Rule 34

wife to a bunch of hairy-legged feminist separatist fundamentalists fills you with horror.

“Please, Bibi, it’s not like that! I only want what’s best for the bairns. If I don’t work, what kind of role model am I going to be for them? But the idiots in the probation service don’t want me to use my skills—”

“I think you mean they don’t want you to get yourself slung back inside for breaking the law. And do you know something, oh my husband? Neither do I! If this was just about the dodgy bread mix, I could ignore it. Or maybe if it was just the odd job for Tariq. I can even ignore the other stuff. I’m not blind. I know what our marriage is to you.” She leans towards you and sniffs. “But he’s had you in that pub again, hasn’t he? And you couldn’t even be bothered to hide it! You smell of beer. Mouthwash right now, or you’ll set them a bad example.” Her nostrils flare. “My mother would have a fit.”

“Sammy isn’t here,” you say defensively. “And anyway, I only had one pint—”

“Oh yes, just one pint. That’s like being a little bit pregnant, or just one casual sex partner, or just one arrest and criminal conviction. Or just one scam at a time. What does it take to get through to you? You’ve got to learn to think ahead! You’ve got to be more discreet!”

You blink at her. The anger seems to have ebbed into wide-eyed confusion. She’s really worried, you realize. It’s not just a bad day in the dispensary, so let’s yell at the house-husband (though that’s happened in the past). What’s got into her? Then another thought strikes you. “You said it’s changing hands for sixty euros a bag. Do you know who’s paying that much for it? I know where to get more; we could clean up—”

That night, you get to bed down on the attic floor, with the burping brew-kit airlock to keep you company as you try to work out exactly what you said wrong.

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 . . .

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.

And for the icing on the shit-cake, my fucking 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.

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?)

“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.”

“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.

“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.”