Rule 34

perhaps if he’d paid his property taxes a little more promptly, things could have turned out differently.)

They called you into the principal’s office while it was happening, and you sat there obediently, just like a serious and sober kid—the kind who would never dream of figuring out his guardian’s password, logging in, and emailing ranting threats of physical mayhem to the IRS agents who were threatening Al with an audit because he’d declared an income of under five hundred bucks for the third year running.

The raid was inevitably followed by a brisk exchange of opinions— 9mm for .357—followed by the arrival of a disappointingly non-black helicopter to evacuate Uncle Albert to the nearest trauma unit, where he was declared dead three hours later. But even in dying, Uncle Al tried to fuck you up. The coroner’s verdict wasn’t even suicide by cop: The last, most unforgivable insult Uncle Al heaped on you was to shoot off the top of his own brain-pan, thus neatly side-stepping the embarrassment of actually leaving Eileen, you, and the girls anything by way of his cheap life-insurance policy. (Even if Eileen hadn’t been on her way to jail on her own behalf for greeting the sheriff’s man with a .22 rifle.)

Anyway, you ended up in the children’s home for a while, and that’s when they discovered the bruises. You put on a good show, wailed the walls down describing precisely how you’d been beaten, and they listened to you. Then they decided to put you on antipsychotic medication and anti-depressants, because obviously what you were describing made no sense, and you were disturbed and clearly at risk of self-harm. Between the cuts to the children’s home budget and the second-rate quacks at the hospital, there was no budget for proper neurological screening or consultation. So there was no oversight when Dr. Hobbes signed you up for a clinical trial of a new high-specificity D2 blocker being pushed by his favourite supplier of gold-plated fountain pens. And you learned to keep taking the pills, because after a month on AL93560, if you stopped taking them the rape machines hiding in the bushes outside your window would whisper unspeakable propositions to you by dead of night.

But then your luck changed, in an unbelievable and positive direction.

Who knew people had two sets of grandparents? Not you, that was for sure!

Dad’s parents were safely dead, and Mom had never mentioned whose crotchfruit she was in your presence—leaving you with a blind spot so fundamental that you’d never even noticed it until they turned up at the supervisor’s office one morning and asked for you.

“He poisoned your ma against us,” Grandma Jane said sadly, when you asked her about it—much later, of course. “I knew from the first that he wasn’t right in the head, and I tried to tell her, but she wouldn’t listen. And he frightened her! He wouldn’t even let her email. God knows what he did to make her put up with him—brainwashing, probably. But we found you in the end. Found you in time to rescue you. Praise the Lord.”

Jane and Frank were retirees, but only just (still in their sixties) when they found you, much as they’d found Jesus in the traumatic aftermath of losing their daughter to Satan’s godson two decades ago. They weren’t rich enough to travel widely, but they’d planned their retirement with care, and they had a decent home and two big cars to park outside it. Too bad that in the gaps between her church activities and his golfing afternoons, they were looking for something to patch the hole in their hearts—a hole just exactly the right size for a cuckoo.

Having just had your second family disintegrate under you, you weren’t about to let this particular gift horse get away. Jane and Frank had driven cross-country to rescue you from the paint-peeling orphanage in Lovelock, planning to whisk you away to suburban Phoenix. It was the least you could do to be their duly grateful grandson. No need to mention Elizabeth, Sara, and Kitty, all in similar straits: You couldn’t possibly impose on Jane and Frank’s generosity on their behalf.

And so you arrived in Phoenix in the company of grandparents 2.0. And you were duly appreciative of this third chance at a stable family life that fate had handed you, and you resolved not to break it by accident.

It is now late morning, the day after. You’re still waiting for the fucktards at head office to get you an appointment with the mad professor, and there’s no point bugging the Hussein mark while he’s at work. So it looks like you have a few hours off. Might as well go tour the city centre, hit a cafe, have a latte, sketch out your plan for world domination. Stalking-horse, of course, but if it suckers the enemy in, who cares?

The weather’s good as you walk along Princes Street; shame about all the shuttered shop-fronts and the builders everywhere, stripping away the mother-of-pearl accretions of architectural history to reveal the Georgian skeleton of the road. With most of the surviving shop chains moving to out-of-city retail parks—those that haven’t succumbed to online stores and custom fabrications—the once-vibrant commercial high street is being flensed of commerce and turned back into an aspic-preserved tourist draw, a false-colour reconstruction of its late- eighteenth-century youth.

That’s all it’s good for, of course: If it was up to you, you’d bulldoze the lot of it, stick in a link road between the M8 and the A1(M), and a shopping mall featuring a thirty-metre-high pink marble statue of yours truly buggering a lizard. But these effete pseudo-Brits have never been too clear on the importance of thinking big, or the grand gesture for that matter. There’s that bloody stone-spike memorial to a writer, of all things—and the statues of philosophers! What the fuck is all that about?

You people-watch as you walk, ever alert for the alien menace. A police drone buzzes dismally above the high-speed rail terminal below the castle; closer to home, an arsehole in a kilt makes cat-strangling noises with the aid of a sack of pipes, squawking every time he changes note. These are street performers, constructing the dialectic of urban civilization—the watcher and the self-consciously watched. Here’s a human robot in silver spray paint and make-up, twitching to archaic German synthrock. There’s a white-faced girl in a pouffed-up wedding dress standing on a plinth, pretending to be a statue because if you can’t dance and can’t sing, what fucking use are you? If they had any kind of audience, you’d be tempted to practice the lightfinger tricks you taught yourself at high school, but alas, the crowd’s not thick enough—and anyway, you’ve got bigger targets in mind than a careless tourist’s wallet.

You stick to the shuttered shops on the built-up side of the street, keeping to the far side of the tram tracks from the gardens—too many bushes, hiding-places for the enemy abduction machines. The battlements of the castle loom blindly above the seething insectile urban hive, the sash-windows and solar-powered street-lamps, the slippery slate roofs and the sandstone bricks of the eighteenth-century town houses creeping back into view as the ants scurry and chop away at the retail-age encrustation.

You’ve come a long way from Phoenix, from the dying suburbs and the empty houses, gouged-out windows staring like eye-sockets across the Astroturf lawns the despairing Realtors laid before them: well-dressed corpses awaiting resurrection, secure in their faith in cheap gas and a Horatio Alger-esque resurgence in global competitiveness.

You didn’t realize at first that Jane and Frank were rescuing you for a castaway adolescence in a city where the price of housing had crashed 70 per cent in ten years. Phoenix wasn’t dead like Detroit; the climate made it a natural for snowbirds, put a floor under the ailing economy. Geography made it a natural for immigrants from the south. But white-middle-class flight driven by the soaring price of gas and power left the schools half-shuttered and decaying, the malls semiempty and desolate. Your pallid skin marked you out as alien, so after a few unfortunate early incidents, Jane and Frank plugged you into the homeschooling network. It was safer than entrusting your lily-white ass to the razor wire and watch-towers, metal detectors and Taserarmed guards on all the schoolrooms; the school board were determined to train the children of the future majority appropriately for a lifetime of providing gainful employment for jail guards. So you spent half your life in hikikomori retreat with your computer and distance-learning coursework, and the other half running wild. Jane and Frank didn’t much mind. As long as you kept your room clean and called them sir and ma’am, they thought the world of you.

At night you flensed lizards and pinned the twitching bodies out on posts to warn the rape machines off. Some afternoons, you’d take off on your bike, pedalling out past the empty suburbs into the graves of aborted communities, where the dirt was gridded out for houses that never came. Beneath the summer sun, you’d shoot imaginary schoolmates with your BB gun, and later with Frank’s old .22 rifle. You had to be careful with the latter: Once or twice the noise attracted cops, like a swarm of flashing blue and red hornets converging on a dropped sandwich. But they never caught you: You were wary, and Uncle Al’s training stood you in good stead.

You made up for the lack of schoolyard socialization in other, darker ways. There were squatters in some of the half-abandoned suburbs, embryonic favelas and hippy communes growing like mushrooms on the corpse of the