by Erik Tabain
“Fuck!” said Lestre, crunching her fist onto her table. She’d just lost access to a crowd-fund of €500,000 but, more importantly, she had lost what she thought was the main lead to finding Jonathan Katcher.
“What’s up?” asked D’Souza, as he roused from the loungeroom couch.
“The woman I was hoping would lead us to Jonathan Katcher is dead. And I’ve lost the bounty fee.”
“Just add it to the bounty for Jonathan Katcher,” D’Souza said. “It will all add up in the long run.”
“Sure, but I have to fork out the ten per cent for people that have already signed up in the search for Greta Banda.”
“Greta who?”
“Greta Banda. She’s the one who was receiving Biocrime secrets from Michael Kransich. And probably the one who was passing them on to the Movement. The one in the photo with Jonathan Katcher during the uprising. And now she’s fucking dead.”
“Call up the data from the East End Bombing,” D’Souza said, thinking quickly. This wasn’t a case of D’Souza thinking outside the box, but it was an obvious connection. Blasts of any nature were not a frequent occurrence in San Francisco, and the East End Bombing was the most recent one.
“What’s your thinking?” asked Lestre, as she called up the key data from the East End Bombing, and placed it side by side with the data from Banda’s apartment.
“Two blasts, almost same results,” D’Souza said. “Large apartment blocks, many people dead. Look at the aerial shots—ground floor area explodes out, the rest of the building implodes. What was the explosive used in the East End Bombing? Semtex? Analyze the new bombing.”
Lestre summoned a deeper delve on the data from Banda’s apartment. She extracted sampling data and compared it with the Semtex coding from the East End Bombings. The screen showed a nine-eight per cent match between the Semtex from the two locations, close enough to suggest it was from the same batch.
“It’s the same Semtex, but doesn’t mean that it came from the same person, or the same location,” Lestre said.
“It’s not like there’s a box of Semtex on every corner of the streets of San Francisco. Of course it’s the same!”
“But East End is a Technocrat area,” Lestre said, “this area is human. Why would Banda want to blow up an area she lives in?”
“Could be any reason. Could have been an accident, a mistake. Could have been trying to hide evidence, or hide a link. Or she might have found out we were on her case.”
“But to kill yourself for the Movement?” said Lestre. “Plausible but unlikely. That’s what underlings would do. Being part of the leadership is fulfilling your ego, part of the mode to not only change the world, but be part of that change when it happens. I’d say it was an accident, or she was trying to get back to her apartment for some reason.”
“Have you searched the area around Banda’s apartment block? There’s bound to be something suspicious nearby.”
“Since yesterday,” Lestre said, “we’ve searched around the apartment in a five-hundred-yard area, just through the drone and mini-satellite. We could expand a little.”
“Zoom out and call up the comparison software,” D’Souza said. “Go incremental for topographical changes and any large features.”
Lestre entered the comparison mode on her lightscreen and created two inset screens: the screen on the left was a still from current mini-satellite data, and the screen on the right was the same image and ratio, and she commenced an incremental back-dating of the image, a slow-motion time lapse of two seconds per twelve-hour period. The lightscreen image showed an area of about three square miles, and the only changes that had occurred showed the aerial movement of people and vehicles, and the transition from daytime to night.
D’Souza studied the changing screens and after it came up to almost five minutes, he was just about to give up on his brainwave of thought and move onto another idea. But then in the top left section of the screen, there was something that caught his eye.
“Look! There! Slow down and zoom in.”
Lestre followed his instruction and zoomed in closer to the image and detected a change in the topography. It was a scan from over a week ago, just before the uprising commenced. They compared the two aerial scans, one from June 6, the other from June 7.
“Zoom in on that part just there,” D’Souza said, pointing to an area that appeared to be a large mound of dirt, “and toggle between the two days. “See. It’s there on that day, but not the day before.”
“I’m sure it’s just routine Biocrime work,” Lestre said, “just doing the underground surveillance work they routinely do.”
“Sure, but zoom in—looks like it hasn’t been cleaned up or cleared yet, but take a closer look.”
Lestre switched over to live mode and zoomed further to the ground. She could see a mound of dirt, and the three-feet hole extracted by the universal service and monitoring vehicle. Lestre surmised it could have been left behind during the uprising and there hadn’t been enough time to clear it up—Biocrime had other priorities—but she scanned around the vehicle and zoomed in further to reveal the body of Agent Jack. His body showed the signs of a week of decay out in the elements, and an extreme zoom revealed his sunken face. It had been pecked at by various birds of prey and smaller insects and, trying to deflect the macabre image, Lestre scanned further until she noticed a datacard next to the body.
She zoomed in on the datacard, and called up the serial code—GT-4536-2517-XY—and matched it up through the continuum. The code was linked into the Biocrime system but when she tried to access the data remotely, it was heavily encrypted and inaccessible. But in the world of crypto-technology and sophisticated coding, anything could be hacked for anyone prepared to pay the right fee. Lestre summoned up another panel on her lightscreen to create a task post, and entered an insecure deep portal within the continuum where all kinds of illicit activities and services were available for hire. Even for Lestre, this was a dangerous zone to access, and the end result that she was trying to achieve might not provide her with immunity, but she needed to act swiftly and urgently.
She spoke gently into the lightscreen—“Urgent decryption service required for visual recording”—prompting an auto-fill function which completed the rest of her post. It wasn’t a usual course of action for her, so she carefully checked the predictive text on her screen.
Visual recording, coded GT-4536-2517-XY, heavily encrypted, require open access to datacard and visual material.
Course of action: Password and release of visual material
Payment: Time-based incremental fee of €500 per minute, maximum €10,000, minimum €1,000.
It was like a reverse auction, as well as a race against time, where the sooner the decryption occurred, the closer the task payment matched the maximum €10,000 fee.
It was a high fee, but it was an incentive to have the decryption completed as soon as possible and, within thirty seconds of lodging the task, Lestre’s lightscreen showed six hackers had taken up the job, each of which was hoping to attract the maximum fee.
While she waited for the decryption task to be completed, Lestre returned to the original post she created for Greta Banda, and summoned a cancellation. The lightscreen responded:
Cancellation fee: €50,000. Do you wish to proceed?
Lestre agreed and the €50,000 was extracted instantly from her income account and distributed to the eighteen people that had already started working on the case to capture Banda. It was a hefty amount but Banda was dead and there wasn’t much she could do about it now. For Lestre, cracking the case of finding Jonathan Katcher was the bigger picture and €50,000 would be a relatively small amount compared to the large bounty she would receive if she was the one that found him.
A few minutes later, a data message appeared on her screen—from Grandmaster Ratte’, a reformed hacktivist and data groper—the hack was completed in twelve minutes, for a total of €4,000. Lestre scanned through the message and retrieved the
data keys, loaded Agent Jack’s datacard and extracted the ninety-two minutes of visual recording instantly into her lightscreen. Satisfied with the results, she agreed to the release of the funds to Grandmaster Ratte’, and he signed off with the iconic cowskull ACSII-styled artwork that had been fashionable for over a thousand years. It had been an expensive day—€54,000 already but Lestre felt it was a necessary expense and she was getting closer to finding the elusive Katcher.
“Well, that’s expensive footage,” D’Souza said. “It’d better be worth it.”
“It’s more than a hunch,” Lestre said, “but I’ve got a good feeling about this. It could be our lucky day.”
They both moved towards the lightscreen display and Lestre activated the data. The visual recording from Agent Jack was slow to begin with. It was a multi-cam recording showing simultaneous screens from all six agents that were down in Anika-6, almost like a self-referential loop of visual activity.
Lestre and D’Souza were impatient at first—it was mundane and tedious, and Lestre scanned forward until the agents were shuttling down through the drilled hole and down to the underground. It was dark with the occasional glimpse of a headlamp—Lestre fast-forwarded another ten minutes of footage until it appeared to show the agents had reached the end of the drilled hole and entering into an underground cavern.
She picked up snippets of scratchy lo-fi audio from the agents: “Not sure what it is… we may as well have a look”. There was the panning of the lightpen to reveal different parts of the cavern, one section that looked like tents in an underground city. The last grab of audio she picked up was “there’s fucking people down here… What the…” and “Get as much data as you can,” interrupted by red flashes and the sounds of laser gun fire.
Several multi-cam images stopped moving, which Lestre assumed were the cameras from the fallen agents, and she scanned through the visual recording in slow motion. The lighting was not good, but she scanned through and zoomed in on one figure which revealed the face of Jonathan Katcher. She toggled back and forth, zoomed in and out to reveal his possession of a laser gun, and then over to another figure, which seemed to match up with the profile of Greta Banda.
The rest of the footage was a confused red and orange lightshow of laser bullets, but enough for Lestre to determine five of the agents had been killed. The visual footage became a solid black, intercepted with the audio of the tungsten rope retracting, scrapings of Agent Jack resurfacing through the drilled hole, and the sounds of gasping for air. The footage continued until Agent Jack completed his ascent back to the surface, struggled out of the drilled tube, passed out and died, when the auto-record function ceased.
Lestre closed down the visual recording and sat with D’Souza in silence for a minute, a time she needed to compose her thoughts. Although the footage was low quality and difficult to see clearly, it was documentary evidence of the killing of several Biocrime officers, and a definitive link of where Katcher was likely to be found.
“Our new public enemy number one,” Lestre said, “has now been placed further up on the perch, and he might be there for some time. Inciting public disorder, revolution and now murder. Not any old murder, but Biocrime officers and there’s six of them.”
“So, that’s the link,” D’Souza said. “Banda’s apartment—just one mile away—linked up somehow. There’d have to be a tunnel from Banda to this underground cavern and Katcher. But he was up on the surface for the revolution—would he still be down there?”
“There’s only one way to find out.”
Lestre returned to the lightscreen and checked the GoFunder crowd fund for the capture of Katcher—it had ticked over to €24 million and would continue to rise. She wasn’t sure if was best to continue with the public bounty, or close it off to registered Biocrime agents, but she decided it was best to have specialist speleology skills for the final capture—either way, the bounty would be a large portion of the total crowd fund, and Lestre wanted the job completed as efficiently and quickly as possible.
She created another internal task post on the Biocrime profiling system, requesting the services of twenty commandoes with excavation and caving expertize. As usual, it was urgent, and there was a high bounty fee for this difficult assignment. Lestre was sure her man was still alive and down in that deep hole, and she was going to get him.
Thirty-Two
Closing in
The final intelligence material from Kransich never made it down to Anika-6: the digital data was destroyed in Banda’s apartment, along with her remains. In his haste, Kransich copied whatever data he could and gave it to Banda but, as he had suggested, it confirmed Biocrime’s priority was to clean up the streets of San Francisco and restore stability to the community. Their assessment was the people behind the uprising, especially Jonathan Katcher, would be caught in due time but, for now, they weren’t the highest priority.
Katcher had recuperated from his injuries but still moved about gingerly in Anika-6, in a state of confusion and insecurity, and he had become impatient with the time it was taking for Banda to return from the surface. No-one knew what the next move should be but Katcher’s instinct was they should be on the move, because being on the move meant they were in control: staying still meant other people were pulling the levers.
“No sign of Greta yet,” Katcher said to Newton.
“No. She’s been gone too long. Something’s up. I’ve tried her on the PPN, but there’s no signal. There was some seismological movement above ground, but we’ve got someone looking at it.”
“I think we should move,” Katcher said, “close up the systems and get out of here. Scan the tunnel and see what’s happening out there.”
“Getting all of us out quickly is ambitious,” Newton said. “We could access the other supply tunnels, but that’s about five miles and would take forever to get through.”
Newton summoned his lightscreen to show the view on the other side of the thick control door, but the usual pristine view was cloudy, almost like a thick pea-soup fog. He scanned further up the tunnel and the closer he scanned to the tube tunnel leading up to Banda’s apartment, the thicker it became.
“Looks like there’s been some kind of disruption or explosion above ground,” Newton said to Katcher. “Dust all the way from Greta’s tube access to the control door just outside here.”
“Switch to surface surveillance, just above Getchen’s apartment—I think something’s happened to her.”
Newton’s datastream switched to the surface to show an aerial view but instead of seeing the expected sight of Banda’s apartment block, there was a pile of collapsed rubble. He flicked over to the news datacast and there were several incoming citizen reports on the collapse of the apartment block, the amount of deaths and casualties, and the similarities with the East End Bombing.
“Fuck, oh fuck. She’s not coming back,” Katcher said looking at the news datacast on Newton’s lightscreen. “Move to shutdown, and destroy all material. It’s time to evactuate.”
Newton signaled to the others to start erasure of all data—their key data and material was backed up through their underground cells in other parts of the world, so the process of digitally and physically erasing their local presence commenced. They sprayed fine particles of acid into the datacells of each of the seventy-five lightscreens and to the central data storage, and packed whatever basic food, laser guns and medicines they could find. They were minutes away from commencing evacuation through the five-mile supply links in the other direction when a massive light flare illuminated the entire cavern, followed by several lachrymator capsules, which released plumes of colored smoke and tear gas.
They reached for their laser guns, but the smoke and gas was overpowering. Coming down the drilled hole from the surface were the twenty Biocrime commandoes that accepted Lestre’s task request. These agents were more prepared than the last ones that made the descent; their gas masks and impenetrable helmets and jackets made sure of that. They were also equ
ipped with a far superior technological advantage, immune from any smoke or laser bullets, and had anti-glare and smoke receptors in their helmets. While everyone else in Anika-6 was confused by the colored smoke and tear gas, the commandoes could see as clear as day, and proceeded to shoot down the underlings of the underground operations, almost like a turkey shoot, and quickly overpowered and shackled the leaders—Katcher and Newton, and four other data controllers.
It was an operation that ran with the efficiency of an Austrian clock from the fourteen-hundreds—twenty had been killed with precision shooting: Katcher was detained, along with five others from the Movement, and these captures would work wonders for propaganda purposes and increase the crowd funding revenues when it came to the crowd trials. Six crowd trials for these detainees from the Movement, especially the one for Kransich, were going to provide a large financial windfall for Biocrime.
Katcher looked at the face of the commando, a threatening shiny dark charcoal colored mask made out of tungsten. Katcher was sure there was a person somewhere behind the veneer, but the outfit was designed to defy any form of humanity that might exist behind it. The gas had subsided, but Katcher’s face was red and puffed up, his eyes welled up and dirty. He looked over to Newton and without saying a word, they both knew it was all over, and the Movement had been set back for a long time. And, as for their punishment, they didn’t have the time to consider it, but they both knew the likely outcome.
Marine Lestre surveyed the rubble of Banda’s apartment, and watched a team of Biocrime contractors removing pieces of glass and concrete, and placing them into a waste removal and recycling vehicle. Another contractor scanned the site for any evidence of life but confirmed the initial reports of fifty-four deaths, and gave the thumbs up for a larger excavation tool to come through and remove the rubble quickly, including human remains. There was nothing left to retrieve and the unsentimental nature of this type of clean-up meant everything was removed quickly.