The Biocrime Spectrum (Books 1-4)

by Erik Tabain

  The streets were dangerous, but it wasn’t a case of being killed on sight—it was easier to move through at night—but Banda and Katcher needed to be careful. The support for the Movement among the citizenry was strong but, like many revolutionaries, they were trying to defy classic human behavior—one of self-interest—and the fact that, in reality, even if popular support was strong for a special cause, not many citizens were prepared to participate, and action was usually implemented by the few adherents and hard-liners.

  In their case, it wasn’t so much a miscalculation of strategy and action, but a miscalculation of the good will of humankind. Self-interest usually won out, collective groups followed patterns of human thought that directly benefit them, and the ancient Roman charade of ‘bread and circuses’ was needed to keep the populace occupied.

  Just as Katcher and Banda were moving to leave the site, a skirmish developed just around the corner of their location. A group of laser gun wielding youths were scanning the apartments to see if there was any movement on balconies, or through any other rooms—kitchens, loungerooms, silhouettes in bathrooms. It was too late to hide or retreat: they caught a glimpse of Katcher and Banda and fired away, laser bullets hitting the metal of the vehicles.

  One of the light bullets caught Katcher in his left shoulder—it was a sharp hot pain, but pumped up by adrenalin and the need to get away, he kept running. And running. Banda was shooting behind her, keeping some of the group at bay, but they kept chasing, advantaged by the fuel of amphetamines and the smell of blood.

  Katcher and Banda could feel the laser bullets whizzing past them and reached a small access point into an underground shop. Just as they reached this point, another band of drug-crazed youths, attracted by the sound of the chase, appeared on the other corner and start firing their laser guns at the first group. This was a welcome distraction, but they’d have to get out of this safe spot at some point. They scanned the location and saw an exit point in the back of the shop, and they moved through this into another alleyway. They were safe for now, but the danger would be evident until they returned to Anika-6.

  They continued to slither through the backstreets and the smaller crowds for another hour and moved towards the South San Francisco autotram station which gave them access back to the underground. Katcher’s left shoulder was throbbing and, although it was manageable, he also had a splitting headache from the rock lump on his head.

  There were some people that sought refuge at the autotram station but this was not a safe area and there was some evidence of attacks, with laser bullet shimmering on the roof and walls of the autotram station, and, although there were no bodies in the station, there were trails of blood on the platforms of the station. Too tired and injured to worry about anyone following them down to Anika-6, they moved towards the tunnel access point.

  It took them a while to come back down to Anika-6—exhausted, overwhelmed and emotionally drained after the loss of their two partners—Scanlen and Renalda—and they were unsure about what their next steps should be and what the unfolding events on the surface meant. Katcher was injured, and they weren’t as careful to cover their tracks on the way back down to Anika-6.

  Despite the uncertainty, as least the descent to the underground offered respite and a temporary sanctuary—but it was a question of how long. Once the mayhem on the streets dissipated, Biocrime would instigate a clean-up operation, retrieve as many of their own as they could, and look for Katcher. He knew that would be the only option available to them now, and they’d be looking for retribution.

  Banda unlocked the thick tungsten and titanium control door with a hand scan and they straggled through the antechamber and slammed the door shut behind them. Once in, they were greeted by Weller’s replacement, Silas Newton, one of the five remaining hacktivists in Anika-6.

  Newtown moved seamlessly into taking on superior responsibilities after Weller was killed when the cavern roof collapsed during the Biocrime drilling, and was doing whatever he could to fill the breech. He’d been monitoring the events from the surface through the personal private network and although he saw the failure of the uprising, he was a dedicated member of the Movement and decided to remain underground.

  “You’re hurt Jonathan,” Newton said. “We’ll get some food into you and get some nanos for the shoulder. And you Greta, all okay?”

  “If you think a total fuck-up and everything is disarray is okay,” Banda said, “sure, things are okay.”

  “Hasn’t turned out as planned, has it,” Katcher responded, ignoring Banda’s sarcasm.

  “Nope,” Newton said. “Mav was sure it would all work out, but maybe we should have done the final testing after all.”

  “Maybe, there’s always a maybe,” Katcher said. “We had to act when we had to. What’s the assessment from the surface?”

  “Our viral videos are still appearing,” Newton said, “but you probably would have seen that most of the billboard lightscreens have been vandalized or deactivated. It’s still up on personal lightscreens, but it seems like most people are using off-line systems, game playing, old news, old visuals.”

  “How long before Lifebook comes back online?” asked Katcher.

  “Probably a few more days. Mav had a secondary system that he was going to instigate after this first intervention… something more permanent. It was only theoretical, but something he said he could do once this algorithm had reached a certain time and frequency.

  “He’s the only one that had the knowledge and information about it—I mean, it’s all here encrypted in this datacard, and who knows what it all means.”

  “It means that we now know we can defeat Biocrime and close down its systems,” Katcher said. “That’s the important thing. It didn’t work this time, but this adds to the future. Even if we’re captured, there’s other people that have access to this data material. Is that right?”

  “Sure,” Newton said, “some of the other units we have around the world that have access to this data can understand where we went wrong.”

  Katcher was tired, hurt and needed sleep. Newton handed him a nanopill, which he swallowed and waited for the drugs to start working on his head and left shoulder.

  This had been a disaster, but he felt some consolation that it was possible to defeat Biocrime, albeit for only a few days. Others in the Movement now had the knowledge and the know-how to take this path to the next step. He thought about how different life would be today if others had taken this path three or four hundred years ago, how much easier their next step would be.

  He was defeated for now, but still, this was a good result in the long-term desire to change the world for natural humans.

  He looked over and saw Banda lying down on the mattress, but she was already asleep. He lay down next to her, but almost as soon as he was horizontal, he’d fallen asleep too. The nanopills started to do their work.

  It was late evening in the Biocrime headquarters, and Don Capone flicked through reports and monitored the assessments coming in from Officer Dyson. He was tired, it was late, but even though there wasn’t much for him to do practically, he needed to be at the headquarters and be seen to be doing things. He was playing a high-level difficulty game of chess against Deep Blue—the number one interactive chess app—but he was sharp as a tack and fluctuated between the critical parts of his chess game and the real world when he needed to. Like the baseball player in between pitched balls, he psychologically switched off when he wanted to, but switched back on when any new details or information came to hand.

  He was half-thinking about strategies and ‘what-if’ scenarios for the action on the ground, and his next move against Deep Blue, contemplating whether he needed to defend his game using the Budapest Gambit. He was keeping his mind active while he waited to digest and interpret the next round of analysis from Officer Dyson.

  “You want some pizza, Don?” asked Officer Dyson, struggling in the Sudoku game she had just commenced.

  “Sure,” Capone said
, thinking about how many hours it had been since the last time he had eaten anything. “Just the usual margarita, if that’s available—something up?”

  “No, not really. We’re progressing as planned—I’m getting all the data from downstairs that they’re on track to disable all guns in the region at sixteen-hundred hours tomorrow, but there’s probably a bit of C.Y.A. going on down there.”

  “Cover your ass?”

  “Yep. They’ll say sixteen-hundred, but that’s probably a case of under-promising and over-delivering. I hope that’s the case, and they can close off gun access by about midday. People are still being cut up down there.”

  “They’re doing what they can,” Capone said. “I know fuck all about coding and hacking, but I’m sure they know how to stop this virus.”

  “Well, you probably know more about it than the guys upstairs. What do they do up there anyway?”

  “They’re like the partners of Biocrime,” Capone said, “the ‘think tank’, with Luanda at the top. They work out ways of generating more income for Biocrime, partnerships with different larger-scale businesses that work for the populace—you know, BioMed, BioEd, universal income.

  “They’re not really concerned about the human factor here, or the killings—this will cost them the big bucks, but now they’re trying to work our ways of minimizing the damage—like retrieving all the universal income accounts from the people that have been killed, or new ways to crowd fund the clean up, or getting the costs of cleaning up the virus.”

  “Sounds boring. Just as well I’m just responsible for coding. So, there’s the four of them up there and their team. Why aren’t you up there too?”

  “Because I’m the strategist. Strategy, that’s what I’m all about. I’m not interested in the games of money, or the games of thrones up there. Luanda’s been the el presidente for about four years, and the others are scheming to take her job. She knows that I’m not interested in being a partner, but she uses me as a buffer and support against the others. It’s just standard political games, which don’t interest me.”

  “But you want to be at the top, don’t you?” asked Officer Dyson, anticipating their pizzas would be ready soon.

  “Yeah, sure,” Capone said, “just not in the way they do it. I want it be on my own merits.”

  “Well, you’ll be waiting a long time,” Officer Dyson said, raising her eyes cynically. “What if we can’t end this virus. What happens then?”

  “No-one really knows. I guess that’s why they’ve got all their team and staff up there, go through all the ‘what ifs’ and actuaries looking at how it affects the bottom line in the long term, break-even points and that type of shit. I guess we’re interested in the ‘what ifs’ to end the crisis, they’re just interested in the money side.”

  “You had a scan of Katcher,” Officer Dyson said, “I saw the scans on the internals this evening. He’s out there. It will take a while, but we’ll catch him.”

  “Sure, but then it’s a question of what we do with him when we find him. We’ve got high-profile stalkers that were working on insiders leaking secrets to others in the Movement, and they’ll work on finding Katcher, once we get these systems back on line.

  “Pizza?”

  It was the crack of dawn, and Officer Dyson was in front of her lightscreen; her team had been methodically analyzing and assessing incoming data and material, through a combination of data aggregators, apps and data-bots. The large room they worked in had that aroma of all-night human activity, the combination of perspiration, bad breath, suppressed flatulence, and stale pizzas and synth coffee. Many people had fluctuated between Capone’s office and the floors above but Capone and Officer Dyson were the constant presence throughout the early morning.

  Capone had caught up on some sleep through mini-naps, alternating between monitoring assessments and his moves against Deep Blue, and sips of strong synth coffee, not so much to keep him awake, but to keep him alert while he was awake.

  “Good news Don,” Officer Dyson said, moving over to Capone’s desk with her synth coffee. “The team downstairs have cracked the coding for the guns, and say they’ll have them deactivated by nine. And that’s precise. The coding has been calculated and formulated to round up at nine-hundred hours.”

  “That’s the under-promising and over-achieving in action, right?” Capone asked. “And what’s the bad?”

  “The carnage on the streets is severe,” Officer Dyson said. “Still going—we’ve estimated maybe about a hundred thousand dead—natural humans and Technocrats—and continuing until we complete the first stage of closing off the guns.”

  “Fuck, oh fuck. One-hundred-thousand. Let’s see.”

  Officer Dyson summoned basic live visual footage from the streets, and while power supplies was still functioning, every frame they viewed had a similar scene of death and destruction; the common factors of fire, and bodies strewn on the ground. In other scenes, areas were completely untouched—like the wildfires that burn large areas to cinders, but inexplicably leave small pockets alone, as if to indicate their ferocious appetite for destruction had limits—a strange sight, where apartment blocks in Technocrat zones were operating as though nothing had happened, while just five-hundred yards away, a scene of total calamity and disaster.

  One-hundred-thousand deaths from a city population of thirty million people was less than half a per cent, but it was still a large volume—Technocrats and natural humans—and it had all been instigated in less than a day.

  “So, another three hours of this,” Capone said, as he contemplated the visuals on Officer Dyson’s lightscreen. “But at least we’re getting to the end of it.”

  Gavin Pinkston and his assorted gang had been on an eight-hour killing rampage, fueled by amphetamines and the constant smell of blood. His gang was one of the many that had filled the streets, leaving a path of destruction behind them. His loose alliance of a gang grew to a peak of sixty-six, but was now about half of this number; many were attacked by other gangs—attacks usually based on just their looks—but, more typically, because they happened to be in the way of another whirlwind of destruction.

  Pinkston’s actions weren’t political, or looking to address any historical antecedents of his forbearers. It wasn’t intellectual, or even based on revenge. It was pure nihilism, wanton killing and destruction. He had no cause to follow, no history, and no desire about the wellbeing of humanity. He was the lead killer, and had randomly mown down around five-hundred people—humans and Technocrats alike. Like many others, he was addicted to a cocktail of his drugs of choice and the mindless war games he played through Lifebook. Once Lifebook came crashing down and with it, his endless access to online war games, he needed to find something to replace it, and once he had full access to a lethal laser gun, there was no stopping him. He wasn’t yet one of the one-hundred-thousand dead that Officer Dyson had documented, but he soon would be.

  It was one minute before nine-hundred hours. Pinkston’s last drug-fuelled and maniacal attack—this time, an eight-year-old girl that had lost her way and was separated from her family. He had reached the peak levels of his hallucination and he imagined the girl was an alien being with thin two-feet long spikes surrounding her body, and razor-sharp teeth as large as an alligator’s.

  Like many of his other victims, he killed her by aiming at the skull, and shot her straight through the head. She was only eight years old, but his drug-induced mind told him he had to kill her before she killed him. He looked like a death warrior, with specks of blood spray covering most of his jacket.

  He rested momentarily, before continuing on his killing spree. He lined up another group of targets: this time, there was a group of six people that, in his mind, had massive claws like the talons of an eagle, each with a dragon’s head and the body of a gorilla dressed in military fatigues. He tried to shoot from his laser gun, but there was nothing. Pinkston didn’t know this, but it had just ticked over to nine o’clock, the expected time that all laser guns
would be deactivated. He kept trying to shoot and realizing that nothing was changing, he tried to run away from his own hallucination.

  He ran and turned back behind him to see he was still being chased by his imaginary dragons. The fires that he was surrounded by and his hallucinations led him to run over a tall bridge, and confident that he was jumping into water, he leapt over the railing, hoping to find the comfort of cold calming liquid. But it wasn’t water. Pinkston had jumped over the railings to a four-hundred-feet drop, and landed directly onto flat concrete, his skulled shattered, internal organs ruptured and most of his two-hundred-and-six bones broken.

  The killing spree for Pinkston had ended, as it soon would for the many others still rampaging the streets. The guns had been silenced, and there was still a great number of deaths that would soon follow in the aftermath but, at least the biggest impediment to restoring order had been removed.

  It was the prompt for Biocrime to reclaim the streets.

  ‘Guns don’t kill people; people kill people’. This was the fashionable catchcry of the National Rifle Association for around three hundred years from the end of the twentieth century. It was the classic disprovable ‘chicken-or-egg’ argument: guns don’t have the free will to kill, people do; but if the guns weren’t there in the first place, the killings wouldn’t take place. But then the next corollary: if the guns were already there, other people would need guns to protect themselves, a form of half-way thinking between an escalation of arms and mutually-assured destruction.

  Eventually, it was the National Rifle Association that won out in this public debate, with legislative changes by the US Congress in the year 2238 to remove restrictions on all guns and weapons, and citizens were guided by free will to obtain whichever weaponry was available to them.