by Erik Tabain
From her loungeroom chair, Marine Lestre moved towards her standing desk and summoned her lightscreen to display the incoming alert, already signaling a positive message, so she knew it was, more likely, providing news about a recent capture of an off-gridder.
“Fuck-ing fan-tastic!” shouted Lestre, as she read the message on her lightscreen, hoping her partner, Marlon D’Souza, would rouse from his sleep on the couch and share in her news.
“What is it,” D’Souza said, sleepily. “Another off-gridder?”
“Yup. Mmm, fancy. Radhika Romanov. Total of twelve-hundred ucas, and six-hundred to the security agents that put her back into the continuum.”
Lestre scanned through the visual recording of the capture, a screen within a screen on her lightscreen display. It was a pseudo three-dimensional recording which combined the viscam recorders from the two security agents with the dashcam from the Biocrime vehicle. When combined with the dynamic sen-surround audio recording, Lestre could easily imagine herself at the scene of the chase—a twelve-minute segment which commenced when the security agents and the robocop first detected Radhika Romanov, progressed with the chase through the back streets of San Francisco, and finally where the security agents put her back into the continuum.
The picture was crystal clear, the audio was dynamic and, with the wide-screen cameras and automatic stabilizers, it had the appeal of a Hollywood blockbuster movie. Lestre edited out the top and tail of the visual recording, superimposed a series of information graphics which outlined the details of the capture—the name, date, location, and brief description of the chase—and uploaded the visual to her Lifebook account, under the ‘Verité’ section.
She allowed thirty-seconds of the visual recording to be freely available, but imposed a €2 fee to watch the remaining eleven minutes. She’ll probably have around a thousand paid views for this visual and, all up, this little investigation and capture would earn her around €2500—not bad for a few hour’s work.
Lestre was a former Biocrime surveillance officer hounded out after she was incorrectly accused of stealing security secrets. Although she was eventually exonerated by Biocrime, her passion for crime prevention and money outweighed her distaste for the organization that almost crucified her, but she had a constant motivation to be the best in the field, and to prove Biocrime wrong.
She was now an official citizen surveillance stalker, linked in with her tribe of stalkers, a ruthless Technocrat and on the hunt for the sorts of crime that resulted in a big payout. While many other stalkers easily became bored with the whole process and monitored only for around an hour each day, Lestre was obsessed and relentless. The success of Biocrime depended on people like Lestre. She was on the system for around sixteen hours each day, and monitored her cell device from any location and from any situation.
Lestre was one of the best in the field—if not the best. She supplemented her universal income of €40,000 with around €200,000 in stalker fees. Although her partner D’Souza wasn’t as active, he still managed to collect around €18,000 each year.
Like many other obsessives, she had been on the system for an eternity, and was always on the lookout for the next big case. Her work resulted in some detentions, and a share in several universal penal zone deportations but, just like a gambling system, she always felt her next big catch was just around the corner.
She knew the ropes: she’d worked inside Biocrime, and moved her way up through the system to become their most senior and sophisticated crime stalker and security agent but, after the accusations of theft, and the realization that she could make many more ucas in the outside world, she decided going ‘freelance’ gave her the freedom she was after—and still having the inside contacts high up in Biocrime gave her an added advantage over so many citizen stalkers. She was in the top five of stalker reward points and still had security clearance with Biocrime. One of the star performers.
She had partnered up with d’Souza, another citizen surveillance stalker. He wasn’t as obsessed as Lestre but, being a Technocrat, was dedicated to the ideals of cyberstalking and reducing or removing subversive elements from society and an easy way to supplement their universal income. And the three incubation kits, albeit in a forgotten part of their surveillance room, showed they were ontrack to perform their civic duties and contribute to the ongoing population dominance of the Technocrats.
Like many other citizen stalkers, Lestre had Jonathan Katcher on her watch list. Her profile and stalking software registered Katcher wasn’t doing anything unusual, nothing outside the parameters developed and recorded over the past ten years. She also monitored past records and profiles on Biocrime, such as Jonathan Katcher’s, to see if there was any value in pursuit. She last monitored Katcher’s profile five years ago—very low activity, but his profile remained on her ‘watch list’.
The only natural human within their circle was a local citizen in the neighborhood, Gordon Lumbardo, a crazed messed-up conservative whose only priority was to raise revenue for himself, and the reduction of crime—if it actually happened—was a side benefit. He was one of the few natural humans who socialized and worked with Technocrats—about five per cent of humans existed and lived within the social tribes of Technocrats—it wasn’t illegal or frowned upon, just the outcome of social development over many centuries, but was considered to be unusual and not according to the accepted social moirés of the day.
Lumbardo was a brash contrarian, loved the idea of being a human among Technocrats. He was also a surveillance stalker, and a good one, and it was his type that would be despised by activists in the Movement. A turncoat human working against ‘the Movement’, one who supplemented his income by raining misery upon his fellow kind.
He was only interested in one thing—money—and had worked himself into a system where he made a great supplement through his stalking work, and maximized everything he could through the system: Reward points for detentions above his monthly quota, referrals to other stalkers, he was incentivized to the hilt.
Like many others living in San Francisco—a massive super city of thirty million inhabitants—they lived in small studio apartments. Lumbardo survived in an apartment on level three which, essentially, was a medium-sized room, but Lestre and D’Souza shared a slightly larger three-room apartment on level four; small but spacious enough for all of their technological mod cons and room for their surveillance stalking work. Lestre was obsessed with surveillance and, like many other Technocrats, had an eternal drive towards accumulating more money and wealth from her activities.
Fresh from her success in reclaiming another off-gridder, and after she uploaded a new monetized visual recording, she focused back onto her lightscreen, scanned all of her points of interest, accessed Biocrime profiling and summoned the lightscreen to scroll down, so she could assess any new areas of anti-community activity and crime. The information on the lightscreen scrolled down quickly, and paused when Lestre wanted it to, and sped up when she wanted it. The lightscreen only stopped when there was a distraction—such as when d’Souza, now fully roused and finally launched into the day, decided it was now time for a morning beverage.
“You want a synth Marine?”
“Just the usual.”
It was a mechanism not dissimilar to Katcher’s food processor—there were over a thousand different types and brands on the market—D’Souza placed two cups in the front tray of the processor, summoned one espresso and one latte, and the low-level hum of the food processor commenced its work and, within two minutes, produced two perfect synthetic coffees, and he passed the latte to Lestre, and kept the espresso for himself.
“Anything else up this morning?”
“No, just the usual low level. It was good to nab that off-gridder, but I’m working on a detention in New York—just need to get some more details on what they’re up to. I’ll set up a post after I finish my coffee.”
Biocrime surveillance was a common way for citizens to supplement their universal income. The
process was simple in itself, but required a certain degree of diligence, patience and perseverance. Like all crime monitoring, it was plain boring. But the rewards were great. The great motto of the surveillance process was ‘I like to watch’, a motto which became a catch cry after a humorous advertising campaign was released many years ago through public screen displays, person-to-person advertising and citizen announcements.
The process itself was relatively simple: firstly, stalkers would create a personal Biocrime account through the continuum, and link to their Lifebook system and their universal income account. This process automatically retrieved the correct scanning and surveillance tools that could access genetic recording and light storage data systems, and linked to an entire range of citizen surveillance systems around the world. Every corner of the globe, except for universal penal zones, was accessible.
Through aggregator software, ‘unusual’ activity was detected and lodged, but still required some interpretive analysis and scrutiny as to whether the unusual activity warranted a post.
Posting about ‘unusual’ activity was all about income and generating thought-bait, attracting the attention of citizens in a specific neighborhood or, if the crime or criminal was more notorious, attracting a wider audience. Posts were linked up to a wide range of crowd funding systems—GoFunder being the largest—and the larger the interest in a case, the more likely citizens were to pledge funds to resolve the crime, and close off the case.
Lestre’s data scanning tools picked up activity in the back streets of New York—three hours ahead of the San Francisco time zone—the live surveillance tool enabled her to zoom overhead to a teenage boy who was throwing rocks at a street light. She summoned the lightscreen to display details of the boy and within a second, the details of Miller Drayton appeared, a sixteen-year-old layabout, without any priors. She summoned up another screen that analyzed Miller Drayton’s blood levels and showed that he was intoxicated with alcohol and crystalline.
Lestre decided to add Miller Drayton to Biocrime profiling and created a new entry on her lightscreen and spoke into her cell device.
“Young punk smashing street light,” Lestre said, as the cell device switched into action, and decided its next move.
The auto-fill function on her lightscreen analyzed Lestre’s words and behavior through the continuum and assessed her anticipated course of action. The process was based on a series of complex algorithms and predictive computations. It seemed a little like thought control, but it was the logical extension of rudimentary anticipatory technologies from the 2100s, where around ninety-nine per cent of human behavior was predictable and, once the precedents of an individual’s patterns were assessed, it became easy to determine what their next moves were going to be.
Based on Lestre’s previous predictive behaviors, the auto-fill generated the text for her entry and completed the description:
We have detected a young man, Miller Drayton near your location in Halleck Street, Hunts Point, New York. Engaging in anti-social behaviour. No prior Biocrime data, but advise short detention as a precautionary measure.
Course of action: One-day detention.
Crowd pledge: €1
Lestre read the generated text on her lightscreen and, after agreeing with the version of events, she summoned the software to approve the text. The post went up immediately, and alerted citizens in this area of New York. If citizens in that area felt it was warranted, they’d summon their cell devices to ‘like’ the request, and pledge the €1 until detention was completed.
‘Likes’ were usually prepared by local citizens but, sometimes, citizens from other areas would contribute, for the sake of punishment or, in Lestre’s case, a process where she trawled and added names to her crime portfolio, and the possibility that people like Miller Drayton could become more serious criminals in the future.
Bounty hunters in the area were alerted and if there was enough community request to proceed with the detention, they would arrest a fugitive, usually with the assistance of a robocop, in a three-way split between stalker, bounty hunter and the local Biocrime detention unit.
In this case, Miller Drayton was lucky. Lestre’s post attracted only four ‘likes’ and one ‘want’ for a total of €4 through GoFunder—not enough to attract any bounty hunter. But he now had a Biocrime profile. An investment for the future, thought Lestre. This was low-level for someone like Lestre, but best to keep busy during idle time.
D’Souza noted the post on Lestre’s tablet.
“Slow day?” he asked.
“So far, it is. Aside from the off-gridder, there’s not much this morning—I’ll go down to the gym and might catch up with Gordon and see how his leads are going.”
“No old activists or subversives to monitor? They don’t lay low forever you know.”
“There’s too many has-beens,” Lestre said. “Most of them have been inactive, and most of their monitoring involves toilet visits, showering. No thanks.”
“Just have a look,” D’Souza said, “it won’t hurt. What’s Jonathan Katcher up to?”
“Let’s see then…”
Lestre summoned her screen to display her Biocrime watch list, which displayed a long list of low-level activity of every potential criminal or high profile activist. But they were all there: Katcher, Chomksy, Smithson, El Guavero, Grayndler; another subgroup list of the members of the Fort Street Seven that destroyed one avenue in Los Angeles in the year 3019—it was like a list the who’s who of counter-subversives in the North America Zone.
Lestre zoomed in on Katcher’s profile.
“Yup. He’s still there, but not much value.”
“How much?”
“Can you believe after ten years, he’s got a bounty fee of two-hundred-and-twenty ucas. That is fuck-all, not even enough for a newbie to take interest.”
“Well, he must have been doing something for those ten years. You know, breathing, eating, shitting…”
D’Souza reference was to the art exhibition and accompanying program produced by a group of Technocrats of Katcher doing all of his daily routine events, including bathroom and toileting activities, material extracted from the world memory bank. Purely designed to humiliate, the exhibition raised massive crowd funds and set the groundwork for other ex-activists to be humiliated in a similar way.
“I’ll just take a look. Hasn’t updated since yesterday, but looks like the same old stuff—that weird stuff he makes in his foodie, and those stupid ‘historical’ lectures he presents at the community hub.”
Lestre scanned through Katcher’s genetic storage and lightcapture. It appeared on her tablet in low-grade color. It wasn’t in real time, but she could scan back to when Katcher was born if she wanted to, but that would be too expensive, even if it was just for personal interest. Besides, if she really wanted to access it, she could probably access it for free through some other convoluted means.
Katcher was now even of less value to stalkers than the average law-abiding citizen. Like many other high profile people with a Biocrime profile, any frivolous or spurious posting of his actions would be knocked down quickly, resulting in stalker accounts being banned for one month, so it was in nobody’s interest to make things up or sensationalize. The lectures Katcher presented were seen as innocuous and tolerated, under the figleaf of ‘freedom of expression’ and ‘diversity of opinion’ but it was widely understood that too much freedom of expression or diversity of opinion would result in a detention, or worse.
“Must be hard for someone like him to be monitored by so many stalkers. But he deserves it,” D’Souza said.
“Sure, but he needs to know that one false move and he’s fucked.”
I like to watch
‘I like to watch’ was the advertisement of the time and was universally accepted as one of the best.
It was a 30-second promotion, commencing with a team of dancers and a heavy bass-dub soundtrack. With each refrain, it cuts to a different person, each one mouthing ‘I like
to watch’, with a computer-generated view of the Biocrime profiling, and finally focusing on a full screen € symbol. Overall, there are seven different characters, of different ages. It appealed to all groups and was a key reason behind an increase in Biocrime stalker numbers, after a decrease in participants over time. Its minimalism is a key feature—slick, sleek, succinct, with an overlay of footage and imagery of featured offenders and captives over time.
The key task of this advertising campaign was to humanize the process of citizen stalking and surveillance, through humor, slickness, and the use of diverse characters to more readily engage the community. After the campaign, Biocrime revenues soon increased by fifty per cent, and citizen participation rose by twenty-seven percent, a level that that continued up to the present time. Although the campaign was first released in 2822, variations of the advertisement existed in different forms and are still in usage.
Six
Seeing the light
A major technological advancement in the twenty-fourth century was the ability to capture the history of light travel, and recreate and store visual memories from DNA samples. While for many years the idea of travelling through time remained within the realm of science fiction, there had been a long history of experimental theories and research in this field—in the early parts of the twentieth century, the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung believed there was a constant transition of memories from the living to the dead, through intergenerational transfer, commencing in utero and continuing through dreams, the human subconscious and the collective unconscious.
From the latter part of the twentieth century onwards, there were many biological and pharmacological experiments relating to sensory deprivation, and towards the end of twenty-second century, the ability to access and capture historical light and experiences was considered to be ‘the Holy Grail’ of scientific development.