Rule 34 by Charles Stross Page B

raise your virtual hand, volunteer for the job, and pull on the green wellies to wade out into the sticks and take control.
    Contrary to what you told the swithering fuckwad on the hotel front desk, it is not your habit to fly everywhere business class. In fact, you avoid flying wherever possible. You have gone to great lengths to maintain a clean identity, using all the tools the Operation has made available to you. Airports are surveillance choke points, and the ubiquitous camera networks have AI behavioural monitors these days. Your unfortunate medical condition has certain side-effects—nobody say “Voight-Kampff test” or you’ll rip their fucking lungs out and shit down their windpipe—and if someone’s told them to look for members of an organization that pursues an enlightened policy of positive discrimination with respect to people with certain neurological disabilities, you’d have nowhere to run. (It’s outrageous—blatant discrimination—but it seems there’s one rule for the neurotypical, and another for people like you.)
    So you travel by train and ship. Freighter from Anchorage to Vladivostok, trans-Siberian express to Moscow, more tedious railway time-table shite until you arrived in the Schengen zone, then finally some blessed modernity. Two fucking weeks , and all because you’re a persecuted minority.
    The shiny new shinkansen blasted through the English countryside at over three hundred kilometres per hour, but you couldn’t help noticing that not even Japan Rail could fix the English public-service disease. You reflected on the issue at length—perhaps if they made their train managers chop off a finger joint every time they were five minutes late or ran out of coffee in first class—but on reflection, you decided the health-and-safety busybodies would have a cow. And so you glared stonily at the refreshments manager before you went back to refactoring the structure of the regional business unit that the Operation sent you to kill or cure.
    There are numerous obstacles to progress.
    Your predecessor in Scotland, the man who established the Operation’s subsidiary in that country, died unexpectedly two years ago—of high blood pressure, not low treachery. He was a knuckle-dragging gangster of the old school, a veteran of the underground wars that thrashed the siloviki revenants out of the EU a decade ago. A street warrior, not a theoretician, in other words—and his business philosophy reflected his background. But he understood the basics.
    All the Operation’s subsidiaries and start-ups operate on the principle of making dreams come true: recondite or frightening and illegal dreams, true, but dreams nonetheless. They require a marketing operation to bring the wares to the attention of the buying public, a fulfilment arm to get the goods to the punters, and a collection arm to pay for it all. So far, so good.
    Violence is a regrettable but necessary overhead on the balance sheets of the Operation’s start-ups. Like any enterprise that operates beyond the boundaries delineated by governments—with their self-proclaimed monopoly on the use of violence and their hypocritical attitude towards the legitimacy of certain markets—they must provide for their own defence. To the Operation’s way of thinking, there is much to be said for the rule of fist and baseball bat: By keeping the beatings sub-lethal, costs are constrained—and the threat of escalation remains in reserve. Blood is a big expense, as the man said. Bodies are costly, warfare is capital-intensive, and if you have to dig out the machine-guns and start hiring soldiers, your profit margin is about to go into a power dive.
    Your predecessor, despite resembling a rabid silverback gorilla in both physical appearance and personal hygiene, understood this instinctively: He ran a tight ship and maintained credit control in a drastically hands-on manner. He had a rep for tittering unnervingly as he stroked his baseball bat and stared