Tag - A Technothriller

by Simon Royle

  I had always thought of the various Devs that I have owned as ‘friends’. Not in the sense that I want to take them out for dinner, although I have done that often, but rather that whenever I have been alone, I have always had the Dev to keep me company. Music, flicks, even characters that had conversations with me, some of which I created, the Dev was always there, to fill that gap. With my newly acquired habit of thinking like a criminal … no that isn’t right, not a criminal, a spy, yes that is how I have to think, as a spy would think … Devs had become dangerous.

  I pressed the red button and the Devscreen instantly came alive. The time in the bottom right corner read 5:30am. The usual time I woke up.

  I said, “Global newsfeeds main living space screen.” The floor-to-ceiling screen, which ran along half the wall occupied by my double sleeper and the relax space with its long sofa and two Siteazys, displayed the global newsfeeds. I had the large center image set on Bloomberg-Reuters, a financial news channel. Around this large square, twenty other news channels displayed. I could change channel by voice command or Devstick which was tuned to function as a remote control for the main Dev in my Env.

  “This is Kathy Peterson reporting for Bloomberg-Reuters, back to you, Jeff.” Commodity prices ran along the bottom of the screen: gold was down, titanium up. I switched channels to legal news. The screen showed an earnest-looking blonde-haired lady, perhaps in her sixties. Although age is hard to tell, she looked like she could be someone’s grandmother. She was listening to a question from an interviewer who was off-image.

  “...And then what are the implications for privacy? The government knows where you are at all times....”

  I turned the volume up a little and walked over to the food prep area just off the relax space. I was lucky to find this Env. It was large, big enough for a family of seven, and I had taken it on a long lease with the condition of significant remodeling. I had retained one of the rooms for guests. It had never been used. The rest of the walls in the Env had been knocked down to leave one large space. In that I had created four distinct sections: The food prep area, the relax area, and the sleeping and working areas. The open space of the Env was about three hundred square meters, large by anyone’s standards, but I had taken the lease at the time when the economy was in a down cycle.

  The interviewer was still speaking. “You’re online, literally on display to the globe, so what does this mean for our privacy? We’re already open at all times to government inspection. Doesn’t this mean that anyone anywhere can tune in to where we are and track us? Isn’t that an enormous security concern?”

  I opened up my fridge and pulled out a carton of orange juice. The freshness indicator on the box showed green, so I poured myself a glass and taking it with me walked over to the relax area and sat in the Siteazy in front of the screen. I took a sip of the orange juice.

  The blonde woman nodded her head. “Barry, before I answer your question, I’d like to get this into perspective because there’s a few assumptions in your question that are simply incorrect. Firstly the new Personal Unique Identification Law, or to call it by its commonly known name, the ‘Tag Law’, does not mean that anyone can suddenly zoom in on an image of you. Far from it. The same processes and protection we have as individuals today will still be in place. No one is advocating removing those. Through your own personalized profile page you will be able to set up more privacy conditions than what we have now. The only difference between this law and the last is that having an embedded PUI is a lot more convenient than having to carry around a Devstick. This law is about more privacy, not less. Bo Vinh’s words on this are appropriate and I quote....”

  “We’ll have to hold it there, June, while we take a quick suggestion break. Don’t change feed – we’ll be right back with June Masters and the rest of our panel to talk about the ‘Tag Law’ and what it means for you.”

  The feed switched into a suggestion for the new Mercedes-Benz electric vehicle. The EV looked sporty enough but I wasn’t tempted. Living in New Singapore and spending most of my time in the city I had little need for an EV. I changed channels. It occurred to me that I was probably behind in voting and changed to the UN Vote channel. The popular vote, ‘Popvote’, was Bo Vinh’s idea and he used it to great effect in ridding the world of the nation states. He set up the first online voting site where, through authentication of your identity, you could vote on any issue happening in the world of politics. Pulling people of all nations to the site with his commentary, he used it as a platform to demonstrate to nation leaders how far off the mark they were with some of their policies. And in many cases how far they had drifted from the wishes of the people that had voted for them.

  I was behind in voting. It is compulsory to vote, and if you don’t, your vote is counted as undecided, and depending on the ranked importance of the vote, you can be fined. It isn’t a large fine and can be paid in either contributing time to a listed cause or in cred. I scanned through the list of votes, scrolling down from the most current through to the last vote I’d made. The list was mostly City council votes for New Singapore, as a resident there I had to vote on those, and there was only one Global vote that I had missed. That had been to develop a new City in the ocean off the Maldives. I would have voted yes but was too late. I credded the fine and changed channel back to the panel discussion. A suggestion for a new slimming regen unit was just finishing, yours for five thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine cred, and then a tanned and serious looking Barry came back.

  “Thanks for staying with us. We’re talking about the new ‘Tag Law’, set for global PopVote Saturday 15 March 2110. Joining me on the panel are June Masters, President of the Goldman School for Public Policy, Andy Haas, former Head Justice of the Permanent Court of Arbitration and currently advisor to the New Aspiration Party responsible for proposing the ‘Tag Law’, Dan Quigley, of the Conservative Christian Party who support the Law, and last but certainly not least, Annika Bardsdale of the Social Responsibility Party who are opposed to the new Law. June, if I can start with you. Just before we went to the break, you were talking about the difference between the existing law and the new law.”

  “Yes, Barry, thank you. As I was saying, the new ‘Tag Law’ provides more privacy. In the words of Bo Vinh: ‘Having nothing to hide from each other is the first step to having nothing to fear from each other,’ and that is what this Law is all about. No more carrying around a Devstick to prove our identity – it becomes a part of us. What could be more human?”

  “That’s a dangerous thought, June, using technology to define what is human. Suppose the Tagged identities are hacked? What then? Your entire life is on display to someone?”

  “Annika, our entire lives are on display right now. If a hacker wants to get into us and they’re skilled enough they can steal your identity right now – it happens all the time. With the Tag that will become much harder because you are the device. The Tag embedded in your arm is protection against identity theft because any action that doesn’t match your current location will immediately be seen for what is. You have to go beyond emotion here and understand the logic.”

  I took another sip of my orange juice. I can’t say I liked the idea of having anything inserted into my body, but the idea of the Tag appealed to me on a number of levels. Firstly, it would cut down crime which has been rising steadily. Secondly, there really was no difference between an embedded Tag and a PUI on a Devstick. Well, the only difference is that your hands are free – but I guess you could say your hands are free if your Devstick is in a pocket or clipped to a belt. Even so, a one mil tag embedded in your upper arm is still more convenient to carry around.

  I thought it would make shopping easier. Just step up to any Dev in any shop space and speak or key in your password. No more waving of Devstick at the shop Dev. If I understood it correctly – and privacy is not my area of expertise under the law – but location and other personal data belong to you. Ents have to delete any data that is yours within one month o
f acquiring it, unless you give them permission not to. In which case they can hold your data but not resell it to any other party without your express permission. You have access to any data the government holds about you, except where such access is deemed to be a threat to the Nation, and then you require a court order.

  The security around personal data is massive, but then again I’d also just seen what Gabriel could do to those systems and that worried me about the Tag. What if someone could hack the data? What could they do? Well, nothing more than what they can do now, and that was why I though the Tag Law would be passed. March 15 – I had to remember to vote. I picked up my Devstick and marked it in my calendar. The time on the Devstick showed it was nearly 5:45am. I got up and swallowed the rest of the orange juice, taking the empty glass back to the food prep area. After putting the glass into the sanitizer, I headed for the shower.

  I think up some of my best ideas while showering, but not this time, and I got it over with as quickly as possible. “Fast dry,” I said, and a blast of warm air hit me from above, driving the wet from my body with its force. No sign yet, a ton of questions and I have to maintain a normal life. That summed it up, but it didn’t help. Frustrated with it all, I looked at myself in the mirror. Who are you?

  Standing there, examining my reflection, I realized something else, something I recognized but wasn’t familiar with – fear. I was scared. I ran my hands through my hair and a down my jaw line, feeling the stubble that had grown there. I had to get a grip: these thoughts were leading me nowhere and being scared, while a natural response, was counterproductive. I had to do something, but what? And that’s when it hit me. Take a vac. Get away from all of this. If Gabriel needed to find me he could, I was sure of that, and suddenly the idea of taking a vac grew. Would it look suspicious? No, not if I told Sir Thomas in advance and made it seem like I was rewarding myself with a hard-earned spell of relaxation.

  Feeling a surge of energy I went back out to the living area and said to the Dev, “Find me a list of Vacenvs within one hour’s travel time from here. Search criteria: clean white sand beach, stand-alone bedroom or cabin, occupancy less than twenty percent, with sailing craft for rent within one kilom of Vacenv.” A list of Vacenvs came up. It wasn’t a long list as December is always high season in South East Asia which is where the map and list had focused, given my criteria. While looking down the list I thought about what I would write to Sir Thomas. It would be better to send him an email as I didn’t trust myself not to show emotion if I was looking at him. I’d just write something short but ask if he had any further leads on the runner – that way it would look as if I knew nothing. I called up my comms program on the Dev and, selecting Sir Thomas from my list of contacts, dictated.

  Dear Sir Thomas,

  Hope you are well. I am planning on taking a vac. I just wanted to check with you that I personally am in no danger from the runner that escaped? I was thinking about going to a beach in the Southern Thailand Geographic. In your opinion is it safe for me to do so? I should be gone for three or four days – I’ll bring you back some of that whisky you like.

  With warm regards,

  Your nephew,

  Jonah.

  Jonah James Oliver

  Arbitrator at Law

  Coughington and Scuttle

  My signature appended itself to the message automatically. The ‘Chatnip’ app gave me a list of my ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ to delete, which I did. I thought it looked a bit too formal but then I always attach my signature to my emails. Just stay normal, keep everything as normal as possible, I thought, and said, “Send.”

  I turned my attention back to the list of Vacenvs and one looked particularly interesting. A tiny Vacenv in a small village called Tha Sala, about fifteen kiloms north from Nakorn Si Thammarat further up along the coast. Using the Changi Lev port, I could reach Phuket within ten mins, and then catch an airship transport across to Nakorn Si Thammarat. I could be on the beach in Tha Sala within an hour of leaving New Singapore. The Lev between New Singapore had only finished construction last year. The final section of tube was put in place in November, ready for pumping out the air. The resulting vacuum allows us to travel at eight thousand kilos per hour, with high speed mag-lev, in the little sixteen seat pods that we call Levs. The idea was adopted for building elevators and many buildings now have the Lev tubes coiled up like a giant spring either inside or outside of the structures to which they provide transport. They were first called Vactrains but when the pods came along and they were put in buildings, trains just didn’t fit anymore. The Transatlantic Lev can take you from London to New York in less than an hour.

  The Geographic of Thailand had standardized on South East Asia Time (SEAT) back in 2020, as had Indonesia, so I hit the comms button next to their name. The hands of a little clock started spinning where my finger had touched the screen. The hands spun some more and then I realized I was still naked. I quickly turned off the cam on my Dev and went to voice-only mode on my side. The clock hands disappeared and a man, standing on a beach, his back to the ocean appeared on my Devscreen. He looked Thai, was wearing a sarong and had a large fish dangling from a meaty fist.

  “Sawasdee Khrap, good morning, Mr Oliver, my name is Bank. Please excuse the fish – I was just on my way to the kitchen when I heard your call. How can I be of service, sir?”

  “Good morning, Khun Bank. I’m thinking of staying at your Vacenv for a few days. Do you still have beach front cottages available?”

  “Yes we do, Mr Oliver. We’ve just opened and are still in soft launch so we’re not doing any marketing right now. In fact we only have two other guests staying here tonight. When were you planning on arriving, sir?”

  “I was thinking about coming over there before lunch. Could you arrange a car for me? I’ll call you when I’m boarding the airship.”

  “Certainly, Mr Oliver. And I take it you would like one of our beach cottages is that right, sir?”

  “Yes, that’s right. As near to the sea as possible, OK?”

  “Yes Mr Oliver, thank you. So we’ll look forward to seeing you around lunchtime then.”

  “Yes, thanks, and save me some of that fish for later,” I said. His face broke into a grin and he gave me a thumbs up as I cut the call. I felt better. At least I was doing something, moving. It had to be an improvement on sitting around brooding over the circumstances I found myself in. I looked across the room at the clothes racks by the sleeper, and frowned. I didn’t have any clothes that were suitable for the beach. Everything I had was either formal or smart-casual. Do clothes define a person? Probably not, but they do tell you a lot about someone’s lifestyle, and mine spoke volumes. The last time that I had taken any time off, ‘self-time’, was when I had just arrived in New Singapore from the Scotland Geographic. All I ever do is contribute and sleep a dreamless sleep.

  Chapter 9

  The Gang of Four

  UNPOL Headquarters, Deep Trace Operations Room, 188th floor.

  Thursday 12 December 2109, 10:00am +8 UTC

  Martine Shorne was the eldest in the team– ‘The Gang of Four’ as they were unofficially known: Marty, as she was usually called, plus Dom, Fatima, and Stanislav, the boy from the Urals Geographic. Together they traced the untraceable. They got the cases that others found impossible, and Case #JM-2109 was somewhere out there beyond impossible. But there was always something.

  They had been given the case at 4:45pm yesterday, six days after his escape. They’d heard about the escape along with the rest of the planet’s population by mid-noon on the Friday when it had been released to the newsfeeds globally. The news quickly became the most commented upon topic online and off.

  Marty had gone over the entire timeline and absorbed all the data. It amounted to nothing. By the second degree of separation, everything disappeared. The lead from the tip-off that led to the raid, the capture, transportation to New Singapore, the footage of the interviews, containment, and finally the clouded-out, gas-filled image of the bl
ack hole in the wall of the White Room and the blunt cylindrical rear end of the mole.

  The Devcockpit they’d recovered gave them nothing; neither did the Mole, found six kiloms away in a warehouse in Old Jurong Port, and completely destroyed with a magnesium bomb. She smiled: she had to admire the planning and execution. Altogether it was a work of art. From the fake mines in the tunnel, the collapsed roof of the tunnel three-quarters of the way down, to the electromagnetic pulse mines that had destroyed the remote control bomb disposal units, it was all beautifully planned and flawlessly executed.

  The sixteen grade one illegals had also disappeared, their PUIs a complete falsification. She knew they were dealing with someone brilliant, but then the 'Gang of Four' were pretty stellar too, and now it was their turn to play. Trace Operations had its hereditary roots in the profiling of serial murderers by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the twentieth century; their primary role being to predict where the accused was and what they were likely to do next. They played ‘what if’ all day and often all night long until they had worked out what was the most plausible course of action for any given individual, group or event. In a sense, they made predictions. In another they were fortunetellers, but a far more sophisticated truth is that everything they did was based on intuition, insight, experience and derived from fact. They also loved a challenge.

  They had half a floor of the northern tower of the UNPOL Complex to themselves. Two thousand square meters of cool rubberized black floor space. The walls were Devscreens and the ceiling appeared to be whatever they wanted it to be, on any given day. It was a huge Devscreen separated from the floor by a height of fifteen meters. Today, as per usual, it was black to match the floor. Despite the size of the room there was no echo, and their name for it was the Cave.

  No one entered their space without asking first. It was an unwritten rule but one enforced by the threat of what might happen to one’s digital history if unheeded. There was a rumor, carefully cultivated, that a senior level UNPOL officer had barged into their space without invitation. That night he had gone to dinner and found that he no longer existed as a person. His PUI had been wiped along with his ability to cred the dinner. He’d been contained and a full investigation into his past had begun before his PUI had reappeared. No one could tell how it had disappeared, or how it had come back, and although everyone suspected the ‘Gang of Four’, no one could prove it and therefore no one dared say anything.