t it? Gangster 2.0 is as much about searching for an IPO and an exit strategy as any other tech start-up business.

  But this is semi-independent Scotland (a country with its own parliament, flag, tax law, and passports, but a military and foreign policy wing outsourced to Westminster). On the basis of your experience so far, it’s also the land of the deep-fried battered Mars bar, remotely piloted airborne dogshit patrols, and accountants shrink-wrapped to mattresses. The latter is particularly disturbing insofar as it blows a honking great hole in your original business plan. But needs must. And Scotland has other assets, like Mr. Placeholder Hussein, who you intend to drop into the hot seat and stick in front of a fake organization to attract the attention of the adversaries.

  You whip out your disposable pad, haul down your desktop from the botnet-hosted cloud once again, fire up the amusing little VoIP gateway app disguised as a board-game, work your jaw to wake your skullphone, and subvocalize. “Hello, Able November here.”

  “Just a second.” (Pause.) “Oh, hello again. Sorry about the delay, sir. Are your medicines helping today?”

  What is this, fucking Kaiser? “Yes, I’m much better now, thanks. And I’m using the new identity.” Beast of Birkenshaw my ass: another psychopathic serial killer? Mother-fuckers! What the fuck do they think they’re doing, giving me these names? “I’m calling because I need another minion; the first two broke. Is the denial-of-service situation any better today?”

  “I can’t discuss the situation at head office.” She sounds a bit snippy. Then you realize; it’s about two o’clock in the morning back in California. (Assuming that’s where the Operation runs its call centre from.) And she’s the same operator you spoke to yesterday daytime (assuming they’re not using real-time speech filtering). “What do you want, Able November?”

  “Like I said, I need a new gofer.” Briefly you outline what you’ve got in mind. “And a new handle—some clever fucker thinks it’s funny to keep giving me serial-killer names. I want that to stop.”

  “Please hold. This could take some time.”

  You’re on hold for nearly fifteen minutes, as it happens: You amuse yourself with the pad, playing a couple of levels of Jack Ketch while you wait for the callback. Finally, your left ear vibrates. “Hi, Able November. What have you got for me?”

  The operator is different this time, male with a Midwestern drawl. “Lemme see if I’ve got this right? Your last two recruits are dead? And you’re still in the field? Why?”

  It’s time to poke the bear and see if it snarls, so you extemporize. “The cops got a DNA sample when I looked in on the first investigation. So the John Christie identity is pinned. And, incidentally, that name belongs to a dead serial killer, and so does Peter Manuel—someone’s sticking ringers in your identity portfolio, and it’s not fucking funny. I have to wait while Legal serve an injunction to get my sample destroyed when the investigation winds down—you know and I know that I didn’t kill Blair. The original plan won’t fly, but I figure I can salvage something from the wreckage. It was your Issyk-Kulistan scam that gave me the idea.”

  One of the annoying things about VoIP codecs is that they filter out nonvoice traffic. You can’t hear the pursed lips of a huff of annoyance; the tells of a tense boiler-room background are silenced by digital audio filtering. So you have to wait three or four seconds, half of which is spent by the signal path as your words go wandering up to geosynchronous orbit and wobble back down to a ground station in the Sierra Nevada, out along a fat pipe, into vibrations in the air hitting the operator’s ear-drum, and the return path therefrom. And then:

  “The BZZT fuck?” (Cheap piece-of-shit throat mikes max out easily and start to clip when a pissed-off operator shouts into them.) “Wendy got me out of bed so—this—” (Ooh, lots of big tells! You hang on his loss of control, fascinated by the unintentional data leak dripping from the glass ceiling high above.) “—The fuck told you about IRIK?”

  “Control sent me to the consulate here for new papers yesterday. They were probably panicking, or didn’t get the memo about how secret it is. Don’t worry, it’s all under wraps. Nobody else knows. It’s probably just a side-effect of the chaos caused by the, the attacks.” So the Issyk-Kulistan connection is another stove-pipe they’re running? Juicy! You allow a little wavery plaint to creep into your voice. “Is there anything I can do to help out . . . ?”

  “You goddamn bet there is!” There’s a heart-felt emphasis on the words. “Stupid dumb fucks are misusing the diplomatic channel for fucking stupid dumb-ass smuggling, would you believe it? Penny-ante shit. But that’s neither here nor there. Son, you’re in the field. You’ve seen what those mother-fuckers are doing to our proxies.”

  “The”—rape machine lizard shapeshifters—“adversaries, yes.”

  “Yeah, them. It’s a network attack, we know that much. We even know what tools they’re using. Anyway, I want you to go meet a man down at the university there in Edin-burg. A double-domed doctor of artificial intelligence. He knows about this stuff.”

  Huh? “What has artificial intelligence got to do with the adversaries?”

  “Target acquisition, son. Do try and follow the plot: The victims are all involved in customer-relationship management. That, and the attack vector relies on combinatorial enhancement of precursor situations to domestic accidents. There’s some network analysis voodoo as well, but I never got my head properly around that neo-Bayesian queuing-theory shit.”

  “But this academic”—you wince—“how’s he going to help m—us take down the adversaries?”

  “He’s not. What he did was, he worked on the project that developed the tools our adversaries are using. Not deliberately—we don’t think he’s responsible; we’re kind of in bed with him on another deal. What you’re going to do is impress upon him the importance of sticking with his business partners. And just in case he doesn’t get the message, you’re going to persuade him to give you his source code, and you’re going to upload it for us to do a walk-through. Fingerprinting. Just in case.”

  “Their source code? What, you’re saying we’re being attacked by some kind of bot?”

  “Yep. Although the folks who designed it—along with Mac-Donald—may not even know what it’s doing: Best if you don’t know too much, either. We’ll get you an appointment with Dr. MacDonald: When you go in, just tell him we want ATHENA.”

  “What about these dumb-shit identity packages?” you demand.

  “We buy them from a reliable source, son.” There’s a pause. “I’ll look into it. We’ll get you a new face just as soon as we figure out what’s going on. Don’t you worry about that. In fact”—there’s a longer pause—“you’re a serial killer right now? I like that, son. Let’s see if we can find you a job to go with it . . .”

  You take after your dad, a high-functioning sociopath with an incurable organic personality disorder. It’s one of the special-sauce variety, the kind with a known genetic cause.

  Your uncle Albert was something different, and worse: He was a man of faith.

  Albert and Eileen and the three girls lived in a paint-peeling house beside a dry creek in the ass-end of nowhere, about eight miles outside Lovelock, Nevada. Or maybe it was a croft in the highlands, ten miles from the nearest wee free kirk. When you arrived, there were five books in the house: a Bible, a copy of To Train Up a Child from the No Greater Joy ministry, and three textbooks borrowed, on a rotating basis, from the county library.

  The Bible in question was not the King James edition; nor
did it include testaments ancient or modern, commandments (other than “keep your gun clean and loaded and your ammunition dry”), or advice about not wearing mixed-fibre fabric and eating shell-fish. It was, nevertheless, adhered to as rigorously as any religious text, within the homeschooled homesteaded ranch of Albert and Eileen: And so you learned to live by the rules of The End of America: How the Federal Government, the IRS and the Insurance Industry plan to use the UN to Destroy America, and how you can resist.

  You remember your first night at the ranch vividly—lying on the lumpy mattress on your stomach and trying not to cry with pain, terrified that if you made a noise, he’d come back—lying in the darkness and the stifling heat, listening to the crickets through the rotten, dry slats of the shuttered window, your entire back a mass of welts and bruises from your first real beating. You remember the taste of tears and blood, the sound of Uncle Al’s rasping, tobacco-roughened breath as he raised the hose again—“Discipline, boy! Lack of discipline gets soldiers killed!”—and the stunning thud it made as it drove the breath from your body.

  Albert and Eileen lived in a bunker at the wrong end of a very strange reality tunnel, in a world dominated by the spectre of the CIAFUNDED Jew-banker spooks who faked crashing the airliners into the Pentagon and the WTC to cover up how they’d bankrupted the nation by stealing all the gold from the Federal Reserve and used it to fund their evil scheme for vaccinating the children of dissidents with an autism-causing virus. (Lyndon LaRouche, in their recondite eschatology, was a Communist Sleeper Agent from North Korea.) Weirdly, they didn’t seem to know about the lizards or the British royal family; an inexplicable omission in hindsight.