Rule 34 hs-2 Read online

  “Not really.” It’s your turn to suppress a twitch. “Seen Speedy today?”

  “Rest break.” A stream in one window freezes and zooms front and centre for his attention. “Uh.” He forces his attention back to you, and you stifle your exasperation: “What was the question?”

  The rest of the force uses ICIU as a dumping ground for the weird ones. It’s always like this with your team of crack ADHD poster children and borderline aspies.

  “Meeting. My office, ten thirty. I haven’t scheduled it yet, so consider this your one-hour reminder.”

  “Okay!” He frowns slightly, eyes flickering as he saccades between your face and the conflicting priority interrupt on screen two. “Um. I think.” Whatever he thinks, he thinks better of it and stops. You lean past his shoulder and glance at his screen.

  “This is about the anomalous short-tandem repeat hits on the used cartridges in the Stockbridge recycling bins, right? You think you’ve found something?”

  He makes up his mind. “Mebbe, skipper, but it’s really fucking out there, know what I mean?”

  Now you let out your exasperated sigh. “Meeting, ten thirty, remember? Have an informal report ready for me.” You straighten up. “Be seeing you.” And you beat a retreat to your office (for unlike the sergeants and constables in their cubes, you rate a solid wall of your own to bang your head against).

  Rule 34: If you can imagine it, there’s pornography about it on the Internet. “It” is the generic “it”—cars, mobile phones, two girls/one cup—grotesquery knows no limit. Originally a throw-away gag in a web comic, popularized by the denizens of 4chan, Rule 34 has come to dominate your life: Because if you turn it on its head and start looking at the net.porn, sooner or later you have to ask, Is whatever is depicted here happening on my beat?

  ICIU isn’t about porn (the war on porn is long since lost, though none dare admit it) so much as it’s about Internet memes—random clumps of bad headmeat that have climbed out of their skulls to go walkabout on the web. Often they’re harmless—a craze for silly captions on cute cat photographs—but sometimes they’re horrendous: And fuckwits see this stuff and think it’s cool, so they imitate it. It was bad enough back in the noughties when it was just happy slappers posting videos of muggings on YouTube; these days a meme can migrate from some cam-wearing pervert’s head in the Philippines and have local copy-cats slashing prostitutes in Leith and Detroit and Yokohama the same day.

  And when you mix memes with maker culture, you have something even weirder: everything from counterfeit pharmaceuticals through to design patterns for nightmares. Things that escape from the darker reaches of cyberspace and show up in suburban dungeons, eldritch fads and niche cultures that have zero local history until they detonate suddenly, leaving a pile of traumatized and bleeding civilians on your door-step.

  Your job is to police all this stuff, to chase it down from both ends—the online supply of designs and the meatspace supply of materials that turn those designs into physical artefacts. Because of resourcing constraints, you mostly focus on the former. But it’s the latter that worries you most.

  You log in to your surface, send out the short-notice meeting reminder to all concerned, and splat up the conference flows on all three walls around you. Then you lean back in your chair and speed-read as you try to catch up with a day out of the blogosphere.

  A decade and a half ago, blogging—whether writing your own or reading them on the job—would pull you a formal disciplinary hearing. Now it’s part of the work-load, and they grade you according to how many comments your postings get. You—and about three thousand senior ICIS professionals in other jurisdictions around the planet—share the work of monitoring the net and tracking the spread of disturbing new trends. You pool the stuff your tame porn monkeys throw up, and they do likewise. There are mailing lists and chat rooms and regular face-to-face international conferences for meme cops to attend. Every week—or more frequently, if necessary—you send out a bulletin for CID and U Division and everyone who needs to be aware of the latest nasty surprises. Several times a day you field puzzled enquiries from officers trying to get their heads around something that just disnae make sense; and you’ve got your own investigations to run, nosing into anything ICIS dredges up that looks like it originated in your town.

  CopSpace is all-encompassing these days, with gateways into the sprawling Interpol and Europol franchises. And your occupation is very atemporal, very post-post-modern. So your first real job of the day is to set up a query agent to look for case files containing Viagra, spammers, homicide, and enemas in close proximity. Then you add a personal note to a co-ordination wave, asking if anyone else has seen anything relevant; tweedle a brief announcement of the facts of the case (suitably blinded) in case any of your colleagues in other jurisdictions have useful suggestions: and on your public blog, ask if any MOPs who were in the vicinity of Mikey Blair’s demesne would like to drop by for tea and a chat. Only then do you get to start sifting through your regular inbox and prioritizing the day’s routine work-load.

  Item: There’s a Person of Repeated Interest in Pilton who’s just turned up at the Royal Infirmary with forty sutures in his lower back, a nasty case of MRSA, and a missing kidney. Question from CID, Do we have an organlegging problem or is this just punishment surgery?

  Item: a Person of Repeated Interest in Cramond has been found unconscious in a gutter, sporting unusual leg injuries. Recovering in hospital, officers called to deal with the reported shooting incident took possession of the recovered projectiles—ultrahard plastic spheres about a centimetre in diameter that show signs of having been produced on an unregistered fabber, invisible on X-ray, which had been fired into the meniscal cartilage of each knee at point-blank range. PORI is being uncooperative: Are there reports of kneecapping using this MO elsewhere on the net?

  Item: We recently lifted another PORI in Craigmillar on a public-order charge. IT Forensics found his phone contained numerous videos which we are treating as Extreme Pornography as per CJ&L(S) (2009). A query with cause on the NPFIT database failed to identify where he downloaded this material—it certainly wasn’t logged over the public Internet. Query: What should we be looking for? Blacknet, sneakernet, or some other option?

  This is the problem with being on the Rule 34 Squad: You get to wade through everyone else’s shit, but your own case resolution metric is in the tank. For example, if you could get the resources to track down where the feedstock for that metal-hard polymer the black hats are putting through their fabbers is coming into the city from, you could follow it to the customers and shut the bastards down for a very long time indeed (Firearms Act, 1968, as amended). If ICIU was classified as a support unit rather than a bastard offshoot of CID you’d be in the clover. But it isn’t, so you’re expected to spend your time running dumb-ass web searches on behalf of the real detectives—support unit stuff—while trying to meet utterly inappropriate performance metrics for arrests and convictions. No gold star for you.

  On the other hand, CID can’t do without the Rule 34 squad these days, doing the stuff nobody else wants to take on. So you get to keep this job so that they don’t need to sit in ancient Aeron chairs all day, drinking bad coffee and staring up the Goatse-shaped ring-piece of the prolapsed, ulcerous arse-meat of the Internet until their eye-balls melt.

  The members of your constantly rotating pool of Internet porn monkeys typically last three months on the team; then they flee screaming back to the blessed relief of patrolling the sinkhole estates and vomit-splattered pub doorways of the wrong side of town. Most of them are volunteers—officers who figure a few months off their feet in a nice warm office with a nanny-free net feed is a soft touch next to collaring neds in Craigmillar or public-order headcases off Lothian Road. Oddly, they don’t often come back for a second tour of duty in bad head park. A small subset are here reluctantly: You figure some of the more unscrupulous brass in E Division may be using ICIU as a punishment posting.

  But for y
ou, there’s no escape. The Internet amplifies everything. You’d thought you’d seen the lot, you with your background in homicide and computer crime and years on the beat. You’ve seen rape and murder and the vileness that men and women do to one another. But the horror of their actions pales into insignificance compared to what they fantasize about. And on that note, it’s just you, Moxie, Speedy, and Squeaky against the scum of the Internet: So it’s a blessed relief when you get to spend a day on the control centre desk and an evening mopping up after a guy in a gimp suit who autodarwinates with extreme prejudice.

  Keep taking the happy pills, Liz. It’s better than the alternative.

  (Didn’t you have a meeting to be going to?)

  Your meeting rolls round, and then a lengthy chat with Chief Inspector Dixon, your boss (who mostly seems to want to catch up with the latest scuttlebutt about Dickie’s dastardly deviant’s demise—prurient curiosity never goes out of fashion, even among those who ought to know better), then an hour-long mentoring session with Speedy (who is arsing around trying to make up his mind whether to go for his PIP entry exams with an eye to making inspector some year or other—not totally impossible, you will concede, but he’ll have to get his shit together and focus if he’s to have a hope).

  You attempt to put in half an hour collating the paper-work on the DNA tests on those black-market feedstock canisters that have been turning up fly-tipped in residents’ recycling bins, but there’s nothing conclusive; it’s one of those hundred–per cent under-resourced investigations that’s going to go nowhere until you find something concrete to justify the resourcing without which—

  Lunch is a speedy bowl of microwave seitan bulgogi noodles slurped down at your desk with the door shut: Then it’s on to the afternoon. First you have a dedicated off-the-hook hour for training courseware; then it’s over to room D31 to give Dickie’s DCs an off-the-cuff (and off-the-record) briefing on Michael Blair’s colourful pre-mortem history. After which it’s back to ICIU and a half-hour mentoring Constables Janie Jones and Baz MacIntyre on the banality of evil, the evil of banality, how to tell the difference between faked videos and the real thing, and the best way to keep a sense of perspective while watching vids of kittens being dropped into food processors in slomo (or whatever else the griefers are amusing themselves with today).

  Sometime during the afternoon, your phone begins to shake, rattle, and roll for your attention, requesting a personality change. At least, you think it began during midafternoon—you tend to ignore it while you’re busy. When you finally get annoyed at the desperate armwaving, you swipe the screen: It does a Jekyll-and-Hyde swap from its officious duty VM to your home phone’s personality.

  You have face-mail. “Liz?” It’s Dorothy. You startle and guiltily look over your shoulder, but the door’s shut. “Long time no see. Uh . . . I’m in town again? And I was wondering if, if you’d like to meet up? I’m free tonight, if that’s convenient, or we could talk?”

  Well, that’s a turn-up. But it also up-ends all your carefully controlled tranquillity. You and Dorothy have history. (Or herstory.) Your heart beats faster for a moment, the phone clammy in your palm. “I—” You stop. Talking to voice mail: ungood. You text her back, quickly, suggesting meeting up in a friendly wine bar in the new town. Then you take a deep breath and swipe your phone back to its on-duty persona. You take another deep breath as you try to gather your scattered thoughts. You’re not sure how you feel about this; it’s been months, hasn’t it? But suddenly you feel almost hopeful. Which is bad, because you’re meant to be on duty. So you turn back to the waves and streams of ICIS chatter, and see—

  KARL@Dresden, DE, 15:56 -1:00H: Hi guys we have a weird one here today! One of our local low-lifes tried to off himself in a really original way—we think. $PERP owns a fancy sun-tanning bed. (Don’t ask.) Apparently there is a common software hack to override the 10-minute maximum exposure and tanning intensity limits, and he drank half a bottle of schnapps spiked with oxazepam before getting in. Not sure why . . . Anyway, third-degree radiation burns to 95% of body! Man, those UVA LEDs are scary! There is rumour about tanning and street drugs producing endorphin high—are any similar reports?

  You’re not sure just what it is that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, but you sit there and stare at the transcript for a long moment, then air-type:

  QUERY: What is $PERP’s background?

  It’s a minute or so before Karl spots your addition and replies, during which time you’re perusing a report on trends in toxicant inhalation among youth in the seedier Parisian banlieues, then:

  $PERP is a scam artist—bulk-mailing fraud and tax evasion. Why?

  Your fingers shaking, you reply:

  Maybe nothing, but we have a weird one here, too. Our $PERP had a record: pharmaceutical spam, illegal sale of medicinal products, counterfeit goods. We are investigating as murder due to circumstances of death.

  More waiting:

  What circumstances?

  At this point you pause to authenticate Karl’s identity credentials. Karl Heyne is indeed an officer of some kind in the Kriminalpolizei in Dresden, according to your departmental authentication server. He is, in the loosest possible sense, one of your colleagues. But on the other hand—you check the department newsfeed for confirmation—Dickie has indeed escalated the case of the late Mr. Blair to Murder in the First Degree as of lunch-time, and the ironclad rule of criminal intelligence is: assimilate everything, disclose nothing. You think for another minute, then:

  I am not principal investigator. Suggest you contact DCI MacLeish (profile attached) for further information. Tell him I noted circumstantial similarity.

  (Bye.)

  At which point you could wash your hands of the whole affair and consider your duty done—but that’s not enough, is it? You stare at Karl’s note for a full minute, letting it all percolate together, trying to quantify your sense of déjà vu.

  Item: $PERP is a spammer.

  Item: $PERP is found dead, in a weird and improbable accident, at home.

  Item: rogue domestic appliances are implicated.

  Item: so are inappropriate intoxicating substances.

  Naah, that never happens, not in real life, outside of the movies. Does it?

  “Dickie will think I’m off my trolley,” you mutter to yourself. Then you pick up your phone, shake it, and speed-dial.

  “Chief Inspector? If I can have a moment . . . ? Really? That’s too bad . . . Listen, I don’t want to add to your work-load, but I have a possible lead from—it’s a long shot—Germany. Yes, it’s intelligence-led. They’ve got a circumstantially similar case on their hands in the past twenty-four hours. No . . . Not exactly the same, but I spotted at least four points of similarity. So far, no, no, they’re still treating it as accidental-but-weird. No, I know. I told him I’m not the lead, gave him your details. Yes, I—I’m sorry, but in my judgement there’s something very fishy about it, and I think you need to talk to the man. No I—no. Look, you know what I do, don’t you? I’m here to watch for—well shit.”

  You put the phone down carefully, in case it explodes. Or maybe in case you explode. Anger management is one of those compulsory people-skills hingmies they put you through on a regular basis; clearly Dickie’s overdue for his next refresher.

  You can fully appreciate how busy he is, and how he’s got the brass breathing down his neck—Scotland as a nation gets about a hundred murders a year, but Edinburgh accounts for less than a tenth of that—and you know this is but a circumstantial what-the-fuck? indicator, most likely a coincidence. But there’s no call to bite your head off. If Dickie disnae want to carry it, he can always fob you off on one of his minions. There is absolutely no fucking call to swear at a fellow officer like that, much less a sometime classmate, and it is indicative of a distinct lack of respect and professionalism, and you have half a mind to—

  No, scratch that. Leave the formal complaint for some other time, when he isn’t being shat on from above
and trying to juggle a murder investigation and his regular case-load. Now is not the time to go nuclear, whether or not Dickie deserves it. You’ve had years of practice at swallowing this shit. Often as not, they don’t even realize they’re dishing it out: coming from a macho subculture, gobbling pints and proton-pump inhibitors to keep their stomachs from exploding with all the bile and suppressed rage that goes with the job—no. Just no. Bottle it up for later.

  And speaking of bottling it, you put in three and a half hours of overtime yesterday, it’s forty minutes to end of shift right now, and if you don’t claw back some personal space, HR will notice and send you on a mandatory work/rest chakra-rebalancing course again (because the new-age hippie counselling shit is cheaper than paying for stress-related sick-leave).

  Anyway, haven’t you got a date?

  It’s time to go home and shower, then off to the wine bar to see what Dorothy wants—whether it’s you, or just a familiar face in a strange town. And to maybe bring down the wall and get comfortably numb for a few hours before you climb back into the broken hamster wheel of your career and scamper round again and again . . .

  Maybe you didn’t know it at the time, but you and Dorothy have been friends for, oh, ever so long. Since maybe back before you were in primary two and Miss Simpson started in on the utterly bowdlerized sexed coursework, which was all they were allowed to hand out back then. Back in the early nineties, in the dog days of Section 28—the part of the Local Government Act that banned local councils and education authorities from admitting that homosexuality even existed, much less allowing teachers to tell isolated kids that being destined for the Adam and Steve alternative didn’t mean they were pariahs or perverts—back then, even aged eight, you’d figured out for yourself that this stuff was all wrong. You’ll never get me to do that with a boy. Well, maybe—but why bother? It’s an awful lot of hard work—and no little mess—for something that doesn’t look much like anything you’d call fun.