The Biocrime Spectrum (Books 1-4)

by Erik Tabain

  Another contractor was positioned next to the lateral driller attached to a USM vehicle, a handy machine for enlarging smaller underground cavities, and after several hours of lateral and flexible drilling, the tube canal that previous led from Banda’s apartment to the main access tunnel in Anika-6 had become an eight-feet square tunnel.

  “Marine! You’ve got your man.”

  Lestre turned to her right to see Don Capone and his entourage arrive, Capone’s extended hand was a comforting sign that her mission was almost over.

  “Not yet,” Lestre said, “he’s still down there until we finish off this tunnel. He’s just sitting down there with enough time to think about what his future might be.”

  “It’s all been confirmed? It’s him?”

  Lestre held up her cell device and summoned a series of visual recordings and static images and thrust it towards Capone’s face.

  “The commandoes sent up some images from below,” Lestre said. “It’s hard getting the data out, but they’ve bypassed some of the controls the Movement set up down there. The images are very clear.”

  Lestre swiped through a range of images on the cell device—close-ups of Katcher’s face, the digital handcuffs and footcuffs; images of the other five revolutionaries that had been captured; wide-shots of the damage to the data equipment and revealing some of the dead humans; selfie shots of some of the commandoes drinking the second-rate synth coffee while they waited for the escape tunnel to be completed.

  “Looks like him,” Capone said, “but we can’t be a hundred per cent sure until he’s back up on the surface.”

  “What’s another hour or so if we’ve been waiting so long to stitch this guy up,” Lestre said. “What are the plans for the rest of the cavern?”

  “We have to retrieve the bodies of our guys stuck down there, and then fill it with flexible concrete.”

  “Not worry about the other bodies or trying to access any data?”

  “No, they can all stay down there as far as I’m concerned,” Capone said. “I don’t even want to retrieve them for pet meat. As for the data, we’ve got reports it’s all been acidified, except for one lightscreen—it might be useful, but probably only for evidence against Katcher—not that we need anything more—but we haven’t got any another data. That’s why we’ll concrete the cavern so it can be never used again.”

  Lestre and Capone moved from one area of the site to another, not so much to scan for any other details or evidence, but to pass the time while they waited for Katcher to resurface with his commando escort.

  “It was you that got me off those Biocrime charges, wasn’t it,” Lestre said.

  “What makes you think that?” asked Capone.

  “It all adds up. The case against me suddenly dropped. I honed my skills on the outside, just doing fine. But then you needed an insider on the outside, someone who knew the logic of Biocrime, someone you could trust who knew what they were doing.”

  “Biocrime fucked up,” Capone admitted, “and it was my fuck up. You know how it is in there—once something is put in place, it’s hard to stop. I pulled the investigation when I realized that it couldn’t have been you selling those secrets, but it was too late. I had to intervene with Luanda, and she reluctantly pulled the plug too.”

  “But that was years ago,” said Lestre. “Luanda had only just started as el president, hadn’t she?”

  “That’s why she didn’t want to pull the plug,” Capone said. “A back-down at that stage wasn’t a good look for a new president, but I managed to get it. I argued that we needed good people onside in the future, rather than sent off to a universal penal zone by mistake. Turned out to be right.”

  Lestre checked her cell device again, and the status of her crowd funding—a total of €29 million—the biggest crowd fund in history. Around sixty-five per cent would be distributed to Biocrime and the commandoes that finally captured Katcher but, nevertheless, it was a hefty reward for Lestre.

  “And getting me on the case?” asked Lestre. “There were hundreds of others you could have chosen, but you chose me. Why.”

  “Business my dear friend,” Capone said. “We needed the best to solve the case, and get the revenues flowing in from it. Assuaging my guilt over my own fuck up? It wasn’t intended but it’s a bonus.”

  At the site, there was a growing group of citizen journalists capturing the action on their cell devices, and offering ongoing commentary to whoever and wherever their viewers were through the continuum and Lifebook Live. It was a busy scene, with the droning sound of excavators, rubble and glass lifted into the backs of empty removal and recycling vehicles, the buzz of an expected happening, and the murmuring of citizen journalists filing their stories to their audiences.

  Capone checked his cell device and could see the visuals of the hole at the top of the tunnel being secured, and all but six of the commandoes had exited Anika-6 through this top hole. Capone and his entourage were now at the exit point to what was Banda’s tunnel: the zone had been cleared and there was now a clear exit point from the Anika-6 underground, back up to the surface.

  The first of the commandoes appeared with one of the shackled hacktivists—a no-name that no-one was interested in, but it was the build up to the main event of showing Katcher to the world that was the real plan here. It was the media event that was now of interest to Biocrime, and a graphics and visual production team in the main headquarters prepared a series of stills that would be superimposed over the visual images that were coming out from this live event, to be screened on Lifebook, public billboards and any other visual access point.

  They comprised the standard clear televisual graphics that showed the mugshot of each person, name, age and alleged crimes, with the usual text embellishment: terrorist, fugitive, crimes against community, a member of the Movement, supporter of the uprising.

  Capone summoned Lestre to come closer, so she could see the fruits of her work and to be one of the first to see Katcher when he surfaced from the tunnel. Four of captives had come out, then followed by Silas Newton. After a short five-minute delay to add to the pandemonium, Jonathan Katcher appeared, pushed forward by the lead commando.

  Katcher was disheveled, unshaven, cuffed with titanium bracelets, and had the look of confusion, understandable considering he was coming from a dark underground location into the bright midday sun, surrounded by the spectacle of machinery and hoards of people wanting to catch a glimpse. There was an air of expectation as he walked past Capone and Lestre. He grimaced and nodded with a sense that his quest was now over, and then a nod to Capone and Lestre. He’d never met them before but he knew from their stance who they were and the roles they played in his capture.

  “And so,” Katcher said, glancing at Lestre, “it has come to this.”

  “You’ve always had that philosophical bent to you, haven’t you,” Lestre said, knowing although it wasn’t a crime, it was best not to speak to the arrested and apprehended.

  “Without philosophy, what is life? My journey ends, but others will take up the Movement. It might take twenty years, it might take a thousand. But it will come.”

  “Well, this part of your journey is definitely over,” Capone said, “Most definitely. I won’t be around in a thousand years, but good luck if you can make it.” Capone motioned to the commando to continue taking Katcher away.

  The six were led forward to a waiting Biocrime vehicle; this vehicle was an orange color, with the obligatory Biocrime logo on the sides. The orange color for these vehicles was used to signify the presumption of innocence, but for all intents and purposes, they were all guilty of their crimes and Biocrime would ensure with all of its tools of propaganda, a high guilty rate would be achieved through the subsequent crowd trial.

  The commandoes ensured Katcher was at the front of this queue and had the maximum exposure to the waiting pack of citizen journalists. No-one had ever heard of Silas Newtown or the other four that have been captured, but everyone knew who Jonathan Katcher was,
and he was the one that everyone wanted to see. The others were led into the Biocrime vehicle and secured.

  It was an ignominious end to Katcher’s public life, ushered into an orange van and driven off to a detention center to be processed, and then sent off to a remote island somewhere in the Pacific. Biocrime had everything needed to convict Katcher and every possible piece of evidence they could retrieve for his crowd trial.

  It was over. Katcher felt dead even before he got to the Biocrime detention center.

  Thirty-Three

  Arrest and processing

  The orange vehicle sped quickly through the streets of San Francisco on its way to the Biocrime detention center, a location not part of the headquarters, but in a fortified location at San Quentin. Katcher sat in the back of the vehicle, wondering about the speed of his delivery to incarceration. He pondered about why humans, contrary to the infinite patience of the universe, always acted in haste to get things done—he’d been captured, he wasn’t going to somehow escape, and speeding to save what could end up being twenty or so minutes seemed pointless to Katcher.

  Although the vehicle travelled at a rapid speed, the journey seemed to go on forever—not that Katcher was too concerned, as every delay was advantageous to him and postponed the inevitable dispatch to a universal penal zone. Eventually, Katcher and the four hacktivists arrived at the Biocrime detention center, dressed in their personalized orange and black detention overalls, and taken to different parts of the location for processing.

  Once he was inside, Katcher didn’t mind the detention center too much: he’d been there before but noticed it had changed since the last time he was detained in 3024. He knew in keeping with the ‘do not kill’ principle of Biocrime, even though it was largely a façade, he would be treated relatively well. It was the other part—‘do no evil’—that troubled him most, as he knew this motto paid lip service to an ethic that didn’t exist.

  His waiting room was almost like a triage cubicle at an emergency hospital—a small room with five seats, and a protected window to a small room housing what seemed to be a Biocrime bureaucrat processing new arrivals. It was safe for both: Katcher was shackled and the bureaucrat was protected by a clear shielded glass. A large lightscreen attached to the wall showed the televisuals of his capture, and a smaller screen in the corner depicting rapidly changing and advancing numbers. Katcher had that short reflective moment where he realized he was the one on the wall screen and, although it took him a while to work it out, it was the beginning of his crowd trial on Lifebook.

  Even though it was only a few hours since he was captured at Anika-6, his crowd trial had already commenced and the legal documentation was fully available through the continuum and Lifebook—unlike his trial from a decade ago, in this case, there was no prosecution or defense team: just an outcome manufactured online decided by the crowd, and a simply mathematical choice: fifty per cent, plus one, meant a guilty verdict and anything less than that guaranteed freedom.

  An update on the wall screen flashed up an unsavory criminal mugshot of Katcher, with the current crowd trial numbers, key graphs and pendulum graphics. Although it was early, the figures were not good for Katcher: there were two columns of figures: Guilty, showing a total of 967,456, and Not Guilty, a total of 87,112, a percentage of 91.7. The next graphic provided a reminder for all citizens to cast their vote through Lifebook within the next six hours, before the closure of the crowd trial, and then returned to the televisuals of his capture, the destruction on the streets of San Francisco, and further propagandizing against the Movement.

  Katcher’s crowd trial was the main event, but trials of the others captured at Anika-6 were held concurrently and, after a few minutes of watching his own image on the wall screen, the profile of Silas Newton appeared. His figures were just as damning as Katcher’s, and the other four hacktivists—names that Katcher didn’t even know: Angela Prizmic; Julian Brogden; Sidartha Amarpu; Marcus Azzapardi—followed in a cycle after Newton, before the visuals returned to Katcher. He expected to see the name of Greta Banda appear for one of the crowd trials, just as a confirmation that she was alive, or had evaded capture, but it was a name that never appeared.

  Assuming that he would be waiting for another six hours before his crowd trial was determined—and he wasn’t expecting anything other than a verdict of guilty—Katcher tried to move his mind into a meditative state to help pass the time, when another image of another crowd trial appeared on the wall screen, a mugshot with the name below: Michael Kransich.

  Katcher had never met Kransich, but in the photograph on the wall screen, his glazed eyes appeared to sink inside his head, a consequence of the memory extraction a few days earlier. There was a list of his purported crimes, along with the causal explanation of the link between each of his acts and the devastation of San Francisco.

  A special treatment would be reserved for Kransich. Because he was a Technocrat, he was presented as a traitor—which he was—for revealing Biocrime secrets to the Movement, and instigating a massive risk to the citizenry, an act of foolishness that resulted in deaths and instability for the community. Biocrime never missed an opportunity to reveal and shame one of their own to deter others. Biocrime had already recreated a visual recording of his misdemeanors: his meetings with Banda, the explosions at Anza Vista that killed over six-hundred Technocrats, Kransich shackled and processed at the detention center.

  The voiceover as part of the visual imagery kept referring to Banda in the past tense, which raised Katcher’s concern about what had happened to her, until the final section of Kransich’s video segment confirmed what he had expected: the voiceover explained how Kransich was under suspicion and underwent memory extraction to reveal all of his trading of Biocrime secrets to the Movement, and in an unrelated act, Banda had been killed in the explosion in the apartment block.

  Katcher felt sorrow, but not shock. He had only known Banda for a short time and although she was a part of the plot to reclaim the world for the Movement, he felt no deeper emotional attachment to her. So much had happened in such a short period and time continued in a compressed state; but defeat and loss had few friends, and Katcher was quick to detach himself psychologically from the recent past. He’d always been a loner: the Revolution Five was short-lived and provided him with some succor for a future he could believe in but, from this group, it was only he and Silas Newton left, a person he barely knew.

  The large lightscreen on the wall continued with the visuals from Kransich’s crowd trial, played over and again, before it returned to Katcher’s material again: the constant voiceover and the confusion of numbers, figures, statistics and graphs provided the opportunity for Katcher to retrieve the meditative state he was after, and he slowly descended into a sleep, something that helped him pass the next six hours quickly.

  Katcher thought he was in Anika-6 when he awoke, but he was reminded of his place when he tried to move out of his chair in the waiting room and realized he was still cuffed with titanium bracelets. This was one of the few items that had stubbornly resisted the waves of massive technological change—it was still the best way to fully restrict a prisoner and ensure they weren’t able to go anywhere. Digital products such as virtual ankle bracelets and detection mechanisms were tried over the years, and were frequently used to detain prisoners, but the cuffs were still considered the best and most effective, as well as maintaining a historical link with penal societies from millennia ago. Although the cuffs automatically registered the name and details of the person they were attached to, detention officers still preferred to go through the motion of verifying the identity of the prisoner.

  The Biocrime security officer stood over Katcher, firmly roused him from his slumber and, in one quick action, lifted him into an upright position. Katcher felt the force was unnecessary but wasn’t foolish enough to engage in futile resistance—there was nothing he could do and the forces against him were too great to allow him to engage in a fracas with this security officer and ma
nufacture an unlikely escape.

  As Katcher was led away from the waiting room and into a processing unit, he noticed more surveillance screens, more Biocrime security officers and subtle changes to uniform compared to the last time he was inside. The black and orange outfits were still the same, but stylized differently—clean and neat, with a small Biocrime logo on the front—and Katcher was impressed with the professional look. But the business here was to confirm his deportation to a universal penal zone, and he knew this was the only outcome when he was forced to sit down in front of the Biocrime processing officer, who quickly started the administrative work to decommission Katcher’s existence in the world.

  “Name?” asked the processing officer, sternly and officiously.

  “You know my name—”

  “—name?”

  “Okay. Jonathan Katcher.”

  As the voice recorded details were converted to text and appeared on the processing officer’s lightscreen, Katcher noticed the identity on the officer’s shirt: ‘Clinton Forster 4465’. Clinton… Katcher thought about whether Clinton had just been given a random name at the incubation hospital, or whether he’d taken the name of the human that had supplied their DNA so another Technocrat could be created.

  He also thought about which was the worse proposition: Clinton, the Technocrat in front of him who was just about to process the end of his life, or the natural human who sold his DNA for a song, so Clinton could be created? Was Katcher’s revolutionary life concerned about the lives of all natural humans, even the one’s selling their DNA who contributed to the modern Technocratic life, or should he have just been saving his kind, people like Banda who was now gone, or Newton, who was also going to suffer the same fate as him?

  “Is it ‘For-ster’ or ‘Fost-er’?” asked Katcher. “And do you know who your mother is?”