The Biocrime Spectrum (Books 1-4)

by Erik Tabain

  Katcher was taking his time to allow this information to sink in, but the news about Scanlen and Renalda still being alive took the longest. If they really were still alive, this could be the grand opportunity to kick-start the revolution again.

  “You can see Scanlen and Renalda now if you want,” Banda said. She sent a message through her personal private network to Scanlen and Renalda, informing them Katcher was with her. They were as surprised as Katcher was, but they responded to say they were ready and would be in Anika-6 cavern soon.

  Katcher wasn’t expecting this. Two hours ago, he was presenting a lecture to a groups of revolutionary wannabes and naïve activists. But now he was back to the real thing, possibly meeting with the people that saved his life—the ones he thought were dead—and, perhaps, taking him back on the pathway to his true revolutionary redemption.

  ‘Going underground’, historically, had been the main metaphoric catchcry of counter-establishment movements, and any actions and activities deemed to be outside of mainstream life, subversive, or standing in the way of human progress, were usually labeled as underground movements.

  Literally going underground was a lot more difficult. Even to this day, exploration under the surface of the earth—especially underwater—had been difficult; the need to drill, dig, and move large sections of rock and soil always proved to be a major deterrent for creating an existence for humans under the earth. But it was possible.

  Resistance movements during times of war, usually against large scale oppressors, created underground networks where they could launch attacks, most notably, the French resistance movements during the worlds wars, and the Vietnam War in the twentieth century.

  The Movement was lucky: because of the centuries of water and fuel extraction from the crust of the earth, there were many pockets of the underground that were empty caverns—soulless and airless, but still livable if the right conditions were met. There was a swathe of tunnels under the city of San Francisco, many were flooded, many were unknown, and some were still radioactive, like the ones currently used in Anika-6.

  Banda and Katcher left the apartment and moved through the first part of the tunnel, in commando crawl mode, and reached the circular tunnel where they could then comfortably walk upright and be guided by Banda’s lightpen.

  “Bet you weren’t expecting this today were you,” Banda said.

  “I’m still half-expecting all of this to be just a big set up. If it is, you’re pretty good at it.” Katcher walked his hand across the lining of the tunnel, feeling the smooth surface of the walls. “What’s this made of?”

  “It’s lead–plutonium mixed in with a hard plaster,” Banda said. “It’s solid as shit, but moves with earthquake activity and can’t be detected by above-ground sonar scanners. Compliments of our good friends at Biocrime.”

  “Through your contact? What’s in it for him?”

  “He’s kinda going through some type of existential crisis, the ‘what does it mean to be human’ type of crisis. Well, has been for three years. He sees the whole point of giving me the secrets as a game, he loses if he gets caught. And he doesn’t want to lose.”

  They were winding down through the circular tunnel, and had reached about two-hundred yards below the surface, with about another ten minutes of walking left to go. Katcher kept up with the questions: he was intrigued about this underground network and wanted to know more, but he was really more intrigued about Scanlen and Renalda. Could they really still be around after all these years? Will they really be there? Or are they now with Biocrime, trying to entrap people like him?

  “Just another few more minutes to go,” Banda said, as she motioned with her lightpen.

  It was getting warmer as they went further down into the underground—generally, it was around fifteen degrees warmer for every mile beneath the surface. It wasn’t unpleasant, but Katcher felt that he was running out of air—not quite gasping, but almost.

  “Not much air down here,” Katcher said. “How do you all survive down here?”

  “It’s a combination of thin tubing to the outside world and artificial air. Another secret from Biocrime—it’s probably not as clean as their formula, but it does the job. We don’t have anything in the circular tunnel, that’s why you’re feeling it. But behind the control door, it’s all fine. There’s air pressure issues and needing to come up to the surface occasionally for the sake of keeping sanity, but that’s about it.”

  They reached the end of the tunnel and came across the thick circular control door made from tungsten and titanium. Banda deactivated the DNA lock to the door, which led them into the vestibule. After she checked the lock to the control door, Banda decoded the vestibule door and led Katcher into Anika-6 for the first time.

  Katcher’s first introduction to Anika-6 was spectacular. It was a large cavern with low-level light, a vast and spectacular collection of stalactites and stalagmites, and a series of white circus-tent like structures dispersed throughout the cavern floor. He couldn’t see very much, but his first impressions were of high-tech sophistication, part war-room, part secret society.

  The first person he saw in the cavern was Weller, the technical wunderkind.

  “This is Maverick Weller,” Banda said, “head of our tech team.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Weller said as he outstretched his hand to make the link with Katcher. “Welcome to our world—it’s taken us a while to create, but it’s safe and we want you to be a part of it.”

  “I had no idea you could do this,” Katcher said. “This is where you created the decoder and all of your counter-surveillance work?”

  “You got it. Piece by piece, we’ve put it all together. A combination of having some brilliant people down here, a bit of hard work and luck, and the materials Greta’s managed to get from Biocrime.”

  With Banda and Weller, he moved through different tents, and came across an astonishing array of high-tech machinery and computer gadgetry, large format lightscreens, most of which were monitored and operated by the vast collection of revolutionaries Banda mentioned to Katcher, the ones that wanted to change the world and end the rule of the Technocrats.

  They all knew who Katcher was: some shook his hands, and the more naïve ones, not knowing exactly what to do, saluted. They felt their commander-in-chief was now back with them—they’d been waiting for this day for a long time.

  Katcher was impressed with Anika-6, with all of its technological sophistication and the collection of committed adherents. But he was getting impatient—as fantastic as this scene was, he wanted to see Scanlen and Renalda and he’d continue to hold his seeds of doubt until he was re-united with them.

  He had a number of mixed emotions. He’d never been here before; he’d never met any of these people before, and it was the strangest world and most unimaginable he’d ever come across. But yet, he felt safe and secure. He felt like he was home.

  Katcher looked at his cell device—it was just after 18:00, he hadn’t eaten and he was hungry.

  “I guess there’s no Gloria’s down here,” Katcher said to Banda.

  “No, I don’t think so. I’ve organized for some food—and Scanlen and Renalda are on their way. They’re just in the tents in the next cavern, but we wanted you to meet some of tribe and get an idea of what we’re capable of down here.”

  The quality of food processors in Anika-6 wasn’t as great as the ones on the surface—they used a much lower level of energy and were of a much smaller size. Banda set the food processor to prepare two bowls of goulash and the familiar hum of the machine preparing a meal commenced. The fake meat would feel rubbery, and the liquid would have the taste of a tinge of plastic. But it would still be nutritious and quite edible, even if the flavors were not quite right.

  The physical features of people change over time, especially when they start to reach their older years. Sometimes, they became unrecognizable, even if their character remained the same. There were numerous theories related to how the psychiatry of
the mind changed as a person aged but the consensus was: after the first seven years of life, essentially, a person remained the same, even if knowledge and experience provided them with increased levels of wisdom.

  Scanlen and Renalda were in their early-forties when Katcher last saw them, and he wondered what they would look like now and how much they’d changed. He concentrated on the scattered images he had of them, certain he could still retrieve some semblance of his memory, distorted by years of swallowing the BanPro mixture provided by Biocrime.

  He was recalibrating his mind to accept they were not dead, as he had believed for many years, and a realization that his political dreams could be back on track. Katcher was finishing up his meal in a larger tent with Banda when Scanlen and Renalda arrived and made their entrance.

  “Jonathan?”

  There is a curious and clinical moment for people that haven’t seen each other for a long time when they fix eyes on each other, that momentary assessment of their respective physical features, compared with their preceding memories of those people that became fixed in time. In that instance, Katcher focused deeply and collated his memories of Scanlen and Renalda—a strong presence, both of solid build and stature, exuberant—and quickly compared with the here and now. They seemed more gaunt than they were a decade ago, Renalda now had grey hair and Scanlen had none, possibly the effects of living underground for a very long time. But their presence and character was still there.

  For Scanlen and Renalda, Katcher had not changed much as all. The physical change in people from their mid-thirties to mid-forties wasn’t as severe, but they’d seen Katcher televisually almost on a daily basis through his Biocrime and Lifebook profiles so, to them, the visible change wasn’t as significant.

  The three engaged in a group embrace, and processed the fact that they hadn’t seen each other for a long time, and that Katcher assumed they were both dead. As they released the embrace, they looked at each other, the momentary comparison with decade-old memories was replaced by what they could now see in front of them with their own eyes.

  “I wasn’t sure about you Mike,” Katcher said, still piecing together his thoughts and memories. “But I knew you were dead Maria, I saw your funeral on Lifebook.”

  “Well, just shows you can’t believe everything you read—or see,” Renalda said. “It was miserable for me up there. Being in the Movement and getting you off the crowd show trial wasn’t going to work for me. So I thought it was better to go off-grid and go one step further underground.”

  “It wasn’t exactly a show trial,” Katcher responded. “I committed those crimes, but you led the defense too well. Everyone hated that, lost money on the trial, Biocrime lost out. And Mike? What happened?”

  “I just decided to go away from the surface. As soon as you were arrested, we thought you were going to a penal zone for sure. By the time the crowd trial was over, and you weren’t deported, we were already half-way through the underground process.

  “We had links with a few off-gridders, and people like Banda, and created smaller tribe cells underground, linked with a larger tribe above ground. I just ‘died’ naturally. I hadn’t been seen by anyone for years, no Lifebook, no continuum, no genetic recording. I was dead to the world.”

  “So how long has this set-up been operating for?” asked Katcher.

  “We started about ten years ago, but it’s been operational for about eight, and we achieved the current capacity about three years ago. The decoder was the biggest breakthrough about a year ago. Maria and I have been above ground a few times—undetected—and we think the decoder can work permanently. Not sure how you live up there. Same shitty control by the Technocrats, same day-to-day mundanity.”

  “Well, not sure how you live down here,” Katcher said. “That goulash was terrible…”

  “Funny John,” Renalda snapped. “We’re the ones trying to get this revolution underway, and you’re complaining about the goulash? It’s not too bad down here, once you get used to it. We have sunpills each day, exercise areas. If you squint a little bit and accept the food, it’s almost like living on the surface.”

  “And if you accept the poor air quality, water leakages, the radioactive material, the damp and occasional rat,” added Mike, “it’s also not too bad. Anyway, let’s get down to some business.”

  It approached 19:00 and both Banda and Katcher needed to get back to their apartments soon. The emulator app and its algorithmic bypass could keep deceiving Lifebook for a certain period of time but if the deception went for too long, it could raise suspicions. Katcher’s cell device didn’t work down in the underground, so he asked to look at his Lifebook profile on a lightscreen. Banda summoned up his Lifebook profile and he saw visuals of himself reading from his mini lightscreen device, eating from a bowl of Singapore noodles—one of his favorite meals. Banda assured him their decoder and emulator apps created by Weller was safe, secure and foolproof. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, Katcher was in his apartment alone, and minding his own business.

  Through his many readings of historical revolutions and in-depth analysis of philosophers and theorists such as Sun Tzu, Niccolò Machiavelli, Carl von Clausewitz, Rosa Luxemburg and Paul Virilio, Katcher understood that revolutionary thought needed to have a praxis with practical actions through group activity. While overthrow of an oppressive system needed to have popular movement of the masses, the seeds of dissent needed to start small and Katcher, like many others in the Movement, subscribed to the somewhat naïve belief that only five people were needed to commence a revolution.

  But which five people? He knew Scanlen and Renalda were as committed as he was, but he barely knew Banda, and he’d only met Weller a few hours before.

  Katcher, Banda, Scanlen and Renalda sat at the table inside another tent, surrounded by lightscreens and links to the outside world, providing every key piece of data imaginable. Weller soon joined them and the five were ready to commence strategic talks and get Katcher up to speed with what they could do from their underground war room.

  Although they felt like equals, Katcher the revolutionary leader had returned, and they felt like the collective was already greater than the sum of its parts. It couldn’t work without Katcher, and now he was back. Katcher commenced the talks, and they took turns in discussing how to take back the city by strategy, interspersed with questions about how they all arrived at this point.

  It was 23:00, but without sunlight throughout the day, it was impossible to have a feeling for the time. The melanin produced by the skin when exposed to sunlight lets the body know when daylight ends and night commences, but there was nothing down in the underground to indicate the demarcation between the two phases. The sunpills they ate provided the body with its requisite vitamin D, but that didn’t help to keep their circadian rhythms flowing correctly.

  All up, it was four hours of discussion about how to move the revolution forward, a range of tactics and strategies: it wasn’t everything, but it was a start. Technically, it didn’t really matter what time Banda and Katcher resurfaced, as far as their body clocks were concerned, but in the back of their mind was the anxiety about their return, in case of any issues with Lifebook and the off-chance of someone detecting the visual recording of Katcher on his stream was a fabrication. Banda was sure the algorithm was permanent but Katcher, being new to this system, wanted to be sure. He now had control of his decoder and emulator apps—he’d rather have a seamless decoding synchronized to his emotional responses, just like the audio speakers in his apartment, but this system created by the Movement used older technology, so he had to remember to switch the decoder app on and off.

  Katcher wanted to spend one more day on the surface and back in his apartment to soak up the day and accumulate his thoughts. Afterall, returning to the surface was where they would all have to come back to if they wanted to reclaim their world.

  It was an eventful day and although buzzing with the excitement from the evening’s events, Katcher was tiring
quickly. After the goodbyes with Renalda, Scanlen and Weller, Banda and Katcher left Anika-6, entered the vestibule and began the journey up through the circular tunnel. It was a steep incline and because of the low levels of oxygen, they had to venture slowly. Banda’s lightpen guided the way, and she could feel Katcher’s relief and satisfaction.

  “I told you it would work out,” Banda said smugly.

  “I had to be careful. I didn’t know who you were, and I’ve had similar approaches before from ‘groupies’.”

  “So I’m a groupie? Gosh, I thought I presented myself as a self-respecting revolutionary intellectual.”

  “I sensed you were different but how was I to know? All those people that come to my lectures? They’re deluded inner-city street rat wannabes that want to see themselves close to some kinda sub-culture and revolution, so they can tell their friends. They’ve just got no idea about the world.”

  “So why did you keep doing it?”

  “I had to maintain my intellectual interests, but had to lay low—for a long time. I was waiting for the right time—and the right people—to start up again. Sometimes, just when you look at the horizon and see nothing—and keep seeing nothing—there’s something that comes up when you don’t expect it—like now.”

  “As they say, all good things come to those that wait,” Banda said. “This is the time, and I’m glad I proved it to you.”

  “It’s just a pity you have to kill six-hundred people to prove a point—”

  “—they’re not people to me. Sounds harsh—some of my best friends are Technocrats you know—but some of them are like the walking dead. Just follow orders, do this, do that. No wonder they want to fuck us over.”

  “Well, we’ve got a chance to change that. Who knows when, but this is a start.”

  Eventually, they reached the top of the circular tunnel. The quality of air had improved at this level and felt like there was more of it, but the steep incline had taken its toll and Banda and Katcher were both exhausted.