Rule 34 - Charles Stross [119]
BE RIGHT ROUND. NEED TO TALK. Then you go hunting for clean underwear.
Embarrassingly, excruciatingly, the panic attack you’ve been bottling up washes over you like a drenching cold ocean breaker just as you reach the end of Liz’s leafy alley-way. You catch yourself and lean against a mossy stone wall, shuddering with fear, eyes clenched shut, twitching at the sound of every passing vehicle. It’s dusk, and there are no other pedestrians around, which is a small mercy. The lane’s cobblestoned, with century-old trees lining the pavements and lending the air a damp, greenish odour—there’s a faint sound of running water from the stream beyond the dead end of the alley. It’s mortifying. What if, your subconscious nudges you, what if Liz can see through you? What if she doesn’t take you seriously—
You force yourself to stand up, afraid of smearing lichen on your jacket. Something flitter-buzzes overhead: a bat, perhaps, or a Council drone checking for broken paving-stones. What if she thinks you fucked Christie to get at her—everything’s bubbling up from the depths of your subconscious, like methane clathrates bursting from an overheated ocean floor. You freeze, unable to make your traitor feet move towards her door. But then you remember what lies behind you in the dusk-haunted corridors of the hotel. Can’t go forward, can’t go back: It’s the existential dilemma in a nutshell, isn’t it? You’re scared of what Liz will think of you, that’s a given, but the flip side of the coin is that you’re scared of what Christie could do to you. That makes things a lot clearer, for which you are duly grateful. “Hi, dear, do you mind if I borrow your futon for the night? I just fucked a psychopath, and I’m afraid he’s stalking me via my employers.” It’s not much of a script, but at least it’s there. Your left foot slides forward, almost against your will, then your right. It’s going to be all right, you think.
Until you climb the six stone steps to the wee front door of the colony flat and ring the doorbell, at which point you lose it again.
LIZ: It’s Complicated
Later:
It’s morning, and you’re on the beat: High pay grade, brightly polished boots—but boots, nonetheless. That’s what it always comes back down to, boots directed by BOOTS, the Bayesian Objective Officer Tracking System, an expert system by any other name, to tell you which street to walk down.
You can’t do policing without boots (whether physical lumps of leather or virtual chunks of software). It takes boots to track down and interview the witnesses, boots to comb the incident scene for debris and clues, boots to define a territory and remind the trolls who the streets belong to, boots to do the necessary social-work clean-up duty after hours on a Saturday night, BOOTS to do the personnel task assignments and match capabilities to needs, BOOTS to take a series of jobs and parcel them out as efficiently as possible. Boots are an integral part of the process.
It’s not like the brass don’t know this, even though they’re always looking for an alternative: surveillance drones in the sky, peepers on segways rolling alongside the gutters, social-networking Crimestoppers and anti-alcoholism initiatives. Boots are labour-intensive, they take training and command and control resources, and they don’t—can’t—give you scalable efficiency improvements. So they’re unpopular with the buzzword-wielding consultants who keep coming back to shape your political masters’ outlook an election or two after they got booted the last time for costing too much.
This morning you started by going straight to the shift-change Babylon briefing, your head still a-churn from the late-night encounter with Dorothy. And lo, Dickie’s got a job for you. “Liz, we’ve got one that’s right up your street.” The moustache twitches in something between a smile and a snarl: “a possible expert witness for you to interview here—a