Rule 34 (33 page)
Authors: Charles Stross
It’s too much.
You
hear whackier stories from the twinks at CC’s every Saturday night you go clubbing, but a fair proportion of the assembled officers are of a, shall we say, small-c conservative upbringing. As for the rest, some of them aren’t as hard-boiled as they’d like to think. Muttered disbelief and the odd titter sweep the room.
You
hear whackier stories from the twinks at CC’s every Saturday night you go clubbing, but a fair proportion of the assembled officers are of a, shall we say, small-c conservative upbringing. As for the rest, some of them aren’t as hard-boiled as they’d like to think. Muttered disbelief and the odd titter sweep the room.
“Silence!” roars Dodgy Dickie, the veins on the side of his neck standing out. “Ahem.” He sounds surprised at himself. “Sarah, if you’d like to continue?”
“Uh, that’s all I’ve really got right now, sir, until we question her known contacts. Details in the case file . . .” She flips a reference into the investigation space hovering above the big conference-table.
“The Crolla post-mortem examination report won’t be available until tomorrow,” Dickie announces, “but we have a preliminary. According to the pathologist, it looks like a massive allergic reaction while the subject was restrained. Anaphylactic shock. They’re still looking for the cause—whatever she was allergic to—but suggest it’s something that was introduced into her apartment’s atmosphere while she was immobilized: I gather Iain’s sent the empty air-freshener cartridge in the bathroom for analysis . . .”
You tap Kemal on the shoulder and jerk your head in the direction of the door. He blinks at you, then nods.
Outside, you march directly—or rather, via a bunch of scuffed and flicker-lit corridors and stairs that resemble a giant hamster maze that’s gone to seed—to your own office in the ICIU. Kemal tags along like your guilty shadow.
“I seem to recall there was a book about it, years ago,” you tell him as you take the fire door into the car-park, then the back corridor past the Air Farce control room—where the pilots sit in their twilit virtual cockpits, alert and ready to dive their stealthed carbon-fibre drones on the heads of any hapless dog-walker who forgets to scoop up the poop their mutt’s just dropped on the Meadows—down past the flammables store, and along the side of the old stables. “About a guy who was into wrapping Roy Orbison in cling-film, uh, Saran Wrap. My mum used it to show me why I should never go with strangers. I had nightmares about kitchenware for years.”
“You think . . . the accountant . . .”
You pause on the threshold of the ICIU suite. “I refuse to speculate: It’s unprofessional, and besides, she might have had a
perfectly innocent
reason for owning a metric shitload of cancelled bank-notes in an obsolete currency. Not that you’d catch
me
shrink-wrapping myself to a pile of used bank-notes: The stuff’s lousy with germs. People sneeze on it.”
perfectly innocent
reason for owning a metric shitload of cancelled bank-notes in an obsolete currency. Not that you’d catch
me
shrink-wrapping myself to a pile of used bank-notes: The stuff’s lousy with germs. People sneeze on it.”
You take a tiny pleasure from Kemal’s expression of cumulatively deepening distaste.
“This is my office, the ICIU. And here’s Detective Sergeant Cunningham. Moxie, this is DI Aslan from Europol. He’s here to
help
us.” Kemal probably won’t spot the slight emphasis on the penultimate word, but you can be sure Moxie will—and the warning eye-flicker. Your attitude to Kemal has changed somewhat since you departed to collect him this morning (was it only five hours ago?), but Moxie isn’t Mr. Sensitive McNewage and can’t be guaranteed to pick that up. You can quite easily live without him unintentionally reopening hostilities.
help
us.” Kemal probably won’t spot the slight emphasis on the penultimate word, but you can be sure Moxie will—and the warning eye-flicker. Your attitude to Kemal has changed somewhat since you departed to collect him this morning (was it only five hours ago?), but Moxie isn’t Mr. Sensitive McNewage and can’t be guaranteed to pick that up. You can quite easily live without him unintentionally reopening hostilities.
“Great, skipper, I could use some help. It’s been one damn thing after another this morning. I’ve got six pending RFIs from some big intelligence investigation CID are running—”
Your heart sinks. “Is it Operation Babylon?” you ask.
“How did you know?” Moxie does his best hamster nose-rubbing imitation at you.
“Meet Operation Babylon’s Europol liaison.” You point at Kemal, who is looking around with an expression that speaks volumes in monosyllables. His gizz turns especially glassy as he spots Moxie’s animated Goatsedance digiframe. (For which you make a mental note to bollock him later: Visiting brass could get
entirely
the wrong idea.) “It’s a black hole, Moxie, coming to swallow us. What have you got in your queue?”
entirely
the wrong idea.) “It’s a black hole, Moxie, coming to swallow us. What have you got in your queue?”
You settle Kemal down with a seat and a pad, then spend the next ten minutes with Moxie dissecting: a request for information about shrink-wrap fetish clubs in Midlothian; demands that someone in IT Support decode the charge sheet you filed against one Mr. Hussein, A., back in the day (“Conspiracy to Bamboozle the Police,” suggests Moxie, identity-theft charges being confusing to officers more normally accustomed to breach-of-the-peace and public-order offences); an urgent enquiry for a backgrounder on spam filters (you boost
that
one to Priority A and sling it at your own job queue); a query from the desk sergeant at Gayfield Square as to whether he can arrest someone for running a home-brew fabricator (that’ll be a “no,” then—not without probable cause, and fuck knows how that one slipped into the Babylon queue); and a query about identity theft and a person of interest claiming to be Mikey Blair’s boy-friend who left a DNA sample and a junk identity trail.
that
one to Priority A and sling it at your own job queue); a query from the desk sergeant at Gayfield Square as to whether he can arrest someone for running a home-brew fabricator (that’ll be a “no,” then—not without probable cause, and fuck knows how that one slipped into the Babylon queue); and a query about identity theft and a person of interest claiming to be Mikey Blair’s boy-friend who left a DNA sample and a junk identity trail.
(Which is just
peachy
, because if
you
dig anything up on the random Mr. Christie and present it to Dickie, he really
will
have a coronary on the briefing-room floor.)
peachy
, because if
you
dig anything up on the random Mr. Christie and present it to Dickie, he really
will
have a coronary on the briefing-room floor.)
Kemal clears his throat.
“Yes?”
“I have an update from the office. They have a causal chain for one of our fatalities.”
You would expect the man to look smug at this point, but he doesn’t: haunted, more like. “What?”
Kemal shakes his head. “Vito Morricone. Dead in Palermo. A yahoo-yahoo boy. He died in a kitchen accident.”
Moxie shakes his head. “A
kitchen
accident?”
kitchen
accident?”
“Yes. He was electrocuted by a deliberately miswired food processor.” (You wince: You’ve had cooking incidents like that.) Kemal continues: “It was a high-end machine, able to heat or chill as well as mincing and mixing. Programmable, networked, you can leave cold ingredients in it and switch it on before you leave work, even change recipes remotely. His partner says that it broke eight months ago, and Morricone took it to a back-street repair shop, where they fixed it for him. The case is stainless steel. A replacement part—” He shakes his head.
“What kind of replacement?”
“The report does not explain this thing. But the local investigators report that the fixer bought the replacement-part design online from a cheap pirate shop, not from the manufacturer’s website. It came with installation instructions, which he followed. Once installed, the machine could be remotely induced to short its input power supply through the case.”
You give a low whistle of appreciation: Moxie claps, slowly. “Murder. Smoking gun.”
“Yes, but.” Kemal looks troubled. “The fixer does not appear to know anything.
Who
supplied the sabotaged component design? And why? The investigating magistrate connected to the same pirate design site and bought the same part: It is apparently harmless. And who sent the signal to activate it? We don’t know yet.”
Who
supplied the sabotaged component design? And why? The investigating magistrate connected to the same pirate design site and bought the same part: It is apparently harmless. And who sent the signal to activate it? We don’t know yet.”
“But it’s an assassination? A well-planned one.” You snap your fingers. “Tariq Hussein. The vacuum robot.” The IM you got while you were talking to Anwar rises to the top of your mind. “Tariq got things
fixed
. Anwar said something about a kitchen appliance that’d broken. Huh.” You pull up a memo window. “I want to know who fixed Tariq’s vacuum cleaner and when. Ask Mrs. Hussein about it. And”—the penny drops—“Mr. Blair’s enema machine. Who repaired it last?”
fixed
. Anwar said something about a kitchen appliance that’d broken. Huh.” You pull up a memo window. “I want to know who fixed Tariq’s vacuum cleaner and when. Ask Mrs. Hussein about it. And”—the penny drops—“Mr. Blair’s enema machine. Who repaired it last?”
“Minute those to BABYLON,” you tell Moxie. He nods and keyboards it into the intelligence wiki, where some poor grunt will funnel it into Mac’s inbound workstream and Mac (or one of his assistant managers) will assign it a priority level and add it to some other detective’s to-do list. Policing, as with all procedural jobs, expands to fill all the time and consume all the resources available for it. And a job like this one is too big to handle in a half-assed manner.
It’s a point of pride among the former nations of the United Kingdom that the murder clear-up rate is in three sigmas territory, somewhere over 92 per cent; but it takes bucketloads of manpower to get there, and process-oriented management and intelligence-supported work flow and human-resources tracking to keep the minimum investigative team of fifty-plus detectives properly coordinated. Most of the public still believe in Sherlock Holmes or Inspector Rebus, the lone genius with an eye for clues: And it suits the brass to maintain the illusion of inscrutable detective insight for political reasons.
But the reality is that behind the magic curtain, there’s a bunch of uniformed desk pilots frantically shuffling terabytes of information, forensic reports and mobile-phone-traffic metadata and public-webcam streams and directed interviews, looking for patterns in the data deluge spewing from the fire-hose. Indeed, a murder investigation is a lot like a mechanical turk: a machine that resembles a marvellous piece of artificial-intelligence software, oracular in its acuity, but that under the hood turns out to be the work of huge numbers of human piece-workers coordinating via network. Crowdsourcing by cop, in other words.
(If you’re one of the piece-workers in a mechanical turk—or one of the rewrite rules inside Searle’s Chinese room—the overall pattern of the job may be indiscernible, lost in an opaque blur of seemingly random subtasks. And if you’re one of the detectives on a murder case, your immediate job—determining who last repaired a defective vacuum cleaner—may seem equally inexplicable. But there’s method in my motion, as you’ll learn for yourself.)
You spend the next two hours with Moxie, churning through queries from Operation Babylon. Part-way through, Kemal disappears (to the toilet, you think at first: then to the briefing room, you decide), returning towards the end. You do lunch in the on-site canteen, communicating in defensive monosyllables: After his contribution from Palermo, he has nothing more to offer you. After lunch, you both attend the afternoon briefing in D31; then you sort Kemal out with a tablet, and he turns out to be surprisingly useful at handling those low-level queries you delegate to him. You update the ICIU shift roster for the next week and attend to another heap of inbound administrivia, before finally clocking off your shift and going home via the hair salon.
Home in your wee flat, you kick your shoes off and hang your jacket, visit the bathroom, and take a good close look at your new hair-do.
It’s always hard to tell for sure at the hairdresser’s, but here you can take your time and not worry about being unduly critical in front of the perfectly coiffured girl with the scissors and the long memory for casual insults from clients. You tilt your head and narrow your eyes and after a minute, you decide that, yes, you can live with it. It’s shorter, but more importantly, it’s
regular
. As business-like as your choice of footwear. Rest easy: Nobody’s going to be passing sly remarks about your hair-do or your sensible shoes in the canteen behind your back. (Locker-room culture will never die: It just goes underground, as you know to your cost.)
regular
. As business-like as your choice of footwear. Rest easy: Nobody’s going to be passing sly remarks about your hair-do or your sensible shoes in the canteen behind your back. (Locker-room culture will never die: It just goes underground, as you know to your cost.)
You have plenty of time for a long comfortable lie in the bath followed by a TV dinner. You plant yourself on the sofa under your tablet, surfing the web while the vacuum sniffs and nudges around the corners of the living-room carpet, as the evening grows old along with your thoughts. Which, as usual, are increasingly bored and lonely.
Burn-out
is such an ugly turn of phrase, and in any case, it doesn’t quite fit; it’s more like you ran out of fuel halfway across the ocean, and you’re gliding now, the site of your crash landing approaching implacably but still hidden from you by the horizon of your retirement. That’s you in a nutshell, drifting slowly down towards lonely old age, the fires of ambition having flamed out years ago.
Burn-out
is such an ugly turn of phrase, and in any case, it doesn’t quite fit; it’s more like you ran out of fuel halfway across the ocean, and you’re gliding now, the site of your crash landing approaching implacably but still hidden from you by the horizon of your retirement. That’s you in a nutshell, drifting slowly down towards lonely old age, the fires of ambition having flamed out years ago.
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