The Biocrime Spectrum (Books 1-4)

by Erik Tabain

  It took a while for Katcher to understand what was happening, and it altered his understanding of the time–space relationship and assumptions of the continuum being the undeniable arbiter of truth and a record of everything that took place in the world.

  There was the saying of the times: ‘If it’s not on Lifebook, it doesn’t exist.’ But what he had just seen was a revelation for him—he knew human experimentation never happened in isolation. Through amorphic resonance and convergence of thinking, if decoding of genetic lightcapture was here in front of him, there would be others that knew about this technology.

  “This is Biocrime technology—straight from my source at Biocrime,” Banda said, in a quieter tone. “We haven’t got the same resources as them, but if we’ve got access to the same technology as them and they don’t know about it, that means we’re one step ahead.”

  “So you say there’s no genetic recording or lightcapture with this device,” Katcher said, impressed but still skeptical. To be sure, he thought it might be possible for the Movement to have an informant within Biocrime—he had come to accept there could be disgruntled Technocrats in the world that would sell Biocrime secrets, but he still thought, on balance, this was an elaborate sting set up either by Biocrime, or a group of citizen stalkers that wanted to cash in on a big catch.

  Conversely, that didn’t make sense to Katcher either. He was a well-known former revolutionary leader—and a potentially dangerous one—but his Biocrime profile had almost no activity on it for almost a decade. He’d been under the radar for a long time, and there was no need for Biocrime to entrap him and send him off to a universal penal zone forever.

  “I know this all this might seem a bit far fetched,” Banda said, “but we need you back at the Movement. You’re the missing link and there’s a groundswell of support to end this domination by Technocrats and oppression of natural humans. Even some Technocrats want it to end.”

  “Well, you’re right—it does sound far fetched,” Katcher said. “You have to do something else to convince me. And how far are you prepared to go?”

  “You’ll see—”

  “—well, until then, get the fuck out of my life.”

  ‘Gloria Jean’s, our millennia’

  Gloria Jean’s was a coffeehouse company founded in the North America Zone in 1979, a cheap low-end establishment that offered hot beverages and small meals. It was one of the few remaining brand names from the franchise era of the late twentieth-century period. Its name became synonymous with longevity and survival, after an endless sequence of scandals relating to exploitation of its workers and international suppliers, provision of foods that comprised high levels of sugar and fat, and relationships with extreme evangelist religious groups.

  In times of corporate troubles, Gloria Jean’s would rehabilitate itself through slick advertising material, and used innovation to future proof itself. In response to constant problems with underpayment of its workers, Gloria Jean’s become the first company to fully mechanize its in-store staff, implementing virtual assistants, robohelpers and automated systems where all of its stores worldwide became staffless. It was also the first franchise foodstore to fully implement synthetic food and coffee.

  In the year 2979, it commissioned the most expensive advertising campaign in history, to recognize its one-thousand year history.

  There’s a thirty-second montage of images from the past thousand years. Like most high corporate advertising, it’s slick clean, highly emotive. It shows families in fun times, a fast moving train, high tech gadgetry, handshakes, and ends with a contemplative forest of tranquility.

  There is no mention of coffee or food, but there is a watermark of the ubiquitous Gloria Jean’s logo in the bottom right hand corner. It conveys emotion, a feeling of what the brand of Gloria Jean’s is—a survivor over many years, through trials and tribulations, but it’s still here, in a world of constant change and still here after over a thousand years. It ends with a fade to black with the words in stark orange and a crimson maroon edge: ‘Gloria Jean’s, our millennia’ and in smaller type: ‘since 1979’.

  Fifteen

  The death zones

  Universal penal zones were the human enigmas of the time. Everyone knew of the universal penal zones but, at the same time, nothing about them; what went on there, how people got there. But they knew about the final outcome, that there was no coming back.

  To fill the void of information, the understanding of universal penal zones grew within the public consciousness: that wild animals roamed these lands; it was lawless and anarchic; the criminals rendered non-citizens by Biocrime were sent there and only lived for a few days before being devoured by these wild animals, or attacked by organized gangs of violent jungle mafia, eaten for food, because supplies were scarce in the universal penal zones. Some theories were that the zones were used for scientific DNA experiments, the creation of hybrid human animals, replicating the imagined creatures of ancient Greek and Roman mythology, where a human head would be coupled with the body of a horse, or the head of a cow coupled with the body of a human.

  There was an opposite school of thought that contemplated universal penal zones as inventions of Biocrime; that they were really zones of paradise, where undesirables and miscreants with no hope of living in mainstream worlds would be sent off to live the life of luxury, much like the old-style dictators from old-world republics that bargained away their incumbency for a secluded life containing all the luxuries for their lasting days. This theory had some traction, due to the belief that Biocrime depended on these types of public and counter-community figures to whip up frenzies about crime, law and order, and create the income needed to support their surveillance system. These citizens were worth more to Biocrime alive than dead.

  There were two universal penal zones—southern and western. The southern penal zone was reserved after the earthquakes of in the year 2314, where the former republic of New Zealand was reduced to rubble and declared unsafe for human life, and the existing population of twelve million in this area was dispersed throughout the Asia and America zones. New Zealand had historically been an earthquake prone zone, where major earthquakes in the 1930s and the 2010s destroyed major cities, and a series of smaller and continuous earthquakes throughout the twenty-third century built up to major quakes throughout 2314, which brought down four major cities, created a series of massive tsunamis and flooded the southern coast region of the Australia Zone.

  The western penal zone was created soon afterwards in the former republic of Madagascar, where a bio-viral outbreak in the year 2321 killed ninety per cent of the island’s eighty-two million people—the remaining people were moved to a quarantine zone in the Western Africa Zone, inoculated and dispersed to other African zones, and the Eurasia Zone. Madagascar had developed into a sophisticated metropolis zone and a center of creative ideas for the future of humanity—the capital of the zone, Antananarivo, had become a diplomatic zone for resolving international conflicts and dilemmas, in a similar way how the city of Reykjavik in the Icelandic Zone was used to negotiate nuclear arms reductions between the United States of America and the Soviet Union during the cold wars of the late twentieth century.

  The bio-viral outbreak was mysterious, but it was widely regarded a rogue scientist entrepreneur had instigated a series of surreptitious biological experiments with exotic animals on the island, with extracted DNA from bones of animals over three million years old—from the mainland Africa Zone—and rendered the land unlivable for a period of almost two hundred years, before the zone became fully free from the virus. The virus was related to an encephalitic auto-immune disease that caused brain synapses to stop connecting with each other, and caused chemical imbalances in the relationship between acetylcholine and cholinesterase in the body muscles, creating a fast-tracked version of motor-neuron disease and causing victims to die within a matter of days. It afflicted humans and animals in a similar way, and was considered one of the greatest epidemiological crises in huma
n history, rivaling the bubonic plague from the middle ages, and the Spanish version of influenza during 1918.

  The northern part of Madagascar was retained as a quarantine zone until the remaining population of around eight million were inoculated and moved to other zones around the world. Due to the nature and unknown properties of the virus, the entire island was abandoned and monitored remotely through soil samples collected by autonomous robohelpers, but the entire island remained as an open grave site, with the rotting carcasses of millions of human and animal bodies left behind where they fell.

  Aerial footage from the western penal zone acquired through drone cameras showed that through a combination of precipitation, humidity and hot temperatures, metropolis areas had naturally crumbled through weather and fast growing weeds and other arboreal matter encompassing the former cities, and remained a biohazard for many years after it was cleared of the remaining human population.

  After depopulation, Biocrime initiated a process of land acquisition in the southern and western penal zones—a painstaking but relatively cheap process that was completed over a ten-year period. It was much easier in the western penal zone, as many generations of land owners had perished during the viral outbreak, but surviving landowners were happy to hand over their titles and recoup whatever they could for otherwise worthless land. Biocrime’s longer term corporate strategy was to seek land masses away from the general citizen population, and instigate penal zones where it was possible to bypass the world memory bank and lightcapture systems, and contiguous land masses that were now free of populations, such as the former republics of New Zealand and Madagascar, were perfect.

  The existing prison zones on mainlands were expensive to operate, manage and maintain, and zones where non-citizens could be deported to and left to fend for themselves without worry was the perfect solution for Biocrime. For Biocrime, these zones were out of sight, out of mind. And, most importantly, at little cost.

  As Biocrime already had crowd authorization to do as they pleased with existing criminals, they completed the software exclusion areas to bypass the world memory bank and lightcapture, and gradually deported mainland non-citizen detainees, initially to the southern penal zone and, after the biohazard had cleared, to the western penal zone.

  Of course, Biocrime kept data on the non-citizens that were deported to these universal penal zones but that was the extent of their interest. The two zones were redacted from satellite imagery and because the zones were also excluded from the continuum, very few people on the planet knew what was happening in these areas.

  It was expected that with no skill in being able to survive, no access to technology, or organize themselves to escape from these zones, detainees would quickly perish.

  The deportations commenced in the early 2600s and within one hundred years, all twenty-two million of the world’s non-citizen criminal population had been moved to the universal penal zone, and the prisons that previously housed the non-citizens were sold off for industrial development or apartment buildings, with some prisons retained for short-term detention zones which were the stage before deportation, if it was deemed a detainee could not be rehabilitated, or was a repeat offender.

  Permanent physical and electronic surveillance was maintained along the coastlines of these two universal penal zones, just on the periphery of the world memory bank exclusion area, but with only around one hundred non-citizens managing to work out a way of getting themselves off the zones each year, the physical surveillance was outsourced to thrillseeker bounty hunters, usually crowd funded to the tune of €25,000 per person, where they could fly off from the either the Australia or Africa zone in solo-propeller flight units, loaded with ammunition, and shoot the offenders dead with high range laser bullets. Even with the costs of flight units and laser bullets, and the twenty per cent commission with Biocrime, it was easy prey and possible to make a €15,000 profit, and as the escapees usually tried to escape the penal zones in groups, it was a lucrative trade.

  Although the Biocrime motto was ‘Do not kill. Do no evil’, non-citizens were not considered remotely as human. They had been decommissioned and deauthorised and were officially dead, so any Technocrat involved in thrillseeker bounty work that involved killing was legally covered, and was essentially killing someone that was already deemed to be dead anyway. And, besides, they were non-citizens that had tried to upend and destroy the social order of the world.

  Over a four-hundred year period, Biocrime estimated that at any given time, there were around ten thousand living in each of the universal penal zones, based on the amount of non-citizens that had been deported there, around five-hundred million over four-hundred years, and the likely rate of survival of one month.

  Not even Biocrime knew exactly what went on in these universal penal zones, but with the bio-viral heritage in the western penal zone, the constant structural instability of the southern penal zone and the introduction of several species of wildlife, the survival rate was very low.

  Sixteen

  An evil plan

  Banda knew Katcher was keen to return to the revolutionary guard, but he wasn’t going to jump into a two-time chance meeting with an unknown who presented information to him that seemed far-fetched, as well as getting him caught up with Biocrime and a possible deportation, if it didn’t come off.

  He probably thought she was a middle-ager that was part of a young punk do-gooder society, a disorganized rabble big on talk but low on action, and when the going got tough, would retreat and only think about their universal incomes and how to protect themselves, rather than actually promoting the Movement.

  Katcher was selfless—Banda thought of herself in the same way too, but she needed to carry out an act that would prove her bona fides to him. Nothing was ever officially proven, but the rumors of Katcher killing Technocrats and using incendiaries in key locations was always held in high regard within the Movement—not so much the act of killing but the fact that the revolutionary leader was prepared to lead from the front and do whatever it took to reach the goals of the revolution and achieve the social change that would matter to all people, not just the select few.

  Katcher had told her to ‘get the fuck’ out of his life just the previous afternoon, but Banda was determined to prove to Katcher that she was a real member of the Movement, a real revolutionary and one committed to upending the current social system.

  As the morning light peered through Banda’s window again, she contemplated her recent conversations with Katcher and planned her next course of actions. As usual, she awoke early, while Kransich caught up on some extra sleep next to her. Her mind fluctuated between her meetings with Katcher and the way it ended yesterday afternoon, and her relationship with Kransich, and whether it was as beneficial as she liked to think it was.

  He had some new material for her—updates about the impending Anika-6 inspection and software patches for a beta surveillance program Biocrime had instigated: in return, Kransich asked for €10,000 in crypto-currency. Banda thought it was a too high, but through her personal private network, she transferred the amount while he slept. She thought about how many private lives Kransich had, and what he did with all the black-market currency he’d been provided with. He was on a decoded system, different to Banda’s system, but decoded nevertheless, so she could never search and find out what he was up to—Kransich said he supported his ‘biological’ mother in a far away zone, but that would involve crypto-market support on the recipient side, so she wasn’t sure how he could actually do this.

  Banda was not sure how true his story was, as she assumed he was cloned from a central source over a thousand years old, but whether he’d been tricked in an elaborate scam or somehow engaged in military trades, she didn’t really care too much about what he did with the crypto-currency. But knowing he was caring for his biological mother—even if wasn’t true—meant that Kransich was emotionally closer to the Movement than most other Technocrats would be. Kransich told Banda that he actively so
ught his biological mother—something very few Technocrats would do—several years ago through a detailed scanning and investigative process through egg donation databanks, and became despondent to see that she was in a decrepit state in a remote zone in Europe. Banda felt Kransich knew what it is to be human, and even though he was a mercenary selling Biocrime secrets, she felt he was a safe bet.

  She waited until Kransich left—he was annoyingly slow this morning—and she wanted to get to Anika-6 so she could announce to Weller, her grand plan to entice Katcher back to the Movement, and the sooner she went down there, the better. Kransich finally left after the two exchanged farewells, and she prepared her datacard with the new material from Biocrime.

  With Kransich gone, she switched on her decoder app and, after she left the room, her Lifebook Live page departed from real-life, and transitioned into fabrication mode. The fabricated visual footage showed that she was still in her apartment, and the algorithm made subtle changes to the footage, so it didn’t look like an inane loop of inactivity.

  She messaged Weller about her impending arrival and slithered through the tubing to get to the underground cavern. It was a thirty-minute journey through the tunnel to get to Anika-6 and, after she travelled through the security passages and unlocked the tungsten and titanium control door, she was inside control central and greeted by the typically enthusiastic Weller.