Rule 34

There’s a time to stand on your work/life balance metric, and a time to throw the rule-book out the window. Dorothy is clearly frightened—so scared it took her three cocktails and a presumptively bug-free bar to open up to you. Unfortunately, a lot of what she told you is as confidential as the contents of your own ongoing investigations (i.e. it’s a honking great disciplinary—or even criminal—offence to talk about it out of school), not to mention reeking of some kind of artificial reality game to anyone who doesn’t know that she really is a chartered social-pathology analyst who works for the Department of Trade and Industry’s Ethical Oversight Inspectorate. (A fancy way of saying she’s a canary in the kind of coal mine where they call the Serious Fraud Office to deal with the cave-ins.)

So, despite being off duty, you put the battery back in your phone and file, in quick succession: an open case report (“female reports being trailed by unidentified male”) with a note that this is subject to investigation under the Protection from Harassment Act; a note for the intelligence desk (subject reports threatening behaviour: Due to sensitive nature of employment they suspect a possible violation of Whistleblower Protection Act); and finally a memo to yourself (“look into organized crime/connection with Issyk-Kulistan”), which you will probably off-load onto Moxie’s overflowing to-do heap on the morrow.

The latter might be treading dangerously close to misuse of police resources for personal gain, but your soft-shoe shuffle if anyone asks will revolve around a third-party tip-off about persons of interest to an ongoing organized-crime investigation in another force area: At worst, the skipper will yell at you and deliver his #3 Not Getting Distracted lecture again.

All of which adds up to this: If Dorothy needs to talk to a control-room officer in a hurry, they’ll clock her CopSpace trail, realize that a detective inspector’s taking her concerns seriously, and listen. (Probably.) Which is the sort of thing that sometimes saves lives, and certainly you’ll sleep a wee bit more soundly for knowing she’s safe under the watching eyes of your colleagues. “That’s filed,” you tell her, and yawn. “Are you going to be okay for the now?”

“I’ll have to be.” She smiles shakily as she stands up. “I’ll not be asking you to come up to my room.” She rolls her eyes in the direction of the camera dome behind the bar, and you don’t have the heart to remind her that for every one she can see, there’ll be at least two that she doesn’t. “Saturday . . . your place?”

You stand up, too. “It’s yours. If you want to come back with me tonight—”

She leans forward, and of an instant you’re hugging each other. Her breath is hot against your neck. “Better not,” she murmurs. “If I’m really being watched, I’m contagious. All the same, I’m going to check into a different hotel tomorrow and hope it throws them, whoever they are.”

“Sounds like a good idea.”

“I think so. So. Are we on for the weekend?”

“If you want—”

She turns her head and kisses you hard on the mouth. You swallow a gasp, suddenly acutely aware that you’re in public—then she pulls back, leaving your lips tingling. “Yes, I want. Good night, darling.” Her smile is a fey thing. It fades as she walks towards the lobby, leaving you standing by the table, your nipples tight, your breath stolen, and your head full of harm.

ANWAR: Diplomat

Over the next four days you fall into a comfortable work-day pattern. Get out of bed, go to the bathroom and get dressed and go downstairs to the kitchen, where Bibi has just about finished getting the breakfast down the bairns before she heads out to sign into the pharmacy at the Leith Walk Tesco. You drink a glass of tea, eat your muesli, grab your phone, and kiss Bibi good-bye. From your front door, it’s twenty minutes to the office on foot or, if it’s pishing down, thirty minutes by way of a quick dash to a shelter and a long wait for the tram.

Not much happens at the office. A couple of times a day, some chancer rings your buzzer, wanting a bag of bread mix and a novelty tourist brochure. (You’ve got a stack of the things in a cardboard display by the door; they cycle tiredly through a grey-scale slide show of yaks, yurts, and tractor factories—the Ministry of Tourism’s budget doesn’t stretch to colour e-ink, let alone hiring a photographer to update their archive footage.) You sadistically abuse the rubber plant whenever you can be bothered and expense a couple of big colour picture frames for the wall, loaded with the least-kitsch corners of the Ministry’s wallpaper archive—mostly mountains and mosques—to make it look more like an authentic consulate.

On day three, a certain existential anomie sets in. So you amuse yourself with your bootleg phone and specs: You pull down your favourite procedural wallpaper from the cloud and overlay the bare, beige office walls with a gigantic play-space hosting an improbable orgy-themed mashup from XXXMen and BackRoomBoyz. It’s machinima-generated real-time porn, and you don’t want to look at their faces for too long or you’ll get creeped out by the inbred uncanny valley features, but all that pumping and writhing and sucking is a good distraction from the fact that is slowly sneaking up on you: You’re bored.

Here you are in your good business suit, sitting at a desk in the consulate, prim and proper as can be, like a maiden aunt haunted by fantasies of debauchery. And there is nothing to fucking do. Welcome to boredomspace. Since you hung out your shingle you have entertained one visiting trade delegation, six assorted shifty-eyed locals in search of a loaf, two adventurous backpackers, a yak-milk importer looking to make an end-run around EU animal-husbandry regulations, and seven confused visitors looking for the games company upstairs.

There are, of course, the language lessons: On your own initiative you’ve expensed a set of Rosetta Stone courseware on Kyrgyz, and you’re trying to spend half an hour a day on it. But you’ve never had much of a knack for language study, you keep tripping over the Cyrillic alphabet, and the spoken tongue sounds like you’re gargling rusty nails (and leaves your throat feeling like it, too). Google Translate doesn’t handle Kyrgyz very well: Luckily the Ministry of Foreign Affairs conducts all their correspondence in mangled English. You really wouldn’t bother except for a nagging sense that at the next interview, it might be good to know what they’re saying behind your back.

In the end, you find yourself reading the small print on the back of a bag of bread mix and thinking about what the Gnome said about home brew. Shite beer, he’d said, unless you add a cofactor. Well, it’s not like you know a lot about brewing to begin with, is it? So you hop on the web and, at considerable risk to your soul, begin searching for websites dedicated to the unclean pursuit.

When the buzzer goes off, you’re queasily engrossed in an account of certain jail-cell antics involving buckets, sugar, yeast, and unspeakable contaminants. The things neds will do to get off their heids . . . you jump, swear quietly, and hit the entryphone button. “Come in.”

You’re standing up when the door opens. Your visitor is probably white underneath the grime, walks with an odd shuffle, and could benefit from a shower and a session at a launderette. He’s probably about twenty and painfully thin. You smile politely. “Welcome to the Issyk-Kulistan Consulate, sir. Would you mind stating your name and business?”

“Ahm Jaxxie. Icannaehingyurrrbagaffbreidmix, likesay?”

Oh, he’s one of them. You nod sympathetically, walk over to the trunkful of INSECT-FREE FAIR TRADE ORGANIC BREAD MIX BARLEY-RYE, and pull out a bag. “One of these?” you ask, remembering to breathe through your mouth as you approach him.

“Gimmedat hingmie.” He makes a lunge for the bag, and you pull it away from him. He wears no specs, which is probably a good thing: He doesn’t look like the type to appreciate the panting contents of the leather sling he’s standing in front of in pornspace.

“You know how to use it, right?” You stare at him. “You know about the cofactor. What is it?”

Jaxxie stares at you in confusion. “Whut?”

“The stuff you add to the bread mix when you’re making beer. What is it?”

“Whut? Ayedinnaekenyeraxent, man. Whityurwantin?”

“What. Have. You. Been. Told. To. Add. To. This. When. You. Brew?” You hold the bag up. Jaxxie’s eyes track the bag like a dog hoping for a treat, oblivious to the gamine sailor boy and the pair of huge leather bears