The Biocrime Spectrum (Books 1-4)

by Erik Tabain

  “Biocrime is mainly concerned about the clean-up,” Kransich said, “and how it’s going to recoup costs over the next twenty years. That’s probably what its priority is. I’d say that it will keep the crowd profile for Katcher for as long as possible, to retrieve more income. It’s got other things to concentrate on—the clean up—Katcher can wait. That’s what I think—”

  “—that’s what you think, but what do you know? We need to find out how much time we have before Biocrime can realistically find us. We just need everything you can give us about Biocrime’s plans.”

  “Look,” Kransich explained, “it’s going to be really risky and I’ll need some time. I could stay past my regular times today. How about two-fifty thousand for trying, and seven-hundred if I get the data?”

  “One-hundred for trying, eight-hundred for the real data. But we’ll need the data quickly.”

  “Mmm. High risk, more money. I’ll get what I can and meet you at the apartment. It’s a deal.”

  Twenty-Nine

  The end of a double agent

  In Biocrime’s headquarters, Lestre moved past the concierge and changed into her security vest. After this, she met Capone in the security zone, greeted by his outstretched arm.

  “Greetings to you, good to see you in person again,” Capone said, firmly shaking Lestre’s hand.

  “And to you Don. Looks like I’ve got a bit of work to get on with.”

  “You certainly have,” Capone said, as he summoned Lestre to follow him into another security room, filled with lightscreens and several Biocrime data researchers.

  “Here are the files on the fifteen final officers—that’s not to say that any of our other officers have been fully excluded, but we’ve done as much testing as possible on those. What we have been able to do is exclude the possibility of collusion, so we think it’s just a lone wolf, operating on their own.”

  “And all of the final fifteen have full access to all Biocrime data and material?” Lestre asked.

  “Yes. They’re some of our top agents—everyone here is vetted before they start for skill level, psychological tests, character, loyalty—all scored a hundred per cent.”

  “Well, let’s see what we can find,” Lestre said, as she moved closer to the large lightscreen. She scanned her finger over the lightscreen which recognized her genetic match with Biocrime data and permitted her to read through the profiles.

  “Anderson, Browning, Courtney… mmm, not very interesting names,” Lestre said, continuing through the list. “Ah, an interesting name at last—Kransich—how long has he been around for?”

  “He’s been with Biocrime for some time,” Capone said. “Seems like a bit of loner, keeps to himself. Why did you single him out?”

  “No reason. Different name, different to the rest. Good looker. Let’s surveil him, just to see what he gets up to. Can we do anything with his decoding serum?”

  “No, but even if we could he’d know in a flash that it wasn’t working.”

  “Well, let’s do something really old fashioned and prehistoric. I’ll tail him and see what he gets up to.”

  “But that could take forever. And if it’s not him—what next?”

  “We move onto the next one… Lienstein, Mitchell, Nitshcke, O’Brien, Smith—there’s always a ‘Smith’ isn’t there?—Thyssen… we just keep going. In the old days, it was called ‘going undercover’. Fancy a bit of old-school police work?”

  Capone agreed. Biocrime had considered options outside of the computer systems, but anything that didn’t use technology was deemed to be useless and primitive, beneath the modern life of Technocrats. If it couldn’t be resolved with technology and gadgetry, it wasn’t worth resolving.

  “Given the timing, there’ll be nothing like starting right now,” Lestre said. “I’ll set up a PPN as a recruitment zone for the people I need—Lumbardo and Marlon are already a part of it. Agreed?”

  “D’Souza?” asked Capone. “He’s not too drug-fucked is he? You think he’ll be secure?”

  “Sure, he takes his drugs,” Lestre said, “but he knows when he needs to be on the ‘up’ and when he needs to be on the ‘down’. He’s the lateral thinker—I’m the ‘yin’ and he’s the ‘yang’. Lumbardo’s the real enforcer, he’ll put him into line.”

  Lestre scanned the lightscreen and picked up the Biocrime profile for Michael Kransich. She had virtually selected him randomly, but had a hunch about him. If he wasn’t good for a lead to Katcher, she felt he’d be good for something else.

  “This will get the ball rolling,” Lestre said. “Interesting profile for Mister Kransich, I’d say. Loner, keeps to himself. Very good looking. Where is he today?”

  “He logged on at eight-fifty this morning. Because he’s one of the ones with decoding serum, we don’t know where he is. But we know he’s in the building.”

  “And after he leaves the building?”

  “He’s decoded—that’s the whole point. We don’t know where he goes, or what he does. Like the others, he’s a combined security officer, spy, enforcer—he’s like a ‘five eyes’ for Biocrime. Like the others, he was highly regulated, passed his regular security ops, flies under the radar. Just like any other good security officer.”

  “It’s the good ones that usually turn bad isn’t it?” said Lestre. “I can see he’s got a reasonable income here, not great but not too bad. Does he seem greedy? Probably not. Maybe he’s one of those Technocrats that gets into all that ‘meaning of life’ crap and what it is to be human. It happens. Has it happened to you?”

  “Of course,” Capone said. “Everyone contemplates their purpose in life and existentialism—”

  “—no,” Lestre interrupted, “I don’t mean that, I mean all the ‘where did I come from’, ‘what is it to be human, ‘why am I a Technocrat’. All that stuff.”

  “Sure, I think about it, but I never question it. This is the right way—emotions get in the way of the choices that we have to make, that’s why the humans are failures and Technocrats are in control. Why question when you’re the biggest beneficiary?”

  “Maybe Kransich—or whoever it is—started asking the big questions, the type of questions that have destroyed civilizations in the past.”

  “Maybe. But I guess that’s why you’re here, to get the answers to these hypotheticals.”

  “That’s right. And I better get going.”

  Lestre scanned Kransich’s profile and extracted everything she needed—profile images, genetic data, and the times he usually left the Biocrime headquarters. It was 15:30 and she’d worked out that she needed to wait in the Biocrime foyer between 16:48 and 18:25. Kransich had never left the office outside of these hours.

  The foyer at Biocrime was a busy place at the end of the day, with scores of people leaving the building at this time. The auto exit register was not such an important facility—Biocrime wasn’t so concerned about people leaving the building, but it did want to register that someone who entered the building had eventually departed. Entering the building was a different matter: authorized personnel were auto scanned and matched up to their iris data. Unauthorized personnel couldn’t proceed at all.

  The entrance and exit points in the foyer of Biocrime for high-level authorized personnel were a series of three-yard-wide holographic barriers. Visually, they had the same appearance as airport security doors, except there was no physical material. The holographic barrier impaired entry for everyone, except for those with iris clearance. Clearance was provided instantly and the hologram disappeared to allow the person through but, for other non-authorized people, the barrier was impossible to get through. It comprised a gradient of electrical amps through its three yards of holography—initially, a small shock of voltage as a warning, through to over three-thousand volts at the end of the three yard hologram. It was an effective deterrent and no-one had ever got past the two-yard point of the hologram.

  Lestre sat in the concierge area of the foyer, her personal device was in the scanning m
ode, and switched to a small scale app version of the mainstream exit scanner, known within Biocrime as DataEx. She created a link between her device and Kransich’s iris data, from the material provided by Capone. It was coming up to 18:25 and there was still no sign of Kransich. She checked his profile again, to confirm his regular departure times, just to make sure—18:25—it seemed unusual that for the decade he’d been working at Biocrime, he had an exit window of only ninety-seven minutes.

  It was 18:59, and it was at this point that Lestre started to query whether her app was functioning or correctly set up, and whether Kransich had another device that could bypass the Biocrime’s exit system and, if he did, what the reasons would be to do this. The amount of workers leaving Biocrime was now sparse and Lestre moved outside the doors of the building. It clocked over to 19:45 and she was on the verge of making a datacall to Capone, when the soft ping of her device altered her to an iris match. She followed the lightscreen on her device and looked across to see Kransich in his civilian attire as he walked through the auto exit register, attractive and confident, busy and business-like. It was 19:46 and he was out of there, but Lestre kept thinking: he was in Biocrime for eighty-one minutes outside his decade-long record. Why today?

  Lestre needed to keep visual track of Kransich, casually and not too officiously in case he suspected her actions, but she decided keeping fifty yards away from Kransich was a reasonable distance. He headed for the autotram that took him to the southern part of San Francisco, the opposite direction to where he lived. No need for concern, Lestre thought. The city was recovering from an uprising, and there were parts of the city that were difficult to access, but there were still many areas that were operating as though nothing had happened.

  Late night shopping, a dinner date, the gym—there were many reasons why people didn’t go straight home—but in such a segmented city like San Francisco, they would at least go somewhere nearby their residence. Kransich was going somewhere completely different.

  She followed Kransich onto the autotram—she didn’t need to be completely incognito, but she didn’t want to raise any suspicions and needed to keep her distance. As the autotram approached the autostop in South San Francisco, Kransich moved to exit, and Lestre moved with him—but there was a rush to get off the autotram and through the crowds of people, Lestre momentarily lost sight of Kransich but then picked up that he was moving towards a smaller village area, complete with eateries, street hawkers and old-style markets. It was dark now, and Kransich was wearing darker civilian attire, so it was easier for him to blend in with his surroundings. He didn’t look out of place and neither did he feel the need to glance behind or suspect anything unusual.

  It was a heavily populated area and like many other parts of San Francisco, it was hard to find some peace and quiet, but it was easy to find anonymity. It was getting harder to keep up and follow in the dark, but she continued to follow Kransich for another ten minutes through a convoluted route, until he walked down a smaller side street, towards a smaller block of apartments, just around the corner from the main streets. Lestre realized the circuitous route was Kransich wanting to remove any suspicions of his activities, and probably took a different pathway each time he ventured to this location, to avoid familiarity with any of the people that might have ever noticed him.

  It was an obscured part of the apartment, unusually dark, and Lestre saw through the small fraction of vision she had from one-hundred yards away, Kransich knocking gently on the door. It was a quaint old-fashioned sight as, generally, people were automatically authorized to enter approved dwellings, until Lestre remembered Kransich had no recordable DNA and probably still used datacards or even keys to get into his own apartment.

  Her views were still largely obscured but a door opened, followed by an exchange of indecipherable words, and the closure of a door after Kransich entered the apartment.

  Lestre’s thoughts wandered: Kransich has a lover in a human zone? It wasn’t unheard of, but it could raise some suspicions for a Technocrat. Perhaps, but one of her best friends and crime-busting colleague was Lumbardo, and that relationship had never caused her any problems. But Lumbardo lived in a Technocrat area, and this area was human central.

  It was hard to be nonchalant when her main purpose was surveillance, and Lestre wasn’t exactly wearing the type of clothing that could fit into the surroundings, but she waited—it had been twenty minutes since Kransich entered the apartment block. Not that anyone would have cared, but she made herself look occupied by scanning her cell device, and called up 3D-WWF, a three-dimensional word game, based on the ancient board game of Scrabble. She had never played the game before, but she mindlessly swiped and swatted the screen, while she kept one eye on the apartment.

  Her thinking continued to wander: should she move closer to the apartment? Should she try and peer through the window—after all, it was on the ground floor—would they be having sex? Would they be eating? Or just talking?

  Lestre decided to stay where she was—she had a location and that, at the least, would give her something to work on. Time was important, but she needed to play a longer game. Forty-five minutes later and Kransich left the apartment block, walked and straightened himself up, an indication to Lestre that this had been some type of assignation, but she wasn’t sure if it meant anything else.

  Lestre kept her distance and, as she predicted, Kransich walked an alternative route away from the apartment, this time through a different part of the busy streets and markets. She continued her discretion, feigning interest in the wide range of wares offered by the street hawkers in the market, and waited until Kransich walked past and let him continue, and assumed he was going back to the autotram, probably on his way back home.

  Wherever Kransich went now was not such a big issue for Lestre: she had some material and some information—Kransich had got off the autotram in the south—a natural humans stronghold, which raised a new set of questions and paths of investigation. Why did Kransich get off in the south of the city? Who did he know there? It wasn’t a crime to go to a different zone, but in a city as big as San Francisco—and especially after the recent upheaval—everything that anyone ever needed was in their own patch. And why did he spend an extra eighty-one minutes inside Biocrime earlier today?

  Was this venture just a friendly fuck for Kransich, or was he engaged in some risky business? Was he reaching his mid-life crisis where he started to ask what does it mean to be human? Who was in that apartment block? Female? Male? Lestre decided to walk back down the street towards the apartment and visually record whatever she could. The apartment was not exactly boarded up and secretive, and although she was now just a few yards away, it was hard to see what was happening inside, other than the silhouette of what appeared to be a woman appearing through the curtains.

  Lestre tried to match up this location with Lifebook Live and any existing Biocrime profiles. She called up the location on her lightscreen and accessed the part of Lifebook that could show her what was going on inside the apartment, but the imagery showed an empty apartment, even though Lestre could see movement from her vantage point. A glitch? Some kind of data blockage? She decided that it was best to record some visual data and moved towards the window and planted a miniature light recorder at the window where there was a slight gap in the curtains, just so she could see who was inside. She moved away back to a distance of about fifty yards, and monitored the visual recording of the interior of apartment.

  It was nothing spectacular: but she could see a basic loungeroom, very similar to the display that she saw through Lifebook—except in her live vision, there was an attractive woman sitting on the couch, finishing off a bowl of fried rice, and placed down next to another empty bowl. Was it dinner? Sex and dinner? Talk? Or was it all of these reasons? Whatever the case was, Lestre now had high-definition images of the woman in the apartment, and she could use her skills to try and find out who the identity of the woman. Would it lead to anything? Perhaps. But the apartment s
eemed to be off-grid and it raised many more questions than answers.

  The trip back home from the south seemed to move quickly. Lestre thought through all the possibilities about Kransich and what he might be up to: a lover in the south, money, dare and risk, opportunity… or perhaps just plain company and a rice dish for dinner? And with a woman who was off-grid?

  Lestre reached her autotram stop, still with some visual remnants of the recent uprising, but at this stage it was mainly Biocrime assessment vehicles and, as there had been little damage in her area, these vehicles moved through the site quickly.

  She moved up through her apartment block, still pondering the different options and possibilities presented by Kransich. Upon entering her apartment, she moved past D’Souza spread-eagled over the couch—another late night marijuana-fueled session while viewing mindless pop-culture visuals—and moved into her workroom.

  It had just ticked over to 23:00 and she transferred the high resolution images to her lightscreen and attempted a range of simple image matches and searches but came up with nothing. Lestre realized the woman in the apartment was an off-gridder, but what is she and who is she? She scanned through Lifebook and a range of Biocrime profiles using deep search tools and software scanners but still couldn’t find anything. She then switched over to DNA mode in her search tools to access the world memory bank and, still, nothing appeared. She summoned to a different part of the lightscreen and entered a datacall to Lumbardo—it was late at night, but Lumbardo was always switched on and ready to go, almost like a human ‘no-wait-state’.

  Lumbardo accepted the datacall but, as with most things involving Lumbardo, a short Amore message appeared, informing Lestre her local specials were still available, but only if she approached her local store before 23:59 tonight. She tried to swipe it away, but it was up for another another eight seconds before the message disappeared. Lumbardo had collected his five ucas for the message appearing, and Lestre was left wondering whether he would still promote these banal messages for the sake of a few ucas, even if the world was facing doom with a fired inferno ball heading towards it.