Rule 34 (23 page)

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Authors: Charles Stross

BOOK: Rule 34
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The replacement prescription sits heavy in your pocket, reassuring, a chemotaxic anchor pulling you closer to the harbour of high-functioning quasi-sanity. Just knowing it’s in your system makes you feel better. So you walk back along the main road towards town, taking your time (and avoiding the nosy buses and their intrusive cameras). About half a mile later you pass a hole-in-the-wall diner, where you pause to order a mixed meze and a plate of falafels. The bored Middle Eastern guy behind the bar spends his time between serving you hunched over an elderly pad, handset glued to his ears, evidently talking an Alzheimer’s patient through replying to an email: “No, look, at the top, it says get mail, write, address book, reply, tap reply—no, not the red dot,
below
the red dot, what do you see?” His despairing half-duplex monotone soothes your rattled nerves, reassuring you that he’s not remotely likely to be spying on you.
When you leave the restaurant, the day has brightened considerably. There are no bushes for concealment, no sinister shapes flitting past overhead—an unmanned police segway rolls up the hill, cameras panning in all directions, but even the neurotypical can see
that
.
Another fifty minutes of walking sees you back in the West End, approaching the marble-fronted monolith of the Hilton. You are relatively calm, at peace with what it is you are about to do. It’s true they have misplaced your luggage, and with it your sample merchandise. However—let us retain a sense of proportion—this is not the worst thing that has happened to you today, is it? Once you have unpacked your 5.62 kilograms of home and bolted the hotel-room door you’ll be safe. It just depends on whether the fool on the hospitality desk has found—
Your march across the polished floor of the lobby comes to an abrupt halt. There’s a well-dressed woman waiting beside the desk, but nobody behind it. You can feel your arousal level rising: You
need
your
bag
; your commercial sample is sleeping in it; are they playing with you? The woman is watching you with elaborate inattentiveness, carefully avoiding eye contact. “Do you work here?” you demand.
“No.”
Now
she looks at you. A wry twist of the lips. “They’re trying to find my parcel. I had it sent poste restante—FedEx say they delivered it this morning, but the hotel know nothing.”
The very idea! Suddenly it strikes you. You shipped your luggage via Yamato, a takuhaibin logistics company, and they simply don’t lose things. But if this woman’s package went missing, and she used FedEx—“My luggage is missing, too,” you confess. “Think they’ve got a problem?”
“I’d say so.” She nods. “Mr. MacAndrews says they’ve been having network trouble all day. That’s usually a euphemism for malware, in my experience.”
An upswing in cybernetic infestation isn’t
your
problem, but it puts the hospitality manager’s attitude in a different light. Maybe he’s not actually
trying
to fuck with you—
And here he comes, scurrying back out from a locked door with a box in his hands. He sees you and does a double-take, but goes straight for your companion: “Ms. Straight? We found it! They’ve got the computers working again, and it was sitting in our loading area along with the other inbound consignments.” He looks at you directly. “Mr. . . . Christie? Your luggage was missing, too, wasn’t it?”
Cheeky sod.
You nod. “I’ll just go see if it’s turned up as well, now we’ve got our logistics working again.”
He turns and rushes off, leaving your companion looking at her box. “Humph. I thought he was supposed to get some proof of identity before handing items over,” she says disapprovingly.
“Well, that’s his problem, isn’t it?” you say, and smile at her. You focus on her properly for the first time, taking in: red hair, carefully styled; lips and eyes emphasized, but not heavy on the slap; wearing a green dress with a low neckline that’s kept on the business side of sexy by a black jacket. Mature but rootable, in other words, and if she isn’t on the pull, you’re a cactus.
You haven’t had any action for a couple of weeks now. You don’t know where the local cruising grounds are, and here in the dour puritan anglosphere the hotel front desk doesn’t provide room service. You have certain needs—exacerbated now you’re coming down from your little reality excursion. You posted an ad on a swinger aggregator a couple of days ago, but no joy yet. The idea of her plumped wasp-sting lips wrapped around your cock appeals: You take conscious control of your smile and widen it.
“I suppose so.” She catches your eye and smiles back. “I’ll just have to wait.”
Interested but coy: You’ve met this attitude before, and it bugs the living fuck out of you. Why don’t these sheeple admit that it’s pointless and drop the pretence that they care?
Oh, but I’d feel guilty,
they say if you ask them why they tipped the waiter/returned the excess change they were given/didn’t pad the insurance claim/turned down the zipless fuck—even though there’s absolutely no chance that anyone would catch them. You smile back at her and nod.
“Are you staying here for long?” you ask.
“Oh, just checking in for a few nights.” She raises an eyebrow. “Yourself?”
“The same,” you say honestly. “Here on business, just checking in, gone tomorrow. At a loose end, really.”
Her pupils dilate slightly, and there are some other cues: You’ve studied this shit, looked into NLP, and you focus on emitting the right signals, mirroring her subconscious arousal. “That’s a shame,” she says. “What line are you in?”
That’s off-script, but not too far off-script. “I’m in toys,” you say. It’s even true. “Re-establishing a local supply-chain subsidiary that’s been neglected for too long.” The door is opening: The irritating Mr. McAndrews is on his way back. “Busy by day, totally at a loose end by night. I don’t suppose you’d be interested in dinner?”
Two out of three times, they say
no
at this point: If she says
yes
, you’ve got about a 40–per cent chance of finding out if she swallows. McAndrews is busy with the telescoping handle of what out of the corner of one eye you recognize is your case. You keep your eye-balls pointed the right way (which is
not
at Ms. Straight’s face or tits).
“Sure,” she says, her smile medium-flirtatious. “Meet here, eight tonight?”
“Glad to,” you say, mirroring her expression and carefully concealing your satisfaction. Then you break contact deliberately, slewing towards Mr. McAndrews, who is wrestling your suitcase to a halt in front of you. “Ah, excellent. By the way, Ms. Straight here—”
“—Dorothy—” You glance back at her, let your smile widen, nod slightly.
“—was expecting you to ask for some ID—”
“Ach, yes, but you see, we have a record.” McAndrews twitches at the discreet camera dome overhead. “Nobody would steal from us.”
Dorothy is raising an eyebrow at you. “John,” you volunteer.
“Mr. John R. Christie. If you could just sign here?”
McAndrews thrusts a tablet at you.
Bastard.
“I’ll see you this evening, John.” She turns and is gone.
 
You take your luggage up to your room and go through it with shaking hands. Here’s the sample merchandise, occupying half the case: You plug it in to charge, just in case a demo is called for in the next couple of days. Here’s your “sterile” pad—still in the box it came in from PC WORLD—and here are your spare clothes. Toothbrush. Shaver. Meds. Bling case. You carefully arrange the small items on the desk in their correct order. Then you put the pad online and tell it to download its work personality from the cloud while you have a scalding-hot shower and change your clothes.
Of course you can’t stay here. But you
must
stay here. Or rather: “John Christie” has to stay where the police expect to find him during their investigation.
You
can be someone else, somewhere else. And your sample merchandise had better be somewhere else, lest the police find it in your custody. That would totally suck.
Luckily, there’s a magical mystery tour in your phone that’ll take you out of John Christie’s panopticon-enforced sheep’s clothing and give you a new suit and a second shot at lift-off. But the sudden shortage of candidate executives for your business plan is disturbing: Finding two of them dead is not a coincidence. You need backup before you start digging for the killers. And you’re going to get very little of it until the Operation cleans up after that DoS attack.
A plan begins to come together in your mind. You’ll renew your room for the rest of the week, but you won’t be there: You’re going to set up shop elsewhere. You’re going to go and buy new luggage and pick up your new papers, like Operation support told you to. Leave your old luggage with the sample merchandise parked with a useful idiot, just in case the police come snooping. Forward all calls, sanitize the room with a brisk spritz of sports stadium DNA, and all that’s left is the legal wrap-up: “John Christie” will still be staying in your hotel room, but you’ll be gone. Meanwhile, tonight there’s dinner—and hopefully
baka sekusu
with the Straight bitch for dessert.
You’ve had better days, but this one is showing signs of improvement.
The pad finishes downloading. You rename some files, point the browser at a malware site, and allow it to infect the machine, scrambling certain files to provide you with deniability if anyone searches it. Then you shove it in the room safe, pick up your meds, bling, and keyring, pull on a pair of glasses, pick up your case (with fully charged sample merchandise), and head out the door.
Once you pair them with your skullphone, the glasses steer you across the main road and down a picturesque path that meanders through Princes Street Gardens, out of sight of the trams, around the base of the huge granite butt-plug on which the castle squats. The skullphone’s display is austere, basic: You can only cram so much intelligence into a gram of glucose fuel-cell-powered silicon leeching off your blood sugar and dissolved oxygen. A third of a mile later, you cross a bridge across the buried railway station, then through a slightly tatty subterranean shopping mall where you spend half an hour hunting for the necessities to replace your regular luggage. Half the storefronts are shuttered, victims of high-street flight. Climbing the Waverley Steps you pause, then turn right and cross the intersection with North Bridge. According to the messages queued in your chip, your new identity documents can be obtained from an office on the third floor of the huge pile of Gothic limestone within whose windows you can just see an eerily glowing glass cube.
You walk through the revolving door and cross the lobby of the old post-office building to the glass-walled lifts that slide silently up and down within the echoing atrium. There’s a transparent airlock in front of the lift doors. “John Christie, for the honorary consul of the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan,” you say, as the outer door closes behind you. There’s a puff of air from the explosive detectors below, a beep, and the lift door opens before you. Thirty seconds later, you’re standing in a narrow corridor, outside a glass door and an entryphone. You push the buzzer. “Mr. Christie? Please come in, it’s the second office on the left,” says a Scottish-accented voice.
You silently repeat your line as you walk along to the second door and arrive as a thirtyish British-Asian man in a cheap suit pulls it open and looks up at you with a peculiarly bovine expression. “What can I do for you?”
“Colonel Datka sent me.” You can see the key turning in the lock behind his petrified eyes. “I’m here to collect some papers. And I have a little job for you.”
Interlude 1
KEMAL: Spamcop
 
Welcome to the postnational age.
Here you are, sitting in the window-seat of a creaky old Embraer as it makes its final approach into Edinburgh airport, banking over the tidal barrage and the wind farms in the Firth of Forth: It’s been five years since your only previous visit, and not long enough by far.
Eggs and spam.
Back then, you had the glamour and the mojo, the whole Men in Black thing working for you: the Europol supercop from l’Organisation pour Nourrir et Consolider L’Europe, travelling with a tiger team of forensic analysts and a digitally signed email from the Judge d’Inquisition to hand in case you needed to steam-roller your way across the objections of a provincial police force who didn’t realize what they were dealing with. Except things went terribly wrong—the national-security dinosaurs rising from their uneasy sleep, opening the closet doors to draw forth a conga line of dancing skeletons. It still gives you the cold shudders, thinking about the ease with which a couple of teams of coke-fuelled black-hat Shanghainese hackers rooted the network backbones of a pair of peripheral states: And the shit you stumbled into out here on the edge of the North Sea was as nothing compared to what your colleagues had to clean up in Gdansk and Warsaw. Not to mention the chewing out your boss François gave you during your performance eval the following spring. Black marks on the Man in Black’s record. And the rudeness of the Scottish police—that really rankled. Professional respect: Have these people never heard of it?

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