Rule 34 - Charles Stross [118]
The phone buzzes again. Work is calling. It’s the backside of ten o’clock, according to the hotel clock radio. Responsible grown-ups who get work calls at that time of night check to see if it’s important. The hotel comps guests a yukata, so you drop the towel and wrap the robe around yourself, then wipe your eyes and grab a hair-band before you answer: With customers all the way out to the Pacific North-west, there’s always the risk of an incoming teleconference. But when you put your specs on and glance at the log, it’s just a priority-tagged wave. URGENT CASE REVIEW REQUESTED.
Oh for fuck’s sake—you follow the link, which leads into the agency’s human-resources back-office cloud. There’s an employee profile; they’re asking you to fill out an anonymized interpersonal ethics evaluation. Snitcheriffic, you think, and open it, expecting to be asked to crit one of the eager-beaver banking IT managers you were meeting with this afternoon.
Instead, it opens on a mug shot of John Christie, and a quiz that, after a second of dumb-struck confusion you recognize as the PCL-R psychopathy check-list.
Hot and cold chills mesh with nauseated recognition. You cancel out of the form frantically, racking your brain for a connection. Head office booked you into this hotel, didn’t they? What did Christie say—here on business? Did someone put him here? But how would they know—the front desk. Your luggage problem. His luggage problem. They put the frighteners on you to drive you out of your comfort zone, then banged you together with him. Emphasis on bang.
They? Who?
It stinks. You worked for McClusky-Williams for three years before they were taken over by Accenture, and 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