Rule 34 - Charles Stross [62]
She pronounces that last with such lip-smacking contempt that you recoil instinctively, racking your brain for an explanation. It must be the women’s studies group at the mosque; they’ve clearly got to her. Next thing you know, she’ll be ditching her jeans for a niqab and angrily denouncing the oligo-hetero-patriarchy on marches. The spectre of no more sex on the home front hovers over you, and despite your desire for dick, the idea of losing your wife to a bunch of hairy-legged feminist separatist fundamentalists fills you with horror.
“Please, Bibi, it’s not like that! I only want what’s best for the bairns. If I don’t work, what kind of role model am I going to be for them? But the idiots in the probation service don’t want me to use my skills—”
“I think you mean they don’t want you to get yourself slung back inside for breaking the law. And do you know something, oh my husband? Neither do I! If this was just about the dodgy bread mix, I could ignore it. Or maybe if it was just the odd job for Tariq. I can even ignore the other stuff. I’m not blind. I know what our marriage is to you.” She leans towards you and sniffs. “But he’s had you in that pub again, hasn’t he? And you couldn’t even be bothered to hide it! You smell of beer. Mouthwash right now, or you’ll set them a bad example.” Her nostrils flare. “My mother would have a fit.”
“Sammy isn’t here,” you say defensively. “And anyway, I only had one pint—”
“Oh yes, just one pint. That’s like being a little bit pregnant, or just one casual sex partner, or just one arrest and criminal conviction. Or just one scam at a time. What does it take to get through to you? You’ve got to learn to think ahead! You’ve got to be more discreet!”
You blink at her. The anger seems to have ebbed into wide-eyed confusion. She’s really worried, you realize. It’s not just a bad day in the dispensary, so let’s yell at the house-husband (though that’s happened in the past). What’s got into her? Then another thought strikes you. “You said it’s changing hands for sixty euros a bag. Do you know who’s paying that much for it? I know where to get more; we could clean up—”
That night, you get to bed down on the attic floor, with the burping brew-kit airlock to keep you company as you try to work out exactly what you said wrong.
Women! Who knows why they do what they do? Certainly not you—and you even married one.
TOYMAKER: Reality Excursion
You!
Yes, you. Who the fuck did you think I was talking to, the Tooth Fairy? (That’s him on the left)—Jesus? No, I’m talking to you, fuckwit. Whoever or whatever you are, watching over me . . .
I’m an executive, you know. That’s why there’s a chip in my head. The Operation put it there so they could keep track of me. You’ve got to look at it from their point of view; it’s cheap due diligence—couple of dozen terabytes of non-volatile storage, mikes and GPS for metadata—“to deter you from going behind our backs,” they said. It’s not just a recorder, either. They can make LTE chipsets really small, you know? Phone chipset in the head. Maybe it’s transmitting all the time, and you’re sitting in a darkened room listening to my subvocalized thoughts. Or maybe you’re just an AI application, running pattern-matching code on the speech-to-text output, somewhere in the cloud. What if it’s receiving, too, controlling the old meatpuppet? Maybe there’s a bomb in my skull. Learning too much about our employers is a firing expense—they’re said to favour nine-millimetre—but what if they wanted to be sure? Multi-channel redundancy via cognitive radio. Push a button, bounce a signal off the moon, hello, bomb, pleased to meet you! Let’s go out with a splash.
You only live in my imagination. (I die, you die.) But I can still talk to you. And we have a problem, my invisible friend.
. . . No. Let me be more precise. I have a problem. Enemies. They’ve iced my primary candidates for COO and CFO before I could door-step them for a pre-induction assessment. To make matters worse, I became a person of interest in the police investigation—purely by coincidence—and