Rule 34

by Charles Stross

  She shows you her teeth. “What could possibly be more important than next Saturday?” (She’s playing with you. If her own job demanded it, she’d stand you up in a split second.) “I thought nothing ever happened in Innovative Crime? Have they got you back on CID?” She pulls back her foot, leaving you tingling.

  “The day before yesterday I was on a community team assignment and got called in on what turned out to be homicide—not your usual ned-on-ned stabby action: more like Tarantino meets Dali.”

  “Wow.” Her eyes widen. “Why are you here, then?” She nudges your foot again: But this time it’s an accident, not enemy action.

  “Because after I corralled the witness and set up the incident room, CID turned up and took all my toys away.” You shrug. “Not that I’ve got a problem with that. I don’t need an extra helping of crap to top up my regular work-load. But Dickie—uh, we’re on Chatham House rules here, aren’t we?” She nods. “He’s the big swinging dick on the investigation, and he’s your classic narrow-focus, results-oriented, overdriven, alpha-male prick. He’s treating it as a regular crime and he’s looking for a suitable perp. Which is normally best practice and the right thing to do, except I happen to know that there was a death in, um, another jurisdiction around the same time, and it bears significant points of similarity. All of which scream meme at me. Internet meme, class one, virulent. Only Tricky Dickie doesn’t want to know.”

  “Oy.” Dorothy leans back and takes a deep breath, then raises her glass. “I didn’t hear any of that, I take it.”

  “No, of course not.” You nod at her. “What’s your sob story?”

  “Work.” She pulls a face. “Another bloody ethics-compliance audit. You walk in the door, and everyone gets defensive, like they expect you to put them on a ducking stool and accuse them of witchcraft or something.”

  “Ethics: It’s not just next door to Suffolk anymore.” It’s feeble and she’s heard it a thousand times but it still raises a smile.

  Dorothy’s job is an odd one: catching corporate corruption before it metastasizes and infects society at large. After Enron collapsed—while you were still in secondary school—the Americans passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, accounting regulations for catching corporate malfeasance. But all they were looking for was accounting irregularities: symptoms of maladministration. The unspoken ideology of capitalism didn’t admit, back then, of any corporate duty beyond making a return on investment for the shareholders while obeying the law.

  Then the terrible teens hit, with a global recession followed by a stuttering shock wave of corporate scandals as rock-ribbed enterprises were exposed as hollow husks run by conscience-free predators who were even less community-minded and altruistic than gangsters. The ravenous supermarket chains had gutted the entire logistic and retail sector, replacing high-street banks and post offices as well as food stores and gas stations, recklessly destroying community infrastructure; manufacturers had outsourced production to the cheapest overseas bidders, hollowing out the middle-class incomes on which consumer capitalism depended: The prison-industrial complex, higher education, and private medical sectors were intent on milking a public purse that no longer had a solid tax base with which to pay. Maximizing short-term profit worked brilliantly for sociopathic executives looking to climb the promotion ladder—but as a long-term strategy for stability, a spiralling Gini coefficient left a lot to be desired.

  The European Parliament responded by focussing on corporate governance. If corporations wanted to be legal citizens, the politicians riding the backlash declared, they could damned well shoulder the responsibilities of good citizenship as well as the benefits. Social as well as financial audits were the order of the day. Directives outlining standards for corporate citizenship were drafted, and a lucrative niche for a new generation of management consultants emerged—those who could look at an organization and sound a warning if its structure rewarded pathological behaviour. And as for the newly nationalized supermarket monopolies, a flourishing future as government-owned logistics hubs beckoned. After all, with no post offices, high-street banks, or independent general stores, who else could do the job?

  “It’s a bank.” Dorothy shrugs. “We’re running a three-year review for them, focussing on human resources, internal promotion practices, and how they monitor compliance with social-policy directives for dealing with customers in default.” Defaults are a political hot potato in this deflationary age. The ground still hasn’t stopped shaking from the collapse of the noughties investment bubble, and only government intervention has stopped Scotland—and the other western EU members—following America down the road of mass repossessions, Greenspan favelas, and civil unrest. “Bankers aren’t stupid this decade; they know what happened to their predecessors. What we’re worrying about is getting to the next decade’s managers before they unlearn the lesson. And there’s some other stuff, but I can’t talk about that.”

  Her mention of other stuff is uncharacteristically low-key. And you know Dorothy well enough to have a clue what makes her tick. “Usual rules?”

  “Cross your heart and hope to spontaneously combust, more like.”

  “Well.” You take a lick of salt from the rim of your glass, roll your tongue at her. “We can see about that.”

  “I’m serious.” Her lips pale.

  “So am I. What do you think would happen if I compromised a live intelligence-led investigation?” (Translation: Why do you want to tell me this?)

  “Much the same.” She looks at you for a moment. “Is your phone on? Remove the battery.”

  You stare at her. Then you reach into your handbag and take out your phone and pop the back of the case. “There’s a camera behind the bar. It’s overlooking the till, but it can see the mirror.”

  “I know. I checked earlier. It’s hi-def, but we’re far enough away that it won’t record a good enough picture for lip-reading. And we’re less likely to be overheard here.” She pulls out her own phone and removes the battery. You suddenly feel as naked as you’ve ever been with her.

  “You didn’t look me up just for old time’s sake,” you accuse.

  “Not—entirely.” She doesn’t try to look away. “I’m sorry. Yes, I have an ulterior motive. I need a sanity check, Liz.”

  “A sanity check? Banking ethics isn’t my—”

  “This isn’t about banking. You’re on my disclosure notice; nobody’s going to think twice about me hooking up with a girl-friend.”

  The indefinite article stings, a reminder of where you stand with Dorothy. “Disclosure notice. I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”

  She waves it off. “It’s a sealed declaration of interests, for the enhanced background enquiry—so I can’t be blackmailed. It’s basically just an enhanced CRB check with extras, Liz.” She pauses. “You’re not in the closet. I mean, at work. Are you?”

  “Not for years.”

  “Good. Look, what I’m concerned about is that nobody’s likely to listen in on this, and anybody who notices us here is going to assume the obvious.” She slides her leg against your knee again. “Oh yes, I’m looking forward to Saturday. Are you?” Her eyes are gleaming. You focus on her lips, glossy and plump with anticipation, and shiver.

  “If I were a man, I’d call you a cock-tease.” You manage to summon up something not unlike a coy smile.

  “I’d like to take you upstairs after this drink, but I think my room’s probably bugged.” She says it so casually, it takes you a moment to understand her words. “I can understand if you don’t want that. Listening in, I mean.”

  It’s like a bucket of cold water in the face. “Who’s bugging you?”

  “I’m not entirely sure. It goes back about two months; I ran across some rather weird correlations when I was going over the transactions for—um, never mind. Anyway, my boss buried my email and reassigned me when I tried to raise it with him last month. Said it was circumstantial, and we didn’t have the resources to go after random leads. Well, I’ve been doing some
more digging, and when I got here, I found a concealed camera in my bedroom and one in the shower.”

  There is a famous optical illusion: a silhouette of a vase, which—once you know what to look for—suddenly flips into a silhouette of two faces looking at each other. (Or vice versa.) You’re looking at Dorothy’s face and one moment you could have sworn she’s excited, turned on—and the next, she’s frightened. Context is everything.

  “What do you think’s going on?” you ask her.

  She shoves her glass to one side of the table and leans forward. “I can’t tell you the details. But part of what we do is abstract social-network analysis on waves, IM, email, phone calls—looking for indicators of pathological communications patterns. If you can track who’s talking to who, you can work out which parts of an organization work together, and see emergent patterns of behaviour. It goes back to the classic study on Enron’s email corpus in the noughties, but there’s been a lot of work since then on agent-assisted NLP and transitive clique identification . . . There’s also some promising work on determination of ethical or conspiratorial networks. There are other data sets we can trawl exhaustively—the banking crisis, the full corpus of internal communications left behind in the wake of the Goldman Sachs collapse. All the data sets from businesses we’ve audited since the corporate-responsibility criteria were introduced, suitably blinded and anonymized. We use them to spot warning signs. You get a different pattern of communication in groups who’re colluding to instigate a cover-up, for instance.”

  At this point, you’re working hard to keep your eyes open. Dorothy would have made a kick-ass accountant if she hadn’t decided to go into corporate psychoanalysis: She could bore for Europe in the Olympics if she wanted to. But you ken where she’s going with this. It’s not so dissimilar to what you do in the Innovative Crime Investigation Unit—which, come to think of it, is how you met her in the first place, at a conference on pre-emptive gang-crime prevention. “What did you find?”

  “What got my attention is the bank I’m here to audit—I got an anonymous tip to look into something and, well, there’s a pattern of communication in their investment arm that looks worryingly similar to some of the crazier stuff that was going on in 2007. Subprime investments, dangerous quant stuff. Unethical, if not illegal. Only it’s not real estate this time, Liz. I pulled the audit trail, and it turns out they’re investing heavily in options trades based on government bonds from a breakaway republic in the back end of Asia.

  “What’s alarming me is . . . round about 2009, one of the things that happened during the great recession was that banks almost universally ran out of liquidity, all over the world, simultaneously. It got to the point where national regulators started turning a blind eye when their banks accepted deposits in cash from, uh, irregular sources. Money laundering. Some say up to a third of a trillion dollars in black money was laundered into the global banking system during the crash. It was the last hurrah of the great drugs cartels: Decriminalization and the dollar collapse effectively bankrupted them over the next decade. But ending the war on drugs didn’t end organized crime, and there are still gangs out there with money to launder. Anyway, I got a tip-off. Began looking for signs of weirdness in the money supply in the, the Republic of Issyk-Kulistan. We’ve got far less data on them than on our own banks, but I didn’t have to look hard. If they’re so poor, and they’ve got a 40 per cent unemployment rate, how come their GDP rose 30 per cent on independence?

  “Anyway? I took it to my line manager, and he told me to lay off. It’s all inconclusive, and anyway, it’s outside our purview. Drop it completely, in other words. Then I got sent up here to do a routine audit, and it turns out that my hotel room’s bugged. Also—I think I spotted a man following me yesterday. On the tram, home from work. I never thought I’d say this, but I’m scared, Liz.”

  There’s a time to stand on your work/life balance metric, and a time to throw the rule-book out the window. Dorothy is clearly frightened—so scared it took her three cocktails and a presumptively bug-free bar to open up to you. Unfortunately, a lot of what she told you is as confidential as the contents of your own ongoing investigations (i.e. it’s a honking great disciplinary—or even criminal—offence to talk about it out of school), not to mention reeking of some kind of artificial reality game to anyone who doesn’t know that she really is a chartered social-pathology analyst who works for the Department of Trade and Industry’s Ethical Oversight Inspectorate. (A fancy way of saying she’s a canary in the kind of coal mine where they call the Serious Fraud Office to deal with the cave-ins.)

  So, despite being off duty, you put the battery back in your phone and file, in quick succession: an open case report (“female reports being trailed by unidentified male”) with a note that this is subject to investigation under the Protection from Harassment Act; a note for the intelligence desk (subject reports threatening behaviour: Due to sensitive nature of employment they suspect a possible violation of Whistleblower Protection Act); and finally a memo to yourself (“look into organized crime/connection with Issyk-Kulistan”), which you will probably off-load onto Moxie’s overflowing to-do heap on the morrow.

  The latter might be treading dangerously close to misuse of police resources for personal gain, but your soft-shoe shuffle if anyone asks will revolve around a third-party tip-off about persons of interest to an ongoing organized-crime investigation in another force area: At worst, the skipper will yell at you and deliver his #3 Not Getting Distracted lecture again.

  All of which adds up to this: If Dorothy needs to talk to a control-room officer in a hurry, they’ll clock her CopSpace trail, realize that a detective inspector’s taking her concerns seriously, and listen. (Probably.) Which is the sort of thing that sometimes saves lives, and certainly you’ll sleep a wee bit more soundly for knowing she’s safe under the watching eyes of your colleagues. “That’s filed,” you tell her, and yawn. “Are you going to be okay for the now?”

  “I’ll have to be.” She smiles shakily as she stands up. “I’ll not be asking you to come up to my room.” She rolls her eyes in the direction of the camera dome behind the bar, and you don’t have the heart to remind her that for every one she can see, there’ll be at least two that she doesn’t. “Saturday . . . your place?”

  You stand up, too. “It’s yours. If you want to come back with me tonight—”

  She leans forward, and of an instant you’re hugging each other. Her breath is hot against your neck. “Better not,” she murmurs. “If I’m really being watched, I’m contagious. All the same, I’m going to check into a different hotel tomorrow and hope it throws them, whoever they are.”

  “Sounds like a good idea.”

  “I think so. So. Are we on for the weekend?”

  “If you want—”

  She turns her head and kisses you hard on the mouth. You swallow a gasp, suddenly acutely aware that you’re in public—then she pulls back, leaving your lips tingling. “Yes, I want. Good night, darling.” Her smile is a fey thing. It fades as she walks towards the lobby, leaving you standing by the table, your nipples tight, your breath stolen, and your head full of harm.

  ANWAR: Diplomat

  Over the next four days you fall into a comfortable work-day pattern. Get out of bed, go to the bathroom and get dressed and go downstairs to the kitchen, where Bibi has just about finished getting the breakfast down the bairns before she heads out to sign into the pharmacy at the Leith Walk Tesco. You drink a glass of tea, eat your muesli, grab your phone, and kiss Bibi good-bye. From your front door, it’s twenty minutes to the office on foot or, if it’s pishing down, thirty minutes by way of a quick dash to a shelter and a long wait for the tram.

  Not much happens at the office. A couple of times a day, some chancer rings your buzzer, wanting a bag of bread mix and a novelty tourist brochure. (You’ve got a stack of the things in a cardboard display by the door; they cycle tiredly through a grey-scale slide show of yaks, yurts, and tractor factories—the Ministry of
Tourism’s budget doesn’t stretch to colour e-ink, let alone hiring a photographer to update their archive footage.) You sadistically abuse the rubber plant whenever you can be bothered and expense a couple of big colour picture frames for the wall, loaded with the least-kitsch corners of the Ministry’s wallpaper archive—mostly mountains and mosques—to make it look more like an authentic consulate.

  On day three, a certain existential anomie sets in. So you amuse yourself with your bootleg phone and specs: You pull down your favourite procedural wallpaper from the cloud and overlay the bare, beige office walls with a gigantic play-space hosting an improbable orgy-themed mashup from XXXMen and BackRoomBoyz. It’s machinima-generated real-time porn, and you don’t want to look at their faces for too long or you’ll get creeped out by the inbred uncanny valley features, but all that pumping and writhing and sucking is a good distraction from the fact that is slowly sneaking up on you: You’re bored.

  Here you are in your good business suit, sitting at a desk in the consulate, prim and proper as can be, like a maiden aunt haunted by fantasies of debauchery. And there is nothing to fucking do. Welcome to boredomspace. Since you hung out your shingle you have entertained one visiting trade delegation, six assorted shifty-eyed locals in search of a loaf, two adventurous backpackers, a yak-milk importer looking to make an end-run around EU animal-husbandry regulations, and seven confused visitors looking for the games company upstairs.

  There are, of course, the language lessons: On your own initiative you’ve expensed a set of Rosetta Stone courseware on Kyrgyz, and you’re trying to spend half an hour a day on it. But you’ve never had much of a knack for language study, you keep tripping over the Cyrillic alphabet, and the spoken tongue sounds like you’re gargling rusty nails (and leaves your throat feeling like it, too). Google Translate doesn’t handle Kyrgyz very well: Luckily the Ministry of Foreign Affairs conducts all their correspondence in mangled English. You really wouldn’t bother except for a nagging sense that at the next interview, it might be good to know what they’re saying behind your back.