Rule 34 - Charles Stross [75]
The Operation knows one thing, and knows it well—how to set up and manage a business for maximum growth until it’s time to negotiate a successful sale and cash out. They have single-handedly dragged the management of vice into the late twentieth century, if not the twenty-first: a monumental, if questionable, achievement.
But now they’re under attack.
The Operation’s business is at its most effective when it can tap new audiences, gain new customers, expand markets—reach out to new sources of profit. Lack of brand awareness is the biggest obstacle to establishing any new sales channel (legal or otherwise), and you can’t advertise counterfeit goods or illegal services through regulated media. Consequently, the Operation is highly dependant on all kinds of spam, from shoutcasting on in-game voice channels to the old search engine optimization racket.
Over the past three days, more than fifty individuals have died in unlikely and frequently messy manners—electrocuted by miswired domestic robots, hearts stopped by improbable prescribing errors, driven off the edge of multi-story car-parks by malfunctioning car autopilots, shot by police in raids on the wrong address. Most of these people are not actual affiliates or employees of the Operation. They are, however, all involved at one level or another in the unregulated network-marketing sector.
Something must be done.
Part 2
LIZ: Mote, Eye, Redux
There is one good thing about being seconded to run interference for Dodgy Dickie’s murder investigation, and it is this: CID always get allocated the best cars, right after Traffic. They get the same priority as the regular community patrols, and that’s a hell of a long way up the pecking order from ICIU.
When you show up at the transport desk this time, you don’t have to grovel for a segway: Instead there’s an unmarked Chinese Volvo waiting for you, silver-grey luxury on wheels. As you slide behind the wheel and orient yourself with the controls, you see it’s got a console full of extras on the passenger side—traffic data terminal, ANPR cameras, external laser projector, the works. So this is how the other half drive, you think enviously as you thumb the airport short-stay car-park into the autopilot and hit the GO button. A moment later, the car reverses out into the station yard and turns towards Queensferry Road in eerie silence: You’re halfway to Turnhouse before it fires up the diesel generator under the bonnet.
Self-driving cars are a mixed blessing. Right now, you miss the bad old days when you needed to keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road: It’d be a welcome distraction. But current health and safety regulations say that only officers assigned to ongoing pursuit and patrol driving duties—and the training that goes with them—are allowed to actually operate vehicles. It’s something to do with the force being liable for damages if you run over any civilians. So you use the spare quarter hour to dig into the CopSpace image of Dickie’s incident room and try to familiarize yourself with who’s doing what (and how far they’ve got so far).
The car parks itself in a police-only bay near domestic/EU arrivals, at Terminal One. You head for the meeting point adjacent to Customs with a sinking heart. CopSpace at the airport is congested, full of security warnings and immigration tags as well as the usual detritus: criminals on probation, minicab drivers with unpaid licenses, and the like. But after a minute, your specs lock onto someone and flicker for attention. You see a vaguely familiar face in the crowd, towing a neat carry-on bag as he stands in front of the exit, scanning—
Yes, that’s him. You start forward. Medium height, dark eyes, Middle Eastern skin, sharp suit. He’s looking around, but he hasn’t clocked you yet. He’s alone this time, no mob of super-cop extras in tow. His head turns. “Kemal Aslan, I presume,” you say, pre-empting him. “Welcome back to Scotland.”
His expression of annoyance is so quickly masked you can’t