Rule 34

three years since—as an independent division—and there’s no way anyone at head office would pull a stunt like that. It’d be a Section Four Fail for starters, with five or six other ethical violations on top, and the consequences for an ethics-compliance group of failing a moral-standards audit start with drastic and go rapidly downhill—

Reluctantly, you open up the wave and follow the link back to the snitch wizard. Yes, it’s him all right. You try to cross-reference to find his employer, but there’s nothing in the system. Digging diligently, you get nowhere except that bloody wikipedia true-crime article about his long-since-hanged namesake. There’s no job number or contract associated with this job, it just came up in the system. Your skin crawls as you think about what it means. You prod your way through the snitch wizard, following the script: glibness/superficial charm, check. Cunning/manipulative, check. Promiscuous sexual behaviour—now hang on a minute: The psych text betrays an implicit polyphobic bias—reluctantly: check. Your stomach clenches as you work down the list. You should have seen this coming for yourself—it was all there in front of you, wasn’t it? Christie is a poster child for narcissistic personality disorder, and you walked straight into it.

The quiz vanishes, to be replaced by another inventory questionnaire, this one more mundane: It’s an appraisal that evaluates key personality traits in an executive-founder. Private-equity outfits and VCs use it to filter their trained start-up monkeys. The target is—your heart sinks—John Christie.

“What the fuck?” you mumble to yourself, just as your phone vibrates again. It’s your private personality module. You glance at the touch screen, leaving the quiz floating open in your specs. It’s Liz again: ARE WE STILL ON FOR SATURDAY?

You flip the phone out of work personality.

YOU HOME? you text.

YES.

CAN I COME ROUND? After a moment, you reluctantly add: NEED COMPANY.

There’s nothing for a minute. Then a tag pops up, showing an address book entry and a handy route map. Your heart flip-flops. All of a sudden a cup of emotional cocoa with Ms. Clingy is looking—well, you’ll get restless eventually, but right now you’re halfway to totally creeped-out and in need of hugs and reassurance.

BE RIGHT ROUND. NEED TO TALK. Then you go hunting for clean underwear.

Embarrassingly, excruciatingly, the panic attack you’ve been bottling up washes over you like a drenching cold ocean breaker just as you reach the end of Liz’s leafy alley-way. You catch yourself and lean against a mossy stone wall, shuddering with fear, eyes clenched shut, twitching at the sound of every passing vehicle. It’s dusk, and there are no other pedestrians around, which is a small mercy. The lane’s cobblestoned, with century-old trees lining the pavements and lending the air a damp, greenish odour—there’s a faint sound of running water from the stream beyond the dead end of the alley. It’s mortifying. What if, your subconscious nudges you, what if Liz can see through you? What if she doesn’t take you seriously—

You force yourself to stand up, afraid of smearing lichen on your jacket. Something flitter-buzzes overhead: a bat, perhaps, or a Council drone checking for broken paving-stones. What if she thinks you fucked Christie to get at her—everything’s bubbling up from the depths of your subconscious, like methane clathrates bursting from an overheated ocean floor. You freeze, unable to make your traitor feet move towards her door. But then you remember what lies behind you in the dusk-haunted corridors of the hotel. Can’t go forward, can’t go back: It’s the existential dilemma in a nutshell, isn’t it? You’re scared of what Liz will think of you, that’s a given, but the flip side of the coin is that you’re scared of what Christie could do to you. That makes things a lot clearer, for which you are duly grateful. “Hi, dear, do you mind if I borrow your futon for the night? I just fucked a psychopath, and I’m afraid he’s stalking me via my employers.” It’s not much of a script, but at least it’s there. Your left foot slides forward, almost against your will, then your right. It’s going to be all right, you think.

Until you climb the six stone steps to the wee front door of the colony flat and ring the doorbell, at which point you lose it again.

LIZ: It’s Complicated

Later:

It’s morning, and you’re on the beat: High pay grade, brightly polished boots—but boots, nonetheless. That’s what it always comes back down to, boots directed by BOOTS, the Bayesian Objective Officer Tracking System, an expert system by any other name, to tell you which street to walk down.

You can’t do policing without boots (whether physical lumps of leather or virtual chunks of software). It takes boots to track down and interview the witnesses, boots to comb the incident scene for debris and clues, boots to define a territory and remind the trolls who the streets belong to, boots to do the necessary social-work clean-up duty after hours on a Saturday night, BOOTS to do the personnel task assignments and match capabilities to needs, BOOTS to take a series of jobs and parcel them out as efficiently as possible. Boots are an integral part of the process.

It’s not like the brass don’t know this, even though they’re always looking for an alternative: surveillance drones in the sky, peepers on segways rolling alongside the gutters, social-networking Crimestoppers and anti-alcoholism initiatives. Boots are labour-intensive, they take training and command and control resources, and they don’t—can’t—give you scalable efficiency improvements. So they’re unpopular with the buzzword-wielding consultants who keep coming back to shape your political masters’ outlook an election or two after they got booted the last time for costing too much.

This morning you started by going straight to the shift-change Babylon briefing, your head still a-churn from the late-night encounter with Dorothy. And lo, Dickie’s got a job for you. “Liz, we’ve got one that’s right up your street.” The moustache twitches in something between a smile and a snarl: “a possible expert witness for you to interview here—a Dr. Adam MacDonald, of the university informatics department.” He flicks a tightly knotted bundle of mind-mapped notes at you. “He’s an expert on the emergent behaviour of distributed oracular systems— whatever they are—and I want you to go pick his brains.” A sniff. “One of your Europol contacts raised it this morning, and BOOTS fingered you to talk to him. Some pish about research into using social networks to distribute subtasks contributing to a fatal outcome. Ye ken it bears on that line about sabotaged dish-washers and back-street fabs ye’ve been pushing.”

You’re too tired to raise an eyebrow at the fact that Dickie’s actually been paying attention to anything you minuted. “Wouldn’t that be a Common Cause charge if we find them . . . ?”

“Aye, it might be. Or it might not, if the participants dinna understand what they’ve been set to doing.” Dickie twitches. “Well?”

“I’ll get right onto it. Anything else?”

Dickie shakes his head. “Next agenda item . . .”

There has been little progress overnight. The promised lead on Mikey Blair’s wild ride came forward voluntarily but turns out to be a rent boy who knows nothing about anything. They’re still looking for Vivian Crolla’s embalming expert, but much digging reveals that she has something of a reputation on the local fetish scene. Half an hour in the right pubs, and you could probably have figured that much out for yourself.

So it is that you and Kemal (who you pick up in the ICIU annexe, where he’s talking to Moxie about something—fitting in too well by half, you think) end up visiting Appleton Tower.

It’s not quite that fast, of course. You’re still somewhat freaked by yesterday’s late-night developments (Dorothy being an emotional wreck in need of support is unexpected: And the rest is just plain disturbing), so you’re not paying one hundred–per cent attention to the job. Which is why Kemal brings you up short as you’re scurrying in circles trying to do three things at once. “What exactly are we being sent to do?” he