Rule 34 - Charles Stross [104]
What’s in the bucket, Anwar?
Adam gave you some helpful pointers. If it’s full of yellow crystalline sediment, back away slowly—but no, that’s not so likely. You glance over your shoulder at the intruder’s suitcase, but it just sits there, eyeless and unspeaking. Too many ideas are jostling in your head, seeking attention. Bread Mix. Colonel Datka’s man. Tariq’s chat room. The stuff you didn’t tell Inspector Butthurt about: Tariq’s unhealthy interest in making sure his chat-room environment wasn’t as well guarded against malware as it looked, his secret VPN access to the webcrime bulletin boards, plausible deniability. And then there are the dark suspicions you don’t dare voice even to yourself as yet: How accidental is all this? Where did Adam hear about the Issyk-Kulistan gig?
Thoughts fermenting in your head, you lever up the rim of the bucket lid and look inside.
The bucket smells of old socks and the broken promises of a hostile future, musty and somehow warm. You peer in and see only dirty greybrown water, a scum adhering to its surface, bubbles forming at the edges: It’s slightly iridescent, as if you’d spilled a drop of diesel oil on top. Is that all? you think, disappointed, and dip the chopsticks in it.
The kitchen utensils don’t spontaneously catch fire, or dissolve, or morph into brightly coloured machine parts. You stir the scum on the surface around a bit, and it crinkles and crumples against them; then you pull them out again. A rope of congealed filmy scum sticks to the chopsticks, dribbling water back into the bucket.
“Yuck.” You raise the chopsticks, and the floating sheet dangles from them, mucilaginous, like an elephant-sized snotter. You cast them aside, and they curl together, landing on the carpet in a stringy mass under the window. You clamp the lid down on the bucket of spoiled whatever-it-is and shake your head. Probably you’ll have to take it downstairs, pour it down the toilet—hope the Environmental Health wardens don’t have surveillance robots lurking in the sewers. It’d be just your luck to be busted for possession of an illegal chemical factory. Assuming the thing hasn’t died or been infected by sixty kinds of bacteria.
You climb downstairs wearily and head for the bedroom. It’s been a long day, what with the visit from Colonel Datka’s man and the unspeakable event at Taleb’s. At least Bibi’s taking care of the kids, you think.
Interlude 2
TOYMAKER: Happy Families
When you were eight, your dad taught you the correct way to peel a live frog.
You seem to recall him teaching you lots of things, but mostly he succeeded in annoying the hell out of you. It wasn’t his fault: He was in therapy for most of your childhood, and it damaged him. Then you were in therapy, and it gets vague real fast.
One of the things he taught you early is that ants can recognize an intruder from another colony; they smell the strangeness and respond by chewing its legs off, immobilizing it until the soldiers come with jaws the size of legs and bite through its neck.
Humans are not dissimilar.
Dad was diagnosed, but never let it get in his way. He learned to cover up by copying, passing for another worker ant. But he wasn’t very good at it.
“Look,” said Dad, holding down the slimy, frantically gulping bull-frog, “it’s simple. Just one cut here and—” He demonstrated. A flip of the fingers and inside out it goes. You laughed excitedly as the skinless amphibian flailed away at the bleeding air. “Looks real funny, doesn’t he? Just like a little man. Now you try.” And he handed you a frog and a knife.
In retrospect, you know exactly what Dad was doing: He was testing you to see if you were like him. Mom or Alice would puke their guts up if he did something