by Erik Tabain
“Does this mean we have to get out of here?”
“No, not for a low-grade scan. High-grade is what we have to look out for—that’s when they actually drill and come down to have a look. It’s a hassle, but we can move everything to a lower cavern. It will take maybe a day to move, but we have to do it. You should be able to get Kransich to provide the date of the high-grade scan.”
The task of high-grade Biocrime specialist officers was to go underground and physically assess locations they thought might be areas of counter-establishment activity—known as targeted assessments—and then compare with previously recorded sonar scans. In this case, Anika-6 hadn’t been scanned or assessed for four years—they didn’t have to leave the area pristine for a targeted assessment, but couldn’t leave one part of any technical material behind. If anything was left behind and raised suspicions, they’d be subjected to further and ongoing targeted assessments, and that would mean capture and a total shut down of Anika-6 or, if they were lucky enough to evade capture, needing to relocate to a new site.
“Is the information we’re getting from Kransich still useful to us?” asked Banda.
“This batch is. But some is good, some isn’t. But the genetic coding stuff he gave us a few years ago, that was the big one. Even if we don’t get anything more useful from Kransich, having the material that led to us developing the decoder and the emulator was the big one.”
Banda had the need to be assured that all of her actions and motivations were worthwhile and contributing to the Movement. Weller’s affirmation to her made the difference. The ‘genetic coding stuff’ Weller referred to was the key data provided by Kransich the Movement used to circumvent genetic recording and the world memory bank, the central platform of Biocrime.
After a year of testing, Weller was certain that his systems could bypass Biocrime. He assured Banda that it was clear to use these systems on the one they really wanted back into the fold. Jonathan Katcher.
Eleven
Scanners
Four-hundred yards above the Anika-6 cavern, where Weller, Banda and the team of hacktivists were plotting the return of the Movement, a small Biocrime surveillance team arrived. Two women and four men exited a blue large vehicle marked with the large white letters ‘USM’—underground surveillance and monitoring. It was a sleek and sophisticated vehicle, fifty-thousand pounds of mechanical and technological sophistication with a presence that commanded fear and respect. It had room for ten people, and four robohelpers but, for today, the internal cabin had a less-than-full feel to it.
The six Technocrats were dressed in the standard black Biocrime protective suits with orange and white trimmings, with laser guns in holsters ready for use. They were dressed to withstand anything that could be thrown at them and, although they weren’t wearing them, their heavy-duty helmets at their sides gave out the collective ‘we-mean-business’ appearance.
It was a small parkland on the edge of suburban Paradise Valley, surrounded by apartments and a healthy collection of large redwood trees—one of the few remaining green zones in this poorer part of the city—but it provided the best access point to the underground.
The vehicle had been physically secured to the ground and, from beneath its chassis, a one-inch tube started screwing into the ground. It was a soft machine, akin to the sound of a dentist’s drill but its softness belied the strength and power of the machinery. At the end of the tube, just above the tungsten and diamond drilling bit, was a scanning camera and a collection of mini-sonar detectors, and it drilled quickly and efficiently to the depth of twenty feet within two minutes.
After the drilling ceased, the camera and sonars scanned to the depth of one mile, and the surrounding one square mile. The technology for underground scanning hadn’t progressed much over the past millennia, and it was a process still dependent on reflective seismographic techniques.
Georgia the Biocrime security manager, was one of the thousand field agents engaged by Biocrime to perform and manage underground surveillance. It was routine work and required a combination of patience, physical fitness, dare and bravado, and the ability to go to areas no-one else wanted to go to. She was a tough mujer firme and she summoned her team to the lightscreen on the side of the vehicle.
“Let’s see if we can dig up some dirt,” she said as she waved the lightscreen to retrieve the app to enable subterraneal scanning data. “Dig up dirt… and in more ways than one.”
“Such a joker aren’t you,” her male security operator said, while he extracted and interpreted the onscreen data. “I’m laughing on the inside, really hard.”
“Okay, I’ll cut the crap. We want a deep scan now, and compare to previous recordings. What’s the data on that?”
“Rome wasn’t built in a day you know. I’ll get it up soon.” A few more seconds passed while the scans and previous data recordings were retrieved and compared with the current information.
“Previous recording, just over four years ago. I’ll assess any change or movement,” the security operator said.
“Haven’t done this area before, I think it’s before my time. The closest one I’ve done around here was Devil’s Slide Bunker down on the coast. What’s down here?”
“Looks like a series of caves and tunnels, but the scans aren’t showing any change over the past four years. Looks clean—oh, hang on…”
On the lightscreen, the operator could see what seemed to be a morass of cabling—but was difficult to discern through the grainy seismological scans.
“Not sure what this shit is—could be some kind of cabling. You get rats that bring this sort of stuff down underground, but not this far. It’s probably nothing, because everything else is clean.”
“Seems like it would be a good place for those fuckers to do no-good down there.”
“No, don’t think so—the scans are coming up with a lot of radioactivity. One of those no-go zones. But it’s close to apartments, and we’re in a human zone, so maybe.”
“Well, we’re due for a targeted assessment in this area. Sure, it will cost a lot of money and resources for Biocrime, but we’re due for one. Plus we’ll get a bonus for the radioactivity. Let’s put this one down for a heavy-scan and inspection on June the seventh.”
The lightscreen listened and understood the intention of Georgia the security manager, and scheduled the date of June 7, 3034. It then accessed the Biocrime system through the continuum and scheduled the time, and the human personal and resources required to perform the targeted assessment, which involved drilling a hole three feet in diameter, four-hundred yards below the surface. A special Biocrime USM with a stronger drill bit and extraction unit was scheduled and, on the day, it would be the second targeted assessment, to commence at 08:00.
The Biocrime team was nonchalant as they finished off this job, and closed the twenty-feet hole they had just created with a solid rubber sealing glue. It was business as usual and they calmly and professionally cleared away their work, and left behind the smallest footprint possible, as if they had never actually been there.
They weren’t expecting their targeted assessment on the seventh of June to be any different to the hundreds of others they’d performed in the past. It was likely to be a comfortable cool day of around seventy degrees Fahrenheit, perhaps with a small amount of precipitation. But, as they would discover when they returned to this site, their targeted assessment would prove to be nothing like the others in the past.
Twelve
The meeting with Katcher
Greta Banda had never met Jonathan Katcher but, like many others in the Movement, felt like she knew him intimately. She looked up Katcher on Lifebook through her own fabricated profile and could see his next session at the Optimus Center in the San Francisco Community Hub was next Wednesday, at 14:00; a ninety-minute session titled ‘Communism and the rise of supraliberalism’. There were data notes, historical references, essays and video recordings to support the session but they were usually not accessed by many—
the few people that did arrive at Katcher’s sessions were mainly those who needed to attend for community participation obligations so they could continue receiving their universal income, a few genuine historians, and others who wanted to see a legendary figure close up.
These sessions were classic ‘old-school’—just like the people going to the theater to imagine how the Shakespearian world appeared, or to see in real life, the amazing skill of actors on stage being able to recite verbatim, two hours of prose. In this case, it was the spectacle of seeing a failed historical revolutionary who provided his interpretations of history. Katcher still had some social and cultural cache, even if he was on the periphery.
Banda scanned through the ‘Also by…’ and ‘You might be interested in…’ sections of Katcher’s Lifebook page and saw a list of other lecture topics: ‘Supracapitalism and how it failed the citizenry’; ‘Revisiting 2149: What Does It Mean To Be Human?; ‘The Rise of Technocratic Power: 2500–2700’; ‘Capital class and labor class systems of the future’… She had read them all, and it was pure academia—well-written articles with succinct ideas, but almost too perfect because no-one really spoke like that anymore. There were no hidden messages in these lecture notes calling for an uprising of labor class people, or for revolution. For Banda, and many others in the Movement, the articles and lecture topics were a disappointment. There was no mistake about the articles as excellent literature but, for those in the Movement, to see their hero and potential leader of the future revolution in this forum was akin to watching an old toothless tiger paraded in a zoological garden; no longer the king of the jungle, but withering away, catching any small fry for a meal, and waiting to die.
She flicked the lightscreen over to the attendance region and clicked on ‘Attend’, followed by an ‘Are you sure?’ prompt, which she confirmed and motioned forward to view the ‘Also attending will be’ screen, which provided a list of the other thirty-one profiles attending. They were as meaningless to her as her own Lifebook alias—DynaMiteMax—was to others: DogPig499, SplodgerNess, DavidM22, DangerFieldTribe. They were all linked to real and easily identifiable people, but Banda’s profile was linked to Moira Harding, a natural human who died last fall, in a hovercar accident on the outskirts of San Francisco. It was one of the account names provided by Kransich and Maverick Weller was able to intercept the closure of the account through a virus code he sent from Anika-6 through his private personal network. It would be several weeks before this Lifebook account was correctly closed down by the trawling bots navigating their way around the continuum but, in the meantime, Banda was going to use it for her own surveillance.
It was a cool Wednesday afternoon, typical of the San Franciscan winter, the sun barely breaking through the clouds as the temperature nudged its way past fifty degrees.
The community hub was housed in a multi-function polis in the old University of California grounds in Berkeley, a combination of older sandstone buildings that had survived for over a thousand years, and newer apartment-style buildings that were earmarked as ‘educational places of learning’, although, in most cases, they were filled with bored people that had nothing better to do with their time.
It was close to 14:00 when Banda arrived at the community hub, dressed to fit in with the crowd of metrosexual men, street rats and unisexed women. Culturally and socially, these were not her people but she decided it was best not to be too try-hard and selected a deep grey new wave Gore-Tex thinsulate jacket, with matching pants, and a woven beanie to keep out the cold.
The Optimus Center in the hub was an oppressive twenty-five storeyed building and, although it was built in the year 2826, it used a quasi-brutalist architectural style from the late-twentieth century common in communist countries but, for unknown reasons, was applied to many educational buildings at the time, as if to suppress creative and educational thinking in a time of cultural liberalization. Optimus was a large company in the America Zone that was engaged in the dual businesses of electricity and education, and building a educational center in a community environment assuaged some of its guilt for fleecing its customers in all of its other business activities.
The building was not in a state of disrepair, but it was obvious that it had not been maintained for some time and, along with many other buildings provided by Optimus for educational purposes, was largely forgotten about.
After entering at the ground level, the elevator zoomed Banda up through the interior of the building and stopped at level seventeen; she exited and found her way to the lecture room. There were a few late bookings, and class numbers were up to forty-three. Banda was there with her decoder app, so she was invisible and impermeable to Biocrime’s genetic data recording and lightcapture systems. Although she enrolled in the session, her profile, DynamiteMax, would be recorded as a ‘no-show’ and because it was a large session, Katcher wouldn’t notice the difference: not that he would care.
Banda’s mission for today was to obtain a piece of Katcher’s genetic material—a strand of hair, or skin scraping—synchronize it with another decoder app, and relay the material to Weller in the underground Anika-6. Weller’s team had created a seamless ‘cut-in’ and ‘cut-out’ technique producing perfect cloaking where from the point the decoder was switched on, actual genetic data and light recording for that person would cease, and not reappear until the decoder was switched off.
The ‘on-off’ process alone would have caused a problem, as there would be a retrieval gap—if a person was being monitored through Lifebook and then instantly disappeared from the lightscreen, this could raise suspicions with Biocrime.
Weller’s solution was to produce an algorithm based on the first end point of light recording when the decoder was switched on, and the beginning point when the decoder was switched off. The algorithm would average out the two points, and fill in the sequences in between. It had been checked in their simulation zones and in the field—thanks to the material provide by Kransich, and through the work of Banda, Weller’s software and coding team created a system that could bypass Biocrime.
The lecture room at the community hub was just a standard room, one of the old style rooms—just the way Katcher wanted it—and there was a combination of seats, desks, beanbags, and the large lightboard, ready for Katcher’s presentation.
At the stroke of 14:00, Katcher walked into the room to the sounds of ‘Another Brick In The Wall’ and the name ‘Pink Floyd – 1979’ on the lightboard—it was a copyright infringement and Katcher would automatically be deducted a small penalty fee—the song was re-issued recently and attributed to Indigo Bluemen, a manufactured ‘concept’ musical group. The common belief was that Indigo Bluemen created the song, but as Katcher despised the trading and repurchasing of song titles—a big business in the 3000s—he insisted on the original attribution, even if he was penalized for it.
It was the first time Banda had seen Katcher in real life. To be sure, she had seen all of his videograms and holographs, but seeing him live in the flesh was radically different. She was not overawed, as she saw herself as an equal in the Movement. Katcher was the spiritual leader, even if he didn’t see this himself in this way, but she was one of the Revolution Five, and what she needed to do today was just a part of business.
Katcher was a tall man, but didn’t seem to have the presence that he had televisually, but when he spoke, he spoke in a manner that commanded authority, respect and attention. He could talk the legs off chairs, and ad-libbing his words was no problem at all for him. He was familiar with the time when governments existed, the long filibustering sessions in the American Congress during the twentieth century, and the especially long eighteen-hour speeches at the United Nations forum by Fidel Castro in the 1960s, the leading figure of Marxist politics in the former republic of Cuba. For Katcher, a ninety-minute session about politics was barely clearing his throat.
“Welcome to Communism and the rise of supraliberalism, I know it’s not as fashionable as it used to be…” The standard for r
eal-life presentation was still the same as it had been for millennia. The introduction. The jest. The eye engagement with the audience. The quick flip over to audiovisual material on the lightboard. Stylish graphics and stark typefaces. Then a switch to moving imagery, of leading figures of communism in the twentieth century; the economic figures behind the commanding heights of the supraliberalism movements of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries.
Banda could tell Katcher was enjoying himself. He might be the toothless tiger parading through the plains in search of the small meal, but this serious and charismatic character needed some outlet, and this venue provided it.
Banda had heard this presentation many times before, and read it so often that she almost knew it verbatim, like most of his other presentations. But this was partially surreal, partially like witnessing a magician perform on stage, with wild gesticulation, summoning on the screen, engaging his audience. But it was a small audience.
By the end of the session, twenty-nine citizens, including Banda, remained—the others decided they’d had enough, their interest wasn’t sustained enough by their short attention spans, or had to be elsewhere.
Several attendees chatted with Katcher, now seated, and surrounded the area where he provided his presentation. Banda knew that humans shed around a hundred strands of hair every day and Katcher, with his full head of dark hair, would have shed about six or seven strands, and they’d be somewhere on the floor. Although he was animated, Katcher was only moving within around one square yard of the scabby dirty floor, made up of recycled parquetry.
Banda tried to maintain discretion—to avoid the appearance of some weird person looking for hair follicles—and she fluctuated between looking engaged with the small crowd around Katcher and the floor. As if trying to get a closer look at the information on the lightboard, she moved to the area where Katcher had been standing and could see three or four dark strands of hair. She nonchalantly dropped her handkerchief on the floor, as if by accident, and scooped up the strands.
