Rule 34

(yeast).

Add water (320ml to 500g Bread Mix), place in bread-maker, and select “wholemeal rapid” program.

Your shuddering gasp of relief is that of a condemned man receiving his pardon on the steps of the gallows; it’s no less heart-felt. You lean back in your chair, eyes screwed shut. You’ve never been much of one for your daily observations, but right now you make a mental note to lay in a prayer rug against the prospect of future roving visits by feral international trade delegations. God is indeed great: He’s sent you organic stone-ground bread mix instead of heroin.

The only question is, why? And so at four o’clock you switch on call divert, lock the office behind you, and go in search of the Gnome.

This afternoon, Adam is holding court in the back of the Halfway House, a wee nook alongside Fleshmarket Close, an improbably stepped thoroughfare that runs up the arse crack from the City Art Gallery to Cockburn Street. (You know you’re in the Old Town when the street’s so steep they’ve been talking about fitting an escalator for the tourists.) You take a short-cut through the upper retail deck of Waverley Station, dodging the commuter crowds, and reach the front door with only a slight shortness of breath. “Ah, Anwar,” calls the Gnome: “Mine’s a pint of sixty bob.”

Bloody typical. You sidle up to the bar and smile ingratiatingly until the wee lassie deigns to notice you and pours your pints—your IPA and the aforementioned sticky black treacle syrup for the Gnome. You carry it to the back. The Gnome smacks his lips and slides his pad away. “I didn’t think there was any signal down here,” you say.

“There isn’t usually.” The Gnome looks pleased with his pint of mild. “Mm, it’s in fine form today. Chewy, with a fine malt aftertaste and some interesting hops.”

You open your messenger bag, extricate the (slightly leaky) sack of bread mix, and plop it on the table in front of him. “Would it go with this?”

The Gnome stares at it for a moment, then picks it up. “You scanned it,” he says tersely. “Where did you get it?”

“No RFIDs,” you tell him. “Only the best organic ingredients, said the visiting trade delegation. I’m to hand them out to visitors, according to Colonel Datka.” You chug half your pint in a single panicky sharp-edged gulp. “What have you got me into?”

The Gnome, for once, is at a loss for words. “I dinna ken, sonny,” he says, lapsing into a self-parody of his ancestral Ayrshire accent. “Sorry. It appears to be . . . Bread mix.” He peers at the label. “Lots of malted barley: I suppose you could use it for home brewing. Some hops, a couple of demijohns, the yeast’s probably not ideal . . .” He trails off thoughtfully. Then he looks up at you. “It’s bread mix,” he says crisply. “Tell yourself it’s just bread mix. Give it to anyone who stops by. Tell them it’s bread mix. If by some chance the police pay you a visit? It’s just bread mix.”

You’ve got that frozen feeling again. “Fucking fuck, are you telling me—”

The Gnome reaches out and grabs your wrist. “It’s just bread mix,” he hisses. He stabs at the bag with one index finger: “If you put that in your bread-maker—if you’ve got one—it will make bread. End of story. That’s all you need to know.”

You pull your hand back. “No it isn’t.”

“Believe me,” he says slowly.

You cross your arms, mulish. “Tell me. Or it’s all going down the shitter tonight.”

He begins to smile. “I wouldn’t do that. Dough tends to clog the pipes. Just think of the plumber’s face . . .”

Despite yourself, you begin to relax. “What is it, really?”

The Gnome fidgets with his drink for a few seconds, then takes a mouthful and wipes his lips dry with the back of a grubby sleeve whose self-cleaning fabric he’s long since overloaded. “It’s bread mix. What you mean is, what else is it.”

“What? What else can it be?”

“Keep thinking that thought.” He smiles disquietingly. “Probably nothing, without Secret Ingredient X.” He whistles between his teeth. “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”

“Secret Ingredient X?”

“You read about so much stuff in the science blogs these days.” The Gnome holds up his pint. “Zymurgy: the oldest human science.”

“Zy—”

“Fermentation. Brewing. Saccharomyces cerevisiae, brewer’s yeast. It was one of the first organisms to have its genome sequenced, you know that? It’s used in baking as well; it’s what makes the bread rise.” He picks up the packet. “This bread mix is interesting. You could brew with it. The beer would probably taste like shit—it doesn’t have any hops—but it’ll still be beer.” And with that, he slides it into one capacious coat pocket.

You take another deep gulp from your pint glass. “So?”

“So think of S. cerevisiae as a handy little biological factory.” The Gnome peers at the bag of bread mix. “Normally it’ll produce bread. But suppose you want to send some interesting chemical feedstock to someone. All they need to know is that they chuck the bread mix in a sterile demijohn with five or ten litres of warm water. And then . . . It produces crap beer. Only before they put it in the demijohn, they add Secret Ingredient X, which is probably some dietary supplement you can buy over the counter in any health-food shop. And in the presence of Secret Ingredient X, some extra metabolic pathway gets switched on, because this is not your ordinary S. cerevisiae; this is mutant ninja genetically engineered superyeast.”

“But what does it make?”

The Gnome finishes his pint and meets you with a bright-eyed smile. “I really have no idea. And you know what? I don’t particularly want to know. You don’t want to know. Colonel Datka doesn’t want you to know; otherwise, he’d have told you. It’s a lot simpler if all anybody knows is that you’ve been told to hand out free samples of organic bread mix by your employer’s trade delegation. Oh, and we didn’t have this conversation, and we weren’t in the back of a pub where there’s sod-all phone signal and no free net access and no CCTV because it’s quarried out of the side of a granite cliff-face. Are we singing from the same hymn book?”

After a moment, you nod. “Is this what you were asking me to keep an eye out for?”

“Could be.” The Gnome reaches into one pocket and pulls out a fat lump of dead cow-skin, as battered and shapeless as if it has been whacked with a hammer. He opens it and pulls out a stack of bank-notes. “This is for you. Don’t spend them all in the same place.”

You reach out and snatch the money. There’s the thick end of a thousand euros there, maybe more. Before the savage deflation of the past few years, you might have thought he was cheaping on you. But not now. It’s enough to pay the mortgage arrears for three months. “I don’t know if I should be doing this.”

The Gnome’s grin slips. “Neither do I, laddie, neither do I.” He puts the wallet away, then pats you on the knee. “But just consider the alternatives.”

TOYMAKER: Headhunter

Ants. I am surrounded by fucking ants. Can’t they get anything right?

This is not rocket science. (Rocket science: fucking 1930s shit invented by Nazi ubermensch engineers and so easy that by the 1990s even a bunch of camel-fucking towel-heads could master it.)

This is not AI. (Artificial intelligence: fucking 1950s shit invented by Jew-boy intellectuals at Stanford and MIT and so useless that by the 1990s its highest achievement was beating a vodka-swilling Russian commie dog-