Tag - A Technothriller (7 page)

I learned of it in my briefing with the Director, the evening of Gabriel’s escape. My part in the matter of Gabriel had not been released to the feeds. Whereas the bitch from hell, Agent Cochran, had her image repeatedly broadcast, and was reported as saying that Muraz would soon be contained and, ‘no further comment for the moment, thank you.’

I tried to keep busy but it was impossible to think of anything else except what I had been told in that exhausting mind conversation. I had a brief chat with Bill Scuttle, the Senior partner in the firm, and cleared with him that I was going to take a few days self-time and that I’d be back to contribute by Monday. I confirmed with UNPOL that there were no pressing pro bono duties, and I stayed in my Envplex waiting for the sign.

I thought about the sign all the time, worried about missing it. I also thought about my uncle, my so-called uncle. He had murdered my father and is was in a conspiracy to send the planet back into the Dark Ages. It sounded crazy, but I believed it. The fact that I believed it made me think I might be going crazy, but I believed it to my core.

I looked at the Devscreen next to the sleeper. 5:15am. I folded my arms behind my head on the pillow and stared at the ceiling. Usually I am good at waiting. I can be very patient – it’s part of being an arbitrator. But this wasn’t some spat between two corporate enterprises, Ents, raging at each other over infringed copyrights. This was my life. I had so many questions that I couldn’t ask. Who am I? Who is Sir Thomas? Why did he kill my father? What is the conspiracy? Was I under suspicion? Was I being more closely watched? Is my Env bugged? This last thought caused a quick surge of adrenalin and I sat up and looked around my Env. I let out a long slow breath. If it was bugged and I suddenly started looking for them, it would be suspicious. If they were there, the only thing I could do was act normally. As long as they can't tell what I'm thinking they can’t know what I know.

Lying there I tried to recall my first known memory. I was surprised that the earliest really solid memory was of when I was ten years old. On my tenth birthday I had boarded a flight. It was a holiday and I was flying to a summer camp in Italy from London. As I was an unaccompanied child, an Alitalia air staffer was assigned to get me on the airship. When she saw from my PUI on my Devstick that it was my birthday, she gave me a big smile and, putting her face close to mine with that big smile on it, proceeded to tug my right ear lobe ten times. It hurt. And I wished she would stop. That is my first real memory.

I can remember things from when I was five years old, but not clearly. They’re impressionist memories. But from ten years old, I can remember things quite clearly. People, events, the schools, knowledge learned, decisions made, these memories are more solid. My uncle had told me that my parents died just after I was born, and this is an impressionist memory. A sad little boy standing in front of his uncle, being told why his parents did not visit him like the other children’s parents. I feel and remember the sadness but the exact time, place and circumstances have faded.

Another reason I believed Gabriel is that Sir Thomas and I look nothing alike. And from what I had seen from the very scant images of my parents, I didn’t look much like my supposed father, Sir Thomas’s brother. If what Gabriel had said was true, and I chose to believe it was, then everything that had been told to me about the origins of my existence was a lie.

I have the images of their funeral service, but apart from that, only two other images of my parents exist. I am in none of them. I had always thought that strange. Don’t mothers always hold their babies and have an image taken? As a boy it was hard to build fantasies around such flimsy evidence of existence, but still I tried. I can remember that. Lying in my sleeper in the dormitory at night imagining that in the morning my parents would be there to take me home. I tried to remember what I dreamed about, after I turned ten, but drew a blank. I tried to remember what I dreamed about last week. I don’t dream, I realized. I have no dreams.

It was hard to frame Sir Thomas in my mind as an evil person. My inheritance from my parents, under Sir Thomas’s management until I turned eighteen, had grown substantially, and I didn’t need to contribute to earn cred. Sir Thomas had also seen to my education and placed me in different schools throughout my youth. He said in speeches that my circumstances were what led him to form the Oliver Foundation, a globally recognized scholarship program for orphaned children.

We had neither lived, nor traveled together. We would meet usually in a meeting room set aside for the purpose at the school or academy I was attending. In one sense I grew up surrounded by people, in another I grew up totally alone. It struck me how little I actually knew about my uncle and I realized that this was not a good thing. I had to know more.

Why did you murder my father? Just to think of that spun the thoughts in my head into a whirlwind. As a society we abhor violence in any form, mental or physical. We are taught from a young age that it is the basest of behaviors, that murder is the most heinous of all violence. The finality of it extinguishes all hope and leaves nothing but negative energy. That my uncle could be capable of such a thing shocked me to my core. Somewhere out there was a man who had answers for me, my brother, he had said, and I believed that too.

Perhaps it was this unsubstantiated, born in the gut sureness that had thrown my thoughts into such confusion. I couldn’t work it out. Usually I am a skeptical person. Not negative. I’m optimistic, but I’m also pragmatic, and therefore skeptical. It wasn’t usual for me to believe in something without having solid evidence to justify that belief. Here I had no such evidence, only an event foretold coming to pass. But there was something else that made me believe Gabriel and it had nothing to do with evidence. It was his eyes.

As much as I wanted to just lie in the sleeper, the lack of a sign gnawed at my conscience. He had told me that he needed my help on a matter of ‘global importance’. It was difficult to sleep with those words constantly in my brain and I felt guilty just lying there. I should be doing something, but what? Wait for the sign. I tried to think what he would have wanted me to do and the only thing I could come up with was to make myself available for discreet contact.

A part of me, a really significant part of me, was afraid of my uncle. To my knowledge I had never met a murderer and just to know that about someone was terrifying. I pushed that thought away with the less sure one that Sir Thomas didn’t know that I knew what he was. The trifling comfort it provided allowed me to sketch out a plan of action. Act normal but try to find out more about Sir Thomas. If Gabriel was smart enough to figure out how to get into and out of the Deep just to meet me, then for sure he was smart enough to send me the sign irrespective of what I was doing. I climbed out of my sleeper and walked naked over to the Clearfilm desk in front of the window that looked out over the causeway to Johor.

I was about to turn on the Dev on the desk, but my hand stopped before it touched the small red button that would bring it alive. What was I going to do on the Dev? Was anyone watching? Would not using the Dev create suspicion? I had to keep up appearances. I had to make it look as if everything was exactly the same in my life. The Dev suddenly became a threat in my mind. We called it Dev, short for Device, the ubiquitous apparatus that provided us with the means of communication. In the twentieth century when personal computers were first invented, they were indeed personal, but by the end of that century most of them were connected to the Internet. The Internet and another invention, the mobile phone, caused the convergence, Dev, that made terms like phone, computer and camera almost obsolete.

I had always thought of the various Devs that I have owned as ‘friends’. Not in the sense that I want to take them out for dinner, although I have done that often, but rather that whenever I have been alone, I have always had the Dev to keep me company. Music, flicks, even characters that had conversations with me, some of which I created, the Dev was always there, to fill that gap. With my newly acquired habit of thinking like a criminal … no that isn’t right, not a criminal, a spy, yes that is how I have to think, as a spy would think … Devs had become dangerous.

I pressed the red button and the Devscreen instantly came alive. The time in the bottom right corner read 5:30am. The usual time I woke up.

I said, “Global newsfeeds main living space screen.” The floor-to-ceiling screen, which ran along half the wall occupied by my double sleeper and the relax space with its long sofa and two Siteazys, displayed the global newsfeeds. I had the large center image set on Bloomberg-Reuters, a financial news channel. Around this large square, twenty other news channels displayed. I could change channel by voice command or Devstick which was tuned to function as a remote control for the main Dev in my Env.

“This is Kathy Peterson reporting for Bloomberg-Reuters, back to you, Jeff.” Commodity prices ran along the bottom of the screen: gold was down, titanium up. I switched channels to legal news. The screen showed an earnest-looking blonde-haired lady, perhaps in her sixties. Although age is hard to tell, she looked like she could be someone’s grandmother. She was listening to a question from an interviewer who was off-image.

“...And then what are the implications for privacy? The government knows where you are at all times....”

I turned the volume up a little and walked over to the food prep area just off the relax space. I was lucky to find this Env. It was large, big enough for a family of seven, and I had taken it on a long lease with the condition of significant remodeling. I had retained one of the rooms for guests. It had never been used. The rest of the walls in the Env had been knocked down to leave one large space. In that I had created four distinct sections: The food prep area, the relax area, and the sleeping and working areas. The open space of the Env was about three hundred square meters, large by anyone’s standards, but I had taken the lease at the time when the economy was in a down cycle.

The interviewer was still speaking. “You’re online, literally on display to the globe, so what does this mean for our privacy? We’re already open at all times to government inspection. Doesn’t this mean that anyone anywhere can tune in to where we are and track us? Isn’t that an enormous security concern?”

I opened up my fridge and pulled out a carton of orange juice. The freshness indicator on the box showed green, so I poured myself a glass and taking it with me walked over to the relax area and sat in the Siteazy in front of the screen. I took a sip of the orange juice.

The blonde woman nodded her head. “Barry, before I answer your question, I’d like to get this into perspective because there’s a few assumptions in your question that are simply incorrect. Firstly the new Personal Unique Identification Law, or to call it by its commonly known name, the ‘Tag Law’, does not mean that anyone can suddenly zoom in on an image of you. Far from it. The same processes and protection we have as individuals today will still be in place. No one is advocating removing those. Through your own personalized profile page you will be able to set up more privacy conditions than what we have now. The only difference between this law and the last is that having an embedded PUI is a lot more convenient than having to carry around a Devstick. This law is about more privacy, not less. Bo Vinh’s words on this are appropriate and I quote....”

“We’ll have to hold it there, June, while we take a quick suggestion break. Don’t change feed – we’ll be right back with June Masters and the rest of our panel to talk about the ‘Tag Law’ and what it means for you.”

The feed switched into a suggestion for the new Mercedes-Benz electric vehicle. The EV looked sporty enough but I wasn’t tempted. Living in New Singapore and spending most of my time in the city I had little need for an EV. I changed channels. It occurred to me that I was probably behind in voting and changed to the UN Vote channel. The popular vote, ‘Popvote’, was Bo Vinh’s idea and he used it to great effect in ridding the world of the nation states. He set up the first online voting site where, through authentication of your identity, you could vote on any issue happening in the world of politics. Pulling people of all nations to the site with his commentary, he used it as a platform to demonstrate to nation leaders how far off the mark they were with some of their policies. And in many cases how far they had drifted from the wishes of the people that had voted for them.

I was behind in voting. It is compulsory to vote, and if you don’t, your vote is counted as undecided, and depending on the ranked importance of the vote, you can be fined. It isn’t a large fine and can be paid in either contributing time to a listed cause or in cred. I scanned through the list of votes, scrolling down from the most current through to the last vote I’d made. The list was mostly City council votes for New Singapore, as a resident there I had to vote on those, and there was only one Global vote that I had missed. That had been to develop a new City in the ocean off the Maldives. I would have voted yes but was too late. I credded the fine and changed channel back to the panel discussion. A suggestion for a new slimming regen unit was just finishing, yours for five thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine cred, and then a tanned and serious looking Barry came back.

“Thanks for staying with us. We’re talking about the new ‘Tag Law’, set for global PopVote Saturday 15 March 2110. Joining me on the panel are June Masters, President of the Goldman School for Public Policy, Andy Haas, former Head Justice of the Permanent Court of Arbitration and currently advisor to the New Aspiration Party responsible for proposing the ‘Tag Law’, Dan Quigley, of the Conservative Christian Party who support the Law, and last but certainly not least, Annika Bardsdale of the Social Responsibility Party who are opposed to the new Law. June, if I can start with you. Just before we went to the break, you were talking about the difference between the existing law and the new law.”