Simon Royle - Tag

As individuals travel through security zones, PUIs, or Tags as they are called, are activated and visually compared to known statistics and image. Everywhere on the Earth, the Moon and Mars, the three 'worlds' human beings occupy, this invasion of privacy is accepted for the right to travel anywhere freely. Every day in New Singapore, half a million people travel through the city and its surrounding area. To run, you need an identity that will appear in its movements and digital actions not to be suspicious, but to be normal. And they each had a tray of normality.

Gabriel, on the far right of the others, glanced to his left. Maloo was struggling into the brown boots he’d selected. With a final tug he laid back his elbows on the cement floor and said, “Well brother, do we look like Haulers?”

“You’ll do,” said Gabriel, and walked over to the wall of the warehouse. A section of the wall stood detached from its space that was just big enough for them to squeeze through. Gabriel went first and the others followed, each turning sideways through the narrow gap. Once on the other side, Gabriel and Maloo pulled the piece of the wall into place and Isaac picked up a tube of instant cement. As soon as the wall fit he pulled the trigger and the cement gun spurted a thin tube of expanding cement from its nozzle. Gabriel and Maloo quickly walked across the floor of the warehouse and went through the next space.

Two warehouses over from the one the Mole had made its exit, a seventy-five meter articulated chrome-plated long-hauler stood waiting with all systems running. The last wall space closed and cemented, the three men headed for the entrance to the long hauler. The door was open and Gabriel made his way up the winding staircase until he reached the bridge. He sat down in the primary driver’s seat and pulled the View Devscreen closer to his eye position. Maloo climbed into the seat next to him and Isaac disappeared down the companionway stairs.

“Activate mapped course to Jakarta, full autopilot on,” Gabriel said into the mic that distended from the edge of the Dev screens. It looked like a fly hovering just a cent from his mouth. Telemetric data from the vehicle flooded the Devscreen with numbers scrolling in a constant flow across images which showed the warehouse from the front, rear, side and top of the vehicle.

Gabriel looked out of the front windshield of the bridge, over the sloped chromed snub-nose of the long-hauler, at the cement floor twenty meters below him. The roof of the warehouse was just high enough with only ten cents clearance between the top of the long-hauler and the ceiling. The doors to the warehouse slowly slid open and the long-hauler pulled out onto Wharf One of Old Jurong Port. Gabriel glanced at the time set into the sweeping console of the bridge in front of him. 8:49pm — slightly ahead of schedule.

UNPOL Headquarters, Active Trace Command Center

Thursday 5 December 2109, 8:50pm +8 UTC

The Active Trace Command Center (ATCC) at UNPOL Headquarters is the largest single user of Devscreen displays in the world. It is designed to provide a global, real-time surveillance and interdiction capability to UNPOL to safeguard the citizens of the world. Capable of reading a watch face, cameras circling the planet capture movement and display that movement on the Devscreens. Actions are compared against an optional set of parameters for a given area. Parameters might include humans, vehicles, walking, running or driving, and when any of these are triggered the camera can zoom down to a minute detail, Tag the movement and bring up any associated information attached to it. Or, in the case of a human being tagged, its Personal Unique Identifier (PUI).

There are approximately six point three million people living and moving around in New Singapore at any one time. Tracking this amount of movement by human eyeballs is possible but requires too many people. ATCC instead relies on its computational ability to solve this problem. Everything from washing machines and mobile phones to electric automobiles has computational ability. This computational ability is called a Dev. ATTC’s Devs are huge, occupying four floors in the massive complex and drawing seven percent of the total power output of New Singapore.

Cochran entered the command center at a fast walk and immediately headed to the primary Devcockpit console set high and at the rear of the room, picking up the helmet that lay on the console she put it on, adjusting the mic to the right angle for her mouth. The room was buzzing with activity. She thumbed a switch on the console and the room’s buzz was replaced with the sound of two UNPOL officers questioning a suspect. The image on her Dev had a blue frame to show it was the active screen that she was listening to.

She said, “Change,” and the image and sound switched to another suspect being questioned, this time aboard a ship on the ocean just off UNPOL Headquarters. From the Devcockpit she had a view of all the Devscreens in the room.

She immediately issued an UNPOL Blue Notice requesting assistance in arrest and containment or any information related to the whereabouts of Jibril Muraz. The Blue Notice also contained the line ‘suspect is believed to be armed and dangerous’ and was flashed to UNPOL offices globally. Scanning the Devscreens arrayed in front of her, she looked up, hands on her hips, and surveyed the rest of the room. It was busy and had been since Muraz had escaped. UNPOL was on high alert and all shifts had been called in.

The Devs do their work in spotting suspicious movement or actions, and then human eyeballs take over to provide analysis and interpretation. Everyone’s Devstick carries their PUI and the log of that PUI can be pulled up for inspection. Everything we’ve achieved and everything we do digitally is attached to our log and transparent to UNPOL. This is their right, just as we have the right to investigate UNPOL and seek access to all files or information that is on record, unless blocked by Court order for reasons of National Security or the safety of others.

Cochran surveyed the list of tagged PUIs and noted their position on the overlay map of New Singapore. The number was around one hundred suspicious acts in progress, but this number rose and fell according to tags being cleared off and new tags being added. The Geographic area of New Singapore had a total of thirty-two thousand, three hundred and thirty-five crimes committed so far this year, an average of eighty-eight point five eight crimes per day. Today, that average was up over ten percent, but Cochran didn’t care about the other ninety-seven point eight seven. The whole department was focused on a single crime; one that was unique in the history of UNPOL, that of Jibril Muraz escaping the Deep.

Most of New Singapore was within ten minutes’ reach. As UNPOL units contacted each suspect and cleared them off the list, the number of suspicious tags started dropping. Within five minutes this had fallen to an average of ten suspicious acts going on at any one time. The Devscreen showed the images of the suspects being halted and questioned, but none of the images showed what she wanted. She glanced at the time again: 8: 53pm. She felt the panic rise in a surge and squashed it down, focusing on the Devscreens in front of her.

A Devscreen to her far left told of events in the tunnel made by the Mole. Mines had been left and the bomb disposal unit was still trying to figure out how to defuse them. Still no progress.

“Send in a remote control unit to sweep. We might lose a couple but it will be faster than this,” Cochran said into the microphone. The UNPOL BDU officer in the tunnel nodded his head. She changed the active Devscreen again. Still nothing. Where, where, where? Where is he? He must have gone out to sea, but everything there had checked out as normal.