Rule 34 - Charles Stross [126]
You stare at the screen. “What the fuck? What the fucking fuck?” The calendar on your desktop is telling you that today is Wednesday and the time is ten past nine, local time—ten past one in Bishkek.
You are not an idiot; you were not born yesterday. You know exactly what’s going on here. You’re supposed to buy the story and sit tight until next Monday, aren’t you? It’s a delaying tactic. What kind of technical-support line is available for ten hours a week, carefully timed for when most of its customers are still asleep in their beds? They’re gaslighting you. Or maybe not. A sudden moment of doubt: Issyk-Kulistan is very poor. What if they can’t afford to run a proper support desk or help-line? If this is the best they can do—how secure is your pay?
You check the phone wiki again and again. Digging deeper, looking for clues. Then a thought strikes you, and thirty seconds later you’ve got another number. You feed another contact to the phone app, and ten seconds later a voice answers you in the flattened vowels of London’s East End: “’ Ello, you’ve reached the consulate of the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan. How can I help you?”
I not we, you notice. “Hi,” you say, “this is Anwar, at the Scottish consulate. Listen, can you tell me, have you had any email through from the Ministry since Monday afternoon?”
It takes a minute or two for you to get Mr. East-Ender to grudgingly acknowledge your identity, and another minute for him to get the picture, but by the time you put the phone down, you know two new facts: that IRIK have only bothered to establish a one-man consular presence in England, and no, he hasn’t heard anything from head office either.
Your moustache twitches at the half-imagined odour of dead Rattus norvegicus, and you turn to your browser. There are news aggregators and search engines and attention proxies, and you are a master of the web, a veritable expert. Even though you’re having to pipe everything through a mess of translation agents, it is but the work of half an hour for you to churn through a hundred searches, refining and reducing and recycling your terms until you’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s not going on. There’s no public holiday today. There are no football matches, riots, or debates going on in the chamber of deputies. More significantly, a bit more digging reveals that there are no bandits, bank robberies, or bombings. In fact, Issyk-Kulistan is a bit of a news black hole. It’s as if a cone of Internet silence has descended across the entire country, and nobody outside has noticed.
Your skin crawls; you’re running low on excuses. If Adam’s right—then the sock-puppet nation is about to be wadded up and thrown away. And you know too damned much. You know about empty-eyed men with suitcases they want you to look after, and trade delegations with bags of not-bread mix. You don’t have to be Inspector Rebus to know what happens to bagmen who aren’t sitting tight when the music stops.
You try a different strategy and waste a few minutes hunting for notifications of service outages afflicting the major trunks in and out of the country. Then you have a moment of blinding realization.
Voice mail.
You flip through the Ministry’s online directory until you come to a different section. With a shaky finger, you drag the address card into your phone and prod the connect button, already rehearsing your abject apologies. It rings twice, then a man answers it, speaking an unfamiliar language. There’s music in the background, tinny voices singing. “Hello?” you say tentatively: “Is Colonel Datka there?”
“One moment.” The speaker’s English is very good, almost unaccented. There’s a scraping sound, as of a hand covering a mobile phone, some muffled