by Erik Tabain
By early afternoon, there were tens of thousands of citizens on the streets—relatively small when compared with the city’s population of thirty million—with Katcher’s viral messages on all lightscreen billboards in the background. Many were caught up in the groundswell of group think and action: they disliked the Technocrats but everyone else was here, so they should as well. Many had their unlocked laser guns with them, about to become untethered and sophisticated killing machines.
The Technocrats—even the ones supportive of the Movement—watched from their apartment buildings. They outnumbered the natural humans by a large ratio, but because their laser guns were now inoperable, it was best to keep the distance. No-one was sure how this was going to work out and the rumors from restricted personal private networks kept coming: a revolution is taking place, Lifebook and Biocrime are gone, danger for Technocrats.
Katcher knew a breakdown in communications meant that very little real news would come out and, in a news-filled world, there was every chance the void would be filled with whatever news became available, even if it was far from the truth. So far, it was working out exactly in the way he anticipated.
Initially, this was a controlled mayhem—Technocrats were hiding away, and some natural humans looked on in bemusement—but there was a wave of low-level street crime and vandalism that threatened to break out into violence at any moment.
Biocrime had been blindsided. It had the mechanisms available to it to suppress such an intervention, but this was the biggest systems hack in human history. Whatever machinery and human resources it could use to intervene were as good as rusted iron without the technology to co-ordinate and manage it all.
A groundswell of support started from more citizens. There was now a larger group of humans rallying in the streets, and there were others in different parts of the city that were also taking up the cause. It was difficult to think about safety: something that seemed innocuous a few hours ago had turned into a hazardous and out-of-control event. The streaming masses were building on the many streets of San Francisco; the visuals and sounds of Katcher on the large lightscreen billboards seemed to become more omnipotent. On empty streets or any other average day, the visuals wouldn’t mean much, but the look on Katcher’s face became more menacing with the groundswell of action at the coalface.
There were now hundreds of thousands on the streets: Scanlen and Renalda had fallen off the pace, but there was a larger number now following and supporting Katcher and Banda, chanting with ongoing monotony: “Kat-cher! Kat-cher! Kat-cher! Kat-cher! Kat-cher!”
It was partially a release of pent-up energy, partially hooliganism, but mainly an opportunity to change the social structure. Katcher, with the larger support of people behind him, decided it was now the best time to livecast through the continuum—they had complete control and access to it—a short sharp speech and when completed, with great agility, move to another location or, disappear completely.
They were in a lower part of Visitacion Valley—and Katcher positioned himself in an area surrounded by trees and low-level buildings. Although laser guns had been disabled for Technocrats, he didn’t want to take any chances. It was old school—a classic off-the-stump rallying cry: he was standing on top of an old stone wall, about three feet above the ground. Banda activated her cell device and, using an auto-live cast software app called ‘Live!AppTV’, which collated key points from the spoken word to create a ticker-tape of scrolling text at the bottom of the screen, she prepared for a livecast of Katcher’s speech.
The visual messages on the lightscreens were interrupted by the live footage from Banda’s cell device. It was high resolution vision, a little like hand-held cinema verité, and a jumbled image before final zooming in on Katcher’s face.
The graphic from the auto-program superimposed the words: ‘Jonathan Katcher to make public statement at 13:15’.
Katcher was nervous, but people that are so sure about the changes they wanted to make in the world, force themselves to reach into the right personal zone. It reached 13:15 and for Katcher, it was time to act. He spoke forcefully—although Bander’s cell device would track his voice perfectly and clearly, the crowd noise was overwhelming.
“Friends, we made this decision today to act upon the injustices that have been taking place against us for many years.”
The crowds throughout San Francisco settled somewhat in anticipation of Katcher’s announcement. Many had been expecting this for some time, but they were also bemused, unsure of what would happen next.
“We’ve been brutalized for many years by the Technocrats, made into second-class citizens, false arrests by Biocrime, spied on, watched over and had our way of life destroyed.
“We’ve had our body parts and pieces of us sold for a song, exploited and misused by Technocrats, blamed for every ill in the world, surveilled and, if we ever supposedly do the wrong thing, sent off to far away penal zones to be devoured by wild animals.
“This can no longer happen. No-one will touch you again!”
The crowds started to cheer and applaud, somewhat placated, and the Katcher chant rose up again, and increased in crescendo.
“Kat-cher! Kat-cher! Kat-cher! Kat-cher! Kat-cher!…”
“I stand here today and I promise you this one thing…” …Katcher was speaking loudly, but the volume of the crowd had become too extreme, and Katcher’s voice was drowned out by the increasing cacophony.
Behind where Katcher spoke was another group of people. They were disaffected dissidents, but couldn’t care less about Katcher and his musings. They were new wave radical decadent nihilists, mainly interested in access to the continuum, lightscreens and the easy way of life. They started to pitch found objects at Katcher’s supporters, and knocked several over.
Katcher had the look of confusion on his face. He hoped his message about the injustices caused by the Technocrats would have prominence, but there were other actions here at play. Had he overestimated the support for the Movement, or underestimated the resistance that might exist among natural humans? Any kind of social movement had a number of different factions, in some cases, diametrically opposed to the values and objectives of the movement, but new wave nihilists? That was another matter entirely.
One of the found objects—a shard of broken concrete—was heading towards Katcher. He saw it coming towards him in the last split second, too late to avoid it completely, but the shard hit him just above the eyebrow. He was momentarily stunned and assessed the damage that revealed a cut and a lump, and a small amount of blood streamed onto his fingers.
Banda switched off her visual recorder and the datacasting reverted to Katcher’s viral propaganda videos.
“Fuck,” Banda shouted, amongst the backdrop of rising crowd violence. “We’ll have to get out of here.”
“Where are Scanlen and Renalda?” asked Katcher.
“They must have fallen back into the crowd. They might still be adjusting to being on the surface again, but we can track them through our PPN.”
“We’ll find them on the way—we gotta get back underground.”
“But we can’t go back down,” Banda said, “we’ll be sitting ducks.”
“Any other suggestions? This is getting out of control, it’s our best bet.”
Soon, there were other radicals joining in the action, the group-think had caught on and shops started being vandalized. The nihilists weren’t exactly sure about what they wanted, but whatever it was, they wanted it now. They were disenchanted and with every passing moment they acted with impunity, they were encouraged to increase their violence, which soon escalated into a major fracas.
A band of radical members from the Movement—the useless punks and street rats Katcher complained about to Banda—threw a brick through a shop window. It was actually a shop managed by a group of natural humans, but the radicals weren’t bothered by this. They had pent-up anger, and directed it at anyone, regardless of who it was. Their tribe was speaking and they wanted everyone
to listen. Just yesterday, they were a ragtag collection of nobodies but now, they were taking their place in the sun. As far as they were concerned, their putative leader had returned and had spoken, and now they were armed and dangerous.
In all revolutions and civil uprisings, there is the one moment that crystalizes the movement and escalates events to another level, and this one moment in Katcher’s revolution was just about to happen.
One of the radical street rat punkers, Gavin Pinkston, was shouting anti-establishment slogans with his tribe. He was in his mid-twenties, loud, big, angry and, with his unlocked gun, he was dangerous and lethal. He looked menacing with his spiked Mohawk green hair, his graffiti-designed leather jacket with studs, and black t-shirt with ‘FUCK YOU’ in a thick hot pink typeface.
He was the classic supraliberal, where he could do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, because it was his freewill that commanded him. He was surrounded by citizens, surrounded by the noise of shouting and chanting, his mind filled with words from Katcher’s voice, and the amphetamines he took this morning.
Pinkston realized that with the swelling and moving crowd, he had arrived into a Technocrat area, and he could see many Technocrats peering through their apartment windows, and some that watched the events on the streets from their small balconies. The Technocrats were unsure about what to do or what to think. Some were recording the events on their cell devices, others were monitoring their lightscreens, and tried a number of software patches and fixes to bypass the Jonathan Katcher that relentlessly appeared on their screens. For them, while there was an unpredictable mass of people on the streets, it was too dangerous to go down there, and they were still expecting some type of response from Biocrime.
But Biocrime didn’t respond. Their systems had been blocked too—they were receiving the same Katcher-ite messages that everyone else was, and they were working hard to determine what had happened, and how to decode and recode their systems. In the meantime, the outrage on the streets of San Francisco continued.
Pinkston’s mind was racing, his heart was pumping. He was caught up in the moment: the high-energy of street protest, the realization the time had come and this was to be a big moment in history. He pointed his laser gun towards an apartment balcony—he didn’t care who he hit, or whether he hit anyone at all—but he wanted to shoot. He could see two men half-hiding on the balcony and his years of pent-up anger was just about to be released. When he pulled the trigger on his laser gun, a series of laser bullets reached the men and penetrated their neck and chest muscles. They were direct hits and both men were down and dying.
There was a flurry of action, where other Technocrats in the apartment pulled in the dying men away to safety. Pinkston took aim at them too, and the tracer bullets ricochet into their bodies, taking them out. In all, Pinkston killed two men, two women and a child. It wouldn’t be immediate, but the Technocrats would retaliate as soon as they had the chance.
Someone else’s actions might have followed the same process, but Pinkston was the first and his unwise actions had started the war. And it would be difficult to stop.
Twenty-Five
Biocrime retaliates
The mid-afternoon shadows were seeping through Don Capone’s window on the fifty-sixth floor, and the golden glow of the sun disturbed his thinking about the events taking place below him on the streets.
This was a serious incident, and the top ten floors of Biocrime were in lock-down, and groups of security officers were war-gaming their operations through their internally protected system. Through their lightscreens, they too could see what was happening in the outside world, and their collection of coding teams were rapidly working on a solution, to be implemented as soon as possible. The last major incident like this occurred sixty years ago in 2974, when a group of hacktivists created a viral loop that took out the continuum and Lifebook systems for a few hours—and resolved within the day—but this disruption was more severe and would involve more than just a bit of patchwork and digital cement work.
Biocrime worked quickly, and within thirty minutes, Capone was assigned a team of twelve security officers, headed by Officer Janet Dyson, a high-level tech-head who was charged with co-ordinating the campaign to stitch up some of the networks of surveillance so, at least, they could receive some close-up action of what was happening on the streets. The old-style surveillance available to them—high-powered telephoto lens—could tell them there was mayhem out there, but they needed to have a clearer view of faces, the people involved, and any way of being able to identify them.
“This is a pure shitstorm Janet,” Capone said. “Pure and simple. The President is not going to be happy.”
“Not happy?” said Officer Dyson, her eyerolls confirming the understatement. “She’ll be fucking furious, but we’ll deal with that later. We’ve got the coders working on creating a network of surveillance through the existing cameras on the streets. There were quite a few that were malfunctioning—old technology.”
“Shows you what happens when we don’t pay to get those maintained and fixed up,” Capone said. “Trying to save a few million over the years is probably now going to cost us billions. How long before we can at least get that system sorted?”
“That should take a few hours, hopefully before sunset,” Officer Dyson said. “We can try to link all the working cameras, and create the algorithm that predicts all the movement in between. Not a hundred per cent, but pretty close. That will give a better look at the ground action.”
“From up here, it’s not good. A fucking disaster.”
Capone was using his high-powered telephoto lens to zoom around the different parts of the city that he could see from his vantage point. The imagery was fuzzy, but in one zoom, he could see several bodies slumped in the corner of an apartment’s balcony—he assumed they were Technocrats—and in another zoom, he saw a group of street-rat punks punching a middle-aged man, and laser gunning his head. He saw other Technocrats using the laser guns to stun, but these were just temporary barriers to further harm—without access to the full features of the laser guns, they were just sitting ducks against the rampaging and out-of-control street-rat punks.
“No-one’s in communication at the moment, Don. And we can’t do anything with robocops, because they’re all synchronized and activated throught the continuum. We’ll have to set up several private networks and see who’s going to scan into it. It will take time, but just through crowd and peer networking, we should be able to get some counter-action on the ground.”
“But it’s a massacre down there,” Capone said. “And will continue for as long as Biocrime’s not on the ground. My course of action is: set up the private networks; instruct our people to switch on their personal visual recorders so we can start scanning at the street level. Offer payments for their recordings.”
“Yes, Don, I agree—there’s a few other things we could add, but let’s take it upstairs.”
Capone and Dyson were due for the emergency session in the Biocrime President’s chambers; they packed their cell devices and datacards and moved to the elevators to take them up to level sixty—the President’s penthouse—the entire floor with three-sixty-degree views of the city, rooms with all mod cons and food supplies to last a year, and a massive conferencing meeting room, with monitors, devices and a team of tech-heads summoning up a range of different screens, deep in soft discussion with others about what key data meant and how to extrapolate the information.
When they entered the conferencing room, there were twenty key Biocrime officers of different ranks—all the important ones—and they deferred to the President of Biocrime, Michelle Luanda, simply know as ‘El’, as in el presidente.
Michelle Luanda was someone who moved up the ranks with Biocrime, now in her late-fifties, a grand accumulator of wealth through a range of Biocrime crowd-sourcing financing schemes, ones that grafted small percentages of monies from unsuspecting Lifebook accounts, and a mastermind of a range of different criminal d
etection systems that created large sums of income for Biocrime. Her presence was large: six-feet-four, short-ish dark hair, and the commanding look of strength that suggested she could easily knock down anyone that stepped in her way. Like almost everyone that reached this station in life, she was a ruthless sociopath, and virtually destroyed everyone in her pathway to become the most powerful person in the world. But her driving force was the continuous accumulation of money, and if this was at risk, her position as President was also at risk.
“Capone, Dyson, please be seated,” Luanda said sternly. She tried to be professional but barely disguised her anger about the events on the ground. “These are trying times, but we’ll sort this out.”
“As always, El, as always,” Capone said. He needed to exude a high level of confidence that he had the ability to end the troubles on the streets, but this time around, Capone was not so sure about what exactly needed to be done. This was unknown territory and no-one really knew what they were going to do to resolve it.
“I think we’re ready to start,” Luanda said, seated at the head of the large conference table, assured, and in control. “As you’re already aware, Biocrime, Lifebook, all of our surveillance is out and, from what I’ve been told, is not likely to come back in a hurry. And it looks like we’re on the verge of civil war on the streets. We can stop this, but we have to act strategically, and we have to act quick, get this shit off our screens, and find Katcher.
“It will cost us the big bucks, but that’s not the aim right now. We have to stop, stabilize, and then we can get Katcher, and find out how he slipped through the net—supposedly fail-proof.”
“It’s not so easy, El,” Capone said, “it will—”
“—look, don’t fucking tell me it won’t be easy,” Luanda said, furiously. “I fucking know that. But we’ve got to fucking act fast and fucking stop the massacre that’s happening on the street. In the spirit of acting fast, I’m going to try to stop being pissed—but I am—we’ve supposedly got the best systems in the world—we are the best and only—but couldn’t stop Katcher from sneaking away from under our noses, hacking our systems so badly—and we didn’t even know about it? Fuck me…”
