The Biocrime Spectrum (Books 1-4)

by Erik Tabain

  The daily BanPro addiction was critical for Biocrime. It was tailored for Katcher’s memory matrix and contained a mixture of trace elements of narcotics and assorted deliriants and disassociative substances. His extreme hallucinations were based on the allegations made against him during his crowd trial, and Biocrime created the perfect concoction that would exacerbate negative experiences which were triggered by certain events—such as the morning datacalls from Biocrime—but left the rest of his brain receptors in tact. This combination of drugs was partially experimental but an essential way for Briocrime to ensure the punishment of Katcher continued indefinitely.

  Aside from the hallucinations, life was bearable for Katcher now, but it wasn’t always this way. He was forty-four and supplemented his low universal yearly income of €10,000—the universal currency unit of the day, known as ‘ucas’, or simply ‘dollars’—by offering historical academic talks, material and information to willing learners at the all-purpose community hub down near the old university town of Berkeley.

  He knew enough about his own history to remember he’d been a failed and irresponsible leader of the Movement, even if his narcotic diet meant he couldn’t quite piece together the remnants of his experiences, the people involved, or how he even arrived to the position of leadership.

  Katcher was passionate about history and this passion belied his tough, rugged look, as a former leader of a revolutionary movement and leading intellectual, the one that beat the system on a software malfunction and a legal technicality, ten years earlier. His life thoughts fluctuated between anxiety of being the failed and irresponsible leader, the mundanity of his current life, and being prepared for opportunities in the future, if they ever presented themselves and, if the opportunities didn’t arrive to him personally, he wanted to engage the next generation, and beyond, with future activism.

  In his previous life before his digital house arrest, he was a violent, petulant and impatient counter-establishment figure, a leading intellectual of a loose alliance known as ‘the Movement’, committed to ending the domination of Technocrats and questioning how the social order of the world could be changed and improved. He had a fascination with twentieth-century life: politics, society and the new-wave Marxists, who in the twenty-second century claimed that the best way to achieve pure communism was through a period of unbridled technological capitalism, where the fruits of mechanical labor were shared through universal income to each citizen. Katcher argued for higher distributions of income and more transparency in Biocrime’s surveillance operations, but was considered to be too radical and disruptive, mainly because of his widespread agitation to close down human cloning clinics and incubation systems, which would have resulted in smaller Technocrat populations in the future.

  Leading up to his arrest a decade ago, and like many other high profile people of his caliber, he had been monitored by crowd-funded citizen surveillance operatives through the continuum—stalkers on the Lifebook platform who liked to watch, surveil, and earn revenue at the same time. His Lifebook account was patched through to an online profile through Biocrime, and citizens lodged ‘click-bait’ negative reports about his behavior, real or imagined. Once his profile gathered enough ‘likes’, ‘wants’ and revenue to justify detention, Biocrime security agents would track Katcher down, detain him for several days but then release him, due to insufficient evidence.

  Through this process, Katcher was detained many times for acting against community interests and finally threatened with deportation to a universal penal zone—remote uncivilized and inhospitable empty islands, where people were incarcerated and had to fend for themselves—unless he curtailed his organizing activities and subversion. He would have been sent away to a universal penal zone years ago and probably dead by now, except for technicalities relating to his profile and data management. Biocrime was also certain Katcher, as a revolutionary, had murdered many Technocrats and even some natural humans, and created destructive events such as apartment bombings and releasing anthrax gas in a San Francisco incubator hospital—killing over a hundred late-stage clone fetuses—but their surveillance systems were intercepted by sophisticated hacktivists and Katcher defied Biocrimes legal structures.

  Biocrime was never able to resolve how their systems were breached, but assumed it was through a sophisticated hacking process that bypassed the continuum and, because of this suspicion, fast-tracked a number of large-scale surveillance projects that closed digital loopholes and cracks in their coding. For Biocrime, Katcher was seen as the one that got away. But they could still make life as difficult as possible for him.

  His digital house arrest was low level for now—but for the first few years, it was different: daily apartment inspections, permanent surveillance, psychological testing, routine bashings and ‘visits’ from Biocrime agents. But, over time, Katcher was considered ‘de-radicalized’ and no longer a threat to the community.

  Katcher’s exterior psychology had changed over the past decade, but none of his interior psychology had been breached by the persistent harassment and digital house arrest, and he saw himself as being ‘technically’ in hibernation, or even on ‘sabbatical’. He was a chancer, a risk-taker with a winner-takes-all mentality but knew when the odds were stacked against him, and they were stacked against him right now. He had curtailed his violence and reluctantly became a non-participant—not that he had a choice—but would jump at a chance if it ever presented itself to him, to again be the revolutionary leader that he thought he was made to be.

  Because of his previous existence as a leading intellectual for ‘the Movement’, Katcher was often contacted by activists, who were often themselves detained or sometimes exported to a universal penal zone in the more extreme cases, to head up a new wave of resistance against the Technocrats. He was regarded as the modern-day ‘spiritual leader’ of ‘the Movement’ by many underground revolutionary agents: a movement needed its leader, and that’s why they wanted him back.

  But Katcher trusted no-one, except for the two people that defended him in his crowd trial—Mike Scanlen and Maria Renalda—but the daily cocktail of narcotics meant his memory of them had become scattered and, on some occasions, he doubted whether they had even ever existed at all.

  Scanlen and Renalda were leading members of the Movement and were the ones who masterminded a series of software malfunctions and legal obstacles in Katcher’s crowd trial that resulted in him found not guilty of the catalogue of criminal allegations collated by Biocrime, but both disappeared soon after the trial was completed. Scanlen hadn’t been seen or heard of for many years, and Renalda reportedly died in suspicious circumstances. But Biocrime realized the psychological connection between Katcher and Scanlen and Renalda and worked over many years to diminish his memory of them, and their strategy of enforced daily BanPro mixtures was the best way of achieving this.

  But even while Katcher’s memory of the only two people he could trust had almost been completely eradicated, he maintained a deep-seated suspicion of almost everyone else and could never be sure if an activist sent to befriend him was a grand plan of entrapment initiated by Biocrime. He refused all requests from anyone he thought would offer a remote possibility of entrapment, and felt that each contact was a recipe for disaster. He knew becoming engaged with the Movement again had major repercussions and, for the time being, preferred his much lower profile, one where at least his intellectual needs were satisfied.

  There hadn’t been any negative activity on his Lifebook profile since his arrest and subsequent release ten years earlier. True to his word, he’d curtailed his activities of subversion and acquiesced to the digital house arrest and court-ordered citizen service at the community hub—the only revenue-raising actions he was permitted to engage in—and his profile was only subjected to citizens interested in historical information about him, or general knowledge about his past actions.

  He was relatively free for now: Biocrime wanted to maintain the semblance of ‘freedom’ for the cit
izenry, but it was a fig-leaf, and most of the population knew it. In reality, Katcher was a prisoner under constant surveillance, and would be detained and sent away forever if he made any false moves.

  So, for now, he existed within the general community and, as long as he flew under the radar and kept away from any activism and contact with the Movement, he would be safe. For the time being.

  Lifebook lives life. Biocrime protects life.

  ‘Life. Is Lifebook’ was a successful advertising campaign to promote the relationship between Lifebook, the all engaging and all pervasive data collator and aggregator, and Biocrime profiling, when it first became a part of the continuum in the year 2600. Every citizen had a Lifebook account created biologically as soon they were born or created in a incubator—there was no need to register or apply—the Lifebook software automatically and seamlessly produced a life-long account, based on detecting changes in cumulative DNA material, and only that citizen could access the account through DNA matching. And the account remained with that person until they died—or circumvented by citizens that escaped the system and wanted to go off-grid.

  Lifebook, of course, was the central part of ‘the continuum’, a term first used in the 2300s. It sounded fancy, but it was merely a replacement for the ‘internet’, an electronic system that existed between circa 1980 and the 2300s. The internet was an electronic network of networks that existed between computers, telephony connected through copper and fiber wiring, and mobile cell communications, but became much more than that with the introduction of biotechnology, where networks could be linked through a combination of biological matter, plants, trees, DNA material, molecules and air particles.

  It was based on scientific research and development over many years, and the merging of electronics, electricity, the biology of the natural world and human behavior, and was considered to be the ‘holy grail’ of science until the continuum was finally achieved circa 2300. Through the continuum, all of life’s transactions were consolidated and found in the one location: love, education, business—and crime detection.

  Lifebook had its many precursors during the technology era between circa 1970 and circa 2200, initially with bulletin boards, chat rooms, the first social media platform known as Six Degrees, following by Facebook, which became a media behemoth in the early 2000s and kept its hegemony for roughly a hundred and fifty years. Media and social management went through a period of entropy where smaller and ineffective systems became prevalent, but through the symbiotic relationship between biology and technology, these smaller networks became redundant and obsolete, resulting in Lifebook becoming the sole system.

  Access to Lifebook was through ubiquitous lightscreens—the modern computer of the day—and smaller hand-held cell devices and tablets, miniature versions of the lightscreen. Through convergence technology, lightscreens and cell devices were the avenues of information where every piece of digital bioelectronic data could be accessed and produced—talking, listening, watching, recording and computing.

  Over time, Lifebook developed an offshoot called Biocrime, which itself, became the largest corporation in the world, based on surveillance and monitoring, using citizens and crowd funding to do its work.

  Biocrime profiling became a key asset of Lifebook and ‘Life. Is Lifebook’ was the first advertising promotion used to encourage citizens to create Biocrime profiles if they ever saw anyone engaged in crime, or behaved suspiciously or performed counter-community activity. It was a system egged on by vigilante behavior, and encouraged financially by imploring the crowd to donate monies for someone else to act upon the crime, like a conduit between the act of crime and crime enforcement.

  For the first time, there was a link between crime, community vigilantes, and profit, and there were immediate rewards for all involved.

  The first moments of the thirty-second advertisement, shown on all media avenues, personal screens and public billboards, are arresting: a slick montage of a group of hoods attacking an older woman late at night while she walks her dog, leaving her for dead on the ground. It’s a slick cinematic production, and the voiceover and graphics announces: “You can do something. Don’t be a bystander”. The scene then cuts away to a middle-aged woman summoning up a Biocrime profile on her lightscreen after seeing the incident through surveillance cameras, and within seconds, generates €300 for herself through a number of ‘likes’ and ‘wants’. A Biocrime vehicle apprehends the culprits and another vehicle takes the woman to hospital.

  The edit then cuts to a wide shot of a diverse group of concerned citizens, their faces turning to smiles with the final graphic: “Lifebook lives life. Biocrime protects life. See something, do something. Be rewarded”.

  Two

  The human divide

  Katcher was a natural human—and proud of it—but needed to keep his pride in check and show indifference about what he was, and who he was. It was better, for now, if he fitted into the crowd and kept away from trouble. But, like many natural humans, he pondered the world from different vantage points, and at different points of time within human history. What would his life be like if he existed in the year 2514? Or in the year 1389? Or during other calamitous events, such as the second world war of the twentieth century? Sometimes, he drifted in and out of thought, almost like being in a meditative state, meandering towards thinking about what life would be like as a Technocrat, before he snapped himself out of it.

  The modern world had two types of people—natural humans and Technocrats, and at the start of the fourth millennium, around seventy per cent of the world’s population of eighteen billion was Technocrat. Through the London Convention Agreement in the year 2214, synthetic reproduction of human substance was permitted and resulted in major developments in human cloning and advances in bio-stem cell research. However, chromozonal imbalances that occurred in cloned humans meant almost all Technocrat men were infertile and it was difficult for adult Technocrat women to fall pregnant. Even the few Technocrat embryos that reached full-term and a live birth, were severely malformed, underdeveloped and unviable, born with violent characteristics and some with animal features. Between 2214 and 2300, only two live births from Technocrat women survived past the age of two years, and neither of those survived past the age of four years.

  It became impossible for Technocrats to reproduce naturally, and they needed access to the DNA from natural humans for survival. Over several centuries, two segregated classes of peoples developed: natural humans; and Technocrats, the cloned ‘synthetic’ people. Like the billions of their predecessors throughout, natural humans were born through natural sexual reproduction, but Technocrats could only be cloned or reproduced artificially in birthing clinic incubators from natural human DNA—sold by desperate humans or compulsory acquired by Biocrime.

  Cloning clinics and incubations become a high level of business development—technological advances resulted in small incubation kits that contained the materials for full development and realization of a child in a home or personal environment. The first incubation kit in the field—i-Incubate—comprised a small rectangular metallic box with a lightsceen on its side, large enough to encompass a full-term fetus, and a range of sachets including the artificial ovum, sperm, and nutrients to kick-start life, and temperature modulators that provided the optimal conditions for human life to form and develop.

  Because of the ease of artificial reproduction of human life, many Technocrat families developed very quickly, some deciding to purchase and develop multiple fetuses concurrently, and the more affluent families outsourced this work to cloning clinics. This lead to the proliferation of Technocrats in a short space of time, and they gradually outnumbered the natural human population, becoming the dominant group around the world. And with dominance, the Technocrats assumed a higher level of social, political and economic control.

  The manner of birth also became an important consideration—natural birth, as opposed to the incubator birth—and there were scores of academic debates rel
ating to child attachment theories, and how the lack of mothering in the incubator births caused the low emotional quotients that were pervasive among the Technocrat population.

  The human–Technocrat divide had existed for centuries, and was the only class of differentiation that had survived over time: racism wasn’t an issue any more, nationalism had dissipated after the gradual removal of state borders, religion had been relegated to the zone of quack theory, English became the lingua franca. But human existence thrived over millennia, based on difference and fear of otherness, and once one point of difference was removed, another one would take its place. Societies throughout history depended on eternal and ongoing conflict. The human–Technocrat divide was the last remaining differential between humans and, for the time being, firmly entrenched.

  Natural humans wanted to maintain diversity and differences and create better regulated worlds, but were outnumbered by Technocrats who believed a world free of governments, religion, and different peoples would ultimately create a more controlled, efficient and better world—and using technology was the best way to achieve this.

  Very few Technocrats worked beyond their €40,000 per year universal income requirements—aside from engaging in crowd-funded surveillance—and would often fill their time reliving historical experiences through inexpensive virtual reality holographs, or attend the more expensive historical sessions provided by historical figures such as Katcher.

  Natural humans were at the other end of society’s scale, receiving only around a quarter of the individual universal income allocated to Technocrats, and were the workers usually engaged in mundane low-income employment, in poor working conditions. Essentially, they were the exploited workers supporting the economy, while the Technocrats enjoyed the rewards and leisure from this exploitation.