Rule 34

Kemal is shaking his head emphatically. “It’s not political.” That’s hard to argue with. What kind of regular terrorist would target spammers?

The car cruises past a gaggle of uniformed school-children on the pavement: That’s an extra half million in damages in the parallel universe where you’re supposed to have your hands on the wheel. “So who do you think it is?” you ask him.

“Not who but what.” He clams up, jaw shut.

“Uh-huh.” Does not compute. “In my experience, crimes usually have perpetrators.”

“But this is not a normal crime,” asserts Kemal. “It is a cluster of anomalous deaths, distributed geographically but sharing a common je ne sais quoi, and occurring nearly simultaneously. This is not the, the symptom of normal criminal activity, no?”

“Oh, bullshit. Next thing you’ll be telling me, it’s aliens or artificial intelligence or some other science-fictional nonsense.”

He’s looking at you intently. “It all depends on what you mean by artificial intelligence.”

You blink rapidly. “How many kinds could there be?” The ocular tic sets CopSpace in a tizzy, flashing through stacks of overlays that flicker across the staid stone-fronted houses: prevalence of porn downloads, undischarged ASBOs, unclosed burglary tickets. “Has someone been building HAL 9000 in their basement, then?”

The car slows, then turns into a side-street. “Not to the best of my knowledge.” Kemal looks unhappy. “But I have been spending too much time tracking fraudsters on the Internet,” he adds elliptically. “The spammers, they are ingenious. The programmers have a saying, you know? ‘If we understand how we do it, it isn’t artificial intelligence anymore.’ Playing chess, driving cars, generating conversational text that can convince humans it’s an old friend and please to click on this download link.” He clears his throat. “You use Internet search engines, don’t you?”

“What, like Google?”

“The programmers have another saying: ‘The question of whether a machine can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.’ The search engines, they are not artificial intelligences, synthetic consciousnesses. They don’t need to be. Perhaps we overestimate consciousness? After all, the spam filters everyone uses—you may not think you’re using one, but your service providers handle the job on your behalf—are very good at telling human beings from bots. And the bots are good, too: They get better and better at emulating human communication, insinuating themselves into our conversations, all the time. For the past three years, they have been able to pass a noniterative Turing Test administered by human beings more often than real human controls. We can’t distinguish spam from ham—not as reliably as our filters. And the filters are still fallible even though they are learning all the time.”

You’ve had enough of this bullshit. “With respect, Inspector Aslan, I don’t see what this has to do with our culpable homicide investigation. Spam fil—software didn’t reach out of the net and spike Mr. Blair’s enema fluid: There’s a human agency involved at some level, and that’s what we’re going to find. Now I will grant you”—you catch yourself on the edge of finger-wagging, and issue yourself a cease and desist (just like the persuasion counsellor warned you to)—“someone may be using spam filters to track and to trace criminals involved in the bulk advertising industry, but you’re not going to convince me that there’s some, some murderous piece of software that’s out to kill—” You’re almost spluttering, and that’s even more of a C&D situation when it comes to influencing people: So you make yourself stop.

Kemal is looking at you with a heavy-lidded expression that gives you a weird shiver of deja vu.

“You are correct: Spam filters do not kill,” he says calmly. “But people using spam filters to backtrace and select their targets are another matter.”

“But why?” You shake your head. “It doesn’t make sense!”

“I agree with you,” he says with exaggerated, acidic dignity. “But somebody is killing them. Our task is to discover who, is it not?”

The car slows, then noses into a hotel car-park, while you’re trying to come up with a sufficiently scathing rejoinder. Then you suddenly remember where you’ve seen his expression before: in the bathroom mirror, this very morning, while you were choking on the sure knowledge that you knew something important about the Blair investigation, but that Dodgy Dickie was certain not to give you the time of day.

Mote, eye, redux.

Kemal doesn’t say another word as the car parks itself, but his expression says it all for him. “I need ten minutes to drop my bag,” he says, opening the car door.

“Of course.” You climb out of the Volvo and collect his wheelie-bag from the boot. The car beeps and shuts down behind you as you take the escalator up to the lobby. You install yourself in an understuffed leather sofa at one side as Kemal does his business with the self-service check-in, picks up a keycard, and is whisked upstairs to salaryman limbo.

Kemal gives you just enough time to do the necessary one-eighty reorientation and get your shit squared away. You’re just finishing up a memo to Doc—necessary clearances for Kemal—when he reappears. “That was fast.”

“I said I only needed time to drop my bag.” You could swear he looks wounded, but those big brown eyes of his make it his default state. “Are we going now?”

“In a moment.” You fold your desktop away into a corner of your left eye and lever yourself ungracefully out of the sofa. Then you dust yourself down. “There’s a passable coffee shop round the corner,” you tell him. “I think you and I ought to go there and discuss the, the spam thing over a latte. Before I take you round the shop and get you into the system.”

He gives you the hairy eye-ball. “What is there to discuss.” It’s not inflected as a question.

“We started out on the wrong foot.” You take a deep breath. “I apologize, for what it’s worth. I’ll give you a fair hearing. But you need to know what you’re walking into before you stick your nose round the incident-room door.”

Kemal exhales. “Politics?”

“You could say that.”

“I think a small espresso would be a good idea,” he concedes.

“In that case . . .”

You’re not entirely sure why the sudden turnaround with respect to Kemal, but there are several factors feeding in to it. It’s hard to stay furious at an abstract, and meeting him face-to-face you recognize only too clearly the stink of failure to launch. You may have been treading water for five years, but Kemal’s spent them sliding down the greasy pole. Stripped of the Eurocop arrogance and the entourage of Men in Black, he’s just a sad-faced little cop with a brief-case full of nightmares. And then there’s the matter in hand: Eight deaths.

You don’t owe Kemal the time of day, but it’d be grossly, unforgivably unprofessional to let your personal dislike get in the way of his investigation.

Sitting in the fake-eighties bachelor-pad bistro-hell coffee shop, you lay it all out for him. “You’re walking in on a high-profile murder investigation. Lead investigator is Detective Chief Inspector Dickie MacLeish; he and I have a history, and it’s not a good one. To be fair, he has a headache because firstly, Edinburgh usually gets maybe one murder a month, and secondly, the victim in this investigation had money and connections. He’s under the spotlight already, and adding a foreign connection is—”

CopSpace clears its throat discreetly. You hold up a cautioning hand to Kemal and glance at the incoming. It takes a second or two to make sense of it, then you swear under your breath. It’s a FLASH broadcast from the virtual situation room, which is exceptional in its own right—they’d usually only do that to alert everyone to an arrest warrant for a dangerous fugitive. This one is even more unusual. “Nine,” you tell Kemal.

His face, glimpsed through a slew of rapidly accreting wikinotes, doesn’t look remotely surprised. “Who?” he asks.

“One Vivian Crolla, accountant by trade.” You read swiftly, then take in the preliminary crime-scene scans. “Jesus.” You can’t help yourself: “Somebody shrink-wrapped her to a mattress full of banknotes—”

“They what?” Now he raises an eyebrow.