by Erik Tabain
“What have you got today?” asked Weller in his usual curt manner.
“News about the targeted inspection,” Banda said. “Kransich said he couldn’t get access to any clearer details—we’ll have to work out what to do about it—and some more bypass patches for Biocrime’s surveillance program.”
“We’ll have to monitor the surface chatter ourselves—it’s just that we won’t know when it’s likely to happen, but we have to be prepared. And Katcher?”
“He’s pissed with me—thinks I’m a plant from Biocrime trying to set him up, and told me to fuck off. I think he’s got an interest, but at the moment, we’re no different to all the other groupies and the bullshit wannabes that have approached him over the past ten years. I’ve got to prove to him we’re for real.”
“Yeah, for sure, but what are you proposing?”
“We’ve got to attack a Technocrat zone,” Banda said, “something big that will show our system works and can’t be detected by Biocrime. And I’ve got to be part of it—I have to do it. It will be dangerous, but if this is what we have to do to prove to Katcher our system works, then we’ve got to do it.”
“You mean, just like Katcher used to do—the attacks? Bombs?”
“Exactly like Katcher used to do, and the bigger, the better.”
With some hesitation, Weller reached out to a lightscreen and prepared for a surface scan and within minutes, estimated one region of San Francisco about eight miles away would be suitable to let off a high-impact detonation, with minimum disruption to natural humans, and maximum damage to Technocrats.
“This one’s in the East End between Richmond and Anza Vista, a high-density Technocrat zone and in this apartment block, there’s access to the underground aircon system—there’s very few natural humans in this area. Looks like there’s lots of old digital surveillance cameras—most are broken though. It’s all concrete out the back there, so less DNA material that can record anything meaningful, but you’ll be on decoder, so you won’t register anyway.”
“How many in the apartment?”
“Looks like there’s around six hundred…” Weller said the figure slowing, before repeating the number: six hundred. “…this is a big fucking deal, but I feel like we’re being so nonchalant about killing a huge number of Technocrats—and some of our own.”
“Mav, you don’t have to do this,” Banda said. “I can take charge. It’s not a big deal to me, I don’t think they’re real people.”
“How about Kransich? Is he real?”
“He’s a mercenary, and he’s using us as much as we’re using him—look, don’t get all moralistic on me—”
“—we can’t decide this for ourselves—this is a big call, it’s high risk. And we’re all equal in this aren’t we?”
Weller wanted to seek counsel from the other members of the revolutionary team—all supposedly equal, but some were more equal than others. Weller summoned Mike Scanlen and Maria Renalda—the two that successfully defended Katcher in his crowd trial all those years ago—from another cavern, and it took five minutes before they appeared with Weller and Banda.
Scanlen and Renalda were both in their mid-fifties, with a high level of technical, legal and analytical skills, and when wise heads were needed to prevail, they were the people you really needed to have by your side.
Scanlen was a contemporary of Katcher—although nine years older, he was a critical background part of the machinery of the revolution before Katcher was arrested and detained. While the movement was destroyed then by Biocrime, it was felt that it was just a matter of time before they regrouped and led the pathway for the Movement again. But ten years on, with technological advances in surveillance and Katcher out of the picture, they were still regrouping—they were a patient group but even this amount of time was starting to test them.
Renalda was the leader in the legal crowd-sourced case for Katcher against BioLaw, the legal behemoth that was appended to Biocrime. Although BioLaw lost the case to make Katcher a non-citizen and deport him to a universal penal zone, they were legally able to restrict what Katcher could do in his life, enabled a twenty-four-hour surveillance of him, effectively ending his position and work as a revolutionary leader of the Movement.
Scanlen and Renalda were both now ‘off-the-grid’. Scanlen was now understood to be ‘missing, presumed dead’ within Biocrime and Lifebook—a status allocated to people not seen or sighted through the servers in the continuum after seven years, were officially listed as ‘expired’.
Renalda’s death was fabricated soon after the completion of Katcher’s crowd trial. Being the lead legal person behind the crowd defense of Katcher didn’t exactly enamour her in the public’s view, and her ability to supplement her universal income was severely reduced. In combination with Scanlen, Weller and Banda, she decided the best pathway to stoking up a revolution was to ‘go underground’.
Scanlen and Renalda were considered ‘thinking’ substitutes for the absent Katcher—‘what would Jonathan Katcher do’—and they were precisely asked this when they arrived to see Weller and Banda.
“What’s up?” Renalda asked, focusing her attention on Banda.
“It’s pretty straight forward really,” Banda said. “We need to bomb a Technocrat area to prove to Jonathan that I’m not a plant. High risk, and it’s a lot of people. Mav thinks we needed a consensus if I want to proceed.”
“Well, is it a high-risk plan,” Renalda said, “it goes without saying. The highest order of crime is killing Technocrats—and you’ll go straight to a universal penal zone, or they’ll work out a way of killing you before then. That’s the first point—”
“—and Katcher would always think,” Scanlen added, “‘what’s the end game, how will this achieve our goal’. It’s always based around the risk.”
Banda was calm but reasoned. “Katcher’s had nothing to do with the Movement for almost a decade, and we have to do something to show him we’re not a Biocrime plant, and we’re prepared to bring on the Movement. We’ve regrouped to the stage where we can go to the next step, and we need to bring him back in.”
“But it’s a fuckload of people,” Weller interjected. “Six hundred people, including a few natural humans.” The magnitude of what was proposed weighed on Weller’s mind, but it was more about the protection of Anika-6 than any concern he had for Technocrats. He hated the Technocrats as much as anyone else, but killing six hundred people to prove a point to one person seemed out of kilter, as well as the prospect of Anika-6 disbanding because of one false move. It was too high a price to pay.
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” Banda said, “which means the opposite can be true too, doesn’t it?”
“If this goes ahead,” Scanlen said, “there can never be any blowback to us—any of us. If you’re captured in this raid, that’s the end of Anika-6, and we’ll have to start up all over again. And it could even mean the end for Jonathan Katcher if Biocrime can make the link between the two of you.”
Weller was still reluctant and believed it was a high-risk strategy that outweighed the benefits but felt it was best to make the consensus—it wasn’t the best strategy in his opinion, but was the only one on the table and they probably didn’t have the time to wargame other scenarios. He was reluctant when it came to high-level decision-making anyway, but with Scanlen and Renalda at the table, he felt more secure, as well as diluting the decision across more people.
He’d hate to see Banda go down, but he was more concerned about losing Anika-6. Ten years’ worth of work going down when they were so close to realizing their dreams would be a disaster.
Semtex was the explosive of choice for terrorists for many years. Its first usage was in the Eastern Europe Zone in the late twentieth century and gained currency for the politically disaffected because it was difficult to detect and highly explosive, even with smaller amounts. Banda could recite all the original ingredients—crystalline, styrene-butadiene, noctyl phthalate tributyl citrate
, naphthylamine.
Although the original Semtex was long gone, the formula in the year 3034 was a mixture of new-wave explosives and synthetic chemicals laced with plutonium. While the original Semtex was extremely powerful, research and development over the centuries had created a formula ten times more powerful and more condensed.
Semtex was still used for construction site detonations, and clearing of geographical features such as rock faces and hills that need to be flattened out for apartment construction, but its use was highly restricted and easily detectable.
This brand of Semtex was ZJ478. The name disappeared from the public domain because of its association with terrorists acts, most notably, the destruction of a commercial aeroplane in the Northern Europe Zone in the late twentieth century. As with most reappropriated names and concepts, ZJ478 bore little semblance to the original product, but in true retro style, some features were replicated, such as the dark red synthetic color, although that had changed slightly to a deep hot pink.
Anika-6 purchased a batch of Semtex through black market crypto-currency, and with the help of Kransich’s secrets from Biocrime. This batch was two years old and was obtained for this type of purpose—they didn’t know it at the time how it was to be used, but every organized revolutionary cell needed to be prepared.
Banda, Weller, Scanlen and Renalda agreed on the plan: Banda would take the Semtex in a small package into the basement of the Technocrat apartment block selected by Weller. The package included a biodegradable decoder patch that shielded it from the continuum and Biocrime, which meant that both Banda and the package were undetectable.
She would leave the package in the basement of the apartment and detonate it from a viewable distance using an app created by Weller. It would be impossible to trace this back to her, or back to Anika-6.
And how would she prove the bona fides of the Movement to Katcher? Her plan was to record her act on a video capture button to show to Katcher, and the news of the explosion would be available everywhere through the continuum and Lifebook. It would be reported as the worst attack on Technocrats in three-hundred years.
She knew Katcher would still be skeptical when she showed him the footage—doctored and manipulated video footage made up almost seventy per cent of all material of Lifebook visual pages—but once he realized her attack was similar to the ones he organized when he was the leader, and that it was highly unlikely Biocrime would stage such a catastrophic explosion that killed six hundred of its own, just for the sake of entrapment, Banda was certain he would be convinced about the true intentions of the Movement.
If she survived—and Banda was very determined to survive—she’d also mention to Katcher that Scanlen and Renalda were waiting for him in the underground.
Seventeen
The bombing at Anza Vista
It was a cool San Francisco morning, overcast with water-laden clouds ready to burst open. Banda had her tools of trade and she was just off the autotram, walking towards the apartment block in Geary Boulevard in the Inner Richmond East End area, eight miles away from her apartment. She had to move quickly, discretely and undetected. Her decoder app was switched on as soon as she left her apartment, and the disposable decoder patch was attached to the Semtex package in her small backpack. It was small and discrete, and she didn’t want to do anything to attract attention. As she moved towards her destination, the rain commenced slowly, and then increased to a heavy fall. She made sure her video capture button was on, and she could see on her cell device the recording was stable. She occasionally took the video button off the lapel and turned it towards herself to check its operation, as if she was doing a ‘selfie’ or masquerading as a citizen journalist.
The apartment block was tall, a forty-story concrete edifice with artificial black and grey marble veneer, but it melded into the horizon of many other apartment blocks in the area. Banda could see the Golden Gate Bridge and the hills further beyond and, after briefly taking in some of the sights, showed some regret that her actions would spoil an otherwise excellent view.
The rain shielded Banda from the gaze of other people that were walking along the boulevard, but it was a zone where people minded their own business anyway, and she was free to carry out her work. She walked to the back of the apartment block and saw an access point for garbage collection. Although the apartment block had a sleek and fashionable design, it was a lower socio-economic Technocrat zone with few modern conveniences. On the inside of these apartments, it was almost top of the range in technology, but lacked facilities such as in-home self-recycling and garbage combustion machines. Some parts of the apartment block were old style, and portable garbage vehicles drove around to apartments like this, keeping the recyclable items, and vaporizing the rest.
At the access point to the basement, Banda could see the old-style surveillance cameras were broken—as Weller suggested to her—but there were four others inside that he told her about. She was also wearing a partial facial disguise and her decoder app meant her genetic data wouldn’t be recorded, but it was best to be in there and out as quickly as possible.
Through the heavy rain, Banda went through the access point, and straight into the disposal unit area which co-ordinated all the pipes where garbage from each apartment was collated and extracted. The strong pungent smell from the disposal unit stopped Banda in her tracks but, because she only intended to be there for less than thirty seconds, she tolerated it. Just as she left the explosive package behind the extraction pipes, a garbage vehicle came through the access point and startled her—but she had enough time to slither around the side walls and through an access door, unseen by anyone.
The bag with the Semtex had been left behind and soon, it would also leave behind a scene of carnage. Banda had a clear conscience about what was just about to happen and fended away the small whisperings that pulled at her heart—many people were going to die and the amalgam of body parts left behind were too gruesome for her to consider.
She ventured towards the Anza Vista lookout—a small park just seven-hundred yards away—but Banda estimated that it was enough to avoid injury from any flying shrapnel but, importantly, close enough to record the event on her video button.
The heavy rain had subsided, reduced to a light patter of water, but the grey clouds still hung ominously, tempting to release another deluge of rain at any fickle moment. Like an arsonist disappearing from the scene of their crime but wanting to see the results of their misdemeanors, Banda positioned herself at the park bench, with a clear view of the apartment block and ready to record the event as a visual trophy. On any other day, the view would be picture perfect, but the gloom and the rain soiled the scene, appropriate for what was just about to take place.
Banda was committed and there was no going back. She retrieved her cell device and located the app that Weller developed to link the Semtex with the detonator. She pressed the button on the app, but the rain droplets interfered with the traction, so she wiped the screen and pressed the button again.
Three seconds later, a massive crashing boom was heard across the suburb. As far as a spectacle was concerned, it disappointed Banda. She expected a pyrotechnic display but after the initial boom, there was no immediate carnage and all she could see was the smashed glass panes on every level of the building and some smoke emanating from the lower levels. That changed after a few more minutes, where fires started to engulf the sides of the building.
The presence of some rain ensured the fires weren’t as extreme as they could have been, but the fires had been fueled by a range of chemicals and gases that powered the building and were going to rage for sometime, irrespective of how much rain was falling, or other retardants poured onto the flames.
The fires were coming, but many were already dead. The sonic boom had already blasted the lungs of over a hundred Technocrats on the lower levels—that was just the start—and those trying to escape through the internal stairwells were taken by the flames, many burnt beyond recognition.
The fire services in San Francisco, managed and operated by a subsidiary of Biocrime, were very effective and efficient and generated a sizeable profit. But even their skills and efficiency were no match for the fast-burning flames in the apartment block.
Fire crews assembled at the base of the apartment block within seven minutes of the blast—their task wasn’t a rescue mission, but to stabilize the environment and put out the flames to ensure nearby apartments weren’t affected. It was part of their job, but the fire workers also had to mask out the smell of so many burning bodies—a mixture of the aroma of burnt human meat, not dissimilar to the smell of barbequed beef and pork; the metallic–coppery smell of burning blood; and the distinct sweet perfumed muskiness of boiled cerebrospinal fluid.
BioMed staff and medical robohelpers moved rapidly to tend to any survivors from the blast—but Semtex was a type of explosive that had sharp results—survivors were also severely injured and very unlikely to live for too much longer.
The scene was one of an organized chaos—the teams of fire and health crews analyzed the likely causes of the blast, moving through the vulture-like presence of the collection of citizen journalists who recorded moving images and acquired the mise en scene of the blast. There was big money to be made, and if they attracted more ‘likes’ and ‘wants’ to their Lifebook profiles, it meant a higher level of supplementary income, especially if their reportage ended up screened on the large-format lightscreens throughout the city.
There was a fee for everything and everything had its price.
