The Biocrime Spectrum (Books 1-4)

by Erik Tabain

  The Biocrime Spectrum

  Erik Tabain

  ARMEDIA Publishing

  Book 1: In The Year 3034

  “The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.”

  —Henri Bergson

  One

  Raw power

  He tried hard to grasp meaning from the images appearing in his mind but he just couldn’t solve the riddle. He pieced some of the images together; a sea of abstract plateaus, faces he thought he should know, short explosive flashes, coupled with the echoed voices of panic and muffled screams of newborn babies. Just as his collection of edited thoughts gained momentum and logic, they lost traction and echoed into the ether, disappearing, as if they’d never existed in the first place.

  The flashes of imagery terrified Jonathan Katcher, but he didn’t know why. His mind was sharp and memory was clear but the recurring momentary hallucinations caused havoc with his synapses. The morning cold was exacerbated by the lack of heating in his small living room and, after deciding a different set of acoustics in this cold room would force away his negative thoughts, he moved his hands towards a small plain, cubed black electronic box and summoned it to play the song in his thoughts.

  Soon after the small round green light emitting diodes flashed in reponse to his gesture, the music of “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” blasted through the hallway of his small ground-floor apartment, and Katcher felt the wall of sound and the energy of the song permeate through this body. The audio system wirelessly synchronized with his thoughts, the volume controlled by his synapse receptors—Katcher wanted the volume levels even louder, so he motioned his head slightly up, and the volume increased to match his movements.

  “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” was the song of the moment for Katcher, the dangerous and failed revolutionary who, a decade ago, evaded incarceration through a technicality, and now forced to work as a low-level teacher of history at the local community hub, with a specialist interest in the twentieth century. And with a fragmented memory. His life was a flight under the radar for now, but he wanted to subvert the system that almost destroyed him, before it could destroy him again.

  It was the year 3034 and “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” was a song reissued and re-credited many times over the past thousand years, now owned and ‘performed’ by the Eastern Dark Collective with its frontman, lead singer Matthias Asmarov. But, as a man who understood his history, Katcher knew the original song and lyrics were written by Gary Numan from the Tubeway Army, one of the more eccentric new wave performers in late twentieth century pop culture. And, for Katcher, the original was always the best.

  Katcher was addicted to his BanPro morning thickshake, a combination of textured sweet insect protein and banana paste—and narcotics—and he entered his kitchenette to empty a small sachet of paste into the top tube of his compact food processor, a modern-day Thermomix-styled microwave appliance that sat in the corner of his kitchen bench and could produce any kind of synthetic food in a matter of minutes.

  The paste oozing through the appliance triggered off its machinery and the comforting hum of his food processor persisted despite the over-energized music and, after a few minutes, a subtle low level green light let him know his breakfast was ready, while the other compartment of the food processor prepared his synthetic coffee and dripped into his favorite red mug, just as the lyrics wondering what I’m doing in a room like this streamed out from the paper-thin audio speakers.

  Katcher’s life was always on edge. He opened the two doors of his food processor, the outsides covered with scrapings of left-over food and spilt beverages, and took out the BanPro mixture—a yellow porridge-like mixture prepared in a scratched small white bowl—and the synthetic coffee, and retreated back to his small living room.

  He reclined into the lounge chair but just when he started to sip his synthetic coffee, the morning routine was broken by the rapid sound of a high-pitched siren and flashing red lights, a common event in these parts of San Francisco.

  He motioned for the levels from the audio speakers to go down and reached for his gun, a reaction to living in this area and to be prepared for the worst. His gun—a standard aluminium CX-44 laser, styled to look like the way personal guns had looked like for millenia—was the common defense weapon of choice and comprised two modes—the default stun mode, where it could send an electronic shock signal to disable a target for five minutes—and kill mode, a mode needing special authorization and decoding, a mode only accessible by less than one per cent of the citizenry. And for good reason: the kill mode had point-and-shoot functions, which could puncture the skin like an old-fashioned lead bullet, and killed if aimed at the head or heart.

  Katcher rose up from his lounge to see the commotion outside and looked through a crack in his curtains to see the back of a black security vehicle with its open doors, and saw two darkly-clad security agents and a robocop, closing in on a young woman, forcing her into a corner of the narrow pathway, with several bemused citizens rushing onto the street to record the event on their cell devices. The lush artificial trees and vile stenciled graffiti behind them made the scene resemble two saber-tooth tigers circling a wild beast in an urban savannah, and the small crowd of citizens added to the sense of an imminent capture.

  “What’s your name fucker!” the security agent screamed towards the woman, an early twenty-something, bare footed with black hair streaming half-way down her back, inappropriately and shabbily dressed for the cold morning air and drizzling rain.

  “Fuck you! Fuck off!” the woman screamed back, rattled, now she was cornered with nowhere else to go.

  “Okay, looks like we’re doing this the hard way,” the security agent said, motioning to the robocop to target its digital taser gun, which was just about to release fifty-thousand volts into the woman’s body.

  “One last time—name?”

  “Fuck you! Fuck—”

  The robocop fired the digital taser gun, which issued a stunning laser shock into the woman, incapacitated her and left her writhing on the ground, as if she was having an epileptic fit. Within fifteen seconds, she was motionless—but still breathing heavily, and her face dripped with the cold sweat from evading the two security agents and the robocop. She’d run for almost a mile, but the security agents and robocop had the advantage in the chase of being in a small four-wheeled security vehicle, able to move through the back streets rapidly.

  The second security officer brought out her cell device, a small wafer-thin screen that could access all the electronic secrets of the universe, as well as able to detect the off-gridders that weren’t registered in her security systems.

  “That was hard work,” the security agent said, “a wild one—can you get the iris scan?”

  Her work partner leant over the woman, opened up the woman’s eyelids to reveal a deep blue iris and a fluctuating pupil, as well as the look of disdain for her captors. The security agent could see the reflection of her own body suit in the woman’s eye: the deep charcoal black with a stunning orange stripe, and the reflected logo words of Biocrime, the biggest and most insidious crime surveillance business in the world. It was early morning, but this woman was their fourth capture of the day, and the agent impatiently scanned her iris with the cell device to complete the job, eager to move to the next chase.

  “What’s it reading?” asked the security agent.

  “Radhika Romanov,” her partner said, as she skimmed through the incoming details on the cell device. “Twenty-two years old, went off-grid when she was four. Who knows what she’s been doing for the past eighteen years, but she’s back into the continuum now.”

  “Ra
dhika Romanov? What sort of fucking name is that? Sounds uppity. You’ve got the blood sample too?”

  “Yep, hang on. In a minute,” her partner said, while she knelt down and extracted blood through a small prick from the limp finger of Radhika Romanov. “Just scanning… and… all done! She’s in now,” as she gave a thumbs-up signal from a hand wrapped in a stylish thick black protective glove.

  “Did you confirm she’s with the Movement?”

  “What do you think? Of course she’s with the Movement! Someone off-grid, runs miles to get away from us, looks like, smells like, and probably thinks like she’s from the Movement … and… confirmed.” The agent’s cell device beeped and a green tick appeared in her display to confirm Radhika Romanov was back into the continuum and a companion of the Movement, the main counter-community subversive tribe that wanted to overthrow the current social order.

  She dropped the arm of Radhika Romanov back to the ground and completed the profile on the cell device. The device recorded the blood of Radhika Romanov and re-connected to her Lifebook profile, the main way Biocrime kept tabs on citizens. Going off-grid to bypass its electronic surveillance clutches was easier many years ago but for these security agents, their main task was to get all off-gridders back into system. And to close down any private personal networks, wireless old-technology networks that were difficult to create and detect, but enabled off-gridders to communicate with each other outside of the continuum.

  “That’s all good—and don’t forget to send a thank you to Marine Lestre,” the security agent said.

  “Of course, never forget the one that brung ya to the dance. Let’s go.”

  “Hey,” the security agent said, “my app just sent an alert—this is Jonathan Katcher’s patch, and he’s watching! I thought I recognized this zone. Shall we go and rough him up a bit?”

  “I’ve got just the right thing for him,” her partner said, instructing the robocop to lift its laser gun and point towards Katcher’s apartment window.

  “Oi, Jonathan Katcher, cradle snatcher!” she shouted, as the robocop pulled the trigger, releasing a volley of thin laser bullets, smashing Katcher’s window and splaying broken glass onto his living room floor.

  “Ha, that will keep him busy. Let’s go, get some more off-gridders.”

  And with that, the two climbed into the security vehicle, pushed the robocop into the trunk, and zoomed away. It was a speedy sleek black four-wheeled vehicle that could also low-level hover, but the most prominent display—the Biocrime logo and its motto: ‘Do no evil’—could be easily recognized, regardless of the speed.

  The area was all clear now—the incident was a regular occurrence in this neighborhood zone but, today, Katcher had a front-row view of one of his own being tasered, recoded and put back into the continuum. And it was another reminder of why he worked so hard to undermine the Biocrime system in the past, and how he needed to return to his role in changing this system. But, in his usual manner, he was dismissive; he didn’t care about Radhika Romanov. She was an individual, and he concerned himself with the bigger picture. She would be mobile again in around three minutes, almost as though nothing had ever happened. She would then wander off, unable to ever join her off-grid tribe, and he would never see her again. And, through the continuum, Biocrime was now able to see each and every one of her movements.

  The commotion Katcher witnessed epitomized the struggle of the times—between the natural humans; and Technocrats, the human clones, the ones who over a short period of a few centuries, managed to reach a level of cybercontrol that permeated virtually every aspect of life in this modern world, sustained their high privilege and dominance over natural humans, and maintained the social order. And the Movement was the revolutionary cause initiated by natural humans who wanted to overturn this social order of control.

  The two security agents were Technocrats and Radhika Romanov, like Katcher, a natural human. It was the faultline of historic and scientific progress, but Katcher was angered by these frequent events and frustrated by the restraints placed on him by Biocrime, and his inability to act. ‘If only I could do something’ was his constant subliminal thought, and he kept this thought as he retracted back into his lounge, finishing off his BanPro breakfast and synthetic coffee.

  Katcher’s apartment block was an unspectacular sight from the outside; twenty-three storeys high with thirty small apartments on each level, and a series of small businesses, cafes and eateries on the ground floor, surrounded by other similarly tall apartment blocks. It was colored with light blue paneling, a color chosen to not offend the brilliance of the stark blue sky but, like many apartment blocks in this zone, it was ragged, dirty, barely functional and aesthetically unpleasing to the eye. The sides of the buildings comprised colorful murals painted by young children many decades ago but, in contrast to the optimism they might have shown when they were first created, these murals were now dank and darkened with pollution and neglect, as forgotten as the rest of community they were trying to uplift.

  Constructed cheaply, the apartment block was as solid as a rock but, with a squint of the eye, it resembled a tall prison without barbed wire. There were a few large mechanical relics from the past embedded within the architectural design and displayed near the foyer—a twenty-feet pulley with massive cogs and wheels from the 1800s, beside a more streamlined rusted mechanical machine from the 2100s, used for hauling bricks, cement and other building materials. These relics were supplemented with a video lightshow screened onto the side walls, which outlined the working tales from yesteryear—a group of overalled men loading up wooden pylons onto a horse-driven carriage; women working away on Spinning Jennys, mostly with ecstatic faces which perpetuated the myth of an exhilarated work ethic. These types of lightshows were common architectural features in modern buildings: it was more ironical than anything else, supposedly to claim a nostalgic piece of yesteryear while the rest of the world sped ahead in its maniacal drive towards technological perfection.

  Just after Katcher took the last swig of his coffee, his music was interrupted by an incoming datacall, which he accepted with a small motion of moving his four fingers towards himself, like royalty requesting the presence of a guest. The datacall appeared on his small lightscreen—an ultra thin Perspex-like televisual structure linked wirelessly to the continuum—positioned in front of his lounge couch and away from the sunlight that usually populated the room at this time of day. He could choose between screen display or hologram, but decided the hologram display was too intrusive for morning time. A familiar face appeared on the lightscreen.

  “Good morning Jonathan, this is Rowena from Biocrime for your daily report.”

  “Yep, hi Rowena,” Katcher said, after an exaggerated pause. “It’s me. As you can see, I’m here, behaving like I should be, like I have for the past ten years.”

  “You can never be too careful can you? What’s on your agenda for today.”

  ‘Rowena from Biocrime’ was a synthetic bot monitoring Katcher’s digital house arrest. It was the same call every morning, and at the same time—08:00 hours. She wasn’t real, but the questions were. She could see and record all of Katcher’s movements and conversations and, if anything seemed unusual or worthy of further investigation, an automatic trigger could be sent to local Biocrime security agents, not dissimilar to the ones that cornered Radhika Romanov, for a follow-up and, if they felt like it, a blow of a baton over Katcher’s head, or a fist to the solar plexus, just to show him who was in charge.

  The invasive monitoring was primarily to continue Biocrime’s ongoing humiliation of Katcher; partially to verify his whereabouts, partially to be a nuisance, but mainly to accrue revenue each day to Biocrime for doing its community service and keeping tabs on Katcher. Biocrime had over thirty-thousand permanent digital house arrests on its books just in San Francisco and it was a lucrative market.

  Whenever Katcher received these datacalls, he put his usual arrogance and bravado in check. His terrifying hallucination
s were usually triggered by the Biocrime datacalls and after a decade of monitoring, he wanted to reduce their interactions to a bare minimum.

  “Just the usual today Ro,” Katcher continued, “study, my research, teaching those classes at the community hub that you force me to do. Having breakfast, lunch, and probably dinner too.”

  “And have you been engaged in any counter-community activities you’re aware of?”

  “Nee. Nein. Votch. O’hi. Tidak. Nej—”

  “Please, in universal English, not one of those dead languages.”

  “Okay, okay. No, I haven’t.”

  “Okay. And we’ve recorded you’ve had the complete sachet of BanPro this morning. Can you confirm?”

  “Yes, one BanPro, just like I have every morning.”

  “That means you have four satchets left. Your monthly batch will be delivered to your apartment tomorrow morning. Thank you Jonathan Katcher, that’s it for now. Until tomorrow, enjoy your day!”

  “Yes, and fuck you, you holographic fuck,” Katcher said under his breath, making sure his anger eluded detection.

  Most of the conversation was perfunctory—small data chips inside each sachet of BanPro sent signals to Biocrime once they were opened and consumed, and ‘Rowena from Biocrime’ had all the information she needed before the conversation commenced, but visual identification and voice recognition added to Katcher’s psychological torment and humiliation. Their short conversation was also recorded and stored in Biocrime’s data center and transcribed in real time, as well as date-stamped for 08:02. It fulfilled the requirements of Katcher’s digital house arrest.

  On some days if he was bored or could adequately manage his hallucinations, he’d have a longer conversation with ‘Rowena from Biocrime’ but the longer these conversations went on, the more he realized the limitations of a holographic bot programmed to do the necessities—ask the questions, get the answers, tick the boxes—and the more he realized the futility of engagement.