Rule 34 (26 page)

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Authors: Charles Stross

BOOK: Rule 34
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Yes, that’s him. You start forward. Medium height, dark eyes, Middle Eastern skin, sharp suit. He’s looking around, but he hasn’t clocked you yet. He’s alone this time, no mob of super-cop extras in tow. His head turns. “Kemal Aslan, I presume,” you say, pre-empting him. “Welcome back to Scotland.”
His expression of annoyance is so quickly masked you can’t be sure it even exists—is it your imagination?—and he extends a hand. “Ah, Inspector Kavanaugh.” You take it and shake. His palm is cool and dry. “I hope you’re well.” He ducks his head. It’s a long way from the arrogant confidence he exuded the first time you saw him, five years ago.
“Well enough.” You gesture towards the exit: “I’ve got a car. How long are you here for?”
“As long as it takes.” You head for the doors; he follows. “If you wouldn’t mind stopping en route, I need to check in at my hotel? Then we should talk.”
You stop. “I’m not entirely clear on what you think there is to talk
about
,” you snap, and he recoils as if you’ve just bared your teeth at him. “We’ve got a sensitive time-critical investigation to run, and unless you’ve got some insight to contribute, something that we should know, you’re just not that high a priority.”
To your surprise he nods. “I appreciate that,” he says softly. “But it is not the only investigation in progress. I am here to help—all of them. On my previous visit, we started out badly. I will apologize, if that is what you desire. But afterwards, we must work together. It is very important.”
You manage not to gape at him, but you’re momentarily at a loss: He delivers his spiel with a dead-pan sincerity that leaves you scrabbling for a handle to hang your anger on. Finally, you manage to say: “In the car. We can discuss this later.” Then you start walking again, so wound-up that you’re as jerky as a marionette.
The car is halfway to his hotel—a boutique establishment in Haymarket—before he speaks again. “Has there been any progress in your investigation?”
“I need to get you signed on and authorized before I can disclose intelligence material.” You’re already working out a shortest path in your head, a circuit of the necessary offices: You need to drag Kemal past the super’s office door for pro forma approval, then your own desk to verify that authentication of his credentials is already in the channel via Europol, then up to Doc, who can tell one of his sergeants to give him external consulting access to the virtual incident room. His eagerness to get started ahead of the formalities is grating and borderline-toxic. (But then, you ask yourself,
What would you do in his shoes?
) “Can you tell me what’s going on from
your
end of things?”
“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 just 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.

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