The Biocrime Spectrum (Books 1-4)

by Erik Tabain

  “Citizens Lestre and Lumbardo,” the voice said from behind the desk, as they approached the concierge. “You’re here for your 14:00 meeting with Officer Capone?”

  It was a perfunctory personal engagement. The concierge was actually a hologram and had the details of Lestre and Lumbardo on ‘his’ lightscreen as soon they walked through the entrance to the building, including the high level nature of their talks and the instruction for them to enter through the secret de-engagement zone.

  “Certainly is,” Lestre answered.

  “For this level meeting,” the concierge said, “we’ll have to de-engage you, please follow our customer service officer, and she’ll go through the procedure with you.”

  The concierge was ‘George’. He had been programmed to accept around twelve million responses and could perform rudimentary tasks such as accept the arrival of attendees, and send voice and text messages to whoever needed to receive them. It was a fail-safe system, and if there was an instruction or command that ‘George’ couldn’t understand, there was a voice autoresponder with the message: ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t resolve this for you right now. I’ve sent a message to a customer service officer, who will personally come here and deal with your issue shortly,” followed by a prompt for a real person to appear to deal with more difficult problems.

  Today, it was ‘George’, and he would be in his position for two months. Holographic assistants were the norm for many ‘meet-and-greet’ situations in reception areas, far cheaper than a real person, and available to perform these tasks all year round. When ‘George’ finished his two-month period, ‘Emilia’ would return. Of course, the hologram could technically change every minute of the day, but having the one hologram for several months gave the appearance of continuity and stability for Biocrime.

  Being a former employee with Biocrime, Lestre had been in this building before, but not to this level. The de-engagement ‘George’ referred to was where visitors needed to change into the black and burnt orange vests, so none of their conversations could be recorded by the world memory bank and remained undetectable, primarily to protect Biocrime.

  The customer service officer greeted Lestre and Lumbardo and led them to two small cubicles containing vests in their size, and locks matched to their genetic code. Once they stripped and changed into their vests, the customer service officer lead them to a special security zone, where they were approached by Capone, dressed in a similar type of vest, but with the extra golden badge to indicate his superiority, next to his embroidered name: ‘CAPONE, D’. Impressive.

  They courteously exchanged handshakes and moved into a secure room. After a minute or two of banal niceties and introduction to the synthetic cream biscuits and tea, Capone moved onto the business at hand.

  “First of all, nothing discussed in this meeting happened. Never did, never will. Like everything else in this building, it’s not recorded, it’s outside of the realm of Biocrime and anyone else. We’ve only got you in here because of your history and we think you’re about two-hundred per cent safe.”

  “And if we did say anything on the outside,” Lestre said, “you’ve got plausible deniability. Is that right?”

  “You got it. Lumbardo? I’ve seen you on Lifebook—you didn’t come in wearing your advertising today?”

  It was partially to break the ice, but Capone disliked the wearable advertising as much as Lestre.

  “These seem to be important citizen matters,” Lumbardo said, “and even I’ve got my levels of standard. But don’t worry, as soon as I get back into my clothes, they’re being switched on. A man’s got to earn his money somehow.”

  Capone got the conversation back on track. “Okay, it’s about the Anza Vista bombing—as we like to say: we. have. a. situation. There’s no data recording or evidence of who planted the bomb.”

  “But you’ve already got the guys,” Lumbardo said, trying not to sound too naïve. “They’re already on the crowd trial.”

  He knew of the stitch ups that happened in the past and some of the flaws within the Biocrime software, but they occurred because of software glitches, rather than a deliberate bypass of the system.

  “We’ve checked all the systems, there’s no record of a glitch, no software malfunction, nothing on the surveillance cameras—although the ones to the front entrance were broken—no-one saw a thing. Not one citizen. Now, the camera stuff and no-one seeing anything—it was late afternoon, and it was raining heavily—that can easily be put down to chance, but genetic recording through the continuum and the memory bank: it’s infallible—or meant to be infallible.”

  “But we’re not software people,” Lestre said. “I mean, we could analyze and report—”

  “—no, it’s not that,” Capone said. “Both of you are top-line stalkers—the best in the field, the top earners. We need top-line specialist surveillance—which you’ll be rewarded well for, as well as any bounty proceeds.”

  “Sure,” Lumbardo said. “We can do that, but what other information do you have? Any ideas of what actually went wrong?”

  “The upshot is this,” Capone said. “We have DNA exclusion zones, most notably, the two penal zones in the west and south, that avoid genetic capture. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the DNA in those regions, we just don’t want to know what goes on in the penal zones, and we don’t want anyone else to know.

  “A large part of our Biocrime headquarters is also outside of genetic capture, for security reasons. Somehow, details of our software program have been sold for €5 million—we know that much, but we don’t know who did it. Or why.

  “We had scant details about the whole thing and weren’t too sure if it was real or not, but we started our ‘due diligence’ about six months ago. Nothing happening during this time until now, and the bombing at Anza Vista confirmed our suspicions.”

  “I’m not a techno,” Lumbardo said, “but I thought this would be the last place on earth to be excluded from the continuum.” He was trying hard to not sound too naïve, but the rumors of the Biocrime headquarters exclusion from the world memory bank, while not rife, were out there. And he certainly knew about insider corruption. But still, news on this level was a surprise.

  “There’s two-thousand people that work in our exclusion zones here,” Capone said, “and they’re all Technocrats. We’ve searched and found nothing so far and we’re down to the last three-hundred possibilities—we had to use traditional methods, you know, sit down, talk, ask questions, where were you, that sort of thing. We’re all Technocrats in here, we’re not expecting this type of thing to happen.”

  “We can work on surveillance,” Lestre said, “that’s our field, but three hundred Technocrats that don’t have a Biocrime profile? That’s quite a bit of work.”

  “Since the bombing, we’ve fast-tracked the vetting of the remaining three-hundred. We can’t raise suspicions, so it might be a slow process, but we’ll get there. We’ll find whoever is behind this.”

  Nineteen

  The next move

  In his small apartment room, Katcher watched the rolling coverage of the Anza Vista bombing on his lightscreen. Of course, he knew about it as soon as everybody else did—this was big news—and he was entranced by the events as much as anyone else.

  He occasionally switched to hologram mode for the complete interactive process but his mind was elsewhere, pondering what this meant and who could be behind it. He knew there were already suspects being crowd trialed and with the usual hysteria attached to these type of cases, they’d be found guilty, but he also knew Biocrime fabricated information about suspects and wondered if these were the real people behind the bombing.

  He also wondered if this was the type of event Banda would concoct to ‘prove’ her credentials to him. But it was extreme behavior to destroy a building and kill six-hundred Technocrats to prove a point.

  Katcher’s mind wandered over to the contents of his next lecture for the next session: Technology change, social markets and
the labor reforms of the 2500s. He was like a popstar preparing to play their best songs on a stage: this lecture subject was old, and he knew the contents backwards and forwards. He found it passé and perennially boring, but it would keep his crowd happy and could even pull in a few extra attendees on the day. And it could give him a chance to ask Banda a few questions—if she actually turned up.

  The community hub was the usual hive of activity, the communal large format lightscreen displayed the ongoing coverage and statistics of the crowd trial of the East End Bombers. The coverage contained snippets of childhood visual footage of one of the suspects—Eva Alvarez—presumably put up by her crowd defense. For every crowd trial, there was all types of evidence put forward to convince the citizen crowd, one way or another. At the bottom of the lightscreen display, it showed the time of 13:58 and, like ants scurrying away when they’ve been disturbed, citizens moved off to their respective sessions, including the forty-eight destined for Katcher’s lecture.

  It was the standard process—at the time of 14:00, some late-comers were still entering the room. Katcher was always prepared fifteen minutes before the lectures commenced and he couldn’t quite understand if he could make plans to arrive on time, why everyone else in the universe couldn’t get their act together to do the same. He waited a few more minutes, drank from a small bottle of water, quietly cleared his throat before he switched on the sound and image presentation, and stood up to commence his talk.

  “Welcome and thanks for being here, today we look at technological change…”

  Katcher’s mind drifted off while his words were coming out. His mouth was on autopilot, and he didn’t even start off with the required quirky remark to engage his audience. That might get him a slight mark down from the class in his crowd ratings on BioEd, but he wasn’t concerned.

  He could see Banda in the back row of the seats, and wondering if there might be any further light she could shed on the Anza Vista bombings. He was thinking: she said she’d do something to convince me. Could this be it? She said our genetic data couldn’t be captured, and it hasn’t been. None of our liaisons have appeared on Lifebook or my Biocrime profile. Is it true? Is she a plant? If she isn’t a plant, who’s behind this?

  The lecture raced through its ninety-minute allocation. Katcher knew it wasn’t his greatest performance, but the sound and audio show that was part of his presentation made up for it.

  He went through the motions of chit-chat with the attendees, but he didn’t want to rush or look like he was agitated. It was Banda he wanted to talk to, but she would have to wait.

  After the last attendee had departed, Banda approached Katcher while he packed up his lightscreen and cell device.

  “Can we talk?” asked Katcher.

  Banda knew Katcher was referring to the decoder app, and nodded to indicate that both of them had moved into off-grid and all of their actions from now on wouldn’t be detected by Lifebook.

  “It’s all set,” Banda said. “And I’ve got something to show you—but it’s at my apartment.”

  “Well, let’s get out of here.”

  Banda and Katcher left the community hub, and walked briskly towards the autotram stop. There was almost no exchange of words between the pair and, this time, there was no Gloria Jean’s. Katcher realized something was up—some big news and possibly the link he needed to find a way back to his revolutionary path.

  They boarded the autotram and, after a thirty-minute journey, alighted at South San Francisco, and near the back of the underground autotram station was a small dark pathway surrounded by rats and sewerage, leading to a slightly larger tunnel. There were good reasons why nobody used it.

  They waited until there was no-one left at the station and Banda lead Katcher through to the dark pathway—it was difficult to avoid the stench of sewage, collections of rotting fruit, dead bird carcasses and rat excrement—but after fifteen minutes, they made to the underground of her apartment. They crawled through another small hole which exited into the middle of Banda’s laundry bathroom, and climbed up through a small floor door.

  “It’s a little bit tough getting through,” Banda said, “but it’s the best way. Coming here on street level might have been a bit difficult. Come on, you might be interested in this.”

  Banda wiped her feet and instructed Katcher to do the same. They moved to the loungeroom where Banda switched on her lightscreen and displayed her appropriated Lifebook Live stream, which screened the fabricated live footage from her apartment. It showed her sitting in this same space, eating from a bowl of soba noodles, and swiping on her lightscreen. This was an extension of what Banda had shown this to him during their last meeting at Gloria Jean’s, and Katcher was beginning to understand—Lifebook Live always showed live actual footage, but the lightscreen was showing something completely different and there was no sign of Katcher on the screen. This was the work of the decoder and emulator, the apps constructed by Weller, and Katcher was seeing the results of it.

  “I told you we could bypass Biocrime—how many times do I need to tell you? I’m taking a shower—you might also be interested in this.”

  Banda summoned up her visual recording of the Anza Vista bombing through her private personal network and Katcher started to watch on the lightscreen, as Banda went back to the bathroom. It was a recording of the entire event, from the time Banda walked towards the apartment block in the Richmond East End in the pouring rain, positioned the Semtex explosive package in the garbage recycling unit, and walked away to view the explosion.

  Katcher scanned through the footage, ignoring the stench he acquired by travelling through the tunnel—he looked at the footage forwards and backwards, and viewed it in three-sixty-degree mode—he could see a semi-disguised face, but could still make out that it was Banda. He knew this type of footage could be fabricated through enhanced computer graphics systems, but that took time and wouldn’t be possible to produce unless there was a large team of coders—something Biocrime could do if they were trying to deceive him, but certainly not within a day or two.

  Katcher alternated between the Banda’s lightscreen and his own Lifebook Live stream on his cell device. The stream showed him in his own apartment preparing a meal in his food processor—even though he was miles away from there. Banda had bypassed the continuum and Biocrime through the decoder and emulator apps—he still wasn’t a hundred per cent sure how this was happening but the proof of her claims was right in front of him.

  Banda, finished her shower and came back into the room, where she saw Katcher studying the footage from the bombing and alternating between the lightscreen and checking his cell device.

  “Yeah, that was me. I’m the East End Bomber, and there’s no trace back to me. And there’s no sign of you either on Lifebook. You’re at your apartment—apparently—cooking up a meal. Convinced?”

  “Well, who’s behind this tribe and how is it all being operated?” asked Katcher.

  “There’s a team of us,” Banda said, “as well as some of your old team.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like Mike Scanlen and Maria Renalda. That’s who.”

  Katcher was initially confused, before he recalibrated his mind to focus on those two names. The narcotic concoction hidden in his daily BanPro mixture had muddled parts of his memory matrix and he needed to concentrate fully to process this information from Banda. He hadn’t seen or heard anything about Scanlen or Renalda since his crowd case over a decade ago. He further focused his memory and recalled he had assumed Scanlen had been deported to a universal penal zone and Renalda had died after being blacklisted for her work on his crowd trial.

  “Mike and Maria?” said Katcher, exasperated. “But they’re both dead. Aren’t they? Or at least Maria is.”

  “Nope, both alive,” said Banda. “Mike went underground, and we staged Maria’s death. As I said, we’re organized and we’ll got highly motivated and highly active people working with us. We’ve got high-level tech and coding facilities av
ailable, our alternative networks, all underground. Mike and Maria are our brains trust.”

  Katcher was still processing the details provided by Banda, taking moments to extract memories from that hadn’t been affected by the narcotics.

  “I know this is hard to piece all together,” said Banda, “especially with that shit Biocrime puts in your breakfast every morning.”

  “What shit?” asked Katcher.

  “The shit Biocrime has been using to make you forget over the past ten years,” said Banda, “the shit that’s been frying part of your brain. They used it on a lot of people like you—mental torture, hallucinations. It’s in the BanPro you have every morning.”

  “That sweet banana drink?”

  “Laced with all sorts of crap, compliments of Biocrime—throw it down the sink. Here…” said Banda, as she threw a sachet of thin white powder towards Katcher. “Cocaine. Old millennium drugs. Use this for your habit, stop using the BanPro, and what I’m saying will be easier to comprehend.”

  Katcher took the sachet and hid it in his pocket. Feeling foolish and berated, he moved the conversation back to Scanlen and Renalda.

  “Mike and Maria alive?” said Katcher. “This is something I did not expect. But Biocrime is supposed to be infallible, but a underground ragtag team has managed to beat the system?”

  “Fuck, stop underestimated what we can do and thinking about us as ‘ragtag’, shouted Banda. “Biocrime’s a big heavy unit, but a lot of it is based on a façade and stupid propaganda. You’ve seen it for yourself. Idiot Technocrat ‘stalkers’ trying to make ends meet by detecting useless crimes and searching for the big hit. And when Biocrime can’t fit the bill, they make shit up. Like they did on Scanlen and Renalda—and the East End Bombers.

  “You’ve seen the footage—it was me, not some low-life riff-raff—Biocrime is fallible, and we’ve got a way we can take it down.”