Authors: Charles Stross
Rule 34 (22 page)
Women! Who knows why they do what they do? Certainly not you—and you even married one.
TOYMAKER: Reality Excursion
You!
Yes,
you
. Who the fuck did you think I was talking to, the Tooth Fairy? (That’s him on the left)—Jesus? No, I’m talking to
you
, fuckwit. Whoever or whatever you are, watching over me . . .
you
. Who the fuck did you think I was talking to, the Tooth Fairy? (That’s him on the left)—Jesus? No, I’m talking to
you
, fuckwit. Whoever or whatever you are, watching over me . . .
I’m an executive, you know. That’s why there’s a chip in my head. The Operation put it there so they could keep track of me. You’ve got to look at it from their point of view; it’s cheap due diligence—couple of dozen terabytes of non-volatile storage, mikes and GPS for metadata—“to deter you from going behind our backs,” they said. It’s not just a recorder, either. They can make LTE chipsets really small, you know? Phone chipset in the head. Maybe it’s transmitting all the time, and you’re sitting in a darkened room listening to my subvocalized thoughts. Or maybe you’re just an AI application, running pattern-matching code on the speech-to-text output, somewhere in the cloud. What if it’s receiving, too, controlling the old meatpuppet? Maybe there’s a bomb in my skull. Learning too much about our employers is a firing expense—they’re said to favour nine-millimetre—but what if they wanted to be sure? Multi-channel redundancy via cognitive radio. Push a button, bounce a signal off the moon, hello, bomb, pleased to meet you! Let’s go out with a splash.
You only live in my imagination. (I die, you die.) But I can still talk to you. And we have a problem, my invisible friend.
. . . No. Let me be more precise.
I
have a problem. Enemies. They’ve iced my primary candidates for COO and CFO before I could door-step them for a pre-induction assessment. To make matters worse, I became a person of interest in the police investigation—purely by coincidence—and they took a DNA sample. I’m pinned down here until we can file a Privacy Redaction Order and get the sample incinerated.
I
have a problem. Enemies. They’ve iced my primary candidates for COO and CFO before I could door-step them for a pre-induction assessment. To make matters worse, I became a person of interest in the police investigation—purely by coincidence—and they took a DNA sample. I’m pinned down here until we can file a Privacy Redaction Order and get the sample incinerated.
And for the icing on the shit-cake, my fucking
luggage
is still
missing
. Missing!
luggage
is still
missing
. Missing!
. . . That was as of three hours ago. Maybe the cunt on the Hilton hospitality desk has found it. That’d be a shame: I was looking forward to taking it out of his hide, with compound interest on top. (Five point six two kilograms.) Fuck it, my
sample
was in there. And my meds. I’ve been giving myself a little holiday from the pills recently, giving myself a holiday to remember what it’s like to have a mind of my own.
Neurodiverse.
(Losing it from the front desk onwards . . . maybe that wasn’t such a good idea?) Guess I just have to hold myself together until I can get my luggage back or I’ll skin Mr. Hospitality in a bathtub full of brine.
sample
was in there. And my meds. I’ve been giving myself a little holiday from the pills recently, giving myself a holiday to remember what it’s like to have a mind of my own.
Neurodiverse.
(Losing it from the front desk onwards . . . maybe that wasn’t such a good idea?) Guess I just have to hold myself together until I can get my luggage back or I’ll skin Mr. Hospitality in a bathtub full of brine.
But anyway: I have a phone. I always have a phone, short of brain surgery to separate me from it. Phones are deadlier than guns. I need to talk to the business-support desk. Arms-race death match between the cognitive radio free Internet rebels and the lizards who run the secret world government: We use the rebels’ remixers. And the phone in my head connects direct through the undernet, diving for a nameless server in central Asia—
“Hello?”
Look around, my invisible friend, see the park, the mud grey field, and the trees? We have bandwidth here. The council installed routers in all the lampposts, the better to handle the feed from the webcams in all the street-lamps. The lizards want to catch the rape machines, but they’re too cunning. Bushes block the electromagnetic emissions from the lights.
“Hello?”
“Uh, this is, is Able November in Edinburgh.”
You—that is to say, me—use Able November as a code-name when talking to the Operation’s call centre. This is the twenty-first century, and even international crime syndicates and off-shore venture-capital trusts—the two are sometimes hard to tell apart—need offshore call centres. You can’t do business without the right tools, after all.
(Is that a police reconnaissance drone cruising just below the eaves of the tenements on the other side of the field? Or is it just a
very large
bat?)
very large
bat?)
“Hello, Able November. What is your situation?”
“Mike Blair has been murdered. Vivian Crolla has been murdered. My”—
fuck shit piss cocksucking
—“luggage has gone missing with my meds and I haven’t had any for seventy-two hours. I am”—
mother-fucking ANGRY
—“losing my objectivity somewhat. Can you help? The meds are the hard part.”
fuck shit piss cocksucking
—“luggage has gone missing with my meds and I haven’t had any for seventy-two hours. I am”—
mother-fucking ANGRY
—“losing my objectivity somewhat. Can you help? The meds are the hard part.”
“I’m putting you on hold. Please wait.”
You find a wooden bench and sit down, touching it, feeling the dry crumbling grain of decomposing dead lignified hermaphrodite flesh between your fingers. You obey the order to hold on instinctively, clutching the surface with one hand. If you lose your grip, you might fall up into the sky: You’re very light. This is a really fucking shitty time to have an attack, but it’s not so surprising. Every so often you cut back on your meds for a couple of days, re-establish your baseline. Is it just bad luck that when you’re ready to go back on the pills, they steal your luggage and murder your contacts? The police have eyes in the sky, watching and waiting. How can these not be connected?
“Able November,” says the woman you’re listening to—her voice distorted by the hearing implant in your skull, drain-pipe echo of an encrypted tunnel—“what’s that about your meds? Are you taking them?”
“No,” you want to shout, but the phone is in your head, and if you yell aloud, someone or something bad might hear.
Gently.
The mike in your throat hears all. “My meds are in my luggage. My luggage has been missing for two days.” Little white lies shining like baby teeth in a shallow grave.
Gently.
The mike in your throat hears all. “My meds are in my luggage. My luggage has been missing for two days.” Little white lies shining like baby teeth in a shallow grave.
“Okay, we can take care of that for you,” says your operator. “I’m going to send your prescription through to the nearest pharmacy for an emergency resupply. Uh, your identity. Is it still clean?”
“No,” you say. “No, no.” It’s your fault. You told the police to steal my DNA, didn’t you? Mother-fucking ghost-chip-skull-bomb invisible capitalist friends, can’t trust ’em anywhere. “It’s . . .” You realize you’re hyperventilating and force yourself to slow down. “I visited Mike Blair and found a murder investigation in progress.” Cops in ceramic terylene overalls picking tiny fragments of your skull off the bathroom floor . . . “They sampled me as a POI. This identity’s dirty. I need a fall-back.”
“Okay, don’t worry. I’m putting you on hold again.”
You hold, while the police RPV ghosts across the park on silent ducted fans, searching the bushes for rape machines—no,
rape machines don’t exist
. Crazy childhood phantasms that lurk into adulthood: They’re less real than this phone in your skull, the life-line to the Operation’s soothing dream of control. Once you get on your meds again, the bad stuff will all go away. The same cannot be said of all the other shit.
You say paranoia, I say surveillance state.
Worried about being tracked by hidden cameras, stealthy air-borne remotely piloted vehicles, and chips implanted in your skull? You’re merely a realist.
rape machines don’t exist
. Crazy childhood phantasms that lurk into adulthood: They’re less real than this phone in your skull, the life-line to the Operation’s soothing dream of control. Once you get on your meds again, the bad stuff will all go away. The same cannot be said of all the other shit.
You say paranoia, I say surveillance state.
Worried about being tracked by hidden cameras, stealthy air-borne remotely piloted vehicles, and chips implanted in your skull? You’re merely a realist.
The twenty-first century so far has been a really fucking awful couple of decades for paranoid schizophrenics. Luckily, you’re not paranoid—you just have these little breakdowns from time to time. A medication side-effect—a side-effect of coming off your meds, that is. Usually at the least convenient time—like now. Something is watching you from the trash can alongside the footpath. Then it moves. A starling. (They’re making a come-back from the brink of extinction.)
“I’m going to text a route to a local pharmacy to your handset. I want you to go there
immediately
, they know you’re a tourist, and it’s urgent. Don’t leave until you’ve got your pills. Do you understand?”
immediately
, they know you’re a tourist, and it’s urgent. Don’t leave until you’ve got your pills. Do you understand?”
You nod happily, glad that someone is there to catch your fall.
Not
a lizard—lizards never catch. “Yes.” They want to brainwash you and make a good little worker-robot-slave out of your flayed soul.
Not
a lizard—lizards never catch. “Yes.” They want to brainwash you and make a good little worker-robot-slave out of your flayed soul.
“Okay. You’re to stop using your current identity immediately after you get your prescription. There’s a new background waiting for you, and I’ll send you the collection details in the next message. Clear?”
“Yes.” You swallow. Your throat is unaccountably dry. This always happens when the firewall in your head springs a leak. “What else?”
“We can’t help with your contacts,” she says abruptly, sibilants buzzing like an angry hornet just behind your left ear. “You’re not the only founder-executive with problems today. We’re busy fighting off denial-of-service attacks on all fronts. Marketing/Communications are experiencing severe functional ablation, and it’s degrading our ability to comply with our service-level agreements. Basic medical and identity services are running normally, but unfortunately as a Tier Two executive, you may experience delays in fulfilment of your general support requests. If you can find out who exactly killed your contacts, you are to let us know
immediately
.”
immediately
.”
Is it the lizards
—your loyal lips are frozen shut. The operator does not need to hear about the lizards. (She’s not the only one. Most people don’t believe in the lizards and react badly if you try to tell them: It’s the brainwashing.) The operator sounds tense and tired. She doesn’t need any more worries. If you make her worry that you are losing it, talking about shape-changing lizards, she may push that button and bounce that signal off the moon and hello, Mr. Brain-Bomb, good-bye Toymaker. So you do not say one word about the lizards. Like the rape machines, they’re imaginary haunts—
except,
an edgy feeling tells you,
they’re not
.
—your loyal lips are frozen shut. The operator does not need to hear about the lizards. (She’s not the only one. Most people don’t believe in the lizards and react badly if you try to tell them: It’s the brainwashing.) The operator sounds tense and tired. She doesn’t need any more worries. If you make her worry that you are losing it, talking about shape-changing lizards, she may push that button and bounce that signal off the moon and hello, Mr. Brain-Bomb, good-bye Toymaker. So you do not say one word about the lizards. Like the rape machines, they’re imaginary haunts—
except,
an edgy feeling tells you,
they’re not
.
“I’ll do that,” you reassure the operator.
“Okay, go get your meds.” And a moment later the phone in your wallet vibrates and a couple of numbered tags show up on its map of the city, along with a helpfully walkable route.
You have a mission. You’re going to get your meds, pick up your new identity documents, then look into replacing your luggage and finding somewhere safe to stay. That’s all you can do right now. Maybe when you’re back in familiar headspace, you can make plans for whittling down the number of your enemies; but that’s not a job for this afternoon.
The nearest pharmacy turns out to be inside a red-brick Tesco superstore, the shiny green glass cylinder of a government-run vertical farm rising from the former parking lot behind it. You sidle up to the counter and make yourself known to the government employee behind the counter. She bustles off into the back room, and the pharmacist comes out. She’s a pretty, petite woman, thirtysomething Anglo-Indian. “Mr. Christie?” she asks. It’s an alias—it’s
your
alias, for the next hour at least. “May I see some proof of identity?”
your
alias, for the next hour at least. “May I see some proof of identity?”
You show her your entirely authentic driving license and she reads it with dark, unreadable eyes then scans your thumbprint and verifies it. “Thank you,” she says. Into the back, then back out again with a bag: “You’ve had this prescription before?”
You nod, eagerly. It’s a selective metabotropic glutamate agonist, sturdy and well-understood, a neuroleptic firewall proof against the rape-machine fantasies and mind-control issues you’ve had ever since the disastrous clinical trial they put you through during your teens. “My luggage went missing. I, uh, I really need this.” You reach out, watching the minute tremors in your hand as if from a great distance.
“I’ll say you do.” She hands the box over with a curious expression on her face. “There’s no charge: You’re in Scotland, we still have a National Health Service. That’s you, then. Have a nice day.” They have a working health-care system here, don’t they? You nod jerkily, then back away.
Outside the shiny socialized factory farm, post office, pharmacy, and general-purpose omnistore, you gulp down two tablets—one of the doctors at the clinic told you how to do that, pump-priming, years ago—and stand there shaking for a minute. Grey streets, tall buildings looking down on you with eye-socket windows. Bats glide overhead, or pigeons, or RPVs with terahertz radar eyes, vigilant for the deviant. You shiver. You need to get under cover before they come for you . . . give the meds time to cut in. You haven’t had an attack this bad since . . . since . . .
Don’t think about it.
You are the Toymaker’s avatar in this nation-state. You’re the executive: strong, and determined, and entrepreneurial, and skilled. You’re not some kind of paranoid-schizophrenic personality-disorder case, stoned on his own brain chemistry. There really
is
a chip in your skull, monitoring and controlling and stabilizing on behalf of the conspiracy for which you work. There really
is
someone or something watching over you, controlling from afar. The hallucinations are going to go away, then you’re going to take this reality by the throat and twist it until it crackles under your fingers like . . . like . . .
is
a chip in your skull, monitoring and controlling and stabilizing on behalf of the conspiracy for which you work. There really
is
someone or something watching over you, controlling from afar. The hallucinations are going to go away, then you’re going to take this reality by the throat and twist it until it crackles under your fingers like . . . like . . .
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