Rule 34 - Charles Stross [57]
Dawning horror steals across Moxie’s face. “Whu—you’re leaving me in charge?”
“Up to a point. I’ll still be around, but only for about an hour a day.” (Rule #1: always budget 50 per cent more time for your people than you tell them you’ve got.) “Think hard before you escalate. Speedy’s off today: I’ll be repeating this chat with him when he’s back in. You’re going to have to co-ordinate with him directly, not through me. Meanwhile, your case-load: Show it to me.”
For about the next hour, Moxie subjects you to his team’s current case-load in all its mind-numbingly recondite, not to mention perverse, detail.
Publicity surrounding the Morningside Cannibals has led to a spate of copy-cat offences against sanity, some of them literally so (as in: There are folks dining on cloned haunch of pedigree Siamese tonight). There’s an anonymous perp randomly posting upskirt videos on neighbourhood blogs, captured by a microcam strapped to one of the too-tame squirrels in the Botanic Gardens. Moxie’s looking for the fabber source of some disturbingly simple meth-lab-in-a-brick chemistry kits that are circulating among the usual numpties in Lochend, and there’s the regular slew of urban-legend queries from the more gullible elements of CID to field. There’s the hentai fan base to keep an eye on, with their current interest in Hitler Yaoi and holocaust tentacle porn—still illegal in Germany, which is giving rise to cross-jurisdictional headaches—and their ongoing attempt to exhaustively explore the M girls N cups polynomial space in NP time, as a computer geek of your acquaintance once put it.
(You’re not quite sure what the NP time bit means, but the combination of cheap machinima tools and lots of unemployed games programmers have turned Edinburgh into a hot-bed of photorealistic fetish video production even though it’s technically illegal. The burden of evidence is higher under Scottish law, so despite having tougher porn laws than England, the smart shocksite developers have all moved north, while their development tools and websites have migrated into the Russian blacknet cloud. Fighting it is an unwinnable battle, so your job is merely to flag up anything involving real-live actors—especially minors—and try to avoid unwittingly popularizing the stuff via the Streisand Effect.)
At the end of the hour you’re just about reeling from the deluge, but you’ve given Moxie a framework for prioritizing his jobs over the next week, not to mention your home and personal mobile numbers and strict instructions to call you immediately if anything really fucked comes up. You can see he’s getting psyched up, ready and prepared to perform triage on Tubgirl should the need make itself known—right up until the moment your mobie rings.
You answer it. It’s Dodgy Dickie. Shit. “Wait one,” you mouth at Moxie. “Yes?”
MacLeish looks like his ulcer’s playing up again. “Inspector? Are you up to speed on the international angle yet?”
You bite back your instant reaction: “I’m in the process of clearing my desk and handing off all current ICIU operations to a subordinate. It’s going to take me another half-hour today, and a couple of hours tomorrow when my relief sergeant is in the shop. So your answer is a conditional ‘no,’ sir. Has something come up?”
“You bet it has, and it’s touching down at Turnhouse in an hour. We’ve got an investigator from Europol flying in to poke his nose where it doesn’t belong. I want you to meet him and keep him the hell off