Rule 34

closes behind you. There’s a puff of air from the explosive detectors below, a beep, and the lift door opens before you. Thirty seconds later, you’re standing in a narrow corridor, outside a glass door and an entryphone. You push the buzzer. “Mr. Christie? Please come in, it’s the second office on the left,” says a Scottish-accented voice.

You silently repeat your line as you walk along to the second door and arrive as a thirtyish British-Asian man in a cheap suit pulls it open and looks up at you with a peculiarly bovine expression. “What can I do for you?”

“Colonel Datka sent me.” You can see the key turning in the lock behind his petrified eyes. “I’m here to collect some papers. And I have a little job for you.”

Interlude 1 KEMAL: Spamcop

Welcome to the postnational age.

Here you are, sitting in the window-seat of a creaky old Embraer as it makes its final approach into Edinburgh airport, banking over the tidal barrage and the wind farms in the Firth of Forth: It’s been five years since your only previous visit, and not long enough by far.

Eggs and spam.

Back then, you had the glamour and the mojo, the whole Men in Black thing working for you: the Europol supercop from l’Organisation pour Nourrir et Consolider L’Europe, travelling with a tiger team of forensic analysts and a digitally signed email from the Judge d’Inquisition to hand in case you needed to steam-roller your way across the objections of a provincial police force who didn’t realize what they were dealing with. Except things went terribly wrong—the national-security dinosaurs rising from their uneasy sleep, opening the closet doors to draw forth a conga line of dancing skeletons. It still gives you the cold shudders, thinking about the ease with which a couple of teams of coke-fuelled black-hat Shanghainese hackers rooted the network backbones of a pair of peripheral states: And the shit you stumbled into out here on the edge of the North Sea was as nothing compared to what your colleagues had to clean up in Gdansk and Warsaw. Not to mention the chewing out your boss Francois gave you during your performance eval the following spring. Black marks on the Man in Black’s record. And the rudeness of the Scottish police—that really rankled. Professional respect: Have these people never heard of it?

Eggs, ham, and spam.

The plane’s wings buzz angrily as flaps extend: The wave-crests are an endless tessellation of white triangles below, marred by the wake of a sailboat. Four years in career limbo, reassigned to Business Affairs and buried leech deep in the bowels of the Department of Internet Fraud. Four years spent in a pokey little office in a corner of Madou Plaza Tower, where flies buzz madly beneath the chilly glare of LED spotlights, patiently paging through reams of spam in search of the websites of the idiots who pay to rent botnets by the hour—

Eggs, ham, sausage, and spam.

Some say the Internet is for porn; but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam. As communication technologies got cheaper, the cost of grabbing a megaphone and jamming it up against the aching ear-drums of an advertising-jaded public collapsed: Meanwhile, the content-is-king mantra of the monetization mavens gridlocked the new media in an advertising-supported business model. The great and the good of the Academy have been fighting a losing battle against the Anglo-Saxon hucksterization model for the past thirty years: But the sad truth is that the battle’s lost. The tide of war was turned in Beijing and New Delhi, when the rapidly industrializing new superpowers climbed on the MAKE MONEY FAST band-wagon and gave free rein to the free market, red in tooth and claw—just as long as the sharp bits were directed outwards. And today the entire world is still drowning in a sea of attention-grabbing unregulated unethical untruthful spamvertising.

Spam, ham, sausage, and spam.

The white-noise roar of the cabin air-conditioning is augmented by a new noise, the wind rush from around the open nose-wheel door as the landing gear drops.

Most of the public don’t notice it, but the war on spam goes ever on, and it’s a war on two fronts. One front, your own, is fought by battalions of law-enforcement officers and prosecutors. The most egregious junk sells hard goods—stuff with a physical shipping address—to the vulnerable; fake pharmaceuticals to die by, trashy Tanzanian machine-tool parts, unlicensed herbal supplements from Nigeria, counterfeit designer clothes and handbags and heart valves made of shoe-leather. They show up, you order the goods, backtrace through courier and logistics to the mother-lode, obtain a warrant, pop goes the weasel, round and round the merry-go-round.

Spam, eggs, spam, spam, ham, and spam.

The brigades of system administrators and programmers on the other front tackle the problem from the opposite end, with ever-more-elaborate AI filters that scan message traffic and tell ham from spam. Ninety-five per cent of all human-readable traffic over the net is spam, a figure virtually unchanged since the late noughties. There are dumb filters and smart filters. Dumb filters look for naughty words. Smart filters look for patterns of diction that are characteristic of automatically assembled text—for much spam is generated by drivel-speaking AI, designed purely to fool the smart filters by convincing them that it’s the effusion of a real human being and of interest to the recipients. Slowly but surely the Turing Test war proceeds, as the spammers are forced to invest in ever-more- elaborate AI engines to generate conversations that can temporarily convince the spamcops’ AI engines that they are in fact human beings.

Spam, sausage, spam, spam, spam, ham, spam, potato, and spam.

And still you’re losing.

There’s a bump and rumble, and you’re shoved forward against your lap-belt as the regional jet’s thrust reversers cut in. Welcome to the Republic of Scotland, semi-privatized satrapy of the former United Kingdom and sock-puppet independent vote on the Council of Ministers—soon to acquire the extra clout of a pair of senators, once the tedious ratification treaty completes and the European Parliament upgrades to a fully bicameral legislature. You’re back, and this time you don’t have a posse of high-powered forensic analysts behind you, or diplomatic letters of marque and reprise, or much of anything in fact: just a dossier, a disturbing-to-terrifying trend analysis from a research team in the Sorbonne, and a suggestive pattern of murders smeared bloody-handed across the width and depth of the EU.

Spam, spam, spam, murder, and spam.

Seventy years of research and development into artificial intelligence failed to deliver HAL 9000, but they did provide a huge array of toolkits for tackling complex problems. Today, in the wake of the bursting of the worldwide higher-education bubble, the big funding sources in computational artificial-intelligence research are computer games and cognitive marketing services, from personalized message generation to automated spear phishing. Some say the spammers are pouring more money into Minsky’s inheritors than the US Department of Defense ever imagined. The spamcops retaliate. There’s an arms race in progress, and some experts mutter dark warnings of the Spamularity: the global chaos that will ensue once the first distributed spamming engine achieves human-equivalent sentience. Possibly the only thing holding it back is the multi-tiered nature of the darknet economy: Malware that supports spamware frequently carries virus-scanning payloads that immunize host computers and phones against rival strains of infection. After all, it’s a free-market economy, red in tooth and claw: And if you can’t count on a state to keep the opposition in check, you’ve got to see to your security yourself.

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked memes, spam, spam, spam, and spam.

This week, for the first time in a couple of years, the machine-generated spew has faltered significantly. Most of the usual darknets are still vomiting forth the gibber fantastic, but their core semantic networks aren’t updating: It’s the same flavour of froth as last week’s, and thereby easier to filter out. No new botnets have surfaced, switching from build-out to broadcast mode: There has been a curious absence of new malware strains. Spam has actually fallen. It would be glad tidings, indeed, if not for the puzzling question of why. And those unsolved killings. Which is what your superiors have sent you to look into in Edinburgh: They skimmed the bullet point in your resume and mistakenly assumed you’d be at home here, able to work hand in glove with the locals. Truly the jaws of irony are agape!

The battle against spam had grown into a bitter trench war fought on two fronts—and now a new front has