by Erik Tabain
Katcher liked to talk and he tried to engage in at least some banter with Office Forster but, to Katcher, he seemed like the standard Technocrat: do the required work—and not much more. Anything that was superfluous to the task at hand used up energy and reduced efficiency. For Office Forster, his task was to process Katcher, not to answer irrelevant questions.
It took a few minutes for all of Katcher’s details, profile and crowd-fund results to appear on Officer Forster’s screen.
“Jonathan Katcher,” Officer Forster announced, “we now have your crowd trial and profile results through Lifebook, and I’m obliged to read them out to you. Your alleged actions are Community Subversion, Community Treason, Counter-Establishment, Terrorism. The crowd results show 39,404,767 affirm, 230,188 deny.”
“Only two-hundred and thirty thousand deny?” asked Katcher. “That’s a real slap in the face.”
Unhumored, Officer Forster continued. “Ninety-nine point four-one per cent of crowd citizens confirm your alleged actions, and you are found by Biocrime to be guilty.”
Katcher repeated the 99.41 figure in his mind. He knew he’d be found guilty but 99.41? The figures must have been fabricated but it didn’t matter. These were level seven actions, the highest level of crime, and the crowd had decided he was guilty. But 99.41?
“As a result,” Officer Forster said, “you will be transported to a universal penal zone vessel and taken to the next available position in a universal penal zone.”
“Which one?” Not that it mattered to Katcher. He still tried to be talkative and engage with Officer Forster. He’d just pissed up his whole life against the wall and was trying to manage his emotions and make light of it.
“Which ever one is next,” Officer Forster said. “Biocrime doesn’t choose, it’s random. You know it will be one of two, West Zone or South Zone.”
The banality of bureaucracy thought Katcher. The end of life as he knew it, cut down at the age of forty-four. How would he be remembered? Would there be another Revolution Five in the future? Would other natural humans take up the Movement, or was this the end of it?
“This way, please,” Officer Forster said, pointing in the direction of yet another processing room, “this way, Jonathan Katcher.”
The more he heard the name ‘Jonathan Katcher’, the more irrelevant it sounded. Who is Jonathan Katcher he thought. Who was Jonathan Katcher?
Officer Forster led Katcher into the final processing room where, officially at least, Katcher would be terminated. Katcher’s bracelet was scanned and his details appeared on another lightscreen, this one attached to a dye sublimation printing machine and two sockets, one to insert his left arm into, the other for his left leg.
Although printing technology largely disappeared many centuries ago, Biocrime was the receptacle for all kinds of old-fashioned machines, the sublimator being one of them.
Officer Forster was decommissioning Katcher, linking the Biocrime crowd-funded adjudication with his main Biocrime profile. There were several sections on the lightscreen he had to go through to terminate Katcher’s account, with final verification after he went through four more prompts. There would be an archival process for historical interest and future investigative work by Biocrime, but after physically linking to Katcher’s body, all DNA data and light recording from this point on would cease.
“Jonathan Katcher,” Officer Forster said, almost like the voice of an automatum. “Please insert your left arm in the top socket, and your left leg into the bottom socket.”
The sublimator was a large white metallic box resembling a horizontal freezer, shoulder height when someone was seated, and had the surface area of a large table. The two sockets were to the right side of the sublimator; Katcher sat down, rolled up his arm sleeve and trouser leg, and placed his arm and leg into the available spaces, rubbered straps automatically secured both his limbs, and he was unable to move.
Officer Forster activated the sublimator and Katcher felt a sharp pain on his left forearm and just above his left ankle, and then the smell of a medical disinfectant. The hum of the sublimator printer continued, and two sublimated sticker sheets were printed and appeared in a side tray.
The rubber straps were released, Katcher extracted his arm and leg, and looked at the back of this forearm, which was etched with a barcode and the alpha-numeric SANFRA-56187261-JK. Katcher worked out the obvious—‘SANFRA’ was the world code for San Francisco, the numbers were his universal income code and the final characters were his initials.
Officer Forster peeled the sublimated sheets, and stuck one on the front of Kester’s shirt, the other sheet on his back. The sheets contained his summary details:
Jonathan Katcher
SANFRA-56187261-JK
Natural human
Community Subversion
Community Treason
Counter-Establishment
Terrorism
Murder
Affirmation: 99.41
BIRTH 1.4.2990
TERMINATION 7.5.3034
SOUTHERN PENAL ZONE
The processing unit had completed its work. Katcher was now officially dead to the world.
Thirty-Four
Deportation
Katcher assumed it was morning, as he had just woken up in his single cell cubicle, but there was no way of knowing. He had been taken from one location to another the previous night and while the interior of the cubicle depressed him, at least it offered some respite from the constant moving around.
The Biocrime detention center was sunless, windowless, almost airless, and possibly the most stark environment on the globe. Aside from its corporate mantras and loglines placed sporadically on the walls in large lettering—‘do no evil’ the most prominent—there was little else of note.
He wasn’t sure when he would be moved on to the next stage of this process but scant information was part of the mindgames Biocrime loved to play on its detainees. No-one told him what to expect from now on, but Katcher felt that whatever it was, it was going to happen sooner rather than later. After a basic synth breakfast of poached eggs on sourdough with a coffee—which was quite good and nourishing in Katcher’s opinion—he was moved on from his cubicle by two Biocrime security guards.
In a journey reminiscent of the travel down the circular tunnel into Anika-6, he was taken endlessly down until they reached what he assumed was the basement of the building, with the doors opening up to show a large window-less vehicle—it was predominantly red, but also contained the Biocrime orange and black corporate coloring on its side paneling, a white logo of two stylized people, with a thick arrow pointing towards an icon of a container ship, and then the large white letters ‘UPZ’. Logo-wise, Katcher thought it was well designed, and typical of how well a cynical and slick style could hide the actions and intentions of a malevolent corporation.
Katcher was bundled into the back of the red vehicle, in with twelve others, all dressed in their personalized orange overalls and all with the printed termination sheets on their fronts and backs. He could see on some exposed arms and ankles, the same sublimated tattooed barcode markings as his. And all of them, like Katcher, were officially dead.
He could see the face of Silas Newton, which he expected—after all, the two had been arrested at the same time—but he was surprised to see the face of Michael Kransich, who he’d assume would have been withheld for further propaganda purposes but, perhaps, Biocrime had recorded everything they needed and decided to cut costs by sending all terminations over to the universal penal zone at the same time. Besides, if Biocrime needed any further vision for propaganda, it was relatively easy to manufacture and manipulate the footage they’d already recorded of Kransich.
As the door to the large red vehicle closed and started off to wherever they were going—Katcher assumed they were being taken to an airport or straight to the universal penal zone vessel somewhere near the docks—he moved closer to Newton. As far as Biocrime and the rest of the world was concerned, they didn�
�t exist anymore.
“That’s it, it’s the end,” Katcher said.
“We fucked up,” Newton said, “totally, fucked, up.”
“It’s okay Silas, it’s just a part of it,” Katcher said. “Others will take up the Movement and we did what we could. Remember the Jews? Just like them, it might take us another few hundred years or a millennia, but we’ll get there.”
“Yeah, the Promised Land,” Newton said, his expression suggesting he wasn’t as sanguine as Katcher. “More like the murdering fields. Took them a thousand years to get back there, and then fucked it up for another thousand years.”
History was littered with many failed causes over the years, and many that ebbed and flowed, and glowed with hope, only to be cut down when the mistakes were made, the wrong strategy used, or the wrong people involved.
Kransich sat in the opposite section of the vehicle, unemotional and totally disengaged with his surroundings. His mind had been zapped by the memory extraction but he still had the power of thought and recollections. Was all the gambling, alcohol, all that fucking worth it? Was it worth it to live like a real human and end up shamed, humiliated? He wasn’t fully aware he was surrounded by other fugitives in the back part of the red vehicle but his awareness would gradually improve on the long boat trip to the universal penal zone. As intended by Biocrime, he’d certainly have the time to relive his mistakes and ponder where he went wrong.
Katcher quickly scanned around to the others in the vehicle, and focused on a face he recognized—it was Radhika Romanov, the off-grid woman Biocrime chased down several months ago and entered her back into the continuum. He also recognized some of the others from Anika-6, and other unfamiliar faces, their origins unknown to him. They’d all been sanitized with mextractodine administered by Biocrime, an amalgam of morphine and artificial endorphine. It was used to gain intelligence from off-the-grid citizens—a substance that stopped the body from passing out and magnified levels of pain. They were all officially dead to the world, but they physically looked dead too—they would survive the cargo vessel trip to the universal penal zone but, even if they did, they would probably be the first ones to perish after that.
Katcher could see on their sublimated sheets, they were guilty of the same crimes as he and Newton, and also had crowd affirmation rates of close to a hundred per cent. He gave a queried look over to Newton to assess any recognition of the others in the vehicle.
“I don’t know them,” Newton said, “but they would have been part of the underground. Tortured, the information Biocrime wanted extracted from them, and sent them off with us to finally die.”
“That means they’ll find the underground tribe and the others in the Movement?” asked Katcher.
“Yeah, probably, but they’ll only send off the leaders to a penal zone. People like us, maybe a few others like these guys, and ‘re-educate’ the others, maybe detain them for a week or two. Get them to work as spies, the weak ones. It’s all broken.”
“There’ll be others though,” Katcher said.
“Maybe.”
“We managed to break the Biocrime system,” Katcher said. “We didn’t break into it for long, but we managed to break it. And it might not be us in the future, but someone will break into Biocrime again.”
Thirty-Five
Arrival at the Port of Auckland
The supply-chain logistics behind the transportation was quite sophisticated, with a network of large red vehicles, just like the one Katcher was imprisoned in, travelling in the larger cities around the world, and taking their human cargo to their local docklands, almost like a livestock animal trade.
The Motor Vessel Nova Tampa was one of the larger ships used for human transportation, an imposing purpose-built container ship of a length of almost nine-hundred feet, and width of around a hundred feet. There were many of these around the world that were destined for one of the two universal penal zones and the MV Nova Tampa floated patiently at its dock in the Port of Oakland, waiting for its new arrivals.
It was a technologically advanced vessel that was painted in the ubiquitous orange, and the large black Biocrime lettering on its side gave a clear indication of ownership and intent. Although this vessel was only thirty-three years old, the name of MV Nova Tampa originated from a similar container vessel—the MV Tampa—that rescued almost five-hundred refugees and asylum seekers in the early part of the twenty-first century in torrid ocean waters near the South Asia Zone and, after this point, the ‘Tampa’ name was used to signify any kind of vessel that transported human cargo.
The red vehicle drove towards the docklands and through a large anonymous gated area, and then onto a small bridge that connected the base of the dock to the innards of the MV Nova Tampa. It was predominantly an automated experience, with scanning devices at each checkpoint automatically accessing the barcode printed on the ankles of each occupant in the red vehicle, and asserting all twelve detainees were still present as it reached its destination inside the vessel.
Inside the red vehicle, there weren’t many exchanges of words, just the occasional glance around from each of the occupants, as if to confirm this event was really taking place and grasping to a forlorn hope that there could be a final part of redemption, and their lives could continue just like before.
Once the red vehicle securely reached inside the MV Nova Tampa, the engines stopped and, with due efficiency, the back doors swung open and a team of black-masked security officers and robocops took each of the twelve occupants out and scanned their ankle barcodes, a process which synchronized their details to a unique fingerprint code and would allow them to access a specially provided cabin. The twelve would join the other four-hundred-and-forty-eight detainees already on the vessel, and each of them would be solitarily confined to their cabins for the duration of the journey.
Katcher assessed his surroundings inside the cavernous hull and, as he expected, it resembled a multi-storey prison block. He didn’t care too much about which universal penal zone he was going to but whatever was at the end of this journey, he wanted the process to be over and done with as quickly as possible. It was a wordless experience, but he was led by one of the Biocrime security officers and a robocop up the stairwell and past a series of other rooms until he came to a room with a light-emitting-diode display above the door, indicating his name, and the destination of the Port of Auckland.
The Port of Auckland was in the heart of the southern penal zone and Katcher estimated the journey would take around twenty days in good weather conditions, a decision that he found favorable, as it assured him he was ever so slightly in control of his circumstances.
The Biocrime security officer instructed Katcher to access the door with his fingerprint, pushed him in and slammed the door shut. The room was about twenty-five feet long and about ten feet wide, a size Katcher considered to be reasonable: a basic room, but it contained a sleeping area, and table and a small food processor, what looked like an area for doing exercise sit-ups and push-ups, and a washing area with a narrow shower, laundry and toilet.
His room was one of the few with a porthole, and Katcher looked through it to take in his last views of San Francisco. His room was slightly higher up than the others, and he seemed to be about thirty feet above the ground. It afforded him a view of parts of the Port of Oakland and revealed the industry of a port devoid of human activity; a series of driverless cranes lifted container crates into even larger ships; remote trucks assembled boxes of organic materials; robotic sweepers picked up debris in their efforts to keep the ports clean. The MV Nova Tampa itself was a captain-less vessel, a large ship controlled remotely from the Biocrime headquarters, the only staff on board was a collection of one-hundred robocops and seventy well-armed and well-paid security officers whose job it was to secure the passage of the four-hundred-and-sixty detainees to the southern penal zone.
It was a room that would be his home for the next twenty days and, like the other detainees, he wouldn’t be leaving the room unti
l they arrived in the Port of Auckland. Katcher lay down on the small sleeping area, a thin ground-level rubber mattress that he found surprisingly comfortable. From this vantage point, he saw a grey barcoded bag made from hemp material stashed under the table, and he leaned over to open the contents. He was surprised to see the top of the bag contained some items of his clothing, which he assumed Biocrime retrieved from his apartment and decided that a man destined to die must have at least some memories and personal artifacts from his life. He quickly took off his orange overalls, momentarily studied the barcode on his left arm, and changed into his personal clothing.
He looked further into the grey hemp bag and retrieved the remaining items: the earing from his mother, the small urn containing the ashes of his father, the post-card size cover of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and a wrapped small thick package. It was a poignant moment, and Katcher had no idea about how these items were brought here, or who retrieved them. As far as he knew, he had taken his personal items down to Anika-6 and they would have been destroyed or discarded once Biocrime came across them.
He opened the small wrapped package and inside was a printed book from the year 2390 titled ‘Kirsten Chamber’s War and Peace’, one of the last books ever printed. He checked the inside pages and the text was actually the original words written by Leo Tolstoy, but he remembered that in keeping with the level of appropriation that had taken place throughout history, Kirsten Chambers must have purchased the right to publish War and Peace in her own name. Katcher had only read the novel on a lightscreen some years ago and, he’d almost forgotten how to read a printed book, but he turned a few pages past the frontispiece and commenced reading. He only read several pages before he lost focus and his concentration, and fell into dark and deep sleep.
