Rule 34 - Charles Stross [99]
“Minute those to BABYLON,” you tell Moxie. He nods and keyboards it into the intelligence wiki, where some poor grunt will funnel it into Mac’s inbound workstream and Mac (or one of his assistant managers) will assign it a priority level and add it to some other detective’s to-do list. Policing, as with all procedural jobs, expands to fill all the time and consume all the resources available for it. And a job like this one is too big to handle in a half-assed manner.
It’s a point of pride among the former nations of the United Kingdom that the murder clear-up rate is in three sigmas territory, somewhere over 92 per cent; but it takes bucketloads of manpower to get there, and process-oriented management and intelligence-supported work flow and human-resources tracking to keep the minimum investigative team of fifty-plus detectives properly coordinated. Most of the public still believe in Sherlock Holmes or Inspector Rebus, the lone genius with an eye for clues: And it suits the brass to maintain the illusion of inscrutable detective insight for political reasons.
But the reality is that behind the magic curtain, there’s a bunch of uniformed desk pilots frantically shuffling terabytes of information, forensic reports and mobile-phone-traffic metadata and public-webcam streams and directed interviews, looking for patterns in the data deluge spewing from the fire-hose. Indeed, a murder investigation is a lot like a mechanical turk: a machine that resembles a marvellous piece of artificial-intelligence software, oracular in its acuity, but that under the hood turns out to be the work of huge numbers of human piece-workers coordinating via network. Crowdsourcing by cop, in other words.
(If you’re one of the piece-workers in a mechanical turk—or one of the rewrite rules inside Searle’s Chinese room—the overall pattern of the job may be indiscernible, lost in an opaque blur of seemingly random subtasks. And if you’re one of the detectives on a murder case, your immediate job—determining who last repaired a defective vacuum cleaner—may seem equally inexplicable. But there’s method in my motion, as you’ll learn for yourself.)
You spend the next two hours with Moxie, churning through queries from Operation Babylon. Part-way through, Kemal disappears (to the toilet, you think at first: then to the briefing room, you decide), returning towards the end. You do lunch in the on-site canteen, communicating in defensive monosyllables: After his contribution from Palermo, he has nothing more to offer you. After lunch, you both attend the afternoon briefing in D31; then you sort Kemal out with a tablet, and he turns out to be surprisingly useful at handling those low-level queries you delegate to him. You update the ICIU shift roster for the next week and attend to another heap of inbound administrivia, before finally clocking off your shift and going home via the hair salon.
Home in your wee flat, you kick your shoes off and hang your jacket, visit the bathroom, and take a good close look at your new hair-do.
It’s always hard to tell for sure at the hairdresser’s, but here you can take your time and not worry about being unduly critical in front of the perfectly coiffured girl with the scissors and the long memory for casual insults from clients. You tilt your head and narrow your eyes and after a minute, you decide that, yes, you can live with it. It’s shorter, but more importantly, it’s regular. As business-like as your choice of footwear. Rest easy: Nobody’s going to be passing sly remarks about your hair-do or your sensible shoes in the canteen behind your back. (Locker-room culture will never die: It just goes underground, as you know to your cost.)
You have plenty of time for a long comfortable lie in the bath followed by a TV dinner. You plant yourself on the sofa under your tablet, surfing the web while the vacuum