Rule 34 - Charles Stross [121]
Kemal nods grimly. “Many more. More than two per target, perhaps more than five. You should search the homes of your local victims, tear everything apart and see what else comes to light. There may be many more. I think we may be mistaking the elephant’s tail for a bell-pull.”
“But who’s designing the things?”
“Ask this academic?” Kemal sounds disturbed.
“Got any ideas what to ask about?”
He pulls his specs on and points. “How about task distribution? And where the designs come from?”
“Huh. That side of it—I’ve been looking into this. The Chinese government began prioritizing design twenty years ago in their universities. India, more recently. The recycling initiative”—Make Do And Mend is big this decade—“and the Internet combine to give them ready access to markets, and the spread of cheap fabbers allows them to export bespoke design patterns. WIPO are trying to do something about the generics, but design and trade-secret laws are not universally harmonized. Not like copyright and patent regulations.”
It’s part of what you’ve been tugging on from the other end, the supply of feedstock to the grey-market fabs—you’ve been looking at demand for counterfeit or contraband goods, and the supply of raw materials and designs feeding them. This is clearly related, but not in a way you can put your finger on just yet.
Kemal picks up his coffee cup. “The problem is not to, to design replacement parts that have lethal flaws. The problem is not even to insert them in the victims’ households—true, some will live large, not repair or recycle domestic appliances, but most will be vulnerable somewhere: an exercise machine at their gym, a brake assembly in their car. No, the problem is how to coordinate the operation.” He looks you in the eye. “It is scary, yes?”
It’s not so much scary as incomprehensible: This murder’s MO stands in relation to a normal homicide as a super-jumbo to a Cessna. “Murder I can get, but why do it this way? It’s positively baroque! Who would do such a thing? It’s inhuman!”
“You’re absolutely right,” Kemal says, pushing his cup aside. “It is inhuman.”
“You’re not going on that AI trip again,” you say wearily.
Kemal shakes his head. “Precisely who is sending us to interview this academic?”
“Tricky—” You stop. BOOTS fingered you to talk to him. “BOOTS,” you say. An expert system for matching personnel assignments to tasks. “Huh.” You finish your coffee. “But it’s just human-resources software.”
“If we know how it works, it isn’t Artificial Intelligence,” snarks Kemal. He stands up. “Shall we go?”
Edinburgh University isn’t built around a campus: Its buildings are scattered through the south side of the city centre, sandwiched between the Old Town and the Meadows, rubbing shoulders with charity shops and cheap apartments and fast-food joints. Its reputation for academic excellence, combined with geographical dispersion, has stood it in good stead in these harsh times—unlike many rival institutions, it’s still in business, although two-thirds of its students this decade have never set foot in Scotland in their lives.
You went to university and did the whole halls-of-residence, livingoff-student-loans thing, back in the day. You did your Master’s in Policing, Policy, and Leadership on day release with distance learning—no faculty within a couple of hundred kilometres offered it as a part-time residential—and you got a taste of the chill wind that was even then beginning to blow through the halls of academia: a wind that’s since then risen to a howling tornado blowing shards of razor-sharp glass, stripping staff and student bodies to the bone as the whole structure of higher education changes. And you’re paying for that sheepskin to this day. Was it worth it? Who knows?
One thing’s for sure: University isn’t what it used to be.
Some things remain. The old buildings, for example. Appleton Tower is every bit as much a crass brutalist statement on the edge of the Old Town as it ever was, if a bit more crumbly about the edges than when it was last refurbished nearly twenty years ago. It’s a listed