The Biocrime Spectrum (Books 1-4)

by Erik Tabain

  Monday, June 7. Biocrime had four targeted assessments scheduled for the day, including the one that was due to take place four-hundred yards above Anika-6. The Biocrime underground surveillance and monitoring vehicle had returned, with its group of five specialist underground officers. They were early risers, with the first dig taking place at five in the morning, and it was now pushing nine o’clock.

  Georgia the Biocrime security manager parked the USM vehicle close to their previous inspection point, the marks of their tube drilling still visible. It was their second targeted assessment today, but they were running behind their schedule.

  The five, led by Georgia the security manager, quickly extracted themselves from the vehicle and swung into their trained actions, and prepared the groundwork for this deep excavation.

  “It’s touch and go for this one,” Georgia said, pointing to the lightscreen on the side paneling of the USM. “It’s a bit more complicated with that branch of crevices. I reckon we just send down a camera for this one.”

  “But we got the guys in the back with us, they’re hungry for more action,” her deputy said. “I think we should take all of us down, just have a quick look and report back—there’s more crowd pay for us, and should improve our record with Biocrime.”

  “Fuck,” Georgia said. “If we take too much time here, we’ll have to rush the other two that we gotta do today. I don’t want to be working until midnight.”

  “Think of the overtime Georgia,” her deputy said. “We’ll do this one now, you get the double fee for tonight, and have a day off next week. It’s working half the time for the same amount. Think about that while you go down underground.”

  Georgia the security manager agreed—she was only half-joking about not going down—she was as greedy as any other Technocrat and she’d do anything to earn more money, while working less. And, besides, it was partially a test to see what her deputy would say—if he agreed not to go down, he’d be out of his job and replaced with someone else.

  “What’s the report for downstairs?” asked Georgia.

  “Stable, obsidian rock. Start our drilling now, we’ll be able to start our descent in about half an hour.”

  “Okay then. Set up, start it up. I’ll let the guys know we’ll go down in thirty. Synth for you?”

  Georgia the security manager swiveled around to the mobile food processor, a small machine that was a lower quality compared to in-home processors, but still made excellent coffees and more-than-acceptable food. She selected five coffees and a tray of cookies: to be ready in five minutes, and the food processor started its usual hum.

  Her deputy positioned the USM vehicle in its correct position and the portable deep speed tube driller slowly extricated itself on the other side of the vehicle, ready to commence its action. The driller was solid boron nitride, with sharpened diamond cutters. It was the toughest known substance in the universe and, when combined with the acid lubricant, it could cut through anything in the earth’s crust at the rate of half-a-yard per second. Its diameter was three-feet wide, which left a hole with enough room for an officer to move comfortable down, and its central extraction pipe sucked out the softened earth and rock.

  Georgia calculated the softened earth and rock extraction would take up a mound of about three yards high and about twenty yards square. They would concrete and mesh the top of the hole when they’d finished, just like a plug hole, and having the tunnel there would make future targeted assessments a great deal easier. A crowd-funded dirt mechanic would come by in a few days time to take away the softened earth and rock and, after a week or two, all evidence of any groundwork would disappear, and no-one would notice any difference.

  The officers positioned the extraction tube in the right location to commence drilling: its noisy mechanism started to spew out the results of the drilling, and gradually moved downwards as the size of the mound increased. It was noisy with a deeply pungent aroma, but they were hungry and no-one missed the barely audible ring from the food processor, which announced their coffees and cookies were ready for consumption.

  “These cookies taste like shit,” one of the specialist officers said, biting into one of the freshly made treats.

  “Well, the coffee more than makes up for it,” Georgia said. “You can’t expect the best when you’re out in the field.”

  “It can’t be any worse that the stuff coming out from the driller,” the officer said. “That’s where the real shit smell is coming from.”

  But it wasn’t the smell of excrement: it was the earthly smell of thousands of year of compacted, composted, rained-on dirt and rock. It was like lancing an old pus boil and it wasn’t anything that anybody wanted to see—or smell. Another twenty-five minutes and a coffee or two, and they would commence their descent.

  Weller was near the front tent in Anika-6, working with a hacktivist on the final parts of their viral propaganda videos for release to the world. It was bright inside this tent, especially compared to the low-light outside the tent, kept dark to further minimize an already slim chance of detection.

  They had moved fast and he was pleased with the work—Katcher’s viral material and political messaging had been completed, and it was moving onto the simulation testing phase. In his estimation, another day or two and they’d be ready to start their surface revolution. As far as Weller was concerned, it all worked in theory, they just needed to test it in practice and all would be ready to go. Weller leaned over one of hacktivist and checked a portion of the coding.

  “What else is needed to complete this part,” Weller asked, pointing to the lightscreen.

  “Nothing Mav,” said the hacktivist, “this is complete. I’ve run through all the coding and all of the tests. I’ve checked on the parallel systems, done a thorough test. We’re ready to go. We should probably do the practical test, but that’s perfunctory. We’re ready.”

  “And the back-up?”

  “I’ve checked. This system goes down, the next one takes over. I’ve done the simulation—even if every system gets blown up, there’s the central system that’s on auto, and will start off the messaging on the surface. It’s all ready. Just waiting for the practical tests—if you want them—and the word from Katcher to go.”

  Weller was taking all of this in—he already knew everything the hacktivist mentioned to him, but a part of his processes was to affirm and re-affirm as often as possible. It was all routine, but he needed to be assured more than a hundred per cent that everything was going according to plan.

  They had developed a fail-save system, and were almost ready to implement it. But something else was distracting Weller. He could hear a low level hum—similar to the sound of a food processor—but this sound was all encompassing. It was coming from the roof of the cavern and gradually becoming louder. It didn’t take him long to work out what was happening—drilling from the surface—and he frantically messaged Banda and Katcher, further down in Anika-6.

  “Greta? Can you hear that?” shouted Weller into his cell device. “It’s fucking drilling.”

  “What?” said Banda. “We didn’t pick up any chatter about this at all.”

  “I think we’ve been set up,” Weller said. He was usually calm in a crisis but only when he was in control. “It’s a targeted assessment and someone’s going to be down soon.”

  “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!” said Banda, looking towards Katcher, who was unclear about what was happening. “This is a fuck-up. How did we fucking miss this? Fuck. Let’s get to Weller.”

  Banda and Katcher grabbed their laser guns and quickly left the lower cavern. The humming was now at an excruciating level, and added to their confusion. Weller was outside his tent and becoming more agitated from the sound, which was getting louder and louder. The sound triggered something inside his head and he plugged his fingers into his earholes—his pain would end soon, but not in the way he would have expected it to.

  The boron nitride diamond bit was nearing the end of its work and a few yards before it reac
hed the roof of the cavern in Anika-6, a large wedge of shale rock broke off and landed over Weller, crushing him. Banda and Katcher rushed over to him among the rocks and dust, they moved him from under the rubble but it was too late. His body had been crushed and his face bloodied: Weller was killed instantly and they’d lost the main man behind their plan.

  Banda shone her lightpen at the roof of the cavern. There was a hole in the top of the cavern, with a three-feet-wide tube-drill poking out of the hole. It was an ugly tool; its diamond teeth staring into the abyss like an alien being from another solar system. Its sensors knew this was the point where it needed to stop drilling and its mechanisms flicked over into a reverse direction and commenced the ascent back to the surface. Banda and Katcher had never seen one of these before but they knew that it could only mean one thing—Biocrime was at the surface and they would be down into Anika-6 soon.

  The deep speed tube driller was a wonderful invention. As well as the drilling tube containing the hardest substance in the universe, its piping mechanism and suction capabilities enabled fast-speed drilling in most locations. It was originally developed in the 2200s in response to the final fuel crisis of that era, where all the major oil reserves were depleted, leaving only smaller pockets of oil areas that could be accessed with small-scale drilling. The original tube-drillers contained hard titanium drill bits that were effective, but with diminishing supplies of oil only being available in remote and geographically complex drilling zones, more sophisticated and direct systems of access had to be developed.

  The ‘peak-oil’ theory was first developed by the geologist M. King Hubbert in 1956, and subscribed to the notion that when the maximum rate of petroleum resources in the world was reached, it would enter a period of permanent decline, and when the peak supply was achieved, other sources of sustainable and affordable energy needed to be developed.

  Although the dates peak-oil would be reached varied, estimates at the time ranged between the years 2000–2050, with the expectation that oil on a commercially viable basis would be fully depleted between the years 2090–2150.

  However, those predictions underestimated the nature of humankind in its quest for commercial exploitation and fear in the face of an impending crisis. Like rats crawling through obscure parts of sewers to find the last remnants of barely edible food, a new wave of small-scale oil entrepreneurs flourished during the 2200s, extracting whatever petroleum resources existed in the world, and the tube driller was one of the vast range of technologies developed to exploit oil as an energy resource.

  Although the peak-oil community was constantly dismissed by larger business interests over many centuries, mainly accused as conspiracy theorists, radical environmental ‘Marxists’ that were only intent of destroying the capitalist system, and rooted in the world of fantasy, the theory of peak-oil and oil depletion eventually became a reality.

  All organically-produced fossil oil was officially depleted in the early 2500s, and while synthetic oil was produced for almost a century, solar-nitrate plutonium power became more efficient and prevalent from the early 2600s onwards.

  With the advent of solar-nitrate plutonium power and the depletion of traditional petroleum, the deep speed tube driller became an obsolete technology and remained dormant until Biocrime acquired the patent rights cheaply, when they realized underground surveillance was a potential revenue source.

  Georgia the security manager instructed her deputy and underling officer to move the extraction pipe away from the dirt mound created by the tube drilling, and she used her lightpen to estimate the volume of the mound.

  “Twelve-hundred and six cubes,” Georgia said, as she looked towards the large pile of sand, crushed rock and sludge the deep speed tube drill had extracted. “Not bad. I was only two cubic feet out.”

  Georgia the security manager was competitive, even when she was competing against herself. She was always in the race against the clock, trying to beat her ‘personal best’, and testing to see how accurate her calculations of dirt extraction were. She motioned to the others—it was time to go down the recently created tunnel hole, and they needed to do their regular equipment checks: oxygen, light-helmet, lightpen, titanium boots, gloves.

  “And laser guns?” asked Georgia. “Maybe we’ll just take the one. Not expecting anything down there, but you’ve always got to be prepared.”

  “I think the most dangerous thing down there,” her deputy said, “is going to be a large rare scorpion, or some kinda lost rat. We’ll be fine.”

  “Do we all have to go down?” the underling officer said.

  “If you don’t go down, you don’t get the pay,” Georgia said. “Let’s go.”

  From another part of the USM vehicle appeared a coil of thin tungsten rope, one-tenth of an inch thick, but strong enough to hold two tons of weight. They had a lightpen attached to the end, and the five took turns to harness themselves to the rungs in the tungsten rope, lowered slightly into the gaping hole in the earth for each officer, until all five were attached to the tungsten rope, and descended at the rate of four feet per second. It was a small tight and claustrophobic hole.

  The five looked like slimmed-down astronauts, and they communicated with each other through their miked-up helmets. The descent would only take around five minutes—there wasn’t too much to say between the five, and the only voice they heard was from the auto-depth detector, announcing they’d passed two-hundred yards, with another two-hundred yards to go.

  They could peer down to see the dark hole continuing if they wanted to but the process was routine and automated. If there was any danger or obstruction, the sensors on their lightpens would communicate the impending issue to the motor generator above the surface and stop the tungsten rope descending further. Like many other contemporary inventions, it was a foolproof system. They were informed by the auto-depth voice they’d be at their destination soon.

  Banda and Katcher moved Weller’s body away from under the hole, into a tent, and left him with the other hacktivists. Renalda and Scanlen were back in the action with Banda and Katcher and they all had to think quickly about their next steps—Weller was close and emotionally attached to them, but this was not the time for sentiment—they had to think quick, think smart, and work strategically. Just like their computer and data systems, already, another hacktivist, Silas Newton, a twenty-five year old technology genius, filled the breach left by Weller, took control, and knew what needed to be done.

  “Kransich’s reports say they usually come down in teams of four or five,” Banda said, “usually armed and takes about ten-to-fifteen minutes to travel down.”

  “Well, did Kransich get this date wrong?—what else do you reckon he’s got wrong?” asked Renalda. “Whatever’s coming down, we got to stop it from going back up.”

  “That’s not so easy,” Banda said. “They’re all in communication, and if they see anything that’s not quite right, they can communicate quickly to Biocrime.”

  “We’ll have to take them out when they come down,” Katcher said. “Make sure they’re all down, and then take them out. That will give us maybe a couple of hours, we can trigger our systems, and then get out of here. We’ll take positions, all lights out, and we’ll wait for them to come down.”

  “Depth: Three-hundred fifty yards. Destination: Fifty yards,” the auto-depth detector said. It was a crystal clear sound, audible in each of the five officer’s helmets, through tiny wafer-thin audio speakers, and they expected to be in the cavern in about one minute. So far, it was like any other targeted inspection. Slow. Boring. Tedious. But by the end of the inspection, they would have clocked up some seriously good income. Just like all the other targeted inspections they were planning to perform on this day.

  Georgia the security manager peered down from her cramped position, and her lightpen showed the end of their tunnel and exposed an entrance into a deeper black void. She was sure she could smell coffee, but decided that it must be some type of underground chemical or a phantom
smell playing with her olfactory senses. She convinced herself there was not going to be anything down in this cavern, but her confidence about this would soon add to her demise.

  She had moved through the end of the tunnel and was dangling from the roof of the cavern, and scanned around with her lightpen to assess whether there was anything of interest. Her device lit up the cavern to show the beauty of the stalactites holding from the roof, almost a cathedral-like presence. She looked further afield and unsure if her eyes were playing tricks on her, could see in the distance, some kind of cloth-like material and, out of curiosity, decided to investigate further.

  “Just wanted to check on something guys,” Georgia said, speaking through her radio microphone. “Not sure what it is, but we’re down here, so we may as well have a look.”

  “We’re all getting off to look?” her deputy asked. “It will take up extra time—Biocrime won’t be too happy to fork out the bill if it ends up being just a group of foraging rats making a home for themselves.”

  “Rats don’t build homes, you fuckwit! That’s what bowerbirds do, and I don’t think we’ll find any down here. Who’s up on top?”

  Agent Jack was the least experienced officer and should have been lower in this chain of five, but they needed one officer to remain in the hole, so it was Agent Jack that confirmed his position to Georgia the security manager. He managed to pull out his cell device and called up a Sudoku number puzzle to bide his time, certain that nothing was to come of this targeted inspection, safe, secure and comfortable in his harness.

  The lights were out in Anika-6. Banda and Katcher were below the hole in the roof of the cavern and could hear the muffled sound of conversation between radio microphones but couldn’t make out what was being said. But they were certain these people were coming down to look around and would report back to Biocrime as soon as they could, if they saw anything of interest.