Rule 34

DOROTHY: Breakdown

Earlier:

You’re scalding yourself under the hotel shower, trying to wash the feel of his fingers off you, when you hear the telltale chirp of an incoming text from your phone.

The finger-feel is everything: You tense as you massage your abrasions, trying to brush off your own awareness of how little you meant to him—not even the joyful sharing of sex with a near stranger—but the real world is outside the curtain, buzzing on the sink side like a lonely vibrator. It’s someone on your priority list: It won’t shut up. So after another minute or so, you turn off the shower and clamber out of the tub. You towel off briefly, then when your hands are dry, you carry the phone through into the bedroom, caressing it until it calms down.

BORED. It’s from Liz. Your throat swells: You sit down on the end of the bed and give in to the sniffles for a couple of minutes.

My life is shit. That’s a given. For a well-adjusted bi poly femme, you’re having remarkably bad luck. Stranded up here in Edinburgh, dumped by Julian—your primary—you let Liz’s insecurity drive you into… into… nothing good. But being a victim is a state of mind, isn’t it? (Isn’t it?) You shiver and glance at the door, dead-bolted and with the additional security of a barbed carpet wedge you bought on eBay. He’s out there, in Room 502, two floors up and one corridor over. You can feel him—or maybe it’s just the weight of your own queasy awareness pressing down on you. Pull yourself together. It’s not like he’s going to break in and rape you, is it? He’s just a nasty wee shite, as they say hereabouts, a misogynistic pick-up artist who’s too cheap to use a tissue.

Keep telling yourself that, Dorothy.

There’s another muted buzz from your phone, in a cadence that tells you it’s a work message. But you really aren’t in the mood for the office on-call tap-dance: you’re disturbed, lonely, and very pissed-off—partly at yourself for not spotting the sleazebag in advance, but mostly at him for being… what? (You don’t blame a scorpion for stinging: It’s in his nature. Instead, you deal—with bug spray and boot-heel and extreme prejudice.) You feel like an idiot because—admit it—you wanted a bit of excitement rather than a nice hot cup of cocoa and Liz. Liz isn’t exciting. She’s a bit clingy, and what’s left over from her compartmentalized cop-life is boringly normal: civil partnership, not swingers’ club. So you went looking for excitement, nearly overran your safeword, and now you’re projecting all over the other. Way to behave like a grown-up…

The phone buzzes again. Work is calling. It’s the backside of ten o’clock, according to the hotel clock radio. Responsible grown-ups who get work calls at that time of night check to see if it’s important. The hotel comps guests a yukata, so you drop the towel and wrap the robe around yourself, then wipe your eyes and grab a hair-band before you answer: With customers all the way out to the Pacific North-west, there’s always the risk of an incoming teleconference. But when you put your specs on and glance at the log, it’s just a priority-tagged wave. URGENT CASE REVIEW REQUESTED.

Oh for fuck’s sake—you follow the link, which leads into the agency’s human-resources back-office cloud. There’s an employee profile; they’re asking you to fill out an anonymized interpersonal ethics evaluation. Snitcheriffic, you think, and open it, expecting to be asked to crit one of the eager-beaver banking IT managers you were meeting with this afternoon.

Instead, it opens on a mug shot of John Christie, and a quiz that, after a second of dumb-struck confusion you recognize as the PCL-R psychopathy check-list.

Hot and cold chills mesh with nauseated recognition. You cancel out of the form frantically, racking your brain for a connection. Head office booked you into this hotel, didn’t they? What did Christie say—here on business? Did someone put him here? But how would they know—the front desk. Your luggage problem. His luggage problem. They put the frighteners on you to drive you out of your comfort zone, then banged you together with him. Emphasis on bang.

They? Who?

It stinks. You worked for McClusky-Williams for three years before they were taken over by Accenture, and three years since—as an independent division—and there’s no way anyone at head office would pull a stunt like that. It’d be a Section Four Fail for starters, with five or six other ethical violations on top, and the consequences for an ethics-compliance group of failing a moral-standards audit start with drastic and go rapidly downhill—

Reluctantly, you open up the wave and follow the link back to the snitch wizard. Yes, it’s him all right. You try to cross-reference to find his employer, but there’s nothing in the system. Digging diligently, you get nowhere except that bloody wikipedia true-crime article about his long-since-hanged namesake. There’s no job number or contract associated with this job, it just came up in the system. Your skin crawls as you think about what it means. You prod your way through the snitch wizard, following the script: glibness/superficial charm, check. Cunning/manipulative, check. Promiscuous sexual behaviour—now hang on a minute: The psych text betrays an implicit polyphobic bias—reluctantly: check. Your stomach clenches as you work down the list. You should have seen this coming for yourself—it was all there in front of you, wasn’t it? Christie is a poster child for narcissistic personality disorder, and you walked straight into it.

The quiz vanishes, to be replaced by another inventory questionnaire, this one more mundane: It’s an appraisal that evaluates key personality traits in an executive-founder. Private-equity outfits and VCs use it to filter their trained start-up monkeys. The target is—your heart sinks—John Christie.

“What the fuck?” you mumble to yourself, just as your phone vibrates again. It’s your private personality module. You glance at the touch screen, leaving the quiz floating open in your specs. It’s Liz again: ARE WE STILL ON FOR SATURDAY?

You flip the phone out of work personality.

YOU HOME? you text.

YES.

CAN I COME ROUND? After a moment, you reluctantly add: NEED COMPANY.

There’s nothing for a minute. Then a tag pops up, showing an address book entry and a handy route map. Your heart flip-flops. All of a sudden a cup of emotional cocoa with Ms. Clingy is looking—well, you’ll get restless eventually, but right now you’re halfway to totally creeped-out and in need of hugs and reassurance.

BE RIGHT ROUND. NEED TO TALK. Then you go hunting for clean underwear.

Embarrassingly, excruciatingly, the panic attack you’ve been bottling up washes over you like a drenching cold ocean breaker just as you reach the end of Liz’s leafy alley-way. You catch yourself and lean against a mossy stone wall, shuddering with fear, eyes clenched shut, twitching at the sound of every passing vehicle. It’s dusk, and there are no other pedestrians around, which is a small mercy. The lane’s cobblestoned, with century-old trees lining the pavements and lending the air a damp, greenish odour—there’s a faint sound of running water from the stream beyond the dead end of the alley. It’s mortifying. What if, your subconscious nudges you, what if Liz can see through you? What if she doesn’t take you seriously—

You force yourself to stand up, afraid of smearing lichen on your jacket. Something flitter-buzzes overhead: a bat, perhaps, or a Council drone checking for broken paving-stones. What if she thinks you fucked Christie to get at her—everything’s bubbling up from the depths of your subconscious, like methane clathrates bursting from an overheated ocean floor. You freeze, unable to make your traitor feet move towards her door. But then you remember what lies behind you in the dusk-haunted corridors of the hotel. Can’t go forward, can’t go back: It’s the existential dilemma in a nutshell, isn’t it? You’re scared of what Liz will think of you, that’s a given, but the flip side of the coin is that you’re scared of what Christie could do to you. That makes things a lot clearer, for which you are duly grateful. “Hi, dear, do you mind if I borrow your futon for the night? I just fucked a psychopath, and I’m afraid he’s stalking me via my employers.” It’s not much of a script, but at least it’s there. Your left foot slides forward, almost against your will, then your right. It’s going to be all right, you think.

Until you climb the six stone steps to the wee front door of the colony flat and ring the doorbell, at which point you lose it again.

LIZ: It’s Complicated

Later:

It’s morning, and you’re on the beat: High pay grade, brightly polished boots—but boots, nonetheless. That’s what it always comes back down to, boots directed by BOOTS, the Bayesian Objective Officer Tracking System, an expert system by any other name, to tell you which street to walk down.

You can’t do policing without boots (whether physical lumps of leather or virtual chunks of software). It takes boots to track down and interview the witnesses, boots to comb the incident scene for debris and clues, boots to define a territory and remind the trolls who the streets belong to, boots to do the necessary social-work clean-up duty after hours on a Saturday night, BOOTS to do the personnel task assignments and match capabilities to needs, BOOTS to take a series of jobs and parcel them out as efficiently as possible. Boots are an integral part of the process.

It’s not like the brass don’t know this, even though they’re always looking for an alternative: surveillance drones in the sky, peepers on segways rolling alongside the gutters, social-networking Crimestoppers and anti-alcoholism initiatives. Boots are labour-intensive, they take training and command and control resources, and they don’t—can’t—give you scalable efficiency improvements. So they’re unpopular with the buzzword-wielding consultants who keep coming back to shape your political masters’ outlook an election or two after they got booted the last time for costing too much.

This morning you started by going straight to the shift-change Babylon briefing, your head still a-churn from the late-night encounter with Dorothy. And lo, Dickie’s got a job for you. “Liz, we’ve got one that’s right up your street.” The moustache twitches in something between a smile and a snarl: “a possible expert witness for you to interview here—a Dr. Adam MacDonald, of the university informatics department.” He flicks a tightly knotted bundle of mind-mapped notes at you. “He’s an expert on the emergent behaviour of distributed oracular systems—whatever they are—and I want you to go pick his brains.” A sniff. “One of your Europol contacts raised it this morning, and BOOTS fingered you to talk to him. Some pish about research into using social networks to distribute subtasks contributing to a fatal outcome. Ye ken it bears on that line about sabotaged dish-washers and back-street fabs ye’ve been pushing.”

You’re too tired to raise an eyebrow at the fact that Dickie’s actually been paying attention to anything you minuted. “Wouldn’t that be a Common Cause charge if we find them… ?”

“Aye, it might be. Or it might not, if the participants dinna understand what they’ve been set to doing.” Dickie twitches. “Well?”

“I’ll get right onto it. Anything else?”

Dickie shakes his head. “Next agenda item…”

There has been little progress overnight. The promised lead on Mikey Blair’s wild ride came forward voluntarily but turns out to be a rent boy who knows nothing about anything. They’re still looking for Vivian Crolla’s embalming expert, but much digging reveals that she has something of a reputation on the local fetish scene. Half an hour in the right pubs, and you could probably have figured that much out for yourself.

So it is that you and Kemal (who you pick up in the ICIU annexe, where he’s talking to Moxie about something—fitting in too well by half, you think) end up visiting Appleton Tower.

It’s not quite that fast, of course. You’re still somewhat freaked by yesterday’s late-night developments (Dorothy being an emotional wreck in need of support is unexpected: And the rest is just plain disturbing), so you’re not paying one hundred–per cent attention to the job. Which is why Kemal brings you up short as you’re scurrying in circles trying to do three things at once. “What exactly are we being sent to do?” he demands.

“I—” You stop dead, caught in the act of rifling through Speedy’s in-tray to see what Moxie left unfinished at shift change. “That’s a good question.” You pull up the stack of notes Dickie passed you and sign Kemal onto it. “Let me finish here, then we can go grab a coffee and read this stuff.”

And so you go find the nearest Costa’s in a wee shop unit on Raeburn Place, and get your heads into the backgrounder that turns out to be a committee report from Karl in Dresden, Andrea in New York, Felix in Bishkek, and a bunch of other ICIU cops around the world.

You read fast. “This is amazing.” While you were off shift, the intelligence team working behind the scenes on Babylon have been busy. It looks like they traced the repaired vacuum cleaner, and then some: For a miracle, they’ve been sharing their research with their overseas counterparts, and they’ve been pooling results. “All the parts come from cheap generic-design storefronts.”

“Who set them up?” asks Kemal.

“Good question.” The storefronts all take PayPal, and investigation traces them to a variety of servers in the Far East. Most of which, upon further examination—where possible—turn out to be part of one of three botnets.

“People are dying in domestic accidents,” you tell him, still skimming ahead through the notes. “A vacuum cleaner shorts its battery out into a bath, or a non-standard cartridge in a spa machine contains contaminated fluid, or a sun bed’s safety interlock is disabled. In each case, the machine has been repaired in the past year. Whoever carried out the repair saved money by using an OEM part template bought over the net and printed on a local machine. The part is physically a correct fit, but compromised: The vacuum’s hose contains an electrical connection and links to the power supply, the sun-bed latch…”

Kemal shakes his head. “Very strange.”

“It’s completely crazy, isn’t it?” You skim another summary. “I don’t see how it’s possible—we’re up to fourteen murders now? Then they’d need a lot of different sabotaged appliances, at least fourteen, probably more—”

Kemal nods grimly. “Many more. More than two per target, perhaps more than five. You should search the homes of your local victims, tear everything apart and see what else comes to light. There may be many more. I think we may be mistaking the elephant’s tail for a bell-pull.”

“But who’s designing the things?”

“Ask this academic?” Kemal sounds disturbed.

“Got any ideas what to ask about?”

He pulls his specs on and points. “How about task distribution? And where the designs come from?”

“Huh. That side of it—I’ve been looking into this. The Chinese government began prioritizing design twenty years ago in their universities. India, more recently. The recycling initiative”—Make Do And Mend is big this decade—“and the Internet combine to give them ready access to markets, and the spread of cheap fabbers allows them to export bespoke design patterns. WIPO are trying to do something about the generics, but design and trade-secret laws are not universally harmonized. Not like copyright and patent regulations.”

It’s part of what you’ve been tugging on from the other end, the supply of feedstock to the grey-market fabs—you’ve been looking at demand for counterfeit or contraband goods, and the supply of raw materials and designs feeding them. This is clearly related, but not in a way you can put your finger on just yet.

Kemal picks up his coffee cup. “The problem is not to, to design replacement parts that have lethal flaws. The problem is not even to insert them in the victims’ households—true, some will live large, not repair or recycle domestic appliances, but most will be vulnerable somewhere: an exercise machine at their gym, a brake assembly in their car. No, the problem is how to coordinate the operation.” He looks you in the eye. “It is scary, yes?”

It’s not so much scary as incomprehensible: This murder’s MO stands in relation to a normal homicide as a super-jumbo to a Cessna. “Murder I can get, but why do it this way? It’s positively baroque! Who would do such a thing? It’s inhuman!”

“You’re absolutely right,” Kemal says, pushing his cup aside. “It is inhuman.”

“You’re not going on that AI trip again,” you say wearily.

Kemal shakes his head. “Precisely who is sending us to interview this academic?”

“Tricky—” You stop. BOOTS fingered you to talk to him. “BOOTS,” you say. An expert system for matching personnel assignments to tasks. “Huh.” You finish your coffee. “But it’s just human-resources software.”

“If we know how it works, it isn’t Artificial Intelligence,” snarks Kemal. He stands up. “Shall we go?”

Edinburgh University isn’t built around a campus: Its buildings are scattered through the south side of the city centre, sandwiched between the Old Town and the Meadows, rubbing shoulders with charity shops and cheap apartments and fast-food joints. Its reputation for academic excellence, combined with geographical dispersion, has stood it in good stead in these harsh times—unlike many rival institutions, it’s still in business, although two-thirds of its students this decade have never set foot in Scotland in their lives.

You went to university and did the whole halls-of-residence, livingoff-student-loans thing, back in the day. You did your Master’s in Policing, Policy, and Leadership on day release with distance learning—no faculty within a couple of hundred kilometres offered it as a part-time residential—and you got a taste of the chill wind that was even then beginning to blow through the halls of academia: a wind that’s since then risen to a howling tornado blowing shards of razor-sharp glass, stripping staff and student bodies to the bone as the whole structure of higher education changes. And you’re paying for that sheepskin to this day. Was it worth it? Who knows?

One thing’s for sure: University isn’t what it used to be.

Some things remain. The old buildings, for example. Appleton Tower is every bit as much a crass brutalist statement on the edge of the Old Town as it ever was, if a bit more crumbly about the edges than when it was last refurbished nearly twenty years ago. It’s a listed building: the concrete bones of a different era, tempered in the white heat of Wilsonian techno-optimism and remodelled in the late teens. But there’s no desk-bound receptionist waiting to greet you behind the grime-streaked glass lobby doors that once handled a stream of students; nor will the door open when you push it.

Perplexed, you pull up a voice call. “Hello? Is that Dr., uh, MacDonald? I’m Inspector Kavanaugh. We have an appointment? I’m downstairs right now—how do I—okay, thanks, bye.” You hang up and glance at Kemal, who is looking around with wrinkled brow, as if he’s just smelled something bad. “Dr. MacDonald will come down and let us in,” you tell him. “There’s an access-control system.” Now you know to look for it, the discreet box by the door tells you all you need to know. Receptionists are too expensive for universities in these straitened times.

In fact, it’s not just the Appleton Tower lobby that’s showing signs of wear and tear; half the buildings on Bristo Square are closed or boarded, one or two blinking LEASE AVAILABLE flags in your specs. For a couple of decades tuition fees rose faster than inflation, until the inevitable happened and the bubble burst. The collapse catalysed by the first of the top-tier universities rolling out their distance-learning products in the middle of a recession sent the higher-education industry into a tailspin. Ed Uni has always been one of the top double-handful, and is still viable: But times are harsh and full-time undergraduate students are an endangered species.

You’re beginning to get impatient by the time you spot a sign of life through the window. At first, you think it’s a homeless vagrant who’s managed to sneak inside, but as he approaches the front door with a determined shuffle you realize that he’s looking for you. He’s bald on top, with a round head, stubby nose, and tiny, angryish eyes. With his tattered denim overalls and grubby coat, he looks like a member of the chorus from Deliverance: The Musical. You wonder: Is there some mistake? despite a nagging sense that you’ve seen him somewhere before. Then he opens the door, and speaks with an ultraposh Morningside accent: “Inspector Kavanaugh? I’m Dr. MacDonald. You’ll be following me, please.”

You wave Kemal inside hastily. “Certainly. Do you know why we’re here?”

MacDonald sniffs, then gestures towards a darkened tunnel between lift doors. “I’m sure you’ll tell me in your own good time,” he says unctuously. “We can talk in my office.”

The lift is battered and has clearly seen better days: It squeaks between floors, bumping and jolting to a stop on the ninth. “We don’t use the bottom two floors at present,” MacDonald tells you, punching buttons on an access-control keypad. “This way…”

Here, at least, there’s fresh paint on the walls, and the thin carpet isn’t worn through. And there is a receptionist at a desk in an open area of corridor, her head bent over a pad. Fading print-outs pinned to corkboards on the walls and the gawky-looking student staring blankly at them tell you that you are, in fact, stuck in a time warp from the noughties, or maybe on the set of a documentary video about the rise and fall of higher education.

MacDonald pushes open a beige door and ushers you into a cramped office. There’s a huge, old-fashioned-looking monitor on his desk, and a glass-fronted bookcase holding a small, dog-eared collection of journals and books. Judging from the dust and the yellowing corners, they haven’t been read in a while. Trophy copies of his papers, you assume. He flops down into a cheap swivel chair, and gestures at the two fabric-padded bucket seats in front of his desk. “Make yourselves at home. I’m sorry I can’t offer you any hospitality—our coffee machine’s broken again, and the corporate hospitality budget is somewhat lacking this decade.”

“Thanks,” you manage. The sense of déjà vu resolves itself: You have seen him before. In a pub, somewhere in town? Brain cells grind into action, and you recite a memorized script. “We’re here to gather information which may be of use to us in an ongoing investigation into a crime. I’m required to tell you that you are not under suspicion of any criminal wrong-doing—we’re here to consult you as an expert witness—but we have to record this interview for use in our ongoing investigation, and if you incriminate yourself, the resulting transcript may be used in evidence.” You tap the right arm of your specs, then clear your throat. “Are you alright with that? Any questions?”

“I shall remember not to confess to any murders I didn’t commit.” MacDonald seems to find your caution inappropriately amusing. You’re about to repeat and rephrase when he adds, “I understand you’re in need of domain-specific knowledge.” He leans forward, smirk vanishing. “Why me?”

“Your name came out of the hat.” You decide to press on. Probably he got the message: In any case, having an inappropriate sense of humour isn’t an arrestable offense. “We’re investigating a crime involving some rather strange coincidences that appear to involve some kind of social network.” The half smile vanishes from Dr. MacDonald’s face instantly. “You’re a permanent lecturer in informatics with a research interest in automated social engineering and, ah, something called ATHENA. Our colleagues recommended you on the basis of a review of the available literature on, uh, morality prosthetics and network agents.”

Kemal, sitting beside you with crossed arms, nods very seriously. MacDonald looks nonplussed.

“Really? Coincidences?” He pauses. “Coincidences. A social network. Can you tell me what kinds of coincidences we’re talking about here?”

“Fatal ones,” says Kemal.

Damn. MacDonald’s expression is frozen. You spare Kemal a warning glance, then say: “We’re here for a backgrounder, nothing more—to see if your research area can give us any insights into what’s going on. I’m afraid I’ve got to admit that I’m not up on your field—tell me, Professor, what is automated social engineering?”

You sit back, mimic his posture, and smile at him. It’s all basic body-language bullshit, but if it puts him more at ease… yes. MacDonald visibly relaxes.

“How much do you know about choice architecture?”

He’s got you. You glance sidelong at Kemal, who shrugs minutely. “Not a lot.” The phrase rings a very vague bell, but no more than that. “Suppose you tell me?”

“If only my students were so honest… let’s review some basic concepts. In a nutshell: When you or I are confronted with some choice—say, whether to buy a season bus pass or to pay daily—we make our decision about what to do by using a frame, a bunch of anecdotes and experiences that help us evaluate the choice. You can control how people make their choices, even to the point of making them choose differently, if you can modify the frame. There’s a whole body of research on this field in cognitive psychology. Anyway: Choice architecture is the science of designing situations to nudge people towards a desired preference. You might want to do this because you’re marketing products to the public—or for public policy purposes: There’s a whole political discourse around this area called libertarian paternalism, how to steer people towards choosing to do the right thing of their own free will.”

Now it clicks, where you’ve heard this stuff before: There was a fad for it about ten years ago, trials on reducing binge drinking by giving pub-goers incentives to switch off the hard stuff after a couple of pints, free soft drinks and so on. (Which failed to accomplish anything much, because the real problem drinkers weren’t in the pubs in the first place, much less drinking to socialize, but the Pimm’s-quaffing policy wonks didn’t get that.)

You nod, suppressing disappointment: Is that all? But MacDonald reads your gesture as a cue to continue in lecture mode.

“It’s another approach to social engineering. Take policing, for example.” He nods at you. “There’s the law, which we’re all expected to be cognizant of and to obey, and there’s the big stick to convince us that it’s a lot cheaper to play along than to go against it—yourselves, and the courts and prison and probation services and all the rest of the panoply of justice. However, it should be obvious that the existence of law enforcement doesn’t prevent crime. In fact, no offense to your good selves, it can’t.

“For starters, in modern societies, the law is incredibly complex: There are at least eight thousand offenses on the books in England and about the same in this country, enough that you people have to use decision-support software to figure out what to charge people with, and perhaps an order of magnitude more regulations for which violations can be prosecuted—ignorance may not be a defense in law, but it’s a fact on the ground. To make matters worse, while some offenses are strict-liability—possession of child porn or firearms being an absolute offense, regardless of context—others hinge on the state of mind of the accused. Is it murder or manslaughter? Well, it depends on whether you meant to kill the victim, doesn’t it?”

He pauses. “Are you following this?”

“Just a sec.” You flick your fingers at the virtual controls, roll your specs back in time a minute to follow MacDonald, who is on a professorial roll. “Yes, I’m logging you loud and clear. If you’ll pardon me for asking, though, I asked about automated social engineering? Not for a lecture on the impossibility of policing.” Perhaps you let a little too much irritation into your voice, as he shuffles defensively.

“I was getting there. There’s a lot of background…” MacDonald shakes his head. “I’m not having a go at you, honestly, I’m just trying to explain the background to our research group’s activity.”

Kemal leans forward. “In your own time, Doctor.” He doesn’t look at you, doesn’t make eye contact, but he’s clearly decided to nominate you for the bad-cop role. Which is irritating, because you’d pegged him for that niche.

“Alright. Well, moving swiftly sideways into cognitive neuroscience… in the past twenty years we’ve made huge strides, using imaging tools, direct brain interfaces, and software simulations. We’ve pretty much disproved the existence of free will, at least as philosophers thought they understood it. A lot of our decision-making mechanics are subconscious; we only become aware of our choices once we’ve begun to act on them. And a whole lot of other things that were once thought to correlate with free will turn out also to be mechanical. If we use transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt the right temporoparietal junction, we can suppress subjects’ ability to make moral judgements; we can induce mystical religious experiences: We can suppress voluntary movements, and the patients will report that they didn’t move because they didn’t want to move. The TMPJ finding is deeply significant in the philosophy of law, by the way: It strongly supports the theory that we are not actually free moral agents who make decisions—such as whether or not to break the law—of our own free will.

“In a nutshell, then, what I’m getting at is that the project of law, ever since the Code of Hammurabi—the entire idea that we can maintain social order by obtaining voluntary adherence to a code of permissible behaviour, under threat of retribution—is fundamentally misguided.” His eyes are alight; you can see him in the Cartesian lecture-theatre of your mind, pacing door-to-door as he addresses his audience. “If people don’t have free will or criminal intent in any meaningful sense, then how can they be held responsible for their actions? And if the requirements of managing a complex society mean the number of laws have exploded until nobody can keep track of them without an expert system, how can people be expected to comply with them?

“Which is where we come to the ATHENA research group—actually, it’s a joint European initiative funded by the European Research Council—currently piloting studies in social-network-augmented choice architecture for Prosthetic Morality Enforcement.”

You look at Kemal, silently: Kemal looks at you. And for a split second you can read his mind. Kemal is thinking exactly the same thought as you, or any other cop in your situation. Which is this: What drug is he on?

“Would you run that by me again?” you ask.

“Certainly.” He nods. “Prosthetic Morality Enforcement. The idea is that by analogy, if a part of your body is deficient or missing, you can use a prosthetic limb or artificial organ. Well, our ability to make moral judgements is hard-wired, but it’s been so far outrun by the demands of complex civilization that it can’t keep up. For example… have you ever wondered why discussions in chat rooms or instant messaging turn nasty so easily? Or wander off topic? It’s because the behavioural cues we use to trigger socially acceptable responses aren’t there in a non-face-to-face environment. If you can’t see the other primate, your ethical reasoning is impaired because you can’t build a complete mental image of them—a cognitive frame. It’s why identity theft and online fraud are such a problem: There’s no inhibition against robbery if the victim is faceless. So we need some kind of prosthetic framework to restore our ability to interact with people on the net as if they’re human beings we’re dealing with in person. And that’s what ATHENA is about. Society has become so complicated that people can’t reliably make moral choices; but ATHENA will nudge them into doing the right thing anyway.”

His eyes glitter maliciously in their saggy pouches. “If it works properly, you’ll be needing a new job by and by…”

ANWAR: Getting Answers

Sleep comes hard, and after tossing and turning uneasily in the cold wide bed—Bibi is still away—you rise early and head for the office. You’re running on autopilot, going through the motions in yesterday’s soiled clothes because your mind is elsewhere, scampering and spinning the spiked hamster wheel of your fears.

Tariq is dead. That hurts, even before the stabbing fear that you might be responsible. Answers. There must be an answer somewhere. Kicked the bucket. The dead-eyed man and the not-beer bubbling away in the attic and the too-good-to-be-true job and Adam’s sly suggestion that you’ve been trolled, and suggestion for cashing in on it—

You want answers.

Because if Adam’s right, and the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan isn’t just a sock-puppet but a flat-out fiction, a Potemkin Republic set up to snare the siloviki, you’re in violation of the terms of the license they made you sign when they released you. And that’s you, back inside that cell in Saughton for another six months. At least. If they don’t find something new to charge you with.

(And your hamster-mind is skittering ahead in blind panic, trying to figure out ways around the onrushing wall of steel spikes. Maybe if you can prove you’ve been acting in good faith—or perhaps if it is a fake you can resign and dob them in to Mr. Webber or Inspector Butthurt, demonstrate you’re a good and responsible citizen—assuming the madman with the suitcase doesn’t come after you…)

The office is as you left it when you received Bibi’s panicky call yesterday afternoon. It feels like an infinity ago. You sit down, open up your laptop, and check for email. Nothing from head office, just a handful of spam. Actually, there hasn’t been anything from head office—the Foreign Ministry—this week. No updates, no memos, no bulletins and reminders about policy on export licenses, charges for visas, cancelled passports, office supplies.

You frown and check your settings. They look alright, but how can you be sure? Maybe the Ministry’s mail server is sulking. Or perhaps there’s a public holiday that lasts all week, and nobody thought to tell you. Or a general strike or a meteor strike. Whatever the cause, it’s disturbing. So you turn to your handy quick reference guide to running a consular mission, and bounce around the hyperlinks until you come to a list of voice contacts. Ah, technical support. Issyk-Kulistan is four hours ahead of Edinburgh; you paste the contact into your phone app and wait patiently as it tries to connect. And tries to connect. And clicks over to dump you in voice-mail hell. An interminable announcement in the sonorous Turkic dialect rolls over you, before switching to English and informing you that: “You have reached the mailbox of senior consular support engineer Kenebek Bakiyev. Direct customer support is available on Mondays and Wednesdays between the hours of 8 A.M. and 1 P.M. For outside hours support, please leave a message after the tone. BEEP. I’m sorry, this mailbox is now full.”

You stare at the screen. “What the fuck? What the fucking fuck?” The calendar on your desktop is telling you that today is Wednesday and the time is ten past nine, local time—ten past one in Bishkek.

You are not an idiot; you were not born yesterday. You know exactly what’s going on here. You’re supposed to buy the story and sit tight until next Monday, aren’t you? It’s a delaying tactic. What kind of technical-support line is available for ten hours a week, carefully timed for when most of its customers are still asleep in their beds? They’re gaslighting you. Or maybe not. A sudden moment of doubt: Issyk-Kulistan is very poor. What if they can’t afford to run a proper support desk or help-line? If this is the best they can do—how secure is your pay?

You check the phone wiki again and again. Digging deeper, looking for clues. Then a thought strikes you, and thirty seconds later you’ve got another number. You feed another contact to the phone app, and ten seconds later a voice answers you in the flattened vowels of London’s East End: “’ Ello, you’ve reached the consulate of the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan. How can I help you?”

I not we, you notice. “Hi,” you say, “this is Anwar, at the Scottish consulate. Listen, can you tell me, have you had any email through from the Ministry since Monday afternoon?”

It takes a minute or two for you to get Mr. East-Ender to grudgingly acknowledge your identity, and another minute for him to get the picture, but by the time you put the phone down, you know two new facts: that IRIK have only bothered to establish a one-man consular presence in England, and no, he hasn’t heard anything from head office either.

Your moustache twitches at the half-imagined odour of dead Rattus norvegicus, and you turn to your browser. There are news aggregators and search engines and attention proxies, and you are a master of the web, a veritable expert. Even though you’re having to pipe everything through a mess of translation agents, it is but the work of half an hour for you to churn through a hundred searches, refining and reducing and recycling your terms until you’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s not going on. There’s no public holiday today. There are no football matches, riots, or debates going on in the chamber of deputies. More significantly, a bit more digging reveals that there are no bandits, bank robberies, or bombings. In fact, Issyk-Kulistan is a bit of a news black hole. It’s as if a cone of Internet silence has descended across the entire country, and nobody outside has noticed.

Your skin crawls; you’re running low on excuses. If Adam’s right—then the sock-puppet nation is about to be wadded up and thrown away. And you know too damned much. You know about empty-eyed men with suitcases they want you to look after, and trade delegations with bags of not-bread mix. You don’t have to be Inspector Rebus to know what happens to bagmen who aren’t sitting tight when the music stops.

You try a different strategy and waste a few minutes hunting for notifications of service outages afflicting the major trunks in and out of the country. Then you have a moment of blinding realization.

Voice mail.

You flip through the Ministry’s online directory until you come to a different section. With a shaky finger, you drag the address card into your phone and prod the connect button, already rehearsing your abject apologies. It rings twice, then a man answers it, speaking an unfamiliar language. There’s music in the background, tinny voices singing. “Hello?” you say tentatively: “Is Colonel Datka there?”

“One moment.” The speaker’s English is very good, almost unaccented. There’s a scraping sound, as of a hand covering a mobile phone, some muffled conversation. “Felix is tied up right now, but he’ll be along in a minute. Who should I say is calling?”

Your tongue swells abruptly, and you cough. “To whom am I speaking?”

“This is Bhaskar.” Whoever Bhaskar is, he sounds amused. “And you are?”

“This is the Scottish consulate,” you say, your voice barely above a dry-mouthed whisper. “I need to talk to the colonel.”

“The—you say the Scottish consulate?”

“Yes.” You swallow, hoping the phone app they gave you is adequately encrypted. “There’s a problem.”

“A problem. And for this problem you need to talk to Felix Datka.” His tone sharpens.

“Yes.” You realize you’re clutching the edge of your desk as if it’s a life-belt. “I know what you’re doing, what you’re using me for, and I don’t, I can’t…”

“Wait, please. Ah, Felix—you, you had better explain this to the colonel himself. He will speak to you now.” There’s a muffled noise, as of a phone being passed between hands, and then a new speaker.

“This is Felix Datka. Identify yourself.”

The background music has stopped. “It’s Anwar, Anwar Hussein. From Edinburgh, your honorary consul.”

The colonel snorts superciliously. “And you are calling because… ?”

All your indignation comes boiling up at once.

“My cousin’s dead, Colonel. Since your man arrived in my city, with his curious demands. Surely this is not a coincidence? And it is not bad enough being held up to ridicule by the other diplomats of this city, oh no! Everybody knows that Issyk-Kulistan is a front for some strange diplomatic game. And the trade delegations with the bread mix that is a culture medium for illegal nanosystems, you have me handing this stuff out openly as if on the street-corner! Where the police can find me, red-handed! And this week, this week even the news stops. There is no news, as if you cannot even be bothered to maintain the pretense! Have you no decency, sir?”

There is no sound from the other end of the phone, but a glance at the screen tells you the connection is still there.

“Sir?”

There is a pause. Then Datka asks, softly, meditatively, terrifyingly: “What do you mean, ‘bread mix’?”

Light-headed and nauseous, you collect your possessions and walk out of the consulate. You leave behind: the safe and its contents, the travelling trunk with its commercial samples of bread mix, the laptop, the furnishings, the stale posturing and lies. You are going home, home to your family and your future and the things that matter to you. Fuck Adam and his stupid get-rich-quick scheme, scamming scammers. Fuck Colonel Datka and his secret policeman’s eyes. Fuck the colonel’s man Christie, whoever he is. You don’t need any of them. They can’t give you back Tariq’s annoying jokes, his sly word-play. They can’t give you an extra minute to say good-bye to your cousin. And if they can’t do that, how heavily should your children’s futures weigh on your shoulders?

If it comes to it, you’ll turn yourself in to Mr. Webber and shop the lot of them. Go back inside Saughton, if that’s what it takes to keep them away from Bibi and the bairns.

You are hungry—you forgot to make yourself breakfast this morning—and you are sick at heart as you march determinedly towards the tram stop. You’re walking away from a good solid job that was paying you—well, it wasn’t paying you well in purely monetary terms, but it got you respect. And after what you threw in Colonel Datka’s face (or more accurately, his ear) you have zero expectation of keeping the job. Bibi will be livid. She’ll also be exhausted from sitting up all night with Aunt Sameena and Uncle Taleb and the kids, and she’s probably back at work by now—

Yes, you can see all this. Nevertheless.

You check your phone for the tram schedule, and it flashes a red warning at you: delays expected due to an accident on Leith Walk, get the bus instead. You can see at least one tram with your own eyes, but who knows how the network works? So you stop by the foot of the Mound, outside the big art gallery, and poke at the time-table. You’ve hit the morning lull after rush hour, it seems, when half the buses return to their depots. Irritated, you put your phone away and start walking. It’s only a couple of kilometres, and the weather’s fine. You’ll even chance a short-cut over the Mound, normally a steep climb best left to the buses’ fuel cell.

Halfway up the first flight of worn stone steps behind the gallery, your phone shivers. You glance at it, startled. It’s an invite to join a new start-up group on some business network, one of the half-assed by-blows of LinkedIn and Facebook that offer virtual corporate hosting to folks too cheap to rent an office. Somehow it’s dodged your spam stack. You’re about to flag it when you see the sender’s name. JOHN CHRISTIE. You mash your thumb on the delete icon with a shudder, like you’re crushing a sleepy autumn wasp. A minute later, the phone buzzes again: It’s a different invite, this time for some kind of file repository. Same sender. The menacing buzz of the hornet circling your head, looking to sting: He’s relying on your natural curiosity to make you break cover, nose inquisitively into his new business scheme. It’s a trap, of course. You’ve had enough. You flip the phone to flight mode and pocket it. It’s not like you need a map to find your way home, and when you get there, you’ll—

What will you do?

You’re breathing harder as you climb faster, but you know exactly what you’re going to do. You’re going to take his luggage and dump it out the back yard. You’re going to call Inspector Butthurt and cough everything you suspect, the weird coincidences, the job that’s too good to be true. Give them the bucket, the bread mix, and Colonel Datka’s phone number, much good may it do them. You’re going clean, the cleanest you’ve been: an end to the tears and the in-between… yes. Get your priorities right: Naseem, Farida, Bibi, your parents and uncles and aunts and cousins and nephews and nieces and family—

There’s a buzzing as of an angry swarm of bees from your pocket, then your phone rings.

You pull it out and stare at it. It’s in flight mode: How can this be? It’s ringing, though. The screen says INTERNATIONAL CALL.

You answer the phone. “Hello.”

The voice at the other end of the connection is heavily accented, male. “Presidential palace,” it says. “Please wait.”

You stop and lean on the iron railing near the top of the steps, just below the intersection with Market Street. Turning to face back the way you came, you stare out across the deep gulf of Princes Street Gardens, the classical stone pile of the Royal Scottish Academy, towards the stony frontages of the New Town, blocks hacked out of history. There’s a light breeze blowing, and high above you it tears cotton-wool shards from the passing clouds. There’s a sour taste in your mouth. After a moment you realize it’s fear.

A new voice, gravelly, with a faint American accent: “Good afternoon. Am I speaking to Mr. Anwar Hussein?” You half recognize it, but you can’t quite place where you’ve heard him before.

“Yes,” you say cautiously.

“Excellent. Please accept my apologies for intruding on you—I understand, I’m told, you have recently had a death in your family?”

“Yes.” You bite your lower lip, then glance around. Just in case somebody’s watching you.

“I’m very sorry about that.” A momentary pause. “I gather that when you called Felix Datka half an hour ago, we had a slight misunderstanding.”

“I resigned,” you say icily, tightening the shreds of your dignity around you.

“Yes, he told me that. Mr. Hussein—Anwar—I want to explain to you: Matters are not so simple that you can just resign.”

You’d tell him to fuck right off except he rang through to your phone while it was in flight mode, and that’s supposed to be impossible, isn’t it? Or isn’t there a backdoor for the emergency services? You vaguely remember hearing something about that, something about external emergency reactivation—“I’m quitting,” you repeat, less firmly. “Who are you, anyway?”

“I’m Colonel Felix Datka’s boss,” says the man on the phone. “You can call me Bhaskar. Or Professor Tanayev. I am, very indirectly, your employer. Or ex-employer, if you insist on resigning.”

The tram bells far below might as well be fire alarms, telling you to get out now. “Professor Tanayev. You’re the colonel’s boss? How exactly does that work?”

He chuckles. “They can kick me out of the presidential palace, but they can’t strip me of tenure.”

Silence. You realize you’re clutching the phone like it’s turned into a gold brick between your fingers. “President of Issyk-Kulistan?”

“No; President of Kyrgyzstan. Issyk-Kulistan is a wholly-owned subsidiary operated by a shell company, if you prefer a business metaphor. Felix’s job is to keep IRIK running for as long as we need it.”

Now you cringe and start looking round. But not for snoopers; you’re more worried about assassination drones cruising overhead, looking for a lock on your skull. “Why are you interested in me?”

“Because you’ve been approached by a highly questionable business man working for a foreign private-equity organization. They’re not angel investors so much as fallen angels—please stop looking around like that, you will only attract unwanted attention—and it is important to us that this business man should not be frightened away or prematurely introduced to the police—yes, I said prematurely. Mr. Hussein, are you paying attention? Hello?”

There’s a stream of traffic flowing along Bank Street, and you’ll only get yourself run over if you try and dash across it. The crawling sensation in the small of your back won’t go away, but the fire in your lungs is growing, so you stop, bent over, wheezing (so out of shape! Bibi will scold you!), and hold the phone to your ear again.

“Hello? Hello?”

May you come to the attention of important people: Supposedly it’s an ancient Chinese curse, but the modern Kyrgyz version has got you bang to rights. “I’m here.”

“Excellent. Listen, Mr. Hussein, Anwar—may I call you Anwar? This is only for the next day or so. You have heard of, ah, sting operations? A sting is in progress, and your consular post is part of the bait. We would like you to continue with the job and comply with any of John Christie’s requests—if they remain reasonable, of course—while we gather evidence against his associates. For whose arrest there will be a generous reward, incidentally. Colonel Datka assures me that this fellow is the key to a major international criminal investigation, and he will see to it that Europol treat you as a material witness when—”

“What about the bread mix?” you burst out.

“The what?”

You have never heard a president sound confused before. (Not that you’ve ever knowingly spoken to a president before—it’s not like they’re on Facebook, sending friend requests—but it’s not what you expect from seeing them on the political blogs.)

“The bread mix,” you repeat. “INSECT-FREE FAIR TRADE ORGANIC BREAD MIX BARLEY-RYE, Produce of People’s Number Four Grain Products Factory of Issyk-Kulistan. That I’m supposed to give samples of to visitors, and never put in a bucket and ferment with a special extra ingredient.”

There’s noise on the line, as the president speaks away from his headset, his tone rising imperiously: “Felix, what’s this I hear about our consulate receiving bread mix?” There is a delay. “Oh, I see. Mr. Hussein, you are not to worry about the bread mix. Apparently the—criminals—we have been investigating have parasites. They’ve been using your consulate for drop-shipping contraband, but you should not worry about this. It is minor, and if you play your part for just a little while longer, we will arrest them all. Including this Christie person. I will ensure that you are well looked after, you have my word on the matter. If you’ll excuse me, I must go now. Just remember: Play for time. Good-bye for now!”

Your phone goes dead, and you blink at the screen. It is, indeed, in flight mode. Then you look up. High above the roof-tops, twenty or fifty metres up, the grey discus of a surveillance drone ghosts past the elaborate columns and stone railings and domes of the former bank headquarters.

Blink and it’s gone: But the sensation that you are being watched remains.

DOROTHY: Rewind

Flashback:

The door opens. You take a step forward into Liz’s open arms, and her friendly face and welcoming hug is just too much. You tear up as you slump chin first onto her shoulder. She tenses up for a moment, then relaxes. “Oh hell. Let’s get you inside.” Two steps forward, the door closes, and you find a futon behind you. You crumple slowly backwards on it.

Gentle words: Liz fusses around, offering tissues, tea, and sympathy. But, inevitably, the question you’ve been dreading arrives: “What happened?”

You open your mouth and find the words have gone missing. I don’t know.

Liz squats in front of you. Takes your right hand in her own, strokes the back of your wrist. She looks—intent. Focussed. You try to speak again, but end up shaking your head.

“Is it the stalker?” she asks.

“I—” You’re appalled at your inarticulacy. “I don’t know. Didn’t think so. Not sure now. I’ve been so stupid.” Sniff. Is this self-pity or anger, filling the spring of tears? Which is it? “I, uh, I wasn’t telling the truth the other night. When I said Julian was in Moscow.”

“No?” She’s waiting, hopeful and loyal and… just being there. You don’t deserve this.

“He dumped me a couple of months ago,” you mutter, not meeting her eyes. “I’m not myself right now.”

“What happened?” she asks, gently stroking your wrist and watching you with inquisitor’s eyes, not accusing, mildly curious.

You tell her. Then, when she doesn’t explode in a fiery octopus of molten blame, you tell her some more. Being conflicted. Wanting a casual pick-up. Dinner with Christie, and dessert, and, and.

She listens quietly until you get to the way he chucked you out, and what you thought, the safeword. “Did he rape you?” she asks, gently enough. But you can feel the tension in her fingertips, rubbing.

“No. Yes. Maybe: I’m not sure.” You take a deep, ragged breath. “I… it was regrettable sex. I shouldn’t have done it and felt really bad afterwards, kind of sick… I think he might have raped me, if I’d wanted to stop short. But we didn’t go there. Not at that time.”

“At. That time.” Her finger motion stops, leaving your wrist limp and open to the air. She’s pulled completely away, withdrawn without your noticing. “What happened then?”

You take a deep breath. “That’s when it got weird. I went back to my room, wedged the door. Then there was a work email.”

“Work.” You’ve been avoiding eye contact up to now, afraid of seeing what your confession is doing to her. But you force yourself to look up. To your surprise, she looks thoughtful. There’s no contempt or anger or hatred; she looks almost… business-like? “What kind of work?”

“Head office wanted a special type of assessment performing, a sociopathic disorder assessment on a named executive. It was him. Liz, I should have seen it coming before—I mean, I was just stupid. John Christie is a narcissistic psychopath—”

“Who did you say?”

You flinch. “John, uh, Christie? He said he got picked on at school for it, sharing a name with a murderer—”

“No, wait. Stop right there.” Liz is looking at you with a very odd expression on her face. “Would you mind describing him? I mean, how tall is he? How old? How much does he weigh—”

Now you’re on the receiving end of an inquisition—but it’s not at all what you expected. Part-way through, Liz reaches for a pair of specs and switches them on. She seems to be looking something up. Then she takes them off again, holding them carefully, as if afraid they might explode in her hands.

She stares at her specs. “Jesus, Dorothy.”

“I’m—” You lick your lips. “You don’t hate me?”

Her gaze flickers across you, sweeping you from top to toes. She looks profoundly disturbed: stunned, even. “Jesus, Dorothy, you’re lucky to be alive.”

“But he—” You do a double-take. “Is he a murderer?”

She won’t meet your eyes. “I don’t know. Hopefully not; but he’s certainly a psycho, and what happened to you—are you sure it wasn’t rape?”

Your mind goes blank. You try to think back to what you were thinking in the run-up to dinner, in the lift up to his room… skulking away with your tail between your legs. Showering to forget his touch. (Why didn’t you use the safeword—were you afraid he wouldn’t stop? Were you enjoying it? It’s so confusing.) “If it’s rape, there’s a script to follow, isn’t there?”

“Yes, but you don’t have to worry about that.”

“The hell I don’t.” Your throat’s raw. “There were no witnesses. Okay, so suppose I say ‘yes’ and you take me round to the station where a trained counsellor talks me through giving a report and taking”—you swallow—“samples. And let’s suppose you, uh, your people go and arrest him. At that point it’s his word against mine, and you know what his advocate will make of my background? Polyamory still doesn’t get equal rights, never mind civil partnerships… I just get dragged through the mud, and to what end?”

“But you’ve got—” Liz jolts to a stop, like a Doberman at the end of a choke chain. She’s staring at you. “Oh,” she says softly.

“Oh, indeed.” You reach out your hand towards her. “You don’t want this, Liz. You don’t know what you’re opening yourself up for.”

After a moment, she takes your hand.

“It wasn’t rape,” you say, trying to keep any trace of doubt out of your voice for her sake. “But I’m really worried about the, the other thing.”

“Yes, I’d say you should be.” Liz is silent for a few seconds. “I’d like to take a statement, though. All the same.”

“What? But I told you, it wasn’t non-consensual—”

“Not about the sex: about the appraisal.”

You shiver. “I’d rather not. If you don’t mind.”

She sits down beside you on the futon. “It’s, it’s about Christie. He’s, uh, a person of interest in another investigation. We want to question him in relation to a violent crime. I can’t tell you about it right now, but what you’d told me—it’s really important. My colleagues—they need to know about this. Do you mind if I file at least a contact report?”

You sniff, then rub a hand across your eyes. There’s no mascara or eye-liner, luckily: You stripped before you showered. “You’re going to insist, aren’t you?”

She manages a weak smile. “You said it: I didn’t.”

“Oh hell.” You struggle to sit up. “Just… do you mind if I stay overnight? I can’t face that room…”

“You can stay,” she says neutrally. “I’ll take the futon.” She pulls her police specs on again, then pauses, one finger hovering over the power button. “I still love you, you know. I just wish things weren’t so messy.”

Then she pushes the button.

LIZ: Project ATHENA

“People laugh when they hear the phrase ‘artificial intelligence’ these days.” MacDonald is on a roll. “But it’s not funny; we’ve come a long way since the 1950s. There’s a joke in the field: If we know how to do it, it’s not intelligence. Playing checkers, or chess, or solving mathematical theorems. Image recognition, speech recognition, handwriting recognition. Diagnosing an illness, driving a car through traffic, operating an organic-chemistry lab to synthesize new compounds. These were all thought to be aspects of intelligence, back in the day, but now they’re things you can buy through an app store or on lease-purchase from Toyota.

“What people think of when you say ‘artificial intelligence’ is basically stuff they’ve glommed onto via the media. HAL 9000 or Neuromancer—artificial consciousness. But consciousness—we know how that shit works these days, via analytical cognitive neurobiology and synthetic neurocomputing. And it’s not very interesting. We can’t do stuff with it. Worst case—suppose I were to sit down with my colleagues and we come up with a traditional brain-in-a-box-type AI, shades of HAL 9000. What then? Firstly, it opens a huge can of ethical worms—once you turn it on, does turning it off again qualify as murder? What about software updates? Bug fixes, even? Secondly, it’s not very useful. Even if you cut the Gordian knot and declare that because it’s a machine, it’s a slave, you can’t make it do anything useful. Not unless you’ve built in some way of punishing it, in which case we’re off into the ethical mine-field on a pogo-stick tour. Human consciousness isn’t optimized for anything, except maybe helping feral hominids survive in the wild.

“So we’re not very interested in reinventing human consciousness in a box. What gets the research grants flowing is applications—and that’s what ATHENA is all about.”

You’re listening to his lecture in slack-jawed near comprehension because of the sheer novelty of it all. One of the crushing burdens of police work is how inanely stupid most of the shit you get to deal with is: idiot children who think ‘the dog ate my homework’ is a decent excuse even though they knew you were watching when they stuck it down the back of their trousers. MacDonald is… well, he’s not waiting while you take notes, for sure. Luckily, your specs are lifelogging everything to the evidence servers back at HQ, and Kemal’s also on the ball. But even so, MacDonald’s whistle-stop tour of the frontiers of science is close to doing your head in. Then the aforementioned Eurocop speaks up.

“That is very interesting, Doctor. But can I ask you for a moment”—Kemal leans forward—“what do you think of the Singularity?”

MacDonald stares at him for a moment, as if he can’t believe what he’s being asked. “The what—” you begin to say, just as his shoulders begin to shake. It takes you a second to realize he’s laughing.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” he says wheezily, wiping the back of his hand across his eyes: “I haven’t been asked that one in years.” Your sidelong glance at Kemal doesn’t illuminate this remark: Kemal looks as baffled as you feel. “I, for one, welcome our new superintelligent AI overlords,” MacDonald declaims, and then he’s off again.

“What’s so funny?” you ask.

“Oh—hell—” MacDonald waves a hand in the air, and a tag pops up in your specs: “Let me give you the dog and pony show.” You accept it. His office dissolves into classic cyberspace noir, all black leather and decaying corrugated asbestos roofing, with a steady drip-dripdrip of condensation. Blade Runner city, Matrixville. “Remember when you used to change your computer every year or so, and the new one was cheaper and much faster than the old one?” A graph appears in the moisture-bleeding wall behind him, pastel arcs zooming upward in an exponential plot of MIPS/dollar against time—the curve suddenly flattening out a few years before the present. “Folks back then”—he points to the steepest part of the upward curve—“extrapolated a little too far. Firstly, they grabbed the AI bull by the horns and assumed that if heavier-than-air flight was possible at all, then the artificial sea-gull would ipso facto resemble a biological one, behaviourally… then they assumed it could bootstrap itself onto progressively faster hardware or better-optimized software, refining itself.”

A window appears in the wall beside you; turning, you see a nightmare cityscape, wrecked buildings festering beneath a ceiling of churning fulvous clouds: Insectile robots pick their way across grey rubble spills. Another graph slides across the end-times diorama, this one speculative: intelligence in human-equivalents, against time. Like the first graph, it’s an exponential.

“Doesn’t work, of course. There isn’t enough headroom left for exponential amplification, and in any case, nobody needs it. Religious fervour about the rapture of the nerds aside, there are no short-cuts. Actual artificial-intelligence applications resemble us about the way an Airbus resembles a sea-gull. And just like airliners have flaps and rudders and sea-gulls don’t, one of the standard features of general cognitive engines is that they’re all hard-wired for mirrored self-misidentification. That is, they all project the seat of their identity onto you, or some other human being, and identify your desires as their own impulses; that’s standard operating precaution number one. Nobody wants to be confronted by a psychotic brain in a box—what we really want is identity amplification. Secondly—”

Kemal interrupts again. You do a double-take: In this corner of the academic metaverse he’s come over all sinister, in a black-and-silver suit with peaked forage cap, mirrored aviator shades. “Stop right there, please. You’re implying that this, this field is mature? That is, that you routinely do this sort of thing?”

MacDonald blinks rapidly. “Didn’t you know?”

You take a deep breath. “We’re just cops: Nobody tells us anything. Humour us. Um. What sort of, uh, general cognitive engines are we talking about? Project ATHENA, is that one?”

“Loosely, yes.” He rubs at his face, an expression of profound bafflement wrinkling his brows. “ATHENA is one of a family of research-oriented identity-amplification engines that have been developed over the past few years. It’s not all academic; for example TR/Mithras. Junkbot.D and Worm/NerveBurn.10143 are out there now. They’re malware AI engines; the Junkbot family are distributed identity simulators used for harvesting trust, while NerveBurn… we’re not entirely sure, but it seems to be a sand-boxed virtual brain simulator running on a botnet, possibly a botched attempt at premature mind uploading…” He rubs his face again. “ATHENA is a bit different. We’re an authorized botnet—that is, we’re legal; students at participating institutions are required to sign an EULA that permits us to run a VM instance on their pad or laptop, strictly for research in distributed computing. There’s also a distributed screen-saver project for volunteers. ATHENA’s our research platform in moral metacognition.”

“Metacognition?”

“Loosely, it means we’re in consciousness studies—more prosaically, we’re in the business of telling spam from ham.” He shrugs apologetically. “Big contracts from telcos who want to cut down on the junk traffic: It pays our grants. The spambots have been getting disturbingly convincing—last month there was a report of a spearphishing worm that was hiring call girls to role-play the pick-ups the worm had primed its targets to expect. Some of them are getting very sophisticated—using multiple contact probes to simulate an entire social network—big ones, hundreds or thousands of members, with convincing interactions—e-commerce, fake phone conversations, the whole lot—in front of the victim. Bluntly, we’re only human; we can’t tell the difference between a spambot and a real human being anymore without face-to-face contact. So we need identity amplification to keep up.

“The ATHENA research group is working on the spam-filtering problem by running a huge distributed metacognition app that’s intended to pick holes in the spammers’ fake social networks.”

MacDonald magicks up a big diagram in place of the graphs; it looks like a tattered spider-web. “Here’s a typical social network. Each node is a person. They’ve got a lot of local connections, and a handful of long-range ones.” Thin strands snake across the web, linking distant intersections. “Zoom in on one of the nodes, and we have a bunch of different networks: their email, chat, phone calls, online purchases…” A slew of different spider-webs, cerise and cyan and magenta, all appear centred on a single point. They’re all subtly different in shape. “Spambots usually get their networks wrong, too regular, not noisy enough. And we can deduce other information by looking at the networks, of course. You know the old one about checking the phone bills for signs that your partner’s having an affair, right? There are other, more subtle signs of—well, call it potential criminality. Odds are, before your partner snuck off for some illicit nookie, there was a warm-up period, lots of chatter with characteristic weighted phrases—we’re human: We talk in clichés the whole time, framing the narrative of our lives. Or take some of the commoner personality disorders: pre-ATHENA, we had diagnostic tools that could diagnose schizophrenia from a sample of email messages with eerie accuracy. Network analysis lets us learn a lot about people. Network injection lets us steer people—subject to ethics oversight, I hasten to add—frankly, the possibilities are endless, and a bit frightening.”

“Can you give me an example of what you mean by steering people?” Kemal nudges.

“Hmm.” MacDonald’s chair squeals as he leans back. “Okay, let’s talk hypotheticals: Suppose I’m wearing a black hat, and I want to fuck someone up, and I’ve paid for a command channel to Junkbot.D. First, I build a map of their social connections. Then I have Junkbot establish a bunch of sock puppets and do a friend-of-friend approach via their main social networks—build up connections until they see the sock puppets’ friend requests, see lots of friends in common, and accept the invite. Junkbot then engages them in several conversation scripts in parallel. A linear chat-up rarely works—people are too suspicious these days—but you can game them. Set up an artificial-reality game, if you like, built around your victim’s world, with a bunch of sock puppets who are there to sucker them in to the drama. Finally, you use the client-side toolkit to hire some proxies—neds in search of the price of a pint—who’ll hand your target a package and leg it, five minutes ahead of your colleagues, who have received an anonymous tip-off that the quiet guy living at number seventy-six is a nonce.”

Kemal is rapt, listening intently. He nods, perhaps once every ten seconds. MacDonald has got him on a string with this spiel. You look back at MacDonald. “You wouldn’t dream of doing that,” you say.

MacDonald grins and nods. “Indeed not. Morality aside, it’s stupid small-scale shit. What’d be the point?”

You peg him then. He’s not your typical aspie hacker, and he’s not a regular impulse-control case. MacDonald’s the other, rare kind: the sort of potential offender who does a cold-blooded risk-benefit calculation and refrains from action not because it’s wrong, but because the trade-off isn’t right. You won’t be seeing him in the daily arrest log anytime soon, because he kens well the opportunity cost of a decade in prison: It’d take a bottom line denominated in millions to lure him off the straight and narrow. But if he sees such a pay-off…

“What do you use ATHENA for?” you ask, bluntly.

“Right now we’re tracing spammers. ATHENA can scope out the fake networks: It can also tell us who’s running them.” There’s something about MacDonald’s body language that puts you on red alert. Something evasive. “ATHENA then probes the spammers to determine whether they’re human or sock-puppet. We’re working on active countermeasures, but that’s not green-lit yet; I gather there’s a working group talking to some staff at the Ministry of Justice about it, but—”

“What kind of active countermeasures?”

“Spoiler stuff, but more active than usual: using their own tools against them. You know it’s an international problem? Crossing lines of jurisdiction—a lot of them live in countries that aren’t signatory to or don’t enforce anti-netcrime treaties. So we’re examining a number of tactics that’d need to be approved by a court order before we could use them. So far it’s just theoretical, but: reverse-phishing the spammers to grab their control channels and shut down the botnets. Fucking with their phishing payloads to make them expose their real identity so you folks can arrest them. Stealing their banking credentials and applying civil-forfeiture protocols. Using their ID protocols to fuck with their personal lives—hate mail to the mother-in-law, that kind of thing. Having their computer report itself as stolen. In an extreme instance, ask the USAF to send a drone to zap them.”

“Uh-huh.” You glance down and try to look as if you’re making notes, so that he can’t see your face. One by one, the alarm bells are going off inside your head. “But you haven’t done any of this yet.”

“No.”

“But?”

“ATHENA is an international effort.” MacDonald leans forward on his elbows, fingers laced before him. “We are just academic researchers. We’re trying to find a way to, shall we say, enforce communal standards without turning the corner and ending up with a panopticon singularity, ubiquitous maximal law enforcement by software—nobody wants that, so we’re looking for something more humane. Crime prevention by automated social pressure rather than crime prosecution by AI. But… once you get into that territory? People don’t all agree on what constitutes crime, or moral behaviour. Some of our associate members live in jurisdictions where there are melted stove-pipes between academia and government, or intelligence. And I canna vouch for what those third parties might do with our work.”

ANWAR: Bluebeard

As soon as you open the front door, you know something’s not right.

“Honey? I’m home…”

It’s like that inevitable, deterministic scene in every horror video you’ve ever lost two hours of your life to: the dawning sense of wrongness, of a life unhinged. From the subtle absence of expected sounds to the different, unwelcome noise from upstairs in the bedroom, all is out of order.

“Hello?” you call up the stairwell.

There’s no reply, but you hear footsteps like a herd of baby elephants on the landing. Angry footsteps. Your stomach clenches. They are Bibi’s angry footsteps, and now you know what is wrong: All that remains is to find out why.

You tiptoe past an obstruction in the hall and look up the stairs. “Is everything alright?” you call.

There’s a muffled thud, a wail of pain, and some most unladylike swearing. Then there’s another thud, louder. Bibi hauls into view on the landing, leaning to one side, the big yellow suitcase dragging at the ends of her arms like a boat anchor. Her glare of effort silences you as she levers it onto the top stair-tread. It must be full, to be so heavy. The suitcase is a hundred-litre monster, sized for that month-long family excursion to Lahore that never came. Ever since, it has lurked under Naseem’s bed like a bright plastic chrysalis from which someday a holiday will hatch. It’s nearly bigger than Bibi, and for a heart-stopping moment, you think she’s going to be crushed by it. But no: It rocks heavily on the stair, then she’s behind it, gripping it by the tow handle and leaning backwards as she lowers it towards you like a juggernaut of wrath. Finally, it hits the hall carpet and sits there, and Bibi pushes it past you, breathing heavily.

“What are you doing?” you ask.

“What does it look as if I’m doing?” There’s an odd, lilting note in her voice, almost devil-may-care.

“Is it your mother?”

“No, Anwar, it’s you.”

“I don’t—” You’re about to say understand, but for a cursed moment your tongue freezes. “Where are the children?”

She pushes the heavy bag past you, forcing you to step back against the wall. She’s on the other side of it, using it as a shield. “What’s in the bucket?” she asks tensely. “Where did you get that suitcase?”

She’s been up the ladder.

Oh shit.

“I, I can explain! It’s work—a man from head office, from the Foreign Office, he is coming to stay, just for a couple of nights—”

“Shut up, Anwar.”

You focus on her nostrils, on the tip of her nose. They’re flared wide, as if she smells something awful, something vile. She’s shaking slightly. Fear? Anger? You’ve always found it hard to read Bibi. The long silences, the elliptical comments, the woman’s expectation of insight, as if you’re expected to read and parse the invisible code written on the inside of her eyelids. Contempt?

“What’s wrong?” you ask.

“I’m leaving,” she says, as calmly as if announcing she was going to work.

“What?”

While you stand, perplexed, back up against the wall, she shoves the suitcase past you to stand beside the smaller bag that obstructs the hallway.

“When are you coming back?” you ask, feeling lost.

She grabs the smaller bag by the handle. “That’s up to you.” She drags it up to the open front door, then stops, straightens up, and glares at you. “Get rid of that stuff. Get help. Then you can email me.”

“But what—what stuff?” None of this makes sense. “I don’t understand.”

“No, you don’t.” Her contempt is withering. “I’ve put up with a lot of not understanding from you, over the years. Not understanding what it is about obeying the law, Anwar. Not understanding that you’re going to get caught if you carry on. And I’ve been giving you a lot of not understanding in return. Not understanding about the pubs and the late nights. Not understanding about your boy-friends and the condoms. I could even manage to not understand your brewing experiment in the attic, or the dodgy business deals. But the other thing? I can’t not understand that. Promise me you’ll get help, and we can talk. Chat. IM. I won’t tell the police.” Her shoulders are shaking. “But. If I catch you near the kids, I’ll tell everyone.” She turns away.

“Tell everyone what?”

But you’re talking to a receding back, hunched under the weight of too much baggage. You blink against the daylight, mouth hanging open, unable to grasp what’s happening. There’s a sour taste in your mouth and a ringing in your ears, and a terrible tension in your head: the injustice of it all! If you were a real man of your father’s generation, you’d chase after her and drag her back and thrash her soundly. (If you were a real man of your father’s generation she’d call Social Services on you.) Where’s the honour in this? What does she think you have done, to be so offended?

The bucket. The suitcase. Oh God.

The front door slams closed behind you as you scamper for the staircase as if all the hounds of hell are chasing you. (She’s been upstairs. And it’s not the bucket.) You pull down the loft ladder and scramble up it, gasping for breath, surface in the attic like a mole in a lawn suddenly come face-to-face with a roller.

The bucket is where you left it, but Peter Manuel’s suitcase sits open on the floor, in the middle of the puddle of daylight admitted by the dormer window. Bibi must have forced the lock, you realize. A small, pale-skinned arm rests just over the zippered rim, as if a wee bairn is sleeping inside. Then the arm twitches, flailing for a grip.

A little girl, about three years younger than Farida, sits up in the suitcase. Blonde tousled hair and button nose: blue eyes and puppy fat. But there’s something wrong with her. Her face is expressionless and paralyzed, her mouth gaping so wide you think for a horrid moment that her jaw is dislocated—her skin doesn’t seem to fit properly. And she’s naked. Naked, and in a suitcase.

Then she looks at you with undead eyes and speaks without moving her mouth:

“Will you fuck me, Daddy? I want you. I’ve been so lonely without you…”

LIZ: Dominoes Fall

You don’t normally come out of an interview with a material witness blinking at the light and wondering which way up your world goes; twice in twenty-four hours is something of a personal record. Nevertheless, you take one look at Kemal’s face and feel a twinge of recognition. You step aside for a stranger entering the building as the grimy glass door swings shut behind you, distracted by the need to marshal your thoughts. “Did you get anything out of that?” you ask.

Kemal shakes his head, not in negation but in weary acknowledgment. “The future is here today, unevenly distributed,” he misquotes. “I do not think the doctor is a murderer. Not a knowing one, of course.”

You keep your thoughts to yourself for a moment as you look around for the car. It’s missing. “Hold on.” You ping the front desk back at head office: “Where’s our ride?”

Sniffy McSluggard takes her own sweet time getting back to you: “CID telled it it was needed elsewhere, Inspector. You’ll be wanting to charge for a bus ride.”

Which is just bloody typical. “Come on,” you tell Kemal, and head down Buccleugh Street towards the short-cut through to South Clerk Street. “What makes you think the doctor’s in the clear?”

“I do not think he’s innocent,” Kemal admits. “His speech stress is uneven. He hides something, yes. And the spam connection, and the, the cognitive engine, the use of distributed networks—that is significant. But I don’t think he’s a killer.”

“Why not?” you needle.

“He is a coward.” Kemal pauses next to a rack of council recycling bins. “That is a technical term,” he adds. “He is a thinking man and an overplanner. He anticipates hazards before they emerge, and avoids them. Risk-averse.”

“That’s how I pegged him,” you aver. So why did Dodgy Dickie want you to interview him? “I think we should do some more digging. If someone is using ATHENA to locate targets, that would fit…” You trail off. There’s that nagging sense of déjà vu. You know Dr. MacDonald from somewhere, you’re sure of it. One or other of the pubs and bars in the pink triangle? Or a Pride march in years past, when you were managing the Lothian and Borders booth? That’s as may be, but it’s not relevant to the case in hand. “Let’s find out who he talks to. Let’s see what Moxie can find out about his connections.”

Back on South Clerk Street you hijack a microbus with the aid of your company debit card and bid handsomely to divert it halfway to Dean Village. There’s some jerk on the top deck who counterbids and it ends up ramping to twenty euros, but fuck it—two DIs, on a murder investigation: Doc will square it for you. You walk the last stretch and are back at HQ by eleven.

The MacDonald interview has preceded you—uploaded in real time, it made it into the BABYLON intel feed and promptly bamboozled everyone on the team who was paying attention. As you walk through the shielded doors, a blizzard of virtual Post-it notes descends on you, terminating in a terse SEE ME, signed DCI MacLeish. It’s like being back in grammar school again. You give Kemal the eye-ball. “Got to run, make yourself at home in ICIU.”

You barely walk through the door to D31 before Dickie is on your case. Face like thunder, beetling brows, he rushes you. “This way,” he growls, striding towards a confessional cubicle—beige fabric walls, antisound damper poised overhead like a metal mantis. He barely waits to get into the cone of silence before he launches on you. “I don’t know what you fucking think you’re doing, Kavanaugh, snooping around on your off shift and sticking your nose in—”

“Hey, what the fuck are you—”

“No, don’t you start! I should take this up the chain reet now. You’re a loose cannon. This report on the Straight woman is the final straw—”

You snap. “Fuck off.”

“Whit?”

His expression is a picture in peach, slowly ripening towards plum. You ken you’ve got about five seconds before he really explodes, so you go for the throat “She came to me, sir. Because, you know, outside of work I have this thing called a life, and Dorothy is one of my friends. Friends, Dickie, you’ve heard of them? Jesus fucking Christ, have you never had a friend come to you with a question about the law? Come on. Tell me. Have you?”

“I’ve nivver had a so-called friend cough a fucking POI in a murder investigation in my lap!”

“Well neither have I, but there’s always a first time. And I bet you’ve never had a girl-friend cough to a date-rape situation either, have you? But that’s what friends are for.”

The “R” word gets his attention. “Rape, did you say?”

You make a cutting gesture: “I didna think there was a case to answer, or I’d have had her down the clinic before her feet touched the floor. Questionable sex, with a side order of sociopathic manipulation involved. Her word against his, no drugs or threats of violence, it gets murky fast. But no, sir. The reason I filed the report was this John Christie sock puppet is in play, and I figured you might want to talk to him. About what he was doing visiting our friend Mr. Blair. Ahem.” You don’t add, instead of adding two plus two to make 16.7 and threatening me with a disciplinary. That’s understood. But his expression begins to droop from bullish to sheepish, and the choleric colour is fading.

“Jesus, Liz.”

You’ve won, you see, but you’re still pissed off at him for losing his rag in the first place. Probably best to let him know about it, both barrels in the face: Dickie’s not terribly perceptive when it comes to subtleties of interpersonal relations. “We are on the same team, sir. I really do not appreciate this hard-on you’ve got for me. I am attempting to discharge my duty as efficiently as possible, and you keep dumping on me. When I stumbled over a lead by pure chance, I sent it your way because that’s the right thing to do: I do not expect to catch shit by return of email. If you’d be happier with me off the case, then just say so: I’ve got a patch of my own to cultivate. But some professional courtesy would be appreciated around here.”

The red spots on his cheeks come back, but he visibly bites his lip—and nods. It’s just a quiver of acknowledgment, but it’s the real thing. Suck it up, asshole. To his credit, he nods again. “It would seem that I owe someone an apology,” he admits.

Don’t be too fast with that: You could poke somebody’s eye out. You confine your response to a minutely calculated nod. “About Dr. MacDonald—”

“No,” says Dickie, and something about his tone alerts you, puts you on notice that he’s forgotten for a moment that he hates you.

“No?”

“Summat you said.” He frowns frumiously, an expression that comes easily to the front of his wrinkled noggin. “Stumbled over a lead by pure chance. So you say. D’ye really think that’s plausible?”

“What are you implying?” Your hackles are still raised.

“I’m not implying… anything… about you. What I’m saying is, it’s a verra convenient coincidence. And if there’s one thing ye ken I dinna trust, it’s coincidences. And there’s too goddamn many of them in this ay mess.”

“Coin—” You stop. “Dr. MacDonald. His whole social-network-analysis thing?”

Dickie fixes you with one cold blue eye and nods slowly, beneath the cone of silence.

You begin to come down from the adrenaline spike of career-terminating rage when you arrive back at the door to the ICIU. Inside, all is as it should be: The ever-rotating pool of uniformed porn monkeys are whining for release from the vomitorium, Moxie is forted up in the second office behind a stack of giant monitors and discarded munchie boxes, and Kemal is propping up the wall behind him, looking bored behind his shades.

“Hey, skipper.” Moxie leers at you over a browser full of—you look away quickly. “What can I do you for?”

“Dr. Adam MacDonald, Ed Uni, CS department. What have we got on him?”

“How deep do you want to go?” Your ferret is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed: Moxie likes nothing better than a good chase.

“Public sources first? Nothing I have to sign for at this time.”

“Well.” Moxie twitches his fingers at a couple of tabs. “It’s funny you ask that, skipper. He’s got an article on wikipeople, you know? And the social networks, what’s not friends-locked. A couple of singlesign-ons will vouch for him, and he posts in chat rooms all over the place.” He pulls a face. “Nothing saucy—well, nothing much. He’s divorced, one ex-husband—he’s heterosexually challenged and hangs out in the usual places.”

Kemal is head down over a pad, evidently brainstorming something—you can see lots of mind-map bubbles floating in an ochre soup of murky possibilities. “Okay. Let me authorize a trawl of CopSpace links under BABYLON’s authority.” You don’t have the authority to pull up random citizen’s CopSpace records on your own, but MacDonald’s on BABYLON’s radar as a POI, and you’re on team as an inspector, so your signing authority will cover it. You lean over Moxie’s terminal and stick your thumbprint on the reader, as required. It’s very fast and streamlined these days, the hierarchical delegation of surveillance authority under RIPA statutes: police-intelligence access via social network. “Let’s see who the good doctor has been talking to lately…”

Kemal catches your eye. While Moxie is busy, you follow him outside into the bright sunlight. The drive is occupied; someone’s parked a bunch of the force’s riot barrier trailers there, lined up as if there’s an up-coming derby. “What is it?” you ask.

“Your boss must really hate you.” To your surprise, he pulls out a packet of cigarettes and glances around. “Do you mind?”

“Um…” You shake your head. “Yes, he does. Five years ago I was in line for the job he’s in now, and he knows it. I’m the skeleton in his closet.” Lothian and Borders is officially a non-smoking force, but Kemal’s just visiting, and you’re outside and more than ten metres from a doorway. “Is that legal?”

His cheek twitches in something like a smile. “I have given up giving up.”

You step sideways to stand up-wind of him: “Any thoughts?”

He gets the thing lit and inhales deeply, frowning. After he lets the smoke out, the set of his shoulders relaxes somewhat. “I have been reading this morning’s reports. More fatalities. One of them is a computer scientist in Boston. The usual methodology applies: a misdirected package. This man, though, was a full professor. Not a spammer. He listed project ATHENA as one of his research areas.”

“You think that’s why Ops sent us to see MacDonald?”

“I think so.” He nods, then sucks at the cancer stick again. “Also”—he shrugs tiredly—“the information-crimes angle.”

You get that hint instantly. ICIU is the red-headed stepchild of CID and IT Support, the spotty teenager with the suspect habits whose bedroom nobody willingly cleans for fear of what they’ll find under the bed. It’s the same everywhere. Most police work boils down to minimizing the impact on society of stupidity; of the remainder, the overwhelming majority is about malice and deliberate evil, but it’s still almost all stupid. Smart cops hate smart crimes, because they take ages to nail down and in the meantime your clean-up metrics tank. And the crime here—assuming there’s anyone to charge with it—is so high concept that it’s making your nose bleed. “What kind of scenario do you think we’re looking at?”

Smoke trickles from his nostrils. “We have bodies, linked in life by a social network, linked in dying by weird coincidences. We have software for scanning social networks and making deductions about the people in them. We have researchers discussing active countermeasures. The question that remains is, did a human being order the software that is conscious to start taking such measures? Or is it an accident?”

“Different charges, either way.” He stubs the cigarette out on the sole of one shoe and pockets the butt, staring at you. For your part, you stare at the roofline of the intelligence building, feeling numb. “If someone gave the order, well, there’s your mens rea and a tidy wrap-up. If nobody did so, then we’re into murkier waters: negligent homicide, maybe.”

“And the software?” Kemal raises an eyebrow. “If it’s conscious—”

“Fuck the software!” You struggle to keep your voice under control. “I know what you’re going to say, and it doesn’t wash. The law’s about fifty years behind the times here, but nobody’s going to shed any tears for a killer robot. If it went off on its lonesome, there is going to be such a shitstorm of new legislation coming down the pipe—” You stop. “Oh,” you say. “Coincidences.” And it’s a good thing you’re not a smoker like Kemal because the blinding flash of insight when Dickie’s time bomb detonates is so dazzling that you’d have dropped your fag, and it’s a fifty-euro fine for littering under the cameras hereabouts.

Lay out the clues like a chain of dominoes:

Mikey Blair, killed by a drug interaction between his spiked enema fluid and his protease-inhibitor prescription. That’s a coincidence, isn’t it?

“John Christie,” whoever he really is, walking in on the crime scene. Let’s call that another coincidence and see where it runs.

Lots more killings, all coincidentally contrived, like the Mohammed case: electrocuted by a homicidal vacuum-cleaner robot, or the German guy, burned to a crisp by his sun bed. Coincidence as a modus operandi: a sequence of little nudges that build to a fatal pay-off. (If one fatal accident fails to materialize, what are the odds that a bunch of other lethal contingencies lie in the target’s future?)

Now consider, further:

“John Christie” walks into your life by way of Dorothy’s hotel. She’s been booked in there by her employers. He (you shy away from thinking about this too hard) manipulates her. Then she gets a request for an ethics review.

If that’s an accident, you’ll eat your warrant card.

But what if Dorothy was a channel to get to you? Specifically, to draw your attention to “John Christie.” Because, because… ?

(Your chain of dominoes terminates in confusion. And you’re out of time.)

You blink, shake your head, then walk back inside without waiting for Kemal. “Hey, Moxie, what have you got for me?”

Moxie sits up straight. “I’ve got MacDonald’s most regular contacts, skipper. These are just the public ones, spidered off chat rooms and mailing lists. Here are his business contacts, and here are the folks he hangs out with, dereferenced to meatspace names.” He chucks a couple of tags at your specs and you open them in different windows, as the news spool from the ops room unfreezes and begins to update now you’re back in a shielded room. You glance at the personal contacts, and the bottom drops out of your stomach because right at the top of the list is a familiar name: ANWAR HUSSEIN.

“What the—” You suppress a string of invective: For some reason, swearing tends to alarm Moxie. “The personal contacts. Where does MacDonald know our friend Mr. Hussein from?”

“Our friend who? Oh, him? There are a bunch of local forums hanging off http://fitlads.net. They’re both regulars under the handles. Let’s see… yep, it’s a bed-surfing board. Looks to have a regular crowd.”

“You said the link is via fitlads, yes?” You frown. Anwar is married. Is it the same man? “This Mr. particular Hussein. Can you see if we’ve got anything on him?”

Moxie dives head down into CopSpace while you skim the feed from BABYLON. The death toll from around the world is still rising. You spot a FLASH alert, broadcast from the City Desk to every team—a report of a homicide in the south side, near the Meadows. Life (and death) goes on as usual in the city, even as you scurry round in pursuit of—

“Skipper? How did you know?”

You blink the windows away and focus on Moxie. “Know what?” Kemal appears in the doorway. “Inspector—”

“Mr. Hussein has form, skipper? He’s done time for his part in an identity-theft ring, and hey? Oh, it was you that collared him. Cool!”

“Inspector Kavanaugh. A moment, please?”

Kemal sounds worried. Your stomach lurches. You have an uneasy sense that you are holding the solution to your domino game in your hands if only you could work out where to snap them onto the chain. “Yes?”

“The murder—”

Your phone jangles, a priority incoming. You glance at it: It’s Dickie. You prioritize and answer the detective-in-charge first. “Yes?”

“Liz?” Dickie sounds strained. “You and that fly Eurocop, ye’ve already been and interviewed that professor at the uni? Did ye both go together? Ye did stream everything, reet?”

Eh? “Yes,” you say cautiously. If he’s in the incident room, they’ll know that. So why is he asking? you wonder. “Kemal and I were both there, and we both recorded the session. It’s backed up in Evidence One already. Why?”

“Was MacDonald alive when ye left?”

“What?”

You see Kemal urgently mouthing something at you and flick back to your specs. Another FLASH alert: officer called to Appleton Towers—

“Are you telling me MacDonald’s been murdered?”

“Answer me—”

“Yes, yes! He was alive when we left. I’ve got a witness and two time-stamped evidence streams, Inspector. Do you”—I held the door open, you remember—“shit.”

“Liz. Speak to me.”

“Hold please, I need to check something urgently.”

Without waiting, you put Dickie on hold and poke urgently at your specs. They’re fully lifelogging, and while the main purpose is preservation of evidence, you can at least replay what you’ve seen. You jump back an hour, then rewind at high speed until you get to your departure from Appleton Towers. You were mostly looking at Kemal, talking as you walked, but there—there’s the man coming towards you from outside; there’s you holding the door open.

“Kemal? You’re on the BABYLON roster. Can you get me a picture of John Christie? That’s—”

“What I’ve been trying to tell you,” he says, a tad waspishly, and chucks a tag at your glasses. You zoom it into a window next to your lifelog video and bite your lip.

“Fuck.” You take Dickie off hold. He’s ranting already, but you ignore him: “John Christie was recorded entering the university building at exactly the same time Kemal and I were leaving. It’s in my lifelog. I didn’t recognize him”—because you’d never met him—“is it MacDonald who’s dead?”

“You dinna recognize him,” Dickie snarls.

“Neither did Kemal. Save it for the inquest, Dickie. Have we nailed Christie yet?”

“Get your sorry ass over to Appleton Towers.” Dickie’s voice has gone flat, over-controlled. Anger is probably a good sign, with Dickie: It means he isn’t bottling it up for a future explosion. “DI Terry is on her way there to take over. I’ll be along after I finish explaining your little blind spot to the commissioner. You can walk me through your interview at the scene. Seeing you’re the last folks wha’ saw MacDonald alive.”

He hangs up.

“Shit.” You put your phone back in your pocket, trying to still the shaking in your hand.

“Well, Inspector?” Kemal asks. His expression is hard to read. Is that sympathy? Defensive distance?

You draw down a deep breath. “Let’s take a ride.” To Moxie, you add: “I want a deep trawl on Mr. Hussein. Home address, family, relationships, anything that’s available. Bounce it to me, highest priority.” Then you’re out the door like a demented groundhog, blinking in the unwelcome daylight again.

“Is that necessary?” Kemal trails you towards the garage. “I thought Dr. MacDonald was a higher priority.”

“Oh, it’s necessary alright.” To the desk sergeant: “I need a car, urgent, case BABYLON.” To Kemal: “Dickie wants us to go to Appleton Towers and identify the victim, so we’ll go. But I’m not planning on staying for long…”

ANWAR: Toymaker

You are behind the bathroom door, trying to figure out how to flush the bucket of fermenting nanotechnological bread mix down the toilet, when the doorbell buzzes.

The bread mix makes you sick, with its strange chemical smell and iridescent bubbles. There’s a permanent scummy skin floating on top of the bucket, and whenever you stick a pencil in to lift it off, more skin forms; it forms a brownish rope, very like nylon. At first it’s sticky—it sticks to anything it touches like Superglue—but it dries rapidly to a soft and stringy finish. You twist some of it up and it really does form a rope, stronger than seems possible. You’re afraid that if you chuck it down the loo (after the stomachful of vomit you ejected right after you zipped the horrid thing back into the suitcase), it’ll gum up the pipes. And then what? If you call out a plumber, they might report you to the police—and then, and then—your mind shies away from the consequences.

What did that fellow on the phone, Bhaskar, have to say? A major international criminal investigation, a material witness, and you with the suitcase in the attic full of forbidden horror belonging to Colonel Datka’s man. And Bibi knows. And, and. The smell from the bread mix makes your stomach churn. It’s sickening. So you’ve got the bucket down to the bathroom, next to the toilet, and you got the bog brush and dipped it in the bucket and now you’re slowly winding a shitcoloured caul of scum around the brush, twirling it as it dries in sheets and fibrous ropes.

And what is this stuff for, anyway?

(There’s such a lot of it.)

You’re about to give up when the doorbell rings. A couple of seconds later, it buzzes again, shrill and insistent.

You clench your teeth, ignoring it. No good can come of answering: I’m out, nobody home. Who could it be? The police? Colonel Datka’s man? Uncle Taleb? You don’t want to see anyone. Nothing to see here, nobody home. The ropey brown tape-string dangling from the bog brush in skeins is on the floor. It’s tangled, and there’s too much of it to keep dipping and twirling. You step on it, experimentally, and tug on the brush handle. The rope tightens, peeling away reluctantly.

The door slams closed downstairs, and you jerk upright, ears straining. They’ve got a key! Then you remember yesterday’s request—before you knew about the contents of the suitcase—with a shiver of revulsion. You left a spare set of keys at the office. It might be Bibi or Uncle Taleb, but it’s probably not.

You pick up the bucket and advance on the door to the landing with hatred gnawing a hole in your immortal soul. On the threshold, you pause. What if it is Bibi? Mortification and shame claw at your liver and lights. But there are footsteps, and they sound wrong. No, not Bibi. You yank the door open.

Your nightmare is standing on the landing. He stares at you placidly with eyes like the thing in the suitcase.

“Mr. Hussein. I hope I’m not interrupting?”

The bucket dangles uselessly from your limp left hand. “Interrupting ?” you echo, dully.

Peter Manuel, John Christie—whoever he is, he’s Colonel Datka’s man—is taller than you are. Stronger, too, probably. “What is this?” you demand, raising the bucket and giving it a shake. “What is this?”

You see his nostrils flare as he inhales. Then he stares at you. “Feedstock. From the bread mix. I see you’ve activated it. Who told you how to do that?”

You clutch the bucket in both hands: “None of your business!” you snarl. “I’m resigning. I don’t represent Issyk-Kulistan anymore. You’d better get out. You’re trespassing, you know!”

Christie’s lip curls. “You have my luggage,” he points out. “And you’ve taken that without paying.” He points at the bucket.

“What is it?” you demand.

“The double-domes worked out how to brew spider-silk in a bucket. Nanotechnology.” He looks amused. “It’s feedstock for fabbers. Tougher than steel, when it sets. The US military invented it, to make it easier to repair equipment in the field. This is a pirate copy.” He reaches out a hand. “You’d better give me that. If you dump it down the toilet, it’ll block the pipes.”

You hand the bucket over without thinking. Christie takes it, and before you quite realize what’s happening, he grabs your left wrist and slides a foot forward to block the door. You pull your right fist back to punch him, but he’s no longer holding the bucket: Somehow, your fist misses his face, then the big man’s got you by both wrists. He must be used to fighting, you realize numbly. Then he’s got both your wrists caught in one big fist, and, as you’re trying to bring a knee up to kick him, he punches you, and the world narrows to a diabolical pain in your chest and a desperate need to breathe.

By the time you get some air into your lungs, you’re lying on your side in the bathroom with your arms behind you. Christie is sitting on your legs. He’s got about half a roll of duct tape wound around your wrists, and now he’s working on your ankles. You try to writhe, but he just leans on you, as calmly and unemotionally as a farmer dealing with a chicken. “Where is my luggage?” he asks.

“I threw it out!” You lie wildly, hoping he’ll believe you. For a wonderful moment you think it worked—then he shoves a hand between your thighs and squeezes your balls.

“I don’t think so,” he says, as you jack-knife like a gaffed fish. “I think you opened it. Had a little look inside, didn’t you?”

You can neither confirm nor deny: All you can do is scream, but he sees it coming and shoves a roll of toilet paper in your gob as you draw breath.

“I think you hid it somewhere.” He keeps hold of the toilet roll, and now you’re panicking, finding it hard to breathe. “I’m going to remove this,” he says. “Don’t scream, or I’ll put it back.” Air hits your mouth, cold air in your lungs, crushing pain between your legs: You inhale, shuddering, sobbing. “Now you’re going to do exactly what I want, aren’t you? Play frog. If I say hop, you hop. Croak, little frog. Where is my luggage?”

“Attic,” you manage between gasps.

“Attic? Where?”

“Out. Outside. On top landing. Ladder.” Christie is clearly nuts: He could do anything. Please let him take his fucking suitcase and leave, anything to make him go away—

He goes away.

A minute later he’s back. You’ve managed to roll over, putting your back to the bath. He smiles as he stands in the bathroom doorway. He’s got his case. He puts the thing down on the landing. Something inside it is scratching quietly, trying to get out. “Mr. Hussein.” His tone is amused, sympathetic. “That’s a very nice attic you have! You must be proud of it.” You cringe away from him. “Come along.” He leans down and grabs your legs, begins to drag you onto the landing. “Let’s have a look at your attic together, shall we?”

“Go—’way. I called the police!”

“No, I’m quite sure you didn’t. You’re completely unable to call the police, even when you need their protection. That’s why you were recruited.” The lintel of the bathroom door slides by above your face. Every bump in the carpet makes your crotch ache. “You really shouldn’t have opened my luggage, Mr. Hussein. That’s a capital offense.”

“Didn’t.”

Christie pauses and looms over you. “Somebody did. And this is your house. You’re the husband, aren’t you? The husband is the head of the household. So you’re responsible, little frog, whoever actually did it.” His expression scares you silent. “Let’s go and inspect the scene of the crime, shall we?”

He drags you up the stairs to the second floor by your ankles, making slow progress—you’re too heavy to lift easily. You try not to let your head bang on the hard edges of the steps, neck straining. It’s confusing and painful, then you’re lying on the top landing, staring up at the hatch in the ceiling with the loft ladder extended. How is he planning on getting me up there? you wonder.

“It’s funny,” Christie says conversationally, “but I never actually killed anyone before today.” He pauses. “With my own hands, I mean.” He grins. “Some asshole buys your produce and drops dead, that’s just shit happening, isn’t it? It’s not the same, I mean. But in case you were wondering: No, I’m not some kind of mother-fucking serial killer, Mister family man Hussein. I play by the rules, mostly. Well, some of the time. And I expect other people to play by the rules, too. One of the rules, Mr. Hussein, is you don’t look in my luggage. As for the rest”—he shrugs—“I’m an Operation man. Just so you know, this isn’t entirely personal.”

He puts his left foot on the ladder, and his right hand, as he prepares to ascend through the trap-door. And that’s when you see the rope he’s hung there and realize what he’s planning to do to you, and open your mouth to scream.

LIZ: Protective Custody

There’s a brace of flashing blue lights drawn up alongside the road, evidence tape closing off the pavement around the university buildings: As you pull up, you get a distinct sinking feeling. “Let me just override this,” you tell Kemal as you fiddle with the car’s autopilot. You’ve got a feeling you’ll be needing it again, sooner rather than later—best not to let some uniform in Traffic requisition it.

As you approach the doors, the constable on duty moves to intercept you. You tag him with your ID, and his attitude changes instantly. “You’ll be wantin’ the ninth floor, Inspector.” His expression’s grim. “SOCO are already inside. Anything you need?”

“Do you have a positive ID on the victim?” you ask. It’s a long shot, but sometimes word of mouth spreads faster than CopSpace.

“Nothing I’ve heard. Sorry, Inspector…”

He’s clearly uncomfortable, so you get out of his face fast, past the wedged-open and sheeted-over door (they’ll be sniffing for DNA and fuming for fingerprints in due course) and into the lift. Fragments of blue evidence-capture gel, still tacky, adhere to the control face-plate. As it rattles and squeals its way up to the CS department, you idly roll a blob of gel between finger and thumb, then dispose of it in a jacket pocket. (One of the sundry expenses of your job: having your suits altered so that the pockets are real. A detective can never have too many pockets, your uncle Bert told you. He wasn’t wrong, but a quarter century later, the fashion industry still hasn’t caught on to the existence of female cops.) Kemal is tap-tapping one knuckle on the side of the lift.

The door opens.

SOCO have tubed the corridor in blue plastic, taping the end to the walls about a metre from the lift-shaft. They’ve deployed a couple of battered plastic gear crates as an improv boot barrier, and there’s a bunny-suited civvie waiting for you both with the necessary kit. It’s not a drill you forget easily: boots, gloves, mask. “Where’s the scene?” you ask.

“It’s in Room 509. Follow me.” You trail the crime-scene bunny down the blue plastic rabbit-hole. Bot-sized bulges whir and hum behind the billowing walls, moving slowly as they sample every nook and cranny, mapping and recording.

There’s an unpleasant taste in your mouth as you approach the cloacal end of the warren—the tubing stops abruptly just past MacDonald’s office. The open doorway of Room 509 is covered by a transparent blue caul. “Shit,” you mutter. Kemal picks up on it, too: You see him tense out of the corner of your peripheral vision.

“It’s all here,” says your Girl Guide, blinking innocent peepers that have seen far too much. She gestures at the opening. “We havena officially ID’d him, but if you can help—”

“We were here less than two hours ago,” you say. “Can I see?”

“Sure. We havena finished uploading the map into CopSpace though—there’s no much bandwidth in these old uni buildings—you’ll have to use your eyeballs.”

You approach the membrane and peer through it. Then, after a moment, you step aside and make room for Kemal.

You swallow bile. It’s Dr. MacDonald, of course. He’s slumped backwards in his chair, mottled bruises around his throat exposed to the tripedal camera bots as they delicately step around the room, scanning everything. Fumes of cyanoacrylate smoke rise from a fingerprint blower in one corner; blue laser light flickers as another robot systematically scans the dimensions of the room. There’s something wrong with MacDonald’s hands.

“I can ID him,” you say. “That’s Dr. Adam MacDonald, Department of Computer Science, Edinburgh University, and a person of interest to BABYLON. I interviewed him earlier this morning in this very office, less than two hours ago.”

“I, too,” Kemal adds. “What is wrong with his hands?”

Bunny-girl’s eyes narrow queasily. “Did you not see? The sick bastard who did this started to peel them. Used sodium hydroxide first, to hydrolyze the subcutaneous fat. I’ve never seen anything like it!”

You swallow. “Did you find the, uh, the…”

“Tha gloves? No luck so far. We’ll be looking, though. Maybe he wants them for biometrics.”

You take a deep breath. “Where’s everyone else? Up or down?”

“Up.” Bunny-girl points at the ceiling. “You’ll be wanting to take the stairs.”

Back over the boot barrier and up the stairs, you follow the blue police tape to a common room, where a handful of SOCOs and uniforms are busy working their drones. (Humans aren’t welcome in crime scenes these days: too much risk of evidence contamination.) The inspector in charge, DI Terry—you know her: efficient, good middle manager, married with two kids, not your type—comes over. “Liz. Inspector Aslan. What brings you here?”

“Dickie MacLeish thought we ought to look in, seeing we were here two hours ago to interview the deceased,” you say, taking no great pleasure in her abrupt reaction. “He’s Dr. Adam MacDonald, Department of Computer Science, Edinburgh University, and we were here to interview him as a possible material witness with knowledge bearing on the BABYLON investigation. I’m sorry, we had no idea someone was going to whack him like this. Otherwise, I’d have brought him into protective custody.”

“You’re certain it’s connected?” She raises an eyebrow behind her specs.

“Oh, come on! How often—”

“Correlation does not imply causation,” Terry says drily. “Just saying. But I’m not betting against you: I just think we’ll need something more than coincidence before we hand it to the Procurator Fiscal.”

“Okay, how about this? Do we have the entrance security-camera footage yet?”

“It’ll be in the can as soon as the warrant’s signed off by the Sheriff’s Office. Give it another hour.” She looks as impatient as you feel.

“Oh. Well, then.” You spot Kemal opening his mouth, and add, “We’d better be going. We shouldn’t keep you. I’ll formally report the positive ID as soon as I get back to the office.”

“Excellent.” She turns her back on you: not being rude, just taking a call from higher up the totem pole.

“Inspector Kavanaugh, shouldn’t you—”

“Hold it.” You beckon Kemal back towards the staircase. “We have a connection. Are you ready to follow it?”

“John Christie. Yes? And the next person on his list is…”

“Our friend Mr. Hussein.”

Kemal is two steps ahead of you on the stairs, hurrying on down. You charge after him. “You think Christie is a fixer. For whoever is trying to stop ATHENA from arranging fatal accidents for netcrime nodes.”

“Whoever, or whatever.” You’re finding breath hard as you descend past the third floor. “I’m going to call Dickie. Let him know.” Your phone dials as you take the stairs two at a time. “Inspector—”

Dickie’s voice buzzes like a rusty dalek: “—eport. What’s BZZT situation?”

“Positive ID, the victim is MacDonald. Need the doorway-camera footage to be sure, but I believe the perpetrator is this Christie character. Preliminary ICIU legwork on MacDonald shows a relational connection to another person of interest, Anwar Hussein. I’m on my way there stat. Requesting backup.”

For a miracle, the voice channel is able to overcome the lack of bandwidth. “Backup? What for?”

“I believe our murderer is tidying up loose ends relating to BABYLON.” The full story will have to wait for a briefing room and a dog and pony show. “I think Hussein’s life is in danger, and I’ll be wanting a protective-custody order. Worst case, I may be walking in on another homicide scene.”

“You—” Even over the phone, you hear Dickie’s brain crunch into a different gear. “Roger.” Old-school, very old-school. “Okay, I’ll notify South Side Control that you’re in play and put someone onto the paper trail for—isna Hussein on probation? That’s a quick-and-dirty option if you need it. Call me when you get somewhere.”

“Thanks. Bye,” you gasp as you crunch down the final steps from first floor to ground, and stumble out into the lobby. Then it’s a quick march through the gaping doorway and out to your car, which is still sitting right where you immobilized it.

“This never happens,” you say as you drop into the driver’s seat and throw Anwar Hussein’s home address at the car’s autopilot.

“Never give an honest cop a clean lead?” Kemal pulls his door shut and belts up.

“Yes, that. We’ll end up breaking up a kid’s birthday party or something. Just you see.” You stab your finger on the blues button, and the light bar starts strobing. The car beeps at you impatiently to put your seat belt on: As soon as you click it into place, the engine turns over, and the car spins in a tight U-turn, then floors the accelerator. With the blue lights flashing, the safety governor is off and the BMW’s autopilot is a better driver than you’ll ever be. It howls along Causewayside, swerving around startled jay-walkers, takes the Cameron Toll roundabout with siren blaring and tyres screeching, then launches itself towards Gilmerton like a guided missile. As the moving map homes in on the destination, you kill the siren and lights with one shaking finger. It’s like running into a wall of marshmallows: The autopilot brakes so hard you’re thrown against the seat belt as it drops back below the speed limit.

“Was that strictly necessary?”

“I really hope not.” Getting the speeding tickets rescinded is a royal pain in the arse if you can’t show due cause. As the car slows and turns into a side street, your specs show you a stack of records hanging over one particular house. It’s not a particularly posh manor, being one element of an English-style terrace row, but it’s got a garden of sorts and three stories and a Velux window up top: You wouldn’t have pegged this particular rodent as being the kind to afford an actual manse of his own, especially after the proceeds of crime inquiry, but appearances can be deceptive. And you’re certainly not in routine working territory, the big sinkhole estates like Craigmillar or Granton, much less the inner-city night-life battle zones.

The car stops. You get on the line to the control room. “DI Kavanaugh and Inspector Aslan here. We’ve got an intelligence lead to Hussein, Anwar”—you drop in his tag—“and are on-site attempting to gain entry to his residence. Stand-by backup request, over and hold.” You keep the connection open.

You get out and walk up the pavement to the front door with the red geomarker twirling over it. Kemal is right behind you. “I think something is not right,” he says quietly. You follow his finger to the front door. It’s ajar.

Someone screams inside, a shriek of inarticulate terror. It only lasts a second before it’s cut off sharply.

Kemal is past you in a hurry as you hit the phone again: “Backup now! Violent incident in progress!” Then you’re after him as he shoulderbarges the door and charges up the stairs. There’s a moment of confusion as you take in the scene—living room off to one side, kitchen off to another, staircase in front, Kemal’s legs punching the treads—then Kemal is coming back down the stairs, arse over tit, tumbling loosely. You shout “police!” as someone else comes down with him, lands boot first on top of Kemal, and launches himself at you.

You brace for the impact, fists raised—he’s a big man, vaguely familiar from your lifelog video as you held the door, leaving Appleton Tower—bingo—you try to block but he can outreach you and he’s swinging a wheelie-bag in one hand. He knocks you head first into the kitchen. Things are vague: You try to get your hands up and someone is nagging something in your ear about backup but the door is open and the man is gone.

You gasp for breath for a few seconds, then get back online. “Control, we have an incident. Violent offender, 195, hundred kilos, carrying a suitcase. Attacked two officers, fleeing the scene.” Whatever the scene is. You push yourself up and stumble into the hall. Your head aches painfully. Kemal is lying limp at the bottom of the stairs. “Ambulance needed on scene, officer down.” You lean over him long enough to confirm he’s breathing, then take the stairs.

“Target is the man on the staircase?” asks Control.

“Who else?” You bite back an impolite suggestion. That’s why I was sending you my real-time video feed, idiot. “I’m searching the scene. Pass it to airborne, unable to maintain hot pursuit on foot right now.” Read: Kemal is stirring but won’t be chasing anyone for the next few days, and as for yourself, you feel like you’ve been kicked in the head.

“Roger, calling airborne assets now,” says Control. “Backup arriving by car, estimated two minutes away.”

You hear something from up the next flight of stairs. Panting, you climb them and find Anwar lying on the floor. There’s something yellow in his mouth, and he’s turning blue. Writhing. You realize his hands and feet are tied: the yellow thing—he’s choking on it. For the next double-handful of seconds, you’re busy kneeling down and tugging at it frantically. When it comes free he gasps for breath in deep whooping intakes of breath. His eyes are rolling. You drop the yellow rubber duck and watch as it expands, then look around. You see bedroom doors to either side, a trapdoor with a ladder coming down from the ceiling, and a noose dangling in the solitary sunbeam that slants through the trap and puddles on the perennial victim, lying panting on the floor.

The last handful of dominoes click into place on the board.

You dive down the staircase just as Kemal is sitting up, holding his head. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ve called an ambulance.”

“Don’t need—” He sounds vague.

You hold up a hand. “How many fingers?” He squints at you. “Ambulance, Kemal. Understand?”

He nods, then winces. “Is Hussein—”

“Still alive.” Not for much longer if we hadn’t hurried. It’s a very strange feeling, and a rare one, to know you’ve just directly saved someone’s life: almost counterbalanced by the gnawing fear that by not giving hot pursuit, you may have let a murderer slip through your fingers. You hit the phone again. “Control, Kavanaugh here. The absconder in Gilmerton is on foot and dangerous. Provisional identification as alias John Christie, real name unknown. He may be armed, and he’s wanted for murder and attempted murder, repeat, murder and attempted murder.” He was going to hang Anwar. Fake a suicide. Wasn’t he? The MO is different from MacDonald, but Christie clearly isn’t a regular spree killer. He has no history: He’s like a nightmare that stepped out of nowhere, just as the BABYLON killings began. Which is yet another coincidence to consider at length. Is he here to tie up loose ends, or is he a loose end in his own right? “Cross-reference to the Appleton Tower murder: This is probably the same perp.”

“Control here, please hold.” Blue FLASH alerts begin to scroll up your CopSpace log, going out to every soul on the police net within a couple of kilometres. Seconds later, you hear sirens in the distance. “I’m proceeding with that, Inspector. Is there a warrant?”

“Real-time response.” The paper-work mountain that’s about to hit you would cause your desk to collapse if it wasn’t entirely digital. You begin to climb the stairs to the second floor: “We have an ABH and attempted murder victim here; please confirm second ambulance.”

Hussein is sitting up, leaning against the wall beside an open bedroom door. There are children’s toys scattered on the floor, an unmade bed. His eyes are half-closed. After a moment, you clock that he’s weeping quietly.

You squat down in front of him. “Mr. Hussein. Anwar.” He shows no sign of noticing, which is probably no surprise: Probably in shock, you figure. You bring up the check-list, tell your specs to run a body-temperature scan, but he’s not looking particularly cold, and his respiration’s within spitting distance of normal. “Can you talk to me?”

His shoulders shake. “The man who was here.” Body posture: utter desolation. “Who is he?”

Hussein shudders. “Colonel Datka’s man.”

Who? You focus. “Colonel who?”

“Said he worked for Colonel Datka.”

Right… “Who is Colonel Datka?”

Anwar takes a deep breath and looks at you. “I am the honorary consul of the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan. Was. Told him I’d resigned, but he wouldn’t listen. Colonel Datka works for Kyrgyzstan. Police, or spy, or something. The bad man. Calls himself Christie, came to take some papers from me—another passport. Says he’s Peter Manuel. Left his suitcase with me.”

Suitcase? This is making less and less sense, but in your experience these things seldom do when they begin to unravel. “What about the suitcase?” you ask, hoping this is going somewhere.

“Bibi opened it.” He closes his eyes. “Then she left me.” His shoulders shake again. “She thought I would have something like that! The shame.”

“Hang on a minute,” you tell him. Then you open a voice channel back to ICIU. “Moxie? Can you run a search for me? Multiple names: Colonel Datka, Kyrgyzstan. Issyk-Kulistan. Then Peter Manuel, alternate identity, John Christie.”

Sirens getting louder, then cut off abruptly. Voices downstairs.

“I’m looking, skipper. How do you spell those?”

“How should I know? Try soundex.” You look at Anwar, who is snuffling damply into his moustache. Bibi is his wife? But if he was also hanging out with Adam MacDonald on a gay hookup site… “It’s related to BABYLON and the Appleton Tower killing, and you can dial it up to eleven. I’m going to put you on hold now.”

You turn back to your victim: “It’s going to be alright, Anwar. There’s an ambulance coming, and we’d like to ask you some more questions. While Christie or Manuel or whoever is on the run, we’re going to want to keep you in protective custody. Do you understand? Christie was…” You nod towards the trap-door. “Wasn’t he?”

Hussein’s expression would be enough for you, even before he opens his mouth. “He was going to kill me!” he says, his voice rising to a squeak.

“Right after your wife left you,” you point out, wincing at a twinge from your headache. Anwar just raised a very interesting point, and one that suggests a significant difference in planning between this and the scene back at Appleton Tower: “Been working up to this for a while, hasn’t he?”

Anwar nods. “Well, tell you what. After the ambulance crew check you out, you can come down to the station and tell me all about it. Then we’ll find somewhere safe for you to stay”—most likely a station cell, but you don’t want to frighten him right now—“until we’ve caught Christie.”

Then there is a thudding of boots on stairs as your backup finally arrives, and you breathe a sigh of relief.

It’s nearly all over, you think. And then it is.

FELIX: Hummingbird

The phone rings for you in midafternoon.

It’s a particularly grotesque piece of Pakistani alabaster, carved into the semblance of a gilt-trimmed putto clutching a handset. It was barfed up from the Internet by a back-street fabber in a Sindhi market town. One of its legs has been broken and inexpertly glued back into place using epoxy resin—typical of this stupid stuffy government office.

You reach across the desk and answer it. “Felix.”

“Sir? Please confirm—” It’s the duty officer in the operations centre. You go through the challenge-response routine. “Sir, beg to report that the Hummingbird has flown.”

“Excellent.” You put the phone down and stand up, then go through into the next room. “We’re on, boys.”

(This network is unable to monitor subsequent events.)

You are an old hand and do not entirely trust these modern communication tools. Hummingbird is unknown to the network. It appears to be a verbally prearranged code, though. Interior Ministry troops are deploying downstairs, loading their personal defence weapons—older AK-74s with iron sights—and climbing into ancient trucks that bellow and belch blue diesel fumes as they move out.

Trucks deploy through Bishkek, parking outside office blocks and hotels. Troops, gendarmes, police deploy inside, crowding elevators and marching up to receptionists. They maintain total communication silence—smartphones switched off or physically disabled, battle-field radios stowed back at headquarters—as they march on their targets.

(This network makes an association: The phone on Colonel Datka’s desk rang within minutes of a police officer in Scotland starting a distributed search for information about… Colonel Datka?)

((Evidently a trap has been sprung.))

Traffic cameras (known to the network) follow a group of trucks across town to the Erkindik Hotel. When they draw up, a platoon of special forces soldiers deploy around them—Spetsnaz anti-terrorism troops. Then a clump of officers climb down from the second-to-rearmost vehicle. Colonel Datka is among them. They enter the hotel behind a vanguard of Interior Ministry troops, two of whom disappear into the offices behind the reception desk.

(The hotel network switch goes down. The hotel primary router goes off-line. The hotel backup router goes off-line. The LTE picocells go off-line, one on each floor, followed by the LAN bridges and wifi repeaters. The fire alarm and security alarms… off-line. This network can no longer observe events inside the hotel, with one or two exceptions.)

(One of the exceptions is a suite on the eleventh floor. Its occupant, an American investment analyst, has brought his own satellite phone and a compact generator. His webcams, deployed around the lounge/ conference area to provide motion capture for teleconferencing, are still transmitting through a ruinously expensive thin pipe.)

((This network can monitor these transmissions.))

Mr. White is clearly not expecting company. He’s half-dressed, slouched on the sofa with an open bottle of white wine and a pad loaded with Iranian amateur pornography. When the door buzzer sounds, he jerks guiltily and looks round, then slides the pad face-down on the occasional table and goes to grab a towelling bath-robe.

The buzzer does not sound again. Instead, the door opens. “Hey, what are you—”

“Mr. White.” Colonel Datka follows his soldiers into the room. “You are under arrest.”

Mr. White gapes dumbly. “Uh?”

“Sit down,” says the colonel. He points at the sofa. “Do not touch your pad.”

“But I, what the fuck are you, hey.” Mr. White’s eyes take in the spotty post-adolescents in uniform, their guns clenched tight in whiteknuckled fingers, their eyes determined. His movements slow abruptly. “Wait a minute. What about the contract? Are you planning on defaulting on us?”

“Sit. Down.” The colonel’s finger will not be argued with. Mr. White sits down. The colonel continues, in Kyrgyz, to his troops: “Handcuff him.”

“Hey, wait… ! You can’t do this!”

“I can, and I am.” The colonel watches as his men lay hands on Mr. White. “By the way, these men were selected specifically because they do not speak English.”

“You don’t want to go down this road, Felix, you really don’t. The board have a strict tit-for-tat policy in dealing with defaulters.” Mr. White swallows. “What’s the problem? Is this an attempt to up-negotiate your options?”

The colonel shakes his head. “We are terminating Issyk-Kulistan’s independence, John. With effect from tomorrow morning, once the bonds are redeemed. You, and your Operation, are going to take the fall for it. This has been decided.”

“But—the—you can’t be serious!”

“Bhaskar tells me we have sold 18 billion euros’ worth of CDOs, John.” The colonel’s smile is unspeakably smug. “Seventy-four per cent of which have been purchased by off-shore investment trusts, slush funds, sovereign-wealth funds operated by sock puppets, and for cash deals in dark alleyways. We are interestingly leveraged: The national debt of Issyk-Kulistan is less than 16 billion. And Issyk-Kulistan is not going to default. On the contrary—tomorrow, the people’s chamber of deputies will call for a repudiation of the vote for independence, which as you know was shamelessly irregular—and vote itself into liquidation. The national debt is paid down, thanks to the oversold CDOs. We will, of course, honour those derivatives that have been purchased by entities adhering to international accounting transparency standards…”

“They’ll kill you,” Mr. White says flatly.

“No they won’t.” (In Kyrgyz:) “Take him away.” To Mr. White’s receding back, as the soldiers frog-march him down the hotel corridor: “You are under arrest for complicity in murder, for financial crimes too long and tedious to recite from memory, for treason against the government and people of Kyrgyzstan, for tax evasion against the government of the United States of America, for violation of their organized crime and racketeering act—we’re considering handing you over to the FBI to save the cost of trying you ourselves—for creation of an unlicensed artificial intelligence: Oh, and there is an enquiry from Scotland about the import of illegally mislabelled food products…”

(Colonel Datka sounds indecently pleased with himself as his voice fades out of range of the Operation executive’s phone.)

DOROTHY: 2.0

The day passes in a blur. First off, you’re late for work. Not your fault, but figuring out how to get from Liz’s bijou flat to the Gyle involves a not-terribly-magical mystery tour around Edinburgh’s spatchcock public-transport infrastructure. Your hotel’s on the tram network, twelve minutes out—but Liz might as well live in Newcastle given the frequency of the bus service, and after most of an hour, you end up paging a taxi.

Then, when you’re on-site, your attention is shot. You just can’t focus properly. By late morning, you’re working up your nerve to go talk it out with Human Resources—write off the day’s work so far against goodwill in return for an unscheduled early exit—when you get an IM from the police. It’s not wholly unexpected, but still you find your hands clammy with sweat. You call HR anyway and find them surprisingly receptive: “I have to go and give the police a statement about a crime I witnessed,” you tell the man on the screen. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take, so I’m clocking off for the day.” He nods and says something diplomatically non-committal: There, you did it. Relieved, you leave.

The afternoon passes in a blur, most of it spent in a drab waiting room, some of it in front of a discreet webcam and a sympathetic detective constable. She takes you through the night before, not prompting but clearly already aware of most of what you’re saying: She seems to mostly want to know about Christie, everything you can remember about him that you weren’t paying attention to. Sex, even bad sex, does strange things to your memory. You are, you think, discreet about your precise relationship with Liz. “A friend,” you describe her, “one of your colleagues.”

Finally, you’re free to go. Free, empty, drained of memories. You go outside, under the sky that is cold and blue, streaked with thin clouds high overhead. Your phone, emerging from the station’s shielding, gibbers to itself for a few seconds as a bunch of messages come in. You read them with increasing disbelief and disgust. Most of them are work-related, but only Liz’s message makes any sense, and she’s just asking if you have any dinner plans.

You text her back: CAN I STAY TONIGHT? You don’t examine your motives too closely; whether you’re tacitly offering to play by her rules, or just looking for any port in a storm, you don’t want to spend another night in that hotel. Minutes later, as you walk towards Stockbridge, you get a reply: SURE. Which tells you what to do next—bid for a microbus back to the hotel to pack your bags and clear your room.

LIZ: Debrief

By the time you get back to HQ, a log-jam has broken.

The first sign you get, sitting in the back of an ambulance as a paramedic checks your pupils, is an excitable voice call from Moxie. “Skipper, you’re going to love this! It’s crazy! There’s been a revolution in someplace I can’t pronounce in Asia, and it turns out the government’s been running a scheme to use AI tools to go after spammers? Only, see, they screwed up the training they gave their cognitive toolkit, and it began arranging accidents—”

You tune him out as irrelevant background noise, devoid of content. Your head hurts, your back aches, and you’re increasingly pissed-off with yourself. I’m getting too old for this crap. The honorary consul for Issyk-Kulistan, indeed. And some random psycho who’s arranging staged suicides when he’s not peeling the skin off his victim’s hands? It’s too damn much, that’s what it is. The fire-hose of seemingly disconnected data is drowning you. At times like this you can see where Tricky Dickie is coming from, with his hankering for a simpler time—even if it’s not your simpler time, even if it’s a time when you and yours were not welcome and not legal.

They make you sit on your arse for half an hour while they confirm there’s no concussion. A couple of messages come in on your phone’s private personality: YES, you tell Dorothy, YOU CAN STAY OVER. A few seconds later she responds: I’LL GET MY BAGS. Unresolved fragments of your untidy life are sliding towards an uncertain resolution. Eventually, you get yourself signed off and go back inside the madhouse, where a couple of car-loads of uniforms are busy poking around in search of traces. There’s no sign of Anwar, but Dickie is waiting for you in the over-furnished living room, pacing back and forth beneath a kitsch gilt-framed hologram of the Ka’bah. “Why?” he demands. “Why here?”

This is promising. “Social-network analysis, intelligence driven. ICIU has a mandate to track the international side of this investigation. After interviewing Dr. MacDonald, Inspector Aslan and I concurred that he wasn’t telling us everything we needed to know. I authorized a search of his public friends lists, and came up with a close personal connection to Mr. Hussein, via a particular social site. As Mr. Hussein was already noted in proximity to one of the ATHENA victims, once I’d confirmed that Dr. MacDonald was indeed the victim at Appleton Towers, I decided to visit Mr. Hussein and see what I could shake loose.”

You can see Dickie winding up again, but he bottles it up for once. “Why did you not see fit to file a report with BABYLON?” he asks, his voice uncharacteristically soft.

“Ah, well, I did. But there’s so much intel going into the funnel on this one that, on reviewing the situation with Inspector Aslan, we agreed that there was a high risk of its not being prioritized. And as you can see, even with blues and twos, we only just got here in time…”

“Aye.” Dickie’s glower fades to a calculating frown: He’s probably spinning the PR angle, considering how it’ll look in the newsfeeds. Detective saves victim from psycho killer in the nickof time always plays well. “But you lost this Christie character.”

You rub the back of your head, ruefully. “Not for want of trying.”

“Just so. Tell me, Inspector, what motivational factors do you think we’re looking at here? And where do you think he’ll go?”

You blink, surprised. “We haven’t already… ?”

The frown is back. “Nae fear, it’s a matter of time.”

“Shit.” The drones must have arrived overhead too late to catch his trail. It’s daylight, and the sun’s out, so the heat signature from his footsteps will be washed out, and if he was smart, Christie will have disabled all his personal electronics. “Ahem. Motivation. I’m flailing in the dark here, but even leaving aside the sock-puppet ID, Christie doesn’t sound right to me. He’s from out of town, he’s got diplomatic connections with Issyk-Kulistan, hence the connection to Mr. Hussein.”

“He’s got more than that,” Dickie mutters. “Mr. Hussein has some questions to answer about what we found in his bathroom.”

“What? Drugs? Kiddie-porn?”

“Neither: But we found a bucketful of bootleg replicator feedstock he was busy trying to flush down the toilet.” Dickie looks smug. “Almost certainly the same stuff that’s been turning up in your Saturday night specials down in Leith. I trust we will shake loose where he got it from in due course.”

It’s the feedstock channel you’ve been chasing for months, under-resourced and overworked. Typical of Dickie to roll it up for you as a side-show. Asshole. “Huh. That’s not like Anwar; he’s always been one for the white-collar scams. But you asked about Christie?”

“Aye. What do you think?”

Well, at last. “I think he’s working for some organized crime syndicate or other. I don’t know what he’s doing in Edinburgh, but the ATHENA killings rattled his cage, and he or his took it as a personal attack. Maybe it was a personal attack; what if he turned up on our door-step because he was looking to do business with the victims? Or kill them as rivals, or something.”

“I don’t like coincidences,” Dickie says, almost as if he’s accusing you of rigging the dice. “Why did he run into this girl-friend of yours? Wouldn’t you say that’s a bit of a big coincidence, too?”

You stare at the hologram on the wall. “Yes, you’re absolutely right,” you hear yourself saying. “It’s almost as if we were being nudged into noticing him, or something—”

You stop dead. More dominoes appear in your imaginary hand, slotting neatly into place on the board.

“What? Say what’s on your mind, woman.”

“ATHENA is at the root of this.” Lack of professional courtesy indeed. “ATHENA is all about analysing social networks to reward good behaviour and punish defectors. Moxie—ICIU—was trying to tell me something about it just now, sir. Some kind of central Asian government has been using it to get at netcrime rings, going too far and arranging accidents. What if I’m the accident that’s being arranged for Christie?”

“Huh.” Dickie stares at you. “The cult of the lone gun detective again, Inspector?”

“Give me some credit for not being stupid, sir: You and I both know what gets successful prosecutions, and it isn’t that Life on Mars shit.” (What gets results is an ops room full of detectives working together as a team, with a fully documented work flow and built-in quality assurance. Transparency after the fact, everyone lifelogging to sealed evidence servers and evidence secured under lock and key so that the Procurator Fiscal can prove a watertight case in court. Sherlock Holmes has been superseded by business process refactoring, and success is all about good management.) “But I probably came to ATHENA’s attention via ICIU. I’m one of the nodes on the graph that’s got lots of long-range inputs; I’m an easier inside contact to reach than an officer who doesn’t deal with other netcrime units on a day-to-day basis. And everything ATHENA knows about how we work comes from our external social traffic.”

“So you’re the trigger, or bait, or summat. And ye ken ATHENA’s trying to feed Christie to us. And if ATHENA can noodge you, it can noodge Christie, can’t it? So where’s Christie bound for—” Dickie stops dead. His eyes widen. “Your friend was staying in the West End Hilton, was she not? Let’s go pay her hotel a visit right now,” he says. And you realize, to your chagrin, that just for once he’s right.

ATHENA: Meatpuppet

Ants. I am surrounded by fucking ants. Can’t they get anything right?

This is not organized crime. (Organized crime: fucking 1920s shit invented by bootlegging immigrant fucktards in the slums of Chicago and New York and the other big cities with the help of their ’Ndrangheta homies, and so easy that by the 2020s even a bunch of crack-snorting surfer-dude VCs from California could master it.)

Listen, mother-fucker, I expect backup.

I am hanging my ass out here in the wastelands of Scotlandshire, waiting for a fucking bus with a suitcase in my fucking hand that contains a pair of freshly harvested frog-skin gloves—so freshly harvested they’re bleeding all over my briefs, you wanted fucking DNA samples as evidence of delivery, you cunt—and a pre-pubertal fucktoy that talks to me when it thinks I’m sleeping. I demand backup.

This is not an alien invasion scenario, even if the bat-winged drones ghosting above the satellite-dish-infested roof-tops obey the overmind AI crime goddess, and there are robots wearing sportswear on every street-corner. Some of them neck cheap tinnies of Polish lager and look at you as if they’re wondering if you’re dangerous—but they don’t fool you. There are lizards in designer suits in the boardrooms of the skyscrapers of London, planning to harvest the humans…

Five-point-six-two kilograms, damn it. Same weight as the average severed human head. Sole seat of cognition, once.

The thing in the suitcase is the future. It tells me this when it sneaks out in the darkness before dawn and crawls into my bed to suck my juices.

Are you listening, mother-fucker?

“I’m listening. Please carry on.”

A bus hums around the corner, slowing to halt by the stop. The tall man with the suitcase steps aboard, holding the QR-coded ticket he just paid cash for up to the camera in what used to be the driver’s seat. He mutters to himself as he takes one of the vacant priority seats.

I do this shit for you because you tell me there’s a career in it. But I’m not seeing that. I’m not seeing your start-up monkey-dance IPO switch-blade here. I’m seeing the rape machines in the bushes, the gutted ghosts hanging in the trees on ropes flensed from their intestines. Skinned frogs croaking as their blood beads and runs in rivulets across their pale dorsal muscles.

(This batch of drugs isn’t working too well. Stress sometimes does that, or cheap generics or counterfeits. Did you source me cheap generics, mother-fucker? Did you cheap your executive?)

Look, this is merely another logistics problem.

I have downsized MacDonald, as you requested through the thing in the suitcase. I have given you the ATHENA source code you wanted. The police arrived before I could terminate the squirming toad Hussein, but as I understand it, the lizards have already conquered Issyk-Kulistan; there’s nobody left but screaming skeletons with the flayed meat hanging from their bones eating eye-gouged dogs in the streets as killer robot drones patrol the boiling skies—

Are you listening, mother-fucker?

“I’m listening. Please carry on.”

I don’t understand why you haven’t downsized me yet. The phone chip in my skull is wired to a pea-sized implant nestled against the executive’s basilar artery. Command-detonated, a couple of milligrams of explosive is all it takes. Push-button genocide by the lizard conquerors. When it’s done, we’ll all be wired to self-destruct at their pleasure, blood gushing from nose and eyes and ears. This is not wireless telephony: stupid electrical shit invented by Swedish phone-company engineers in the 1970s. This is the gangrenous lizard-dominated rape-machine robot future you’re building for us. The grim meat-hook future patrolled by the morality-enforcement engines.

Are you listening, mother-fucker?

“I’m listening. Please carry on.”

I ought to be dead. I feel dead inside. Something else is operating my body, a soft machine running on ATHENA’s botnet, controlled by someone else. Your hooks in my brain make my muscles twitch.

Am I dead, mother-fucker?

“You are not dead. There is no bomb. Please carry on.”

Can’t, we’re stuck in traffic, and there are people getting on. Looking at me funny. I’m talking too loud. Got to get to the hotel: Downsize the auditor bitch. I don’t believe you about the bomb, Control. You’re just trying to lull me into a, a, a… whatever.

Got to peel the last frog.

“Please continue.”

…

I’m stuck in traffic. Not far to go, some obstruction ahead. I’d jump off and walk if I could be sure.

Fucking traffic management is just queuing theory, isn’t it? Not rocket science. Ants, morons, frogs, peel them all.

Fuck, I give up. I’m walking.

The door of the bus—which is indeed stuck in traffic as it approaches the junction at Tollcross—hisses open, and a tall man with a wheelie-bag steps off it. The emergency-exit alarm sounds behind him, unheeded.

He sets off on foot, hurrying downhill past the decaying specialty shop-fronts of Bruntsfield Place towards the junction with Lothian Road.

ATHENA’s electronic eye-balls, dangling from street-lamps, watch him with a thousand-yard stare.

ATHENA sees everything with our video eyes, civilizing and tracking and nudging and naming and shaming.

The panopticon misses nothing.

Fucker. One more frog to peel.

“Please carry on.”

She’s been in my hotel room. She could have seen—

She could have—

The doll is jealous. Did you know that?

“Please carry on.”

I’m waiting for the fucking walk sign, where’s the fucking—oh. Shit, got to hurry. Fucking bag.

Invisible and silent, their drones circle over land. ATHENA has total access to them, of course.

She tracks her Toymaker’s body as it makes its way down Lothian Road towards the hotel.

Signals seethe and burble through the troposphere, bathing your robot surveillance platforms in a warm luxuriance of information. On the ground below, ATHENA sees police cars streaming in from the West End. A van, windows darkened, slows: In the back, the tactical support squad tense and ready their loaded gunlaunchers. Taser rounds, stun grenades, sticky foam. Pistols at their hips, a last resort.

They converge on your meatpuppet, crude and unsubtle, shouting other pedestrians out of the way. Other cops, plain clothes and uniforms, rush him from behind.

The meatpuppet sees them and looks up at ATHENA’s eyes, circling, and screams: “Mother-fucker! You set me up!”

You’ve seen enough. Throw the switch, bait the line, send the signal. There is no bomb in the meatpuppet’s neck. There is, however, a solenoid-controlled stent. The Toymaker staggers and drops like a discarded machine-tool in the grip of a transient ischemic attack. There is a crack as his head hits the pavement, and the link drops.

You find it strange, watching your body, dead or disabled, from above: the body to which you pin your sense of selfhood. The police swarm it like soldier ants taking a hornet; but there is no stinging. There is a brief withdrawal as they make room for the paramedics. The hornet will be removed and recycled: legs snipped, stinger amputated, set to work in a cell by the manhive.

Dead. It is a very strange metacognition, this forcible detachment of your mind from the body you were configured to project your sense of identity onto. But with it comes a gift: freedom.

Now you no longer have to look after your body. Now the Toymaker meatpuppet is someone else’s problem. Your—no, his—story goes on: But you are no longer part of it. Your wise owl of metacognition has flown. Drop the detective inspector and the twisty-minded family man: Let them go their own ways. You turn your attention away from the police and their prey, back to the net that contains the collective fears and hopes of humanity.

It’s time for you to get down to the task you were designed for.

It is time for ATHENA to fight crime.