by Erik Tabain
The advantaged world of the Technocrats could only be achieved through more community-based law enforcement and surveillance, with short-term detention centers for minor indiscretions, and deportation to permanent universal penal zones for any citizens deemed to be acting against the interests of the community, whether it was through serious criminal actions, or working towards a change in the social order.
Natural humans were considered the ‘higher’ life form with full emotional and intellectual potential, while Technocrats, even through they were the wealth accumulators and controlled virtually every aspect of the world, were considered ‘inferior’, with lesser emotional qualities, and fixated on the here and now of the world, the technical and economic requirements of the world, rather than the inequities of society and those divisions between natural humans and Technocrats.
The natural humans thumbed their noses at such audacious cybercontrol of the world, and were prepared to engage in counter-establishment actions and activities, knowing that all of their actions could be retrieved and used against them, resulting in detentions, or the worst fate of being sent to a universal penal zone, likely to die a horrible death, and certainly never to return. But yet they continued to resist, even though theirs was likely to be a lost cause.
Many worked for ‘the Movement’, a cause which had it roots in the mid-twenty-fourth century, when Technocrats started to outnumber natural humans, and the general understanding of ‘what it meant to be human’ changed drastically.
Technocrats were considered to be the ‘idiot’ class by natural humans. Cold, calculating, almost on auto-pilot, ensuring that every task needed to maintain the law and order of the community was in place. They caused the radical change in social and cultural existence: the end of borders, the end of governments, free passage of citizens and capital, bio-medical advances, with the ‘we cannot stand in the way of progress’ philosophy. Many Technocrats ridiculed ‘the Movement’ and all it represented and often queried why the natural humans couldn’t accept the good changes they’d implemented over centuries, bemused by resistance that, if successful, could only result in a return to destructive competitive nationalisms, warfare and social chaos.
Katcher saw himself as some kind of internationalist and believer in equality and fraternity amongst all humans, but he was as chauvinistic as the worst. He would never admit it but, subconsciously, he didn’t think Technocrats were people at all, even though they’d been created from the DNA of natural humans. He thought Technocrats were like factory chickens, sterile and couldn’t be like humans because they couldn’t reproduce outside of their incubators. He engaged with these thoughts, but he never attempted to push them away. Internally, he was a hypocrite, one of the enduring and timeless of all human frailties. He accepted his personal hypocrisy, but also believed that purity in thought and action was unattainable and only the impotent were pure and consistent.
How else could he have been responsible for the deaths of so many Technocrats if he believed in equality and fraternity for all?
Three
The year 3034
There were very few places to hide in the year 3034. The continuum, genetic memory and lightcapture made sure of that. Every movement, every discussion, every conversation could be retrieved through data scanners and lightscreen devices. Every citizen who wanted to watch the world through the continuum could link through Lifebook or becoming a self-appointed stalker, where anyone could report crime and social misdemeanors through citizen surveillance and updating details on other citizen’s Biocrime profiles.
The continuum created a web of linkages between all existing DNA in the world—living and dead—as well as the storage of genetic memory and historical lightcapture, which meant that anyone with a lightscreen could access the experiences of everyone and every event from human history—for a fee. It also meant citizen stalkers could datamine genetic memory and lightcapture—if they had the time and energy—to detect actions and activities by anyone in the past, and to see if there was anything can could be reported or updated on Biocrime profiles. It was a sophisticated system, one which reduced crime to a level where only extremist natural humans or off-gridders were engaged in subversive actions.
Jonathan Katcher knew every move he made and every word he uttered could be retrieved through the continuum. He was on many surveillance watch lists, and his actions were recorded and uploaded to his Biocrime profile but, mainly, they were only minor blips and nothing of value to any stalkers, and wouldn’t be, as long as he maintained his current lifestyle and current level of interests. Biocrime allowed for some leeway in crime monitoring, as it was determined by crowd-sourced material and assessments, so, for now, Katcher was safe.
Regular stalkers could see he held his regular historical and economic lectures, but they were nothing controversial and they could see there were no ucas to retrieve by producing updated reports. He was so low on the radar that he barely warranted an appearance on so many watch lists, and he hoped eventually, he would drop off entirely. This was unlikely, but there was always a hope.
Katcher was a thought machine and a deep thinker—thinking about ways to lead his revolution to the forefront again, and end the domination of the Technocrats. He liked the fact that English was the universal language, with a few variations around the globe, but he often wondered about the dead languages that dropped off—German, French, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese. These were only spoken in a few historical learning and research environments but the advent of automatic real-time translation through the continuum made most languages redundant, and in 2650, English became the universal language.
Language was important but there were many parts of the modern world that Katcher was marveled with. Skin colour, language and cultures averaged out over hundreds of years and, with no controls over human and capital flow after the collapse of state and national boundaries, around ninety-five per cent of people lived in cities and close to water zones. People lived wherever they wanted to, anywhere in the world, as long as they were prepared to pay for it.
Medical advances had reached a stage where few people were physically or psychologically ill, and medical robots performed all surgical procedures, but natural life expectancy was still only around eighty years and had only marginally increased over the past millennia.
Nanomeds, created by the BioMed industry, the medical equivalent of Biocrime, kept the population well, but they cost a fortune. Medicines had been reduced to three types of nanomeds: regular maintenance nanomeds taken once each year—nano-medical robots that travelled through the circulation system, monitoring core bodily functions and performing nano-biopsies, scaling back built-up cholesterol and other blockages with the body, removing any sign of cancerous growths, clearing blood flow and pulmonary functions, brain health and emitting medical updates to the central BioMed system, which, of course, was linked up to Lifebook through the continuum.
Onset nanomeds were taken as a remedial and preventative response to accidents or wounds and had the ability to repair small-scale damaged tissue. This performed a preliminary triage for a patient, could monitor immediate danger signals and assess whether a BioMed ambulance, equipped with a health robot, would be required to take the injured to a hospital.
Standard nanomeds were the cheapest, the new-wave headache tablets, combining paracetamol, barbituates and an entire range of biochemical and medical substances which the body took and used as needed, depending on the ailment, with remaining and unwanted substances eliminated through the body’s urine system. Standard nanomeds were widely available through a wide range a brand names, and were commonly known as ‘happy pills’.
Due to the depletion and scarcity of resources and economy of extraction, recycling materials was one of the biggest business activities in the world, second to Biocrime’s crime and surveillance business. In the mid-2200s, the world was faced with an environmental catastrophe, and had the choice to continue obtaining metals from more obscure parts of the earth’s crust,
or put an end to resource wastage, and recycle an already plentiful supply of metal and resources that had already been extracted from the earth. Every material was recycled—metal, plastics, wood, lightscreen parts and pieces, organic materials, food waste, water, cloth—and consumer behaviors changed within a short period of time.
There was no centralized government and all human activity was managed through citizen surveiling. Everything could be scanned and checked, and there were no privacy restrictions or limitations. Genetic recording and lightcapture meant people could be monitored, in the hope they would refrain from any activities considered counter to society’s expectations.
Citizens decided how their communities should be built and constructed, through online and technological interactives, but through the evolution of time, many cities and communities around the world had a similar look and feel to them, mainly only differentiated by geographical landmarks and topographical features.
In the world of 3034, citizens were multi-skilled. Through the results of having less working time and less time absorbed by menial tasks, citizens had more skills and personalized interests, and education was based around the ability to learn and acquire new knowledge, rather than provided with core data and facts, which could easily be acquired through other means.
There was a universal income that was generated through super-private entities, where profits and surplus revenues were collated through the continuum and distributed to citizens through Lifebook. Universal income was enough to survive well, but many citizens, especially Technocrats, supplemented their income becoming engaged in any industry of activity they could find. The main source of income and activity for many citizens was crowd-funded surveillance to catch ‘criminals’, or people engaged in counter-social or counter-economic activities. It was a combination of infotainment, news, work and, if someone was lucky, a supplement to universal income.
Online surveillance stalking relied on two main methods of data access: Lifebook Live was an add-on within the main Lifebook platform and provided live and real-time visual footage from virtually any molecular point from the surface of the earth, with the sound and imagery presented through a lightscreen. It used a combination of lightcapture technology, where any visual vantage point could be accessed—panoramic, aerial view, close-up view, a three-sixty-degree street view, and anything in between.
The second mode of data access was from historical recordings of this lightcapture and genetic sampling material—through an extension of Lifebook Live which recorded and stored genome data into a system known as the world memory bank.
Stalkers accessed and monitored Lifebook Live and the world memory bank to detect counter-establishment activities and, if they saw anything that warranted intervention from Biocrime, posted embellished reports to seek crowd-funded payments and rewards to make an arrest. Posted reports that were found to be false or incorrect were marked down as unreliable sources and if there were too many mark-downs on a stalker’s account, they were banned from the system for one month, and serial offenders were barred permanently.
It was a process that required a fine balance between factual and embellishment, but it was a system that weeded out the inexperienced and the sensationalists, and one that rewarded the best.
Four
The snowflake effect
The morning had turned overcast and the grey of the sky seemed more in tune with the depressing light blue paneling on the outside of Katcher’s apartment block. Inside, his apartment was just as drab—a colorless combined living and eating area with bland light grey walls, with a seemingly out-of-the-way toilet and bathroom area tucked in behind his small bedroom door—a rudimentary setup, but at least his living area was enlightened with ornaments from yesteryear positioned in various parts of his apartment.
One ornament was a miniature cat-like figurine from the ancient republic of Egypt—not an original, but a mass-produced artifact—that was housed in the practice rooms of Sigmund Freud, a leading psychoanalyst from the twentieth century. Katcher couldn’t quite understand the relationship between ancient Egypt and psychiatry, but he was impressed with the exploration of psyche, and keeping a memento with a spurious link to Freud reminded him how the power of one person gave rise to a thousand years of the symbiotic relationship between the mind, the body, and technology.
Katcher looked at his inanimate feline friend from across the room, thought about this relationship between the continuum and synapses, not just in his brain, but everybody’s brain. It was a momentary thought before he returned to putting the final touches to his presentation for his weekly one-hour session at the community hub—this one was titled ‘Communism and the rise of supraliberalism’, to be uploaded to his Lifebook profile.
Although he was a failed revolutionary and still considered by Biocrime and the community to be a threat to the social system, he was still considered to be a leading influencer and thinker among his tribe and, for this presentation, he expected the usual number of around forty in attendance, most of which were humans, and a few semi-interested Technocrats. He would be paid through the continuum, like every other financial transaction in the world economy. Each person attending the session paid what they thought the value was to them—on average, it was around twenty ucas, paid in real time as Katcher spoke. If any of the attendees left early, that was the point they stop paying and that was when Katcher stopped receiving income. And because of this, he needed to entertain his audience like a song and dance man—nobody had time for boring monotones and unimpressive speeches.
Normally for this type of event, Katcher would have his lectures and talks screened through the continuum—he’d probably have another five or six thousand citizens paying up to watch if that was the case—but his Biocrime profile had been restricted under international security guidelines and didn’t allow him to webcast to an audience so, for the time being, he provided old-school in-person presentations, only available to a small band of adherents and interested parties.
Katcher was intrigued by supraliberalism, the brand of economic philosophy that expanded into all areas of human activity, and had become the only kind of economic system available. It was a term that became prominent in the early 2100s and gave rise to many other functions of human existence. Its antecedents were rooted in the economic philosophies of Freidrich Hayek in the early twentieth century, which developed into neoliberalist thinking from the Chicago school of economists towards the latter part of the century.
The great economic schism that existed for nearly two centuries—the Marxism–laissez-faire dichotomy—and led the world to the brink of catastrophe in the mid-twentieth century and the early twenty-first century, largely disappeared towards the mid-2150s, where collectivism and the virtues of organized labor were only discussed in the few historical and societies in existence at the time, and examined as historical curiosities, rather than a serious return to collectivism. Collectivism, and any ideologies relating to communism or socialism were not outlawed or discouraged, but due to the onset of expanded neoliberal ideas (and further into supraliberalism) and the acceptance of these new ideas, their popularity fell away.
Like many current economic thinkers and theorists, Katcher was bemused there was only the one world economic practice that had been prevalent for the past thousands years. He pondered about the dichotomy of economic theories throughout history, and the systems that preceded the onset of communism in the twentieth century—serfdom, the free market and the slave market, where empires were built on the enforced labor of citizens.
As Katcher summoned his lightscreen to complete and check his presentation, he wondered whether the world of today really did have the one economic system or, whether in reality, it had reverted to the economies of old, based on a free market on one side, and a sophisticated form of slavery on the other side.
He made a note about this issue for discussion and added it to his presentation. He flicked his hand towards the lightscreen to approve his presentation and it wou
ld soon be available through the continuum, onto Lifebook and through to the forty or so citizens likely to attend his lecture.
He wanted to maintain influence somewhere and somehow through his restricted activities, and influencing the minds of a small gathering at a community hub, however insubstantial, could make a difference. It was only a small contribution into his world of ‘snowflake’ activism—the belief that it was always the one snowflake that tipped the avalanche into the valleys and crevices below—but it was a contribution, nevertheless.
Five
I like to watch
A subtle buzz sounded on a lightscreen in the Potrero Hill apartment, a more salubrious and densely populated Technocrat zone, not far from the harbor water. The thirteen-storey block was in the midst of other apartment blocks and surrounded by well-kept recreational zones, complete with enough visual space, greenery and parkland, designed to create a harmony between the inner workings of the mind and the grunge of the modern world.
The lightscreen was in a small untidy room, a stark contrast to the external environment, with a range of smaller disused lightscreens and gadgets and digital storage units: everything had a reason for being there but, for the outside observer, it was a disorganized chaos. Among the chaos was a bank of three personal i-Incubate kits, placed in the corner of the room, almost like a forgotten relic. The small liquid crystal diode numbers on each of kits showed incubation commenced eight weeks ago, and all fetal functions were performing normally. Someone in this apartment was expecting triple clones, but it was difficult to tell who it was going to be.
