Rule 34

demands.

“I—” You stop dead, caught in the act of rifling through Speedy’s in-tray to see what Moxie left unfinished at shift change. “That’s a good question.” You pull up the stack of notes Dickie passed you and sign Kemal onto it. “Let me finish here, then we can go grab a coffee and read this stuff.”

And so you go find the nearest Costa’s in a wee shop unit on Raeburn Place, and get your heads into the backgrounder that turns out to be a committee report from Karl in Dresden, Andrea in New York, Felix in Bishkek, and a bunch of other ICIU cops around the world.

You read fast. “This is amazing.” While you were off shift, the intelligence team working behind the scenes on Babylon have been busy. It looks like they traced the repaired vacuum cleaner, and then some: For a miracle, they’ve been sharing their research with their overseas counterparts, and they’ve been pooling results. “All the parts come from cheap generic-design storefronts.”

“Who set them up?” asks Kemal.

“Good question.” The storefronts all take PayPal, and investigation traces them to a variety of servers in the Far East. Most of which, upon further examination—where possible—turn out to be part of one of three botnets.

“People are dying in domestic accidents,” you tell him, still skimming ahead through the notes. “A vacuum cleaner shorts its battery out into a bath, or a non-standard cartridge in a spa machine contains contaminated fluid, or a sun bed’s safety interlock is disabled. In each case, the machine has been repaired in the past year. Whoever carried out the repair saved money by using an OEM part template bought over the net and printed on a local machine. The part is physically a correct fit, but compromised: The vacuum’s hose contains an electrical connection and links to the power supply, the sun-bed latch . . .”

Kemal shakes his head. “Very strange.”

“It’s completely crazy, isn’t it?” You skim another summary. “I don’t see how it’s possible—we’re up to fourteen murders now? Then they’d need a lot of different sabotaged appliances, at least fourteen, probably more —”

Kemal nods grimly. “Many more. More than two per target, perhaps more than five. You should search the homes of your local victims, tear everything apart and see what else comes to light. There may be many more. I think we may be mistaking the elephant’s tail for a bell-pull.”

“But who’s designing the things?”

“Ask this academic?” Kemal sounds disturbed.

“Got any ideas what to ask about?”

He pulls his specs on and points. “How about task distribution? And where the designs come from?”

“Huh. That side of it—I’ve been looking into this. The Chinese government began prioritizing design twenty years ago in their universities. India, more recently. The recycling initiative”—Make Do And Mend is big this decade—“and the Internet combine to give them ready access to markets, and the spread of cheap fabbers allows them to export bespoke design patterns. WIPO are trying to do something about the generics, but design and trade-secret laws are not universally harmonized. Not like copyright and patent regulations.”

It’s part of what you’ve been tugging on from the other end, the supply of feedstock to the grey-market fabs—you’ve been looking at demand for counterfeit or contraband goods, and the supply of raw materials and designs feeding them. This is clearly related, but not in a way you can put your finger on just yet.

Kemal picks up his coffee cup. “The problem is not to, to design replacement parts that have lethal flaws. The problem is not even to insert them in the victims’ households—true, some will live large, not repair or recycle domestic appliances, but most will be vulnerable somewhere: an exercise machine at their gym, a brake assembly in their car. No, the problem is how to coordinate the operation.” He looks you in the eye. “It is scary, yes?”

It’s not so much scary as incomprehensible: This murder’s MO stands in relation to a normal homicide as a super-jumbo to a Cessna. “Murder I can get, but why do it this way? It’s positively baroque! Who would do such a thing? It’s inhuman!”

“You’re absolutely right,” Kemal says, pushing his cup aside. “It is inhuman.”

“You’re not going on that AI trip again,” you say wearily.

Kemal shakes his head. “Precisely who is sending us to interview this academic?”

“Tricky—” You stop. BOOTS fingered you to talk to him. “BOOTS,” you say. An expert system for matching personnel assignments to tasks. “Huh.” You finish your coffee. “But it’s just human- resources software.”

“If we know how it works, it isn’t Artificial Intelligence,” snarks Kemal. He stands up. “Shall we go?”

Edinburgh University isn’t built around a campus: Its buildings are scattered through the south side of the city centre, sandwiched between the Old Town and the Meadows, rubbing shoulders with charity shops and cheap apartments and fast-food joints. Its reputation for academic excellence, combined with geographical dispersion, has stood it in good stead in these harsh times—unlike many rival institutions, it’s still in business, although two-thirds of its students this decade have never set foot in Scotland in their lives.

You went to university and did the whole halls-of-residence, livingoff-student-loans thing, back in the day. You did your Master’s in Policing, Policy, and Leadership on day release with distance learning—no faculty within a couple of hundred kilometres offered it as a part-time residential—and you got a taste of the chill wind that was even then beginning to blow through the halls of academia: a wind that’s since then risen to a howling tornado blowing shards of razor-sharp glass, stripping staff and student bodies to the bone as the whole structure of higher education changes. And you’re paying for that sheepskin to this day. Was it worth it? Who knows?

One thing’s for sure: University isn’t what it used to be.

Some things remain. The old buildings, for example. Appleton Tower is every bit as much a crass brutalist statement on the edge of the Old Town as it ever was, if a bit more crumbly about the edges than when it was last refurbished nearly twenty years ago. It’s a listed building: the concrete bones of a different era, tempered in the white heat of Wilsonian techno-optimism and remodelled in the late teens. But there’s no desk-bound receptionist waiting to greet you behind the grime-streaked glass lobby doors that once handled a stream of students; nor will the door open when you push it.

Perplexed, you pull up a voice call. “Hello? Is that Dr., uh, MacDonald? I’m Inspector Kavanaugh. We have an appointment? I’m downstairs right now—how do I—okay, thanks, bye.” You hang up and glance at Kemal, who is looking around with wrinkled brow, as if he’s just smelled something bad. “Dr. MacDonald will come down and let us in,” you tell him. “There’s an access-control system.” Now you know to look for it, the discreet box by the door tells you all you need to know. Receptionists are too expensive for universities in these straitened times.

In fact, it’s not just the Appleton Tower lobby that’s showing signs of wear and tear; half the buildings on Bristo Square are closed or boarded, one or two blinking LEASE AVAILABLE flags in your specs. For a couple of decades tuition fees rose faster than inflation, until the inevitable happened and the bubble burst. The collapse catalysed by the first of the top-tier universities rolling out their distance-learning products in the middle of a recession sent the higher-education industry into a tailspin. Ed Uni has always been one of the top double-handful, and is still viable: But times are harsh and full-time undergraduate students are an endangered species.

You’re beginning to get impatient by the time you spot a sign of life through the window. At first, you think it’s a homeless vagrant who’s managed to sneak inside, but as he approaches the front door with a determined shuffle you realize that he’s looking for you. He’s bald on top, with a round head, stubby nose, and tiny, angryish eyes. With his tattered denim overalls and grubby coat, he looks like a member of the chorus from Deliverance: The Musical. You wonder: Is there some mistake? despite a nagging sense that you’ve seen him somewhere before. Then he opens the door, and speaks with an ultraposh Morningside accent: “Inspector Kavanaugh? I’m Dr. MacDonald. You’ll be following me, please.”

You wave Kemal inside hastily. “Certainly. Do you know why we’re here?”

MacDonald sniffs, then gestures towards a darkened tunnel between lift doors. “I’m sure you’ll tell me in your own good time,” he says unctuously. “We can talk in my office.”

The lift is battered and has clearly seen better days: It squeaks between floors, bumping and jolting to a stop on the ninth. “We don’t use the bottom two floors at present,” MacDonald tells you, punching buttons on an access-control keypad. “This way . . .”