Rule 34 - Charles Stross [31]
It could be anybody, as long as they hate you with a fiery, all-consuming passion and decide to devote the next few months of their life to monstering you into an early grave for the sheer fun of pulling apart a quivering lump of feckless time-expired meat.
Get me my luggage, mister hospitality manager. It was due here two hours ago via interhotel transfer from the Marriott on Lothian Road—here’s the receipt. I’ll be generous: You’ve got a couple of hours to save your job, your career, and your life. I’m going to go hunt down some dinner. Make sure my luggage is in my room and waiting for me when I get back, and we’ll say no more about this matter.
—What line of work am I in, you ask?
It’s not really any of your fucking business.
I sell toys.
You’re the acting Toymaker in Edinburgh this month, here to take care of a nasty little headache for the Operation (along the way to setting up a new subsidiary). Supply-chain logistics and order fulfilment in the Central Belt—the Edinburgh–Glasgow M8 conurbation, where two-thirds of the population of the gallus wee free time-share republic huddle together below the highlands—have taken a dive in the shitter of late. Unfulfilled demand remains high, but supply is patchy, and there is a risk of ad hoc competition emerging.
Competition would be bad. The Operation likes its subsidiaries to maintain a supply-side monopoly and goes to some lengths to keep it that way, even tolerating competition between local franchisee storefronts—it’s a significant opportunity cost, but deterring interlopers from entering the market in the first place is cheaper than dislodging them once they’re dug in.
Scotland is a mess. Word came down from the very top: Someone needs to go into the field and fix things. It’s not just a matter of repairing the existing franchise, but of evaluating new market opportunities and if necessary taking the over-the-hill cash cow to the slaughterhouse, then bootstrapping a new clean-room start-up to replace it. Scotland is a small but significant market. As an entrepreneur backed by the Operation’s training, guidance, and investor confidence, you can seize the opportunity to make your mark without pissing on the gate-posts of any of the big incumbents. So you raise your virtual hand, volunteer for the job, and pull on the green wellies to wade out into the sticks and take control.
Contrary to what you told the swithering fuckwad on the hotel front desk, it is not your habit to fly everywhere business class. In fact, you avoid flying wherever possible. You have gone to great lengths to maintain a clean identity, using all the tools the Operation has made available to you. Airports are surveillance choke points, and the ubiquitous camera networks have AI behavioural monitors these days. Your unfortunate medical condition has certain side-effects—nobody say “Voight-Kampff test” or you’ll rip their fucking lungs out and shit down their windpipe—and if someone’s told them to look for members of an organization that pursues an enlightened policy of positive discrimination with respect to people with certain neurological disabilities, you’d have nowhere to run. (It’s outrageous—blatant discrimination—but it seems there’s one rule for the neurotypical, and another for people like you.)
So you travel by train and ship. Freighter from Anchorage to Vladivostok, trans-Siberian express to Moscow, more tedious railway time-table shite until you arrived in the Schengen zone, then finally some blessed modernity. Two fucking weeks, and all because you’re a persecuted minority.
The shiny new shinkansen blasted through the English countryside at over three hundred kilometres per hour, but you couldn’t help noticing that not even Japan Rail could fix the