Rule 34 - Charles Stross [106]
But that didn’t happen. Instead, the next day, a battered SUV pulled up outside the camp office. Half an hour later, the youngest counsellor came for you. “Your uncle Albert’s offered to take you in while your father’s in the hospital,” she explained.
Albert? You’d never met him, although Dad had mentioned his elder brother’s name once. And besides, you were bored with the camp. “Great!” you piped up.
If only you’d known . . .
You walk home to your snug wee hotel room, whistling happily to yourself. You lock the door, sniff, step out of your clothes and shower vigorously: yawn and crawl naked between the crisp cotton sheets to sleep the sleep of the righteously zoned out.
You wake early and amuse yourself for a while surfing on the hotel’s in-room cable service. News streams bombard you with trivia; unemployment’s up again, projects to retrain service-industry workers aren’t delivering: Sow’s ear into silk-purse futures are tanking. Another large vertical farm is under construction in Livingstone: The planning enquiry into the Torness “E” reactor unexpectedly drags on into a second month. The Scottish Parliament is discussing a bill banning factory farming of pigs on hygienic grounds and cattle on emissions: Farmers are protesting that they can repopulate bovine gut flora with kangaroo-derived acetogen cultures, dealing with the methane menace at source, and that the bill is pandering to vegetarian green voters in the run-up to the election next year . . .
You make a note. Research current steak consumption and supply-chain issues for black-market meat imports in event of ban. (Prohibition is always good for business, and vat-grown tissue won’t satisfy the more ruthless palate: Stress hormones are excellent tenderizers.) Then you channel-hop while you wait for room service to deliver your continental, surfing past the talking-head Jeezebot prayer breakfast and the traffic accident channel, pausing briefly at the Hitler network before you get to the baroque humiliations of the “So You Think You Want a Job” reality shows.
Job scams: Those are a perennial favourite, just like work-fromhome and you-can-be-rich-too. But they’re not only unoriginal, they’re so old they can vote. Some of the scams are so well-known that the cops have bots looking for them—the half-life to detection is measured in double-digit hours.
Fuck. It was looking so easy when you came here. Commission the illegal breweries to manufacture the feedstock, the back-street fabbers to make the goods, the sweat-shop kids in the Middle Eastern call centres to operate them, the clerks to count the cash, and the footsoldiers to keep the sales flowing—maintain tight communications discipline so that none of them can run the business without you, then find a franchisee and cash out. That’s the basic iMob value proposition, isn’t it? Gangster 2.0 is as much about searching for an IPO and an exit strategy as any other tech start-up business.
But this is semi-independent Scotland (a country with its own parliament, flag, tax law, and passports, but a military and foreign policy wing outsourced to Westminster). On the basis of your experience so far, it’s also the land of the deep-fried battered Mars bar, remotely piloted airborne dogshit patrols, and accountants shrink-wrapped to mattresses. The latter is particularly disturbing insofar as it blows a honking great hole in your original business plan. But needs must. And Scotland has other assets, like Mr. Placeholder Hussein, who you intend to drop into the hot seat and stick in front of a fake organization to attract the attention of the adversaries.
You whip out your disposable pad, haul down your desktop from