Rule 34

by Charles Stross

  “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.

  Kemal is looking at you with a heavy-lidded expression that gives you a weird shiver of déjà vu.

  “You are correct: Spam filters do not kill,” he says calmly. “But people using spam filters to backtrace and select their targets are another matter.”

  “But why?” You shake your head. “It doesn’t make sense!”

  “I agree with you,” he says with exaggerated, acidic dignity. “But somebody is killing them. Our task is to discover who, is it not?”

  The car slows, then noses into a hotel car-park, while you’re trying to come up with a sufficiently scathing rejoinder. Then you suddenly remember where you’ve seen his expression before: in the bathroom mirror, this very morning, while you were choking on the sure knowledge that you knew something important about the Blair investigation, but that Dodgy Dickie was certain not to give you the time of day.

  Mote, eye, redux.

  Kemal doesn’t say another word as the car parks itself, but his expression says it all for him. “I need ten minutes to drop my bag,” he says, opening the car door.

  “Of course.” You climb out of the Volvo and collect his wheelie-bag from the boot. The car beeps and shuts down behind you as you take the escalator up to the lobby. You install yourself in an understuffed leather sofa at one side as Kemal does his business with the self-service check-in, picks up a keycard, and is whisked upstairs to salaryman limbo.

  Kemal gives you just enough time to do the necessary one-eighty reorientation and get your shit squared away. You’re just finishing up a memo to Doc—necessary clearances for Kemal—when he reappears. “That was fast.”

  “I said I only needed time to drop my bag.” You could swear he looks wounded, but those big brown eyes of his make it his default state. “Are we going now?”

  “In a moment.” You fold your desktop away into a corner of your left eye and lever yourself ungracefully out of the sofa. Then you dust yourself down. “There’s a passable coffee shop round the corner,” you tell him. “I think you and I ought to go there and discuss the, the spam thing over a latte. Before I take you round the shop and get you into the system.”

  He gives you the hairy eye-ball. “What is there to discuss.” It’s not inflected as a question.

  “We started out on the wrong foot.” You take a deep breath. “I apologize, for what it’s worth. I’ll give you a fair hearing. But you need to know what you’re walking into before you stick your nose round the incident-room door.”

  Kemal exhales. “Politics?”

  “You could say that.”

  “I think a small espresso would be a good idea,” he concedes.

  “In that case . . .”

  You’re not entirely sure why the sudden turnaround with respect to Kemal, but there are several factors feeding in to it. It’s hard to stay furious at an abstract, and meeting him face-to-face you recognize only too clearly the stink of failure to launch. You may have been treading water for five years, but Kemal’s spent them sliding down the greasy pole. Stripped of the Eurocop arrogance and the entourage of Men in Black, he’s jus
t a sad-faced little cop with a brief-case full of nightmares. And then there’s the matter in hand: Eight deaths.

  You don’t owe Kemal the time of day, but it’d be grossly, unforgivably unprofessional to let your personal dislike get in the way of his investigation.

  Sitting in the fake-eighties bachelor-pad bistro-hell coffee shop, you lay it all out for him. “You’re walking in on a high-profile murder investigation. Lead investigator is Detective Chief Inspector Dickie MacLeish; he and I have a history, and it’s not a good one. To be fair, he has a headache because firstly, Edinburgh usually gets maybe one murder a month, and secondly, the victim in this investigation had money and connections. He’s under the spotlight already, and adding a foreign connection is—”

  CopSpace clears its throat discreetly. You hold up a cautioning hand to Kemal and glance at the incoming. It takes a second or two to make sense of it, then you swear under your breath. It’s a FLASH broadcast from the virtual situation room, which is exceptional in its own right—they’d usually only do that to alert everyone to an arrest warrant for a dangerous fugitive. This one is even more unusual. “Nine,” you tell Kemal.

  His face, glimpsed through a slew of rapidly accreting wikinotes, doesn’t look remotely surprised. “Who?” he asks.

  “One Vivian Crolla, accountant by trade.” You read swiftly, then take in the preliminary crime-scene scans. “Jesus.” You can’t help yourself: “Somebody shrink-wrapped her to a mattress full of banknotes—”

  “They what?” Now he raises an eyebrow.

  You blink the overlay aside. “We should go and get you signed in,” you suggest. How should I know who they are? you wonder defensively. What kind of lunatic goes around shrink-wrapping people to bales of bank-notes? “Michael Blair was one of her customers.”

  “Ah.” Kemal raises his tiny cup, pulls a face, and knocks back his ristretto in one. You eye your own cup: It’s half-full. Regretfully, you stand and turn your back on it. “Lead on,” he says.

  Back at HQ, it’s as if a giant virtual boot has kicked over the anthill. You normally get plenty of passing trade at the station, but it’s mostly beat cops checking in petty shoplifters and such-like at this time of day. Two Bizarro-world murders in rapid succession—with rumours of a Eurotrash gangland connection—have got folks nervous. They remember the hideous mess five years ago when everything fell over, back to manual typewriters and anonymous prepay mobiles while the spooks ran around upgrading the security keys on all the nation’s key routers and praying that the hackers responsible weren’t fucking with the air traffic control system or the reactor complex at Torness. The atmosphere today’s a lot like that: Word has got around the canteen grape-vine that something really out of order is going on. And you’re getting the hairy eye-ball from all sides as soon as you walk up to the desk in reception and sign a visitor’s badge for Kemal.

  You run him straight upstairs to CI Dixon’s office, where Doc’s secretary casually signs his ID onto the system—logging his biometrics solely on your say-so (talk about being granted a sufficiency of rope for a career asphyxiation!)—then you herd him along the corridor to IT Support, where a pathologically detached civilian contractor registers his phone and gets him logged into CopSpace. You’ve just short-circuited about two days of procedures specifically designed to prevent J. Random Unauthorized Person from getting into IT Support’s hair, but you’re in no mood to take shit right now. If Kemal’s right about the scale of what’s going on, Dickie needs to know the shape of the tiger he’s got by the tail. And so, less than two hours after you picked him up, you’re back in front of the door to briefing room D31.

  “Inspector Kavanaugh.” Dickie looks up from the surface in the middle of the room. It’s displaying a 3D cutaway of a typical Edinburgh tenement, one-sixth of life-size, with SOCO annotations hazing the air above it as thickly as the cigarette smoke of an earlier generation. “This would be . . .”

  “Inspector Kemal Aslan, on assignment to Europol Business Affairs in Brussels from Emniyet Genel Müdürlüğü in Ankara.”

  Kemal clears his throat. “We have been monitoring an upswing in violent deaths of individuals engaged in the Internet fraud sector.” He meets Dickie MacLeish’s fiercely sceptical gaze: “Eight so far, across Europe, all within forty-eight hours. Nine, now.”

  You tag-team with him, piling it up on MacLeish: “Inspector Aslan is ready to give you an overview of the larger picture whenever you’re ready. I checked him in with IT, he’s on the system. His auths from Europol check out.” (Which is an important point, as it’s not so long ago that a nutter with a cop fetish managed to fast-talk his way onto a prostitution sweep in Portobello.)

  Kemal doesn’t switch target. “We believe there is a common mechanism behind the killings, although proving a culpable human perpetrator may be—”

  He’s about to get stuck into his spiel when a uniform from CID shoulders his way into your circle and clears his throat apologetically. “Inspectors.” He nods at Dickie. “Skipper? Got a moment?”

  “Aye?” Dickie cuts you dead of an instant. Kemal’s neck muscles tense at that, but he bites his tongue like he’s had lots of practice lately. You peer closer at the crime scene on the virtual dissecting table. It’s one of those upper stairwell flats with a windowless hall and rooms branching off it on all sides. There’s something in the living room, like a discarded square-cut sandwich—

  “—The Blair scene yesterday, his ID was in the name of John, uh, Christie. It’s just that it rang a bell with Mary as she was compiling the daily for Oversight. She’s got a true-crime reading habit, and she looked him up online, and he’s a ringer, sir.”

  “What kind of ringer?” Dickie’s diction is clipped. He looks like he’s going to blow a gasket: not unusual for him, but even so . . .

  “John Reginald Halliday Christie—just like we logged on this guy’s driving license—was a serial killer, sir, the Notting Hill Strangler. Hanged for murder in 1953.” He pronounces that last with relish. (There are quite a few in this building who’d like to see those days of rope-burn closure back again.) “After he’d set up his neighbour, Timothy Evans, to take the drop for him.”

  Dickie’s left eyelid is twitching: Your cheek is threatening to come out in sympathy. “You’re telling me that the civilian capture and release contact on the Blair house was using false ID in the name of a serial killer, and nobody clocked it?”

  Constable Ballantyne shakes his head. “Constable Brown logged his ID and took a swab, sir—the driving license checked out with DVLA and the mug shot matched. It wasn’t false at that level—”

  Now your cheek does twitch because this is the kind of shit that isn’t supposed to happen. The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency database backs onto the Identity and Passport Service’s database, and you can’t get a driving license without authenticating. Which means the joker who just horned in on your crime scene is walking around with a genuine identity record on the national system in the name of a long-ago-executed serial killer.

  “—The birth date on his driving license, uh, Constable Brown didn’t clock it at the time: He was just checking that the name and face were valid. But in the database, it’s given as 15 July 1953—the day the real Christie was executed. I reviewed Ed’s helmet video, and the fly bastard sure doesn’t look seventy.”

  He’s been rattling on into a growing circle of silence for almost thirty seconds, oblivious to the gigantic loaf he’s pinched in the middle of the investigation. It is becoming glaringly obvious that someone is deliberately fucking with the brains of Edinburgh’s finest, and wants you to know it. Dickie, no cool cucumber at the best of times, is giving you serious concern for his ticker. Half the uniforms in the room are desperately trying not to boggle (and failing). The other half aren’t even trying. A vein pulses weirdly in MacLeish’s forehead: Then a curious ripple in the hairy salt-and-pepper caterpillar that passes for his moustache presages six urgently grunted words, pulled from so deep in his abdomen that you
’d think DC Ballantyne had just kneed him in the nuts:

  “Whoever this fucker is, pull him.”

  Then, as an aside, Dickie adds: “Find that swab and run it on the—no.” He nods formally at Kemal. “Put it on the wire to Europol and flag it as a suspect implicated in Inspector Aslan’s investigation. And run it on NDNAD. Then backtrace the driving license, find out who issued it, and open a new investigation: how this ringer got onto the IPS database. There’ll be a counterfeiting offence in there, probably more than one.” He knuckles his forehead as if squeezing out more charges, then glances at you and Kemal. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to update the super now.” His banked anger is still there: But it’s not pointed your way anymore. “What a pile of”—he claws at an invisible target—“shit.”

  The silence dissolves in a buzz of crosstalk. Kicked anthills, indeed. This might be a breakthrough in the long run, but in the short term, it’s every case manager’s nightmare: to have a suspect walk right into the middle of the crime scene, bare their arse at the officers on the spot, and waltz out again. The prurient eyes of Edinburgh are upon you, and this is juicy enough that it’s not going to stay under wraps for long—it’s going to be top of every newscrawl within hours, and Dickie’s the one who’ll bear the brunt of the jokes and finger-pointing.

  Deprived of responsibility for the moment, you take the opportunity to walk around the table, showing Kemal how the investigation is set up—every police force does things differently. He nods appreciatively and asks sensible questions as you discreetly bring yourself up to speed. The Crolla scene is just as bizarre as the Blair bathroom. Here: a mattress stuffed with long-withdrawn one-pound notes that were cancelled more than a decade ago, even before the Euro switch-over. There: a woman’s body, still wearing a business suit, shrink-wrapped onto the mattress with industrial-strength plastic sheeting. Preliminary pathology report: cause of death, anaphylactic shock—victim unconscious prior to death. The occlusive layer alone wasn’t fatal, and there’s no bruising or signs suggestive of forcible immobilization.