Rule 34 - Charles Stross [152]
This is not organized crime. (Organized crime: fucking 1920s shit invented by bootlegging immigrant fucktards in the slums of Chicago and New York and the other big cities with the help of their ’Ndrangheta homies, and so easy that by the 2020s even a bunch of crack-snorting surfer-dude VCs from California could master it.)
Listen, mother-fucker, I expect backup.
I am hanging my ass out here in the wastelands of Scotlandshire, waiting for a fucking bus with a suitcase in my fucking hand that contains a pair of freshly harvested frog-skin gloves—so freshly harvested they’re bleeding all over my briefs, you wanted fucking DNA samples as evidence of delivery, you cunt—and a pre-pubertal fucktoy that talks to me when it thinks I’m sleeping. I demand backup.
This is not an alien invasion scenario, even if the bat-winged drones ghosting above the satellite-dish-infested roof-tops obey the overmind AI crime goddess, and there are robots wearing sportswear on every street-corner. Some of them neck cheap tinnies of Polish lager and look at you as if they’re wondering if you’re dangerous—but they don’t fool you. There are lizards in designer suits in the boardrooms of the skyscrapers of London, planning to harvest the humans . . .
Five-point-six-two kilograms, damn it. Same weight as the average severed human head. Sole seat of cognition, once.
The thing in the suitcase is the future. It tells me this when it sneaks out in the darkness before dawn and crawls into my bed to suck my juices.
Are you listening, mother-fucker?
“I’m listening. Please carry on.”
A bus hums around the corner, slowing to halt by the stop. The tall man with the suitcase steps aboard, holding the QR-coded ticket he just paid cash for up to the camera in what used to be the driver’s seat. He mutters to himself as he takes one of the vacant priority seats.
I do this shit for you because you tell me there’s a career in it. But I’m not seeing that. I’m not seeing your start-up monkey-dance IPO switch-blade here. I’m seeing the rape machines in the bushes, the gutted ghosts hanging in the trees on ropes flensed from their intestines. Skinned frogs croaking as their blood beads and runs in rivulets across their pale dorsal muscles.
(This batch of drugs isn’t working too well. Stress sometimes does that, or cheap generics or counterfeits. Did you source me cheap generics, mother-fucker? Did you cheap your executive?)
Look, this is merely another logistics problem.
I have downsized MacDonald, as you requested through the thing in the suitcase. I have given you the ATHENA source code you wanted. The police arrived before I could terminate the squirming toad Hussein, but as I understand it, the lizards have already conquered Issyk-Kulistan; there’s nobody left but screaming skeletons with the flayed meat hanging from their bones eating eye-gouged dogs in the streets as killer robot drones patrol the boiling skies—
Are you listening, mother-fucker?
“I’m listening. Please carry on.”
I don’t understand why you haven’t downsized me yet. The phone chip in my skull is wired to a pea-sized implant nestled against the executive’s basilar artery. Command-detonated, a couple of milligrams of explosive is all it takes. Push-button genocide by the lizard conquerors. When it’s done, we’ll all be wired to self-destruct at their pleasure, blood gushing from nose and eyes and ears. This is not wireless telephony: stupid electrical shit invented by Swedish phone-company engineers in the 1970s. This is the gangrenous lizard-dominated rape-machine robot future you’re building for us. The grim meat-hook future patrolled by the morality-enforcement engines.
Are you listening, mother-fucker?
“I’m listening. Please carry on.”
I ought to be dead. I feel dead inside. Something else is operating my body, a soft machine running on ATHENA’s botnet, controlled by someone else. Your hooks in my brain make my muscles twitch.
Am I dead, mother-fucker?
“You are not dead. There is no bomb. Please carry on.”
Can’t, we’re stuck in traffic,