Rule 34 - Charles Stross [15]
You roll off the soiled sofa, gurning, and stagger out to the lavvie. The keekin-glass shows you an orc with eyes like red-rimmed pissholes in a block of lard. Jaxxie, this is your life! Loser, tosser, fabmonkey to the gentry of the night—it’s a’ there. You look away hastily, stumble out and through the grimy kitchen to the backdoor and the shed.
The shed. You open the door and step inside. First up, you ken it smells wrong. Fabbers have their ain smell; not humming, like, but a goosh of hot plastic and metal. When it’s working hard plastic, there’s a lot of hot metal, and steam from the chiller circuit. This is like all soft placky. Which is wrong. So you hit the light switch.
Something’s gone very wrong with your fabber.
The red supply blinkenlights are pulsing manically across its front, and the lid’s come open. Not only that; it’s rising on a fucking pillar of multicoloured hingmies pushing their way out of the extrusion cell like a loaf of bread that’s risen too far. Fuck, the fucking fucker’s fucked! You grab the handle on the lid. A lime green hingmy pops up at you and you clock what it is, and that’s when you realize that no, the fucking fucker isnae fucked, it’s you what’s fucked.
The evidence is all over the screen of your lappie, which, fucking eejit that you are, you left online when you went inside last night.
You grab the lime green plastic dildo. It’s an anatomically correct cock, but it’s the wrong colour, only about eight centimetres long, and there’s something embossed on it—a URL. As you squint at it, another wee plastic cock—this one cherry red—topples off the mound that’s rising from the fabber’s guts and bounces across the floor. “Jesus fuck.” You stare at the lappie in horror. About sixty dozen overlapping windows are warning you that spyware has been detected, inviting you to download an antivirus package from the app store of a fly-bynight scamware vendor in Hainan. You ken it’s the same site as the URL on the dildo. “Jesus fuck,” you repeat.
It’s ransomware, pure and simple.
“Tha’ dug ate ma’ hamewurk.”
Never mind Gav and his minions. Tomorrow you’re gonnae meet the Operation’s tax farmer, who expects you to pay up for your key to the dark gates of toyland.
Twenty-seven hours to lay your hands on three large. You are so fucked.
Hello.
We interrupt your scheduled browsing to bring you news of an unfortunate incident.
Stuart Jackson, aged twenty-two, a resident of Hamilton Wynd, Leith, has just visited our local business-development executive, the Toymaker—that would be me—to plead for assistance in restructuring his debt.
Perhaps you are thinking that the Operation is unduly harsh in its treatment of defaulters. And it’s possible you have some sneaking sympathy for Jaxxie, a secondary-school drop-out struggling to make his way in a cruel and bewildering world that has written him off as being of no conceivable value.
Well, you’d be wrong.
This vale of tears we live in holds a virtually unending supply of Jaxxies, eager neds ready and willing to sell crack to their grannies and jack their neighbours’ laptops to pay for the next bottle of Bucky. Jaxxie is distinguished from the rest of them solely by a modicum of low cunning, a propensity for graft, and a minor eye for space-filling structure that—if he had applied himself to his Standards and Baccalaureate—might have found him a place on the rolls of a distance-learning institution and ultimately a ladder up to what passes for a respectable middle-class profession in this degraded age of outsourcing.
But Jaxxie is lazy. Jaxxie disnae enjoy the learnin’. Jaxxie is a petty criminal who pays his way by acting as an outlet for the Toymaker’s bottom-tier products. And Jaxxie slept through his Economics classes in school.
As you have doubtless realized by now, the Operation’s products are all illegal; this imposes certain regrettable cost externalities on us—you can’t buy insurance and police protection for your business if what you manufacture ranges from MDMA labs to clitoridectomy kits.
We have