The Biocrime Spectrum (Books 1-4)

by Erik Tabain

  The major migration clampdowns and draconian measures that largely existed during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries were considered ‘against the human spirit’ and against the principles of supraliberalism and democracy. Monuments recognizing the movements of peoples prior to the nineteenth century, and for all the people that had drowned at sea in the East America, South Asia, North Africa and Australia zones, were created to recognize those attempts to move to better lives. These acts were considered to be the precursors to the global free human movement.

  Supraliberalism and the freeing up of borders also meant that the relevance of the nation–state declined and, following on from debates, discussions and political theories developed over many centuries, the nation–state relationship was seen as the root cause of wars, famine, and ‘Remove Difference’ became the esprit de corp and thinking of the times.

  After reaching their high points in the late twenty-second century, China and the Russian Federation commenced a decline during the twenty-third century, fracturing into smaller autonomous zones and then becoming borderless in the early 2400s.

  Through continuous and automated micro-financial payments, transactions and incentivation programs, the need for government controlled bureaucracies diminished dramatically. In the United States, the reformist President Julian Navarro presented the New Deal in the year 2285 that dissolved the country, and following the Lagos Agreement of 2290, all areas previously recognized as states, nation–states or countries were formally dissolved. Borders after the year 2290 were officially open for capital, labor and people movement, and the Lagos Agreement of 2290 codified what had been a de facto existence for around a hundred years.

  The world worked towards a financial and social equilibrium and the need for official borders and governments morphed into crowd-sourced decision-making processes and areas defined by geography, rather than nation.

  The final and current stage of globalization arrived through the development of biotechnology. After the world economic system was consolidated through the global free movement of capital, people and labor, a fast-tracking process of computer enhancement creating the link between electronics and biological material resulted in the development of a vast range of new technologies, most notably, the continuum, which created the nexus between computers and the biological world, and genetic recording.

  The world without borders, historically, was regarded as the greatest human achievement, as it removed many of the issues that had plagued the world since time immemorial—nationalism, racism, religion, isolationism, terrorism, fanaticism—and rewarded humanity with virtually every technological asset it could think of in the field of health, education, commerce, arts, entertainment and communication. The downside was that the byproduct of these technological wonders was the biggest level of surveillance and corporate interference ever in the daily lives of people all around the world. The creation of Biocrime.

  Unchain My Heart

  A powerful advertising campaign was developed in the early 2100s, promoting the end of national and international borders and pushing forward the free movements of people to any part of the world.

  It was a ninety-second visual recording that featured a montage of oppressive images of negro slaves from the southern states during the 1860s, Australian Aboriginal people held in neck chains from the 1930s, images of the torture of Chinese citizens during the Japanese invasion in Nanking in 1937, with the audio backing of ‘Unchain My Heart’, a song written by Bobby Sharp and sung by Ray Charles, a popular American soul, rhythm and blues musician from the mid-twentieth century.

  The serious male voiceover commenced: “Man was born free, yet everywhere he is in chains. Our mission is to unchain our hearts and move towards the freedom we were all born with.”

  It gradually faded into a sharper montage of footage from what was considered to be the pinnacle of fascism and destruction in the world, the rise of Nazism throughout the Europe Zone during the Great War and World War of the twentieth-century, machete attacks between the Tutsi and Hutu people during the Rwanda–Burundi Wars during the 1990s, and famines in the northern parts of the Africa Zone in the mid-twenty-first century. These sequences used ‘Blue Monday’ as the audio backdrop, a song originally performed by New Order, a post-punk electronic dance group from the Northern Europe Zone.

  Towards the end of the sequence is an orchestral version of ‘Unchain My Heart’, showing slow motion footage of chains being broken and adults helping children leap over barbed-wire fences, and a soft and seductive male voiceover narrating a series of sophisticated images from around the world, following the path of a sophisticatedly dressed man of Moroccan appearance travelling through a downtown part of Casablanca: “He’s checking his weather on a phone made in Beijing; while riding in a cab produced in Germany; he pays for his meal with his bank account held in Zurich; he watches the football game played in New York, on a television screen made in Korea; he’s a multi-national, but he’s part of the one nation: the human nation”.

  The final scene ends with a group of families in a wide shot, with a smooth female voiceover saying: “We’re moving towards a better world, towards a better future. Towards a borderless world.”

  The final graphic contains the two stark words: ‘Remove difference’.

  It fitted perfectly into the zeitgeist of the time and was the most successful advertisement in the early part of the twenty-second century.

  Fourteen

  Recruiting Katcher

  “Welcome and thanks for being here: The Decline of Organized Governments—some would say governments were never organized and have always been in a state of decline. And that’s why they finally died off, and to use an ancient Japanese word, we said sayonara to them.”

  Katcher started his next session at the community hub with the perfunctory jovial remark—standard Presentation 101 tactics—humor the audience to get them engaged and feel more comfortable in their own skin, almost like being the ‘song-and-dance’ man for the day to entertain the crowd. And he loved to use words from a dead language that meant something in the lingua franca of the day, English. ‘Sayonara’ was an old Japanese word that was used interchangeably with ‘goodbye’, as was the old Italian word ‘ciao’. Not many words from the Teutonic languages survived the gradual cull of universal words over the centuries, but many of the words that did survive had their basis in popular culture, such as ‘borgen’, a word that was used interchangeably for ‘castle’ or large edifice of a building, after the title of a Danish television crime series from the early part of the twenty-first century.

  In this session, there were forty-one participants, and as he scanned the room, he could see Banda seated close to the back. Katcher briefly thought this to be strange: her avatar—DynaMiteMax—didn’t appear on his list of confirms. He was okay with this, he didn’t mind so much, it just meant he wouldn’t receive any income from her attendance, but he’d much rather have interested unrecorded people come along to his sessions, rather than recoup the €5 he’d receive from an official attendee bored out of their brains.

  Everyone in the room—Katcher included—never lived under a government or within a centralized control of the economy and resources. In 3034, the entire world was controlled and organized through the continuum, the world memory bank and a vast array of sophisticated crowd-sourcing apps. However, there was still a fascination and thirst for knowledge about yesteryear, the way humans used to live—not so much for a return to this life, but a bemusement and surprise for how a small section of the citizenry formed governments that were responsible for deciding allocation of resources, direction for the economy, creation of laws, and the bizarre notion of the election of officials to carry out these tasks.

  As Katcher continued in the session, he outlined how some of the smaller remaining states in the world had maintained the semblance of government, holding elections and electing representatives, for the sake of historical continuity. These officials were figureheads, rather t
han holding any meaningful power, and the last remaining international state was the small principality of San Andorra, contained within the South Europe Zone, but it ceased being relevant—its last election was represented by less than one per cent of the citizenry and, by that stage, it resembled a small debating society, not dissimilar to Katcher’s sessions at the community hub.

  The session continued to run through a range of ideas about government—like a magical performer, Katcher wove the intricacies of time and space throughout history, moved from one concept to another, and produced mental gymnastics by going through a wide range of theories of knowledge. If Katcher was a performer at a circus, it would have been the equivalent of juggling balls on the high-wire trapeze, without a safety net to catch any incorrect or inadequate moves.

  It was a riveting lecture and, ninety minutes later, Katcher finished speaking and concluded the session with lightscreen montage of moving images from the time of governments: the footage of President Navarro signing the end of the United States in 2285; the last election in San Andorra during 2517; footage of a range of world presidents of the twenty-second century; the Battle of Agincourt of 1415, recreated from genetic recording and lightcapture; President Mikhail Gorbachev, signing off the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.

  It was an inspirational end to the session, some of the participants left the room before the final screening had completed, but there was the requisite number of participants that remained for further discussion—they could always continue these discussions through a wide range online platforms—the main ones such as Lifebook and BioEd, or the smaller more obscure ones like Tweetie, BunSwang, AliBaba or Cursory—but what better way to soak up the information than to hear the words straight from the the mouth of a former revolutionary.

  It would be another twenty minutes before Katcher palmed off the final curious participant, but while he packed the materials from his presentation away, he noticed Bander approaching him. Banda had just activated the decoder apps for Katcher, so they were both now out of detection of the continuum, and Lifebook and Biocrime.

  After the last meeting with Banda, he knew there was something different about her, but his immediate thought this time was the fact that she hadn’t paid for her attendance today.

  “You’re a no-show and this time you didn’t even register,” Katcher said, as he put away the final material back into his bag.

  “Sometimes the tech fails me,” Banda said, “but I was keen to come along. I’ll get you a meal to make up for it.”

  “Look, it’s getting late, and I really must get going.” Katcher noticed it was close to 16:00, but felt he could do with a coffee and a bite to eat. His body language signaled to Banda that he could be amenable but before he had time to hesitate further, she took control of the conversation.

  “We won’t be long—let’s go. Gloria Jean’s again?”

  Before Katcher knew it, he was walking away from the lecture room, through the quiet atmospherics of the parkland near the community hub, and onto the bustling streets of downtown Berkeley.

  On the way to Gloria Jean’s, there was the idle chat between Katcher and Banda about the end of government and quaint notion of the small star chambers throughout history that decided what was best for the community when, in actual fact, most political leaders had always acted corruptly and in self-interest.

  Fifteen minutes later, Katcher and Banda walked through the doors of Gloria Jean’s: again, Katcher wanted to sit in a space close to other people, but Banda summoned him to the same quiet location where they sat the previous week. It was relatively foolproof—because of Banda’s decoder apps, they were currently off the grid, but Banda still didn’t want to attract any unwanted attention at all. On this occasion, Banda realized she could keep Katcher longer if she was eating as well, so she ordered the burger and fries; Katcher went for the pasta bolognaise. It was kitsch food and synthetic, but it was cheap and affordable.

  The food was made with the usual promptness, delivered by robohelper: they were both hungry and launched into their respective meals, interrupted only by the occasional sip of the synth coffees. Banda wasn’t quite sure how to bypass the intellectual and historical conversations, but half-way through her burger, she decided to stop the banter and went straight to the point of her purpose.

  “John, I’m not here for the conversations, I’m here for the Movement.”

  Katcher had heard this before, from many others, but he related back to his thoughts about something being different about Banda. His initial intuition was that he suspected it might come to this type of point—as it usually did—but he just didn’t know who Banda was. His mind raced through a range of permutations. Is she with Biocrime? Is she a nutter? A rebel without a tribe? Or just lonely? Or is she really from the Movement?

  “Look, I’m not interested,” Katcher said, “never will be. This is just fancy talk, and you know all of our conversations can be retrieved.”

  He knew all of the conversations he made with Banda could technically be retrieved but, nevertheless, decided to at least hear her out. Of course, he’d always be interested in discussions about the Movement but he knew his acts of deniability and refusing these overtures meant he was safe, and less likely to face any sanction from Biocrime in the event he was caught out by some citizen stalker.

  “We’ve worked out a way of bypassing Biocrime,” Banda said.

  “Oh for sure, the most complicated surveillance system in history, and of all the people that have tried to bring it down over the centuries, you’ve managed to work this one out?”

  “No, not just me,” Banda said, as she ignored Katcher’s put down. “We’ve had a team working on this—it’s a decoder that interrupts genetic recording and lightcapture—”

  “—look, I know my history,” Katcher interrupted, not believing a word Banda had uttered. “Many subversives for the Movement have tried disruption over the centuries and they’ve always been caught out. Why would this one be any different?”

  “Because it uses light storage itself and refraction to scatter the DNA logic. We know that some parts of the world are not part of Biocrime—like the universal penal zone—”

  “—like I said,” Katcher said,“ I know my history, that’s a system used in the twenty-seven hundreds and look what happened to the people that tried to install it. Found out, captured, and their bones would now be scattered in a penal zone somewhere, after being carved up by some wild cloned animal or one of the deranged prisoners on those islands. Look, I gotta go, you know some stalker is going to pick up this conversation.”

  “But they won’t. I’m using the decoder now. And I’ve linked one up to you too. My tribe from the Movement picked up on those developments in the past and it works. We’ve been using it for a year now, acting out our subversion on the surface, and none of us have a profile recording with Biocrime.”

  “Yes, but that’s because Biocrime is reeling you in. You can’t escape the continuum, you know that. Nice chatting, but I gotta go.”

  “We’ve also got insider information from Biocrime…”

  This made Katcher pause for thought. Not for long, but enough time for him to consider it a possibility.

  “You’re getting information from Biocrime?—from a Technocrat?—why would they do that? That does not make sense. Biocrime data is the most restricted part of the universe. If they were leaking information, they’d create a high-level taskforce to find out what happened—they’d work out a way, like they always do.”

  “There’s a lot of Technocrats out there that don’t subscribe to all this ‘new world’ crap and the divide between us and them,” Banda said. “You wouldn’t believe how many Technocrats want this whole order of things to change and their number is growing. There’s not many, but they’re as fucked as any other human, infallible, they question their existence—and don’t care if they’re caught out.”

  “Well, I don’t know any Technos, aside from the ones turning up to my sessions,” K
atcher said. “They seem reasonable, but I’ve always assumed the Technocrats that have anything to do with humans are spies and selling information back to Biocrime to supplement their universal income.

  “I still don’t trust it. How do you know it’s not a plant? How do you know that you’re not being reeled in? Biocrime has done that in the past with people like you.”

  “John, we’ve been using it for a year. It works. And we need you to come back to the Movement. What are you going to do, spend your life giving meaningless history lessons to a few groupies and Technocrats that want to boost their BioEd credits—the ones that you think are spies anyway? And you want to be keep being humiliated by Biocrime for the rest of your life?”

  Katcher knew what Banda said was true. He wanted to come back to the Movement, but what good was it if this ended up being a sting, and he got captured and was sent away to a universal penal zone in a remote island? He’s knew Banda was saying it was better to die standing up than from your knees, but this was dangerous territory. But could he also run the risk of being seen as someone who was given a chance to return to the Movement but turned his back on natural humans?

  “I know you’re thinking ‘who is this crazy woman; she’s a spy; she’s a Biocrime agent’,” Banda said. “But check Lifebook, check Biocrime. There’s no profile on me, and there never will be while I use this decoder. Has anything registered on your profile? Search my name—Greta Banda—it’s nowhere. It’s a system that works, I’m telling you.”

  Katcher reached for his cell device, opened the Lifebook app and searched Banda’s profile and history. There was no evidence of her presence at his lecture last week, or their catch-up at Gloria Jean’s. On her live visual page, he could see Banda at her ground-floor apartment watching the lightscreen and reading her tablet, even though she was actually sitting in front of him. He then summoned over onto his own Lifebook profile. On his live visual page, he expected to see the images of him seated with Banda at a table in Gloria Jean’s. Instead, the visual page showed him on the Line 7 autobus, probably heading back home to his apartment. There was no reference or data relating to any conversations he’d had with Banda.