by Erik Tabain
“There will be a massive cost involved in rebuilding and restoring confidence in the systems, but I will now ask Brian Kasprovich to outline the details for this. Brian…”
Kasprovich commenced his outline of all the details—reducing universal income for natural humans by ten per cent as collective punishment—which would create some problems for the economy, but it was more important to implement this punishment than concerns about fiscal rectitude and fiduciary responsibilities—amortising costs over twenty-five years, by which time the local economy would grow to a level of three point nine per cent of gross zonal product…
Capone started to glaze over all of the facts, figures and key data that was appearing on the large lightscreen, and Kasprovich was someone who liked to read verbatim from a presentation, rather than extemporizing—so it made for a boring presentation, and it was material which Capone would synthesize at a later time. For all of the years of technological civilization and advancement, Capone couldn’t understand why many presenters of this type of material felt it necessary to read word-for-word what the rest of the world could see in front of them, as though he was some kind of three-year-old child that needed every single word thrown back at them.
The points outlined by Kasprovich were all Capone’s—good ones of course—after all, as chief strategist, he was the one that devised all the points of order. But, it was the same age-old system: The underlings produced all the work and created all of the ideas, only for those further up the production chain claiming all the credit.
In a nutshell—and according to Capone, it could have been wrapped up in about five minutes—Kasprovich outlined the damage to the community and infrastructure was great; many people had lost their lives; the uprising had been neutered; Biocrime was securing the streets; Lifebook would be back online in a few day’s time; the full clean up would commence after that; the cost would be great, and recouped over many years, and the natural humans were going to pay for it, as collective punishment.
But Kasprovich carried on, squeezing out all interest of the discussion by laboriously outlining each issue—it might have been of interest to others, but Capone knew the plan in microscopic detail.
The meeting dragged on for eighty-three minutes, all spoken conversation was recorded and translated into text, and all documents tables were scanned and available for future reference. Luanda took back control of the conference meeting after Kasprovich ended, and prepared the group for a special announcement.
“Thank you all for being here,” Luanda said, “I think we’ve got a plan to implement order back to the streets of San Francisco and I thank you all for your great efforts.
“I’m very honored to invite Richard Framton to speak to you, one of our most creative and influential entrepreneurs—you all know who he is, and he is a great friend of Biocrime. Richard…”
Nothing goes to waste
Richard Framton was a free-wheeling entrepreneur, on the look out for marketing and money-making opportunities. He was a Technocrat of the highest order, and San Francisco’s wealthiest man through his company, Origin, and being the wealthiest man in San Francisco also meant he was the wealthiest man in the world.
But he didn’t become the city’s wealthiest man with a do-nothing, clean approach to life. He was corrupt, had his enforcers, and would crawl into any deep hole or up a rat sewer to find a source of income.
He pulled deals together fast, used psychological games and tricks to implement his deals, and exploited any situation for personal and private gain. The uprising created a grand opportunity for him and his business interests. Although there had been great mayhem on the streets, he was cocooned from it within his fortressed compound and personal security detail.
Before arriving to the meeting, he was in his personal visuals production suite, with a team of image and sound designers, putting the finishing touches to a series of visual advertisements and billboard messaging for his new product of a range of premium pet foods, including ‘Canine Pure’, ‘Sassy Treats’, ‘Royal Organic Black Hawk’, and ‘Paw Paw Premium’.
His team of musicians created the voiceovers and soundtrack for these advertisements—sophisticated inspirational ambient music, with deep soothing female voices, enticing the audience towards these new premium products: “Your pet is your best friend: She deserves the best”. The visuals were sophisticated montages, with a sleek black cat, walking perfectly over the rooftops at midnight during a full moon.
Within the space of forty-eight hours after the uprising commenced, Framton had stitched up a lucrative five-way deal between Origin, Biocrime, BioMed, BioLaw and BioCycle, a niche waste management company.
The deal involved the immediate clean-up of the streets of all human bodies and left-over body parts—including any animals that may have been caught in the cross-fire during the uprising. All bodies would be removed of all clothing and any personal effects, and recycled through resale, or re-manufacturing.
The bodies would be sanitized through BioMed products, which removed rotted flesh and any organic content that contained unwanted bacteria not fit for animal consumption.
Suitable meat and bone would be crushed and processed into a wide range of products, including sausages, steaks and cat biscuits. These are premium and boutique pet food products catering for the more affluent families and pet owners around the world and, as it contained real meat, would command a price roughly around ten times the price of comparable synthetic food products.
Biocrime and BioLaw provided the legal groundwork and establishing precedents for this clean-up and commercial operation. Framton was part of the winner’s circle and this was a victory for unbridled commercialism and capitalism. This was a world where nothing goes to waste.
Framton made his presentation to the Biocrime executive team: his plan was accepted in full and the session ended with hearty applause and a standing ovation.
Twenty-Seven
Lifebook comes back to life
It was a race against time for Don Capone. The meeting with the upper echelons was perfunctory, and he was back in his level fifty-six office with Officer Dyson, the space where he felt more comfortable and free of the political and bureaucratic distractions. He’d been in the Briocrime headquarters for the past six days, and while he had his ensuite with all the personal accoutrements, he rarely left his desk—except for the briefings with Luanda upstairs, or to lounge across to collect yet another slice of pizza from the food processor.
All the plans for the immediate clean up of the city to remove bodies and other organic matter were ready to go, but the longer the plan to instigate was delayed, the more likely the city would start to move towards a biological health hazard, and while the citizenry was still dealing with the shock of what had taken place over the past six days, there was always the chance the next wave of violence could start up, unless the central lifeblood of Lifebook returned online.
Biocrime tanks had stabilized the city, but was there another batch of hacking to come that they didn’t know about, one that could reactivate the guns again, and ready to arouse another bout of violence? This was Capone’s main concern, that there was a litany of unknowables that could be anywhere, and could appear at any time. His world, and the world of many others, was based on knowing what the near future looked like and, at the present, no-one was quite sure.
“What’s the latest Janet?” asked Capone, crunching on another piece of old dry pizza.
Officer Dyson was glancing up and down on her lightscreen, summoning and swiping different key data around the lightscreen, checking on her coding team downstairs, with real-time updates.
“It’s hard to say,” Officer Dyson responded. “Like I keep telling you, it’s a sophisticated hack, almost like a perpetual motion machine that just keeps going. It’s not impossible to stop, but solving it is a bit like a creative thought—the solution might appear in a few minutes, or it might take a few months. Or a few years.”
“You know we haven’t go
t that amount of time,” Capone snapped, knowing Officer Dyson wasn’t too serious about the solution taking that long. “Upstairs is worried about the money and lost revenues, and that type of thing. And then there’s the health hazard on the ground. I can almost smell it from up here.”
“Well, that’s not possible—we’re too high up and we’re in a bubble. Your olfactory senses are playing with your mind and you’re imagining it.”
“Maybe. Maybe it’s the smell of stale pizza that’s getting to me. Or it could be—”
“—oh, fuck! Fuck!”
Officer Dyson’s lightscreen momentarily flashed up her Lifebook account. It was only up for several seconds, but she noted that it was in exactly at the same state as she left it before the uprising started, and then tinkered over to some of her other profiles, and then Lifebook blacked out, and reverted to the ongoing Jonathan Katcher broadcasts.
“We’ve got some movement happening,” Officer Dyson said. “Lifebook was only up for a few seconds, but I think the team might be on the verge of defeating the hack.”
“Who’s responsible?” asked Capone. “They’ll deserve a medal if they crack this. Call him up on the screen.”
Officer Dyson summoned up Officer Paul Jurgen on her lightscreen, the leader of the anti-hacking team, into a three-way visual conversation, and they waited for him to accept the datacall.
After a few seconds, a beady looking unshaven face appeared on the lightscreen, through the internal network. It was Officer Jurgen. He was antisocial, and taciturn, but could talk the leg off a chair when it came to coding, hacking, computers, and anything remotely related to technology.
“Janet, we’ve cracked the code,” Officer Jurgen said. “I must say, I was very impressed. It was a combination of ancient codes like Woda and XML—stuff that we hadn’t seen for centuries, mixed up with different systems. It would have taken a few geniuses to create this but, luckily, we’ve got more than a few geniuses here. We’ll have to keep the team running it for a while, but with the apps and bots doing their work, we probably won’t need as many coders on the case—they can take a rest.”
“What stage is it at,” asked Capone, “and where do we go from here?”
“The first step is to cut out Katcher’s viral videos. The flash of Lightbook you saw on your screen was us circumventing his code, and seeing how long we can run it for. As always, it’s still theoretical, but we’ll fully put in our code in about an hour—it should remove Katcher and put back our systems in place.
“It’s taken a while, but it was like mixing Pythagorean theory, ten cryptic crosswords, three-D Scrabble, and then throwing in a few diabolical Sudoku puzzles all into the mix, and doing that at a hundred miles an hour with one hand behind your back.”
Capone didn’t fully comprehend the analogy Officer Jurgen presented—perhaps if he’d mentioned a chess reference in a grand play-off between Gary Kasparov and Magnus Carlsen, two players regarded as the best ever in history, he might have understood—but, at the least, he recognized the amount of human resource that had gone into resolving the problem.
“Well, I appreciate your efforts,” Officer Dyson said, as he signed off and motioned down the datacall.
“What’s the verdict?” asked Capone.
“First, they’ll get rid of Katcher on the screen,” Officer Dyson said, “and then our code will do its work—scrub out the hack, disinfect systems, and reinstall Lifebook. According to Jurgen, the hack was a brilliant piece of work—closely resembling our work here. I guess that’s what the leaker was getting up to, providing secrets about our coding plans for the future. Ripping us off, probably selling it on the black cryto-market, and fucking us over.”
“Don’t worry,” Capone said. “When we catch whoever’s responsible, they’ll burn. And then we’ll get Katcher and his team, and they’ll burn too. It’s what they deserve.”
Modern apartments, for most people, were designed for minimal engagement. Most were used for sleep and personal entertainment—small, secure, and laden with small technological gadgets and personal cell devices. The action of the civil world took place outside of the apartment blocks and on the streets of life—commerce, fitness, leisure, intellectual stimulus, eating, dining and wining.
Except for the people like Marine Lestre, whose life was taken up with surveillance and her new special assignment to find the people that were leaking secret material to the Movement and, if she was lucky, finding Jonathan Katcher.
Since the uprising, like so many other people, she’d been holed up in her apartment for safety, but without any technology—except for the constant droning of Jonathan Katcher’s revolutionary ramblings—there was not much more to do except for be fearful and wait for the next steps to take place. The incubators containing the three fetuses were unaffected and still functioning normally, despite the calamity in the outside world, and Lestre had more time to think about a future beyond the uprising and whether life would ever return to a semblance of normality.
The apartment she shared with D’Souza faced away from the streets, so she hadn’t felt the brunt of the attacks or the laser bullets that had afflicted other parts of this apartment compound. The front of the building had bullet marks and the signs of several spot fires that were easily put out by residents. No-one had been killed in her apartment compound but, then again, it wasn’t at the center of the major uprising and had been spared.
Lestre was like a restless tiger—no physical activity, no lightscreen time, no interaction with the outside world, except for basic text updates from Don Capone through her personal private network. She had more information, albeit sparse, than anyone else in her region—it wasn’t much, but gave her more reason for hope than others. She received one important piece of information: a brief text message from Capone that the hack was close to being successfully defeated—without knowing the timeframes, she was confident she’d be able to get back to work on her cases soon.
D’Souza had been stoned for six days, following an unrelenting digestion and inhalation of a wide range of low-level drugs and old-style hashish, just to pass the time. Asleep on the couch, he wasn’t fully aware of what was going on around him, but he decided days ago that if the world was going to end, he wanted it to be a happy ending, an artificial joy aided and abetted by his constant drug taking.
Lestre glanced through her back window, and saw a Biocrime tank slowly moving down the backstreet, with security agents scanning the perimeter, using their laser scanners to assess damage, and record any casualties. It was mainly a show of strength from Biocrime but to also provide the citizenry with a sense of confidence that life would soon return back to normal.
This area was a Technocrat stronghold, so the damage was minimal, but Lestre noticed as the tank and security agents passed through the backstreet and disappeared to the next zone, the large billboard lightscreen that had been playing the Jonathan Katcher messages over the past few days blanked out for several minutes, followed by an advertisement for Amore synth coffee.
She moved back inside and summoned her lightscreen to reboot, the system NextGen icon appeared, followed by the ‘Life is Lifebook’ start-up screen, and the lightscreen set up Lestre had before the uprising commenced, exactly as it appeared six days ago.
Within a minute, there was an incoming level nine datacall coming through—from Biocrime—which meant it could only from one person.
She accepted the datacall to reveal the disheveled, unshaven face of Don Capone.
“Marine? I guess you know what this call is all about.”
“You’ve defeated the hack and Lifebook is back?”
“Well, that’s stating the obvious, but yes, we’ve done it,” Capone said. “We did some pre-testing and put it back online about twenty minutes ago. Biocrime profiling is back too. You would have noticed through my updates on your PPN, that there’s been a lot of death and damage, but we’ve stabilized the streets, and the clean up will commence soon.”
“And the ca
ses? To be continued?”
“Oh yes, most definitely. We had a few other stalkers working on finding the leaker at Biocrime, but they’ve been killed—our resources in the field are down a bit, but yep. Finding Katcher is the top priority, but finding the leaker might lead us to Katcher, so I guess you know what needs to be done. And when we find them, off to the penal zone they go. I’ll send through the authorization to lodge a post for Katcher—if it comes off, big bucks for you, and a few less people to worry about.”
“It’s all good Don,” Lestre said.
She knew Capone was a busy man, and it wasn’t the time for any small talk, but she signed off from the datacall, and started scanning through her lightscreen. Even after only six days, a endless habit took time to rekindle, but Lestre took only a few moments to refamiliarize herself with her tasks, and slowly reorganized her workspace.
She had work to do.
The blue Origin vehicles travelled down every street of San Francisco, looking out for every dead body they could find—not that it was difficult. Many bodies just lay where they fell, some had been there for almost a week, collecting flies, ants, rats—anything that could find its way to the feast of flesh. By now, the rotting bodies had become a biohazard, and no amount of public deodorizer could cancel out the stench that was permeating through several sectors of the city.
But, encouraged by the profit drive, Origin proceeded efficiently and effectively. There was great money to be made in the clean up, with the added bonus of recycling organic matter, and making a healthy profit there too.
The process was very clean and very efficient. Origin officers and robohelpers scanned DNA samples from each body they came across to confirm identities and, now that Lifebook was back online, automatically notified the next of kin that all financial and physical assets of their dead relatives were to be acquired by Biocrime, with percentages instantly distributed to Origin and all other providers in the clean-up operations.
