Rule 34 - Charles Stross [114]
Teleconferencing, actually.
“How much longer do you propose to keep on stringing them along?” asks the delegate from Maryland. (She’s blonde and thin as a rake and clearly addicted to amphetamines or emetics or both: You wouldn’t fuck her at gun-point.)
“They already realize what is going on!” The delegate from Brussels is clearly irritated by her naïveté. The lip-sync in the teleconference loop is borked: The real-time interpreter net is clearly not keeping up with his waspish tirade. “It is inconceivable that they don’t. Perhaps they use this as an opportunity to diminish their headcount. Or perhaps the short-term financial gain really is worth it to them—”
“Twenty-four hours.” You cut in before his Belgian counterpart manages to crash the software. “That’s all we need for the wrap.”
“Twenty-four hours is too long!” insists the Europol delegate. “We are already have trouble securing for the operation. And these ‘accidents,’ they attract attention. I am hearing reports that are mortifying. What are you doing? We did not agree to this!”
“What precisely didn’t you consent to?” You raise one bushy eyebrow. “I seem to recall the negotiations over the concordat were exhaustive.”
“This!” A wild hand gesture sweeps into view briefly, providing insight. (The American or Japanese programmers who designed the auto-track for this conference system clearly weren’t thinking in terms of cultures that are big on semaphore.) “The agents your associates have deployed are killing people! That was not part of our agreement. This arrangement was to suck in the assets of organized netcrime for civil confiscation, leaving an audit trail to facilitate prosecution of the perpetrators. Extralegal assassination is, is unacceptable! What are you doing?”
It’s clearly running out of control, and you try not to sigh. “I am not doing anything: I’m not responsible for these deaths.” You shrug, then lean back in your well-upholstered command chair. “I assure you, they are nothing to do with me.” You look at Maryland. “Is your government . . . ?”
Maryland looks as if she’s swallowed a live toad. “We’re not in the remote-kill business these days. This isn’t the noughties: Congress would never stand for it.” Ever since Filipino Jemaah Islamiyah hackers pwned an MQ-9 Reaper and zapped the governor of Palawan with USAF-owned Hellfire missiles, the Americans have gone back to keeping a human finger on the trigger: not because a state governor from a foreign country was killed, but because of who was in the armoured limousine right behind him. (The prospect of having to utter the term collateral damage in the same sentence as President of the United States before a congressional enquiry had focussed a few minds.) “Where’s the attack coming from?”
“It’s not part of the original picture.” It’s uncomfortable to talk about. “To make IRIK look plausible, it was necessary to provide a haven for certain undesirable elements. They run botnets, of course, but their customers are . . . unclear. We had assumed the traditional, of course: spammers, malware vendors, child-labour sweat-shops providing teleoperator control of animatronic sex toys for paedophiles.” You clear your throat. “What we weren’t expecting: cheap grid computing for pharmaceutical companies solving protein-folding problems. A Chinese automobile company using a botnet to evolve the design of their latest car using genetic algorithms fed with data from consumer surveys. Artificial-intelligence researchers renting the same botnets that spammers rely on to train their spam filters. Who knew? It is a, a soup of virtual