The Biocrime Spectrum (Books 1-4)

by Erik Tabain

  Among the jagged and refracting rays of lightpens moving around from the officers, they saw four Biocrime suits appearing out from the hole in the roof—the number suggested by Kransich—and decided to take them all out when the timing was right. It was dark, so they would be guided by the lightpens from the Biocrime officers, making precision difficult and the risk of error high.

  Georgia the security manager and the three others lowered themselves to the floor of the cavern and as they came closer to the cloth material, they realized they were actually a series of tents.

  “Well, I’ll be,” Georgia said, while switching on her visual recorder. “There’s fucking people down here. What the…”

  “We’ll take evidence and report back to Biocrime,” her deputy said. “This might be big.”

  Georgia the security manager checked her cell device—there was no coverage, and no link to the surface. She could see the device was trying to connect to some kind of wireless networking but it was not something she’d ever seen before.

  “Yep, I think this is big. Get as much data as you can and let’s get—”

  There was a flash of red and the sound of shattered glass. Banda laser gunned Georgia the security manager with a direct hit to the head. The laser entered her brain through her eye socket and the shards of glass scattered into her face. If the laser didn’t kill her, the shards certainly would have finished her off.

  Her deputy was more lucky: he had the one and only laser gun on his side, and started firing randomly in the direction where he suspected the original attack came from. He tried to switch off his lightpen, but Katcher fired his laser into the deputy’s arm and leg. The deputy put up something of a struggle, but he was a sitting duck—Katcher fired away again—it was too dark to see accurately—but his laser bullets hit the deputy in the stomach and the heart. He was dead too.

  Agent Jack heard the commotion through his radio microphone and the remaining officers shouted for him to leave them behind and get back to the surface as quickly as possible. Stunned after focusing solely on his losing Sudoku puzzle, he switched on his device to haul the tungsten rope—and him—back up to the surface.

  “There’s another one in the tunnel,” Katcher shouted. “We’ve got to stop him too.”

  The other two officers were defenseless and Banda, without any emotion, clinically laser gunned them dead. Katcher moved to the hole in the roof of the cavern, but Agent Jack had already commenced his ascent back to the surface—it wasn’t as quick as the descent, but he was moving back up at a rapid pace. Katcher pointed his laser gun through the tunnel and shot randomly.

  The light was limited and Katcher couldn’t see where or what he was shooting at. The best could do was to continue shooting up the tunnel and hope that he managed to take down the remaining agent. The tungsten rope continued to pull up Agent Jack to the surface but Katcher didn’t know whether he was dead or alive.

  “We have to release it now.”

  Banda was pressuring Katcher, Renalda and Scanlen to release the viral videos and the hack—it had been tested internally and worked, in theory, but they weren’t one hundred per cent sure in practice.

  “We don’t know whether that officer will make to the top alive or not,” Banda said. “If he does, we’ve got about an hour before we have to get out of here. If he’s dead—someone will find him soon enough—so we maybe have two or three hours. I say we release the viral videos now.”

  They were all in agreement without uttering another word, but Weller wasn’t here to advise. He was the technical genius and his replacement, Silas Newton, wasn’t as sharp or as confident.

  “I advised Mav the entire virus hack was ready to go,” Newton said. “We did all the internal tests, but he wanted to do a prac test just to be two-hundred per cent sure. Mav was always like that.”

  “Then, let’s go with it,” Banda said. “Set up the system on auto—once it’s in place, it won’t stop for a couple of weeks. It’s earlier than we planned, and we haven’t done the final check that Weller wanted, but the time is now. Let’s do it. And then we have to get back up to the surface.”

  They took their cell devices and laser guns. Newton activated the hacking and viral videos to cut out into Biocrime and Lifebook through the continuum, to be intercepted with the political messages of Jonathan Katcher and his call for an uprising against the world of Technocrats.

  Soon, Katcher, Banda, Renalda and Scanlen worked their way through the tunnel and up to the surface. The team of hacktivists staggered their departures until only half of them remained in the underground, ensuring the system was activated correctly, and those that remained, operated Anika-6 on a basic level, unconcerned about their own safety.

  Agent Jack reached the surface. His legs were badly sliced and cut by the light bullets coming from Katcher’s laser gun. He scrolled through his cell device and saw there were a number of visual recordings from Georgia the security manager and the deputy, showing the underground cavern and the tent-structures underground. Before they were killed, the other officers also managed to visually record some of the technology down there. He scanned through some of the footage and set up a datacard transfer back to Biocrime. If he could transfer the data, it would alert Biocrime of his location and provide them a good deal of information about what was going on underground in Anika-6.

  He rolled over onto his back and looked up at the blue sky. His injuries were far worse than he imagined: some of the laser bullets went through his legs, through his groin and into his stomach and upper organs. He was losing too much blood and his vision of the stunning blue sky gradually faded to white. He was losing control of his thought processes and there was a stunning and rapid montage of key thoughts and events from his life: the incubation hospital where he and his two children were created; sports trophies from a range of baseball competitions he won as a child; a range of dinner dates with his wife; his work as a Biocrime agent, and the final descent into the deep dark tunnel into Anika-6.

  Agent Jack didn’t make it.

  Twenty-Four

  The rise of the revolution

  Marine Lestre was on her lightscreen, working through her morning watch list, while D’Souza lit up a bong—he was old school when it came to his recreational drugs of choice and the manner he ingested them—but he could always take a downer—or an upper, depending on which drugs he’d taken—if anything came up.

  She was overseeing a list of reports and self-managing bots producing a range of scenarios and focused on likely suspects of the taker of secrets at Biocrime. In the corner of her screen was a rolling update on Katcher’s whereabouts.

  “Any sign of Katcher?” asked d’Souza, surrounded by a halo of hash smoke. Like most substances, it was artificial, but guaranteed to be as good, if not better, than the real thing. He didn’t feel stoned, but it was all relative: he inhaled artificial hashish for most of the day, so his body and mind were used to it now.

  “Nope. He hasn’t been seen for four days and his digital house arrest report hasn’t been made for six days. He’s the only one on the watchlist that I can’t match up. It’s gone beyond the point of being a glitch—nothing on any hospital or death lists. Surprising. Look, I gotta take a pee—watch the lightscreen and see if anything changes?”

  Lestre took off for the bathroom. She knew she’d only be a few minutes and she’d be able to backtrack on her lightscreen monitoring, but her instruction was partially to keep D’Souza on his toes and, if anything did change, he’d shout out to her, so she could immediately know.

  She was thinking what Katcher’s absence could mean—she knew he’d been a revolutionary leader but surely ten years away from the limelight couldn’t rekindle an interest in an instance. If it wasn’t a glitch, what was it? People didn’t disappear and drop off completely from the continuum just like that.

  Lestre left the bathroom and was on her way back to her lightscreen, and could hear the music from the Amore advertisement, and that song—‘It’s a Gra
nd Old Flag’—streaming down the corridor.

  She passed D’Souza zoned out on the couch, and expecting to see the Amore advertisement on her lightscreen, she got the shock of her life.

  “What the fuck is this!” shouted Lestre. d’Souza, startled, zoned back in and saw Lestre standing in front of the lightscreen, with what he recognized to be the face of Jonathan Katcher talking directly to the audience. D’Souza took an upper pill and the effects of the hashish wore off within a few seconds. He was annoyed that he had just wasted a good batch of hashish, but he was now alert enough to realize something was wrong, and possibly seriously wrong.

  “You stupid cunt! You were meant to monitor this,” Lestre screamed.

  “Well, fuck, it’s not like one minute is going to make a difference—”

  “—well, in this case, one minute could mean everything.”

  Lestre toggled between screens and called up different light channels and systems, but it was all the same. The voice and face of Katcher was on every screen, every channel, and she couldn’t access anything else on her system. She looked at her cell device hoping for some relief, but it was the same. Her communications were down.

  “What about your cell,” Lestre asked, still in a furious mood. “Anything on it?”

  “Just the same as yours—looks like we’ve been hacked—I can bypass and go onto the PPN.”

  Katcher’s face was onscreen, and his voice outlined a series of short pithy statements.

  “Friends, I’m Jonathan Katcher, and I’ve escaped from my virtual arrest and ready to continue the fight against our oppression against Biocrime and the Technocrats. Remember when your mother disappeared? Or you father? Or your sister, or your brother. That was the work of Biocrime and the Technocrats.”

  “This revolutionary crap,” Lestre said, dismissively. “It’s for babies! We’ve got to find out what’s going on. I can’t access anything, except for Katcher’s face onscreen. So that’s what the fucker’s been up to.”

  Katchers’ messages were short, slick and stylish, almost indistinguishable from any other modern advertising. Key graphics and key points flashed up on the screen, outlining the terrible history for natural humans since Technocratic control. The messages were on a loop, followed by documentary-style footage of terrible acts perpetrated by the Technocrats, and then another thirty-second message from Katcher.

  “Friends, we’ve had centuries of oppression from the Technocrats. I am now free to lead our uprising against Biocrime. And with your help, our battle starts today.”

  And at the bottom of the screen was the graphic that guns belonging to natural humans have been unlocked to ‘kill’ mode, for the sake of self-protection and advancing the uprise.

  “Have you got the PPN working yet?” shouted Lestre.

  “No, this looks like it’s a serious hack,” D’Souza said. “I can’t get anything in or out. What’s happening outside?”

  Lestre looked through the window of the apartment, and the large billboard lightscreen was not showing the usual advertising or news material, but Katchers’ closeup face, and the superimposition: ‘the Movement is coming now!’

  “Fuck. It’s on the billboard too, same as what’s appearing on my lightscreen. If this is showing everywhere, we’re fucked.”

  There was a knock on the door of the apartment. Unsure of what this meant, Lestre and D’Souza took their laser guns. Lestre looked through the peephole and could see an agitated Lumbardo, and she opened the door to let him in.

  “You’ve seen the visuals?” asked Lumbardo. “This could be big. I can’t get to Biocrime, nothing through the continuum, no contact. Nothing!”

  “We don’t know what this means yet. Could be big. Could be small. But Biocrime will be onto it. It’s only been thirty minutes so far.”

  And, indeed, Biocrime was onto it, but there was little they could do at this stage. Their counter-hacking unit commenced their work within a minute of Katcher’s viral videos appearing, but this hack was going to be a difficult one to stop. The counter-hacking unit was mainly a collection of sophisticated auto-bots assessing hacking and viruses, attempting real-time solutions, and engaging in speed coding to catch up and overtake the interventionist hacking.

  But, after his death, Weller’s coding was creating havoc and was the most advanced viral hack ever created. The beauty of Weller’s algorithm was its reactive nature, and once it was ahead of the field, it could react to whatever coding was put in its way to destroy it, and in theory, could be infinite, unless Biocrime’s system were clever enough or advanced enough to break the code. And until they could do this, Katcher’s viral videos would be on infinite loop—on every visual device and in every location around the world.

  In a twenty-four hour free-market city like San Francisco, there was no difference between night and day. Business and social activity was constant, the only change was the faces: different people that came in at different times, according to their body rhythms, lifestyles and personal choice, moving along to the rhythm and cycle of the city. Contemporary life was so dependent on technology that it was almost impossible to exist without it: work, eating, entertainment, surveillance, security. Through the continuum and Lifebook, everyone was born into technology, so they lived through it, and died through it.

  It was late-morning when Katcher’s viral videos appeared on every lightscreen, billboard and personal cell device and, initially, there was great confusion in the community. The messaging sounded like advertising—it was slick, professional, and used the jingle from the famous Amore advertisement. It wasn’t selling anything, but was a call to arms and for natural humans to uprise against Technocrats. Most citizens were annoyed because they couldn’t access Lifebook and the vast range of mindless visual and digital material that was available to them through the continuum. The assumption was that this was an unusual glitch and an expectation that normal transmission would resume soon, but Katcher’s voice and image kept on appearing on lightscreens and would keep appearing for some time.

  It took a while amid the confusion, but citizens realized that if Lifebook and Biocrime couldn’t be accessed, Lifebook and Biocrime couldn’t access them. Without access to Lifebook and technology rendered useless, there was nothing to do in their apartments, citizens started to leave their buildings—with their laser guns for protection—and massed onto the street, checking each other’s cell screens to confirm what they were seen on their own screens. In every location and on every screen, there was Katcher’s face and his revolutionary videos.

  In times like this, there are many critical points that need to concatenate for a social upheaval and mass movement to commence, and the pieces started to fall into place. For many citizens, especially those in the Movement, this was the moment they’d been waiting for, the one they’d been told about for many years. For others, they were furious but not sure who was at fault and who to blame: like addicts to the drug, they wanted their access to technology returned, access to Lifebook, surveillance of other citizens and, most importantly, to supplement their universal income. The pissant on the screen—Jonathan Katcher—was talking about an uprising and revolution, but was this what they wanted as well?

  There is an incredibly fine line between human order and chaos, and societies are held together by insidious control through a manufactured consent—a consent where citizens are amused and entertained through the mundane and meaningless, while being controlled by others. History has shown how human order can quickly descend into a destructive chaos, even when the possibility seems distant on the horizon, but once the manufactured consent had been removed, an uprising seemed the most inevitable conclusion. Like a young dog trained to perform tricks for its master, the collective mind of a community reacts quickly to changing events, and returns to basic self-protective instincts. Without external control, social systems fall away very quickly, and the streets of San Francisco began to unravel.

  In the midst of this confusion, many citizens were waiting for the
next moment, unsure about what awaited them. Some were waiting for the ‘glitch’ to recede, so they could continue accessing the continuum: others, unable to make contact with anyone, went down to the streets, enquiring if anyone knew what was happening and when it would all return to normal.

  Some of the more technically inclined, tried to access personal private networks—many weren’t working, but some did, and scant and sketchy details moved slowly across the city, mixed in with the whispers of rumor and unreality: Jonathan Katcher has returned; the Movement is coming; Lifebook is broken; the unhackable system has been hacked; Biocrime can’t watch us anymore; revolution is coming, people will die.

  War.

  The street crowds grew larger with every minute, and the combination of confusion, self-interest and basic instinct created a sense of impending pandemonium, much like aimless wandering of the streets after a fire alert.

  Coinciding with the release of the viral videos and the confusion on the streets, Katcher, Banda, Scanlen and Renalda reached the surface and mingled with the developing crowd. Some in the crowd recognized Katcher; others made the correlation between his face and the face on the billboard lightscreens. There was no time to react though, no-one really knew what to do anyway, and it was best to continue with self-preservation.

  Scanlen and Renalda were still adjusting to being in the outside world again, but Katcher was reveling in what was an uncertain time. This was his moment, but it was also the first part of what he hoped would be the start of a brave new world. Banda was agitated and impatient: even though the crowd was building up, she wanted action now.

  “You should be leading from the front,” Banda said, pointing to a point further in the crowd.

  “There is no front,” Katcher responded. “This is happening all over the city. When the time is right, we’ll intercept the lightscreens and livecast from wherever we happen to be.”