Rule 34 (36 page)

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Authors: Charles Stross

BOOK: Rule 34
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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.
Less reclusive than some, Al and Eileen sent the kids to school, dealt with the devil under duress—Al did gun shows, trading and fixing partially deactivated weapons: He even filed tax returns now and then—meanwhile they hunkered down, waiting for the storm. There was no Internet and no television in the bunker. There was always plenty of work to fill idle hands, and a beating as final punctuation for insolent questions.
You learned what was expected of you very quickly after the first day. No back-chat, a “yessir” or “yes, ma’am” to Uncle Al or Aunt Eileen’s orders, and keep your thoughts to yourself. The beatings fell off, became a random threat, a necessary dominance ritual. Al and Eileen treated their girls no less harshly, and Sara for one was always in trouble, unable to keep her yap shut: You remember the time Al broke her arm, and went on whacking her while she hollered with pain until Eileen realized what was wrong and scolded him into splinting it. Elizabeth, older and sneakier, was the snitch: You learned
that
fast.

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