Chapter 1: Scanbobs
Mateus Fiel knew of the fierce territorialism between rival scanbob gangs in the area. He chose to ignore it, the score proving too lucrative to pass up. Venturing outside of his home exurb constituted a risk. His Harmony Score had withered into single digit territory, a numeric cage that should have anchored him to the district’s edge, yet here he was, trespassing against The Committee’s will. Many defied this. Most people flouted the laws to engage in leisure activities, and many more did so for business opportunities. Mateus did it for both reasons, so he considered all the risks he took this time around as absolutely justified.
Sydenham was no ordinary urban core; it was a scar on the conurbation’s map, a district that had endured more than its share of cascading crime waves until the Directorate simply stopped trying. Underfunded and systematically neglected, the local surveillance infrastructure lay in a state of terminal disrepair. What the weather hadn’t corroded, the local grinder gangs had dismantled; cameras hung like gouged eyes from poles, and the facial-recognition arrays were choked by layers of graffiti and the scars of constant vandalism.
Here, the Committee’s gaze was not a constant light, but a blinking, faulty fluorescent lamp.
Mateus moved through it with the careful indifference of someone who understood that attention was a currency more volatile than any other. His coat drank in the drizzle, its tycho-fabric dimming its own sheen to avoid drawing the eye. He kept his pace measured, neither hurried nor idle, threading himself between clusters of low-tier citizens and ghosting past those who lingered beneath glitching signage.
Above the entrance to the town square, a digital ticker-tape unfurled in an endless loop, its glow cutting through the murk like a blade through cloth. Numbers scrolled with indifference, each update accompanied by a soft chime that felt almost devotional.
[HXI] …………………………. 87.44 ▲ +0.6
[CLAR] ……………………… 96.02 ▼ -1.1
[REQ] ……………………….. 71.83 ▼ -3.8
[PRC] ……………………….. 62.11 ▼ -7.4
[IVM] ………………………… 94.77 ▲ +2.1
[SFD] ……………………….. 48.88 ▲ +5.9
The index pulsed once, as if proud of itself.
A man nearby paused to watch it, lips parted in something between awe and resignation, before lowering his gaze and continuing on. The number no one spoke about out loud anymore, not flaunted anywhere in public, was the price of information.
⊄53,076 / TeraByte
Cyberflation had long since moved past outrage and settled into government doctrine. Information was no longer a utility or even a commodity; it had become a weapon against the populace. The Committee built the datanet like a mountain. The higher you climbed, the more you could see. Most people were kept at ground level, where the horizon was short and the sky permanently overcast. Ignorance was not enforced with violence so much as it was priced into normality.
Another figure nowhere to be seen, is the ‘continuance’.
Baseline citizen allocated income sat at ⊄182 per day.
Thats ⊄5,460 a month, enough for nutrient stamps, exurb habitation, transit corridors, low-grade synthetic entertainment, public utility access, and some filtered state datanet access.
Mateus glanced at the ticker only briefly. Long enough to confirm what he already knew, not long enough to appear interested. In the eyes of the Committee, interest was a proxy for intent. To display a curiosity for the data was to signal a purpose, and purpose invariably invited the kind of questions Mateus Fiel was not prepared to answer.
Instead, he shifted his focus to the peripheral overlays hovering at the edge of his vision, the faint residue of his mindject interface waiting for permission to bloom into full clarity. Icons flickered as if nervous, offering access, connection, immersion—luxuries measured by the risks they constituted.
He dismissed them with a subtle neural twitch.
Better to see the city raw.
Better to feel its weight without the aberrations.
The real world, stripped of the mindject overlay, became a grim, mundane reality defined by a corporate grey, from the weathered, once gleaming, architecture to the gloomy sky.. The constant state of consternation on people’s faces became more visible, more obvious – a symptom of partial mindjection, as the pervasive augmented reality acted as a secondary reality, each commuter navigating with one foot in the physical world, the other in the augmented one.
Each high-tier commuter; a target, a potential score.
Mateus Fiel did not think of it as theft; theft implied a crude incision, an invasive incursion into the limited sovereignty of an individual. A scanbob run was closer to skimming the excesses of the diabolical social credit system.
“Found one!” A voice interrupted his thoughts, via his thoughts.
Orson Valentine.
Scanbobs walk the crowded streets scanning people’s body area networks. They use the target’s own magnetic near-field system as a portal into their lives. A good scanbob can reverse social-engineer a person in five minutes. Most work in teams of two. One searches for a potential target from afar using a powerful scope, immediately diving into their biometric and cyber footprint.
“Brunette. Snazzy corporate jumpsuit. Black with red trimming.”
Mateus scanned the crowd, and saw nothing but corporate blacks and greys, some snazzy, some drab, the description hard to pinpoint.
“Get back on the ject,” said Orson. “And look for zeros.”
Adjusting his cap, making it snug, Mateus felt the warmth of theta waves against his skin and hair.
Around him, the street pulsed with holographs and signal streaming, each commuter a walking constellation of virtual identifiers. Whether it be encrypted chatter portals, or status indicators, or assistant avatars, their Body Area Networks projected faint halos of databots into the air. Most apparitions were standard, valueless applications; others were a wealth of densely layered databots; yet some were dark, zero apparition… zero avatars.
No criminal, subversive or insurgent hid like this. If anything, they deployed mimics and fake databots to avoid scrutiny. Only the bureaucracy strolled the public spaces like this, The Committee having banned them from using such technology when outside their secure zones.
That didn’t mean they weren’t carrying any loopdrives or personal BAN devices, it just meant they were switching their projections off to avoid being hacked…
… but that didn’t mean they couldn’t be hacked.
Mateus let his breathing slow, syncing his internal rhythm to the scanner’s oscillations, allowing his databot to map the holographic contours of nearby networks. An empty patch—dark, deliberate—cut a hole through the virtual haze.
Black corporate jumpsuit.
Red trim.
Directorate grade.
He didn’t look directly at the woman. You never looked.
Instead, Mateus tracked her through reflections and sound: a smear of polished shoes in a puddle, the distorted glide of a tailored jumpsuit across a chrome pillar, the faint footsteps, melodiously timed to her swaying hips and shoulders. The official moved with a quiet certainty, her BAN, even though turned off, still broadcasting faintly, in tight bursts, each pulsing looking for an authenticating action from the owner. From a distance, it was impenetrable. Up close, it was possible to interact with her BAN.
All a scanbob needs to do is merely pretend to be the target.
Mateus shifted, letting the current of commuters carry him forward. One meter. Half. Closer. The antenna weaved along his sleeve warmed, hungry now, tasting the edge of the BAN signal. He angled his body just enough to align the node with the woman’s flank.
Two feet. That was the threshold.
The art of the scanbob was simple; mimicry.
Beyond that distance, the subversion commenced.
Who is she?
He waited for Lance to social engineer his way into the target’s life.
Mateus’s databot, Sementer, generated a comprehensive phantom body-area-network, a dark twin synthesized from the target’s own neuroelectric markers and quantum identity signatures.
“I’m ready,” declared Orson, as more data fed Semeter’s counterfeit network.
Mateus activated a localized, low-decibel EMP flared. The executive floundered, her stride broken by a microscopic hitch in her BAN, a vacant glaze crossing her eyes as biosensors shorted out and entered a forced reboot. In that split-second vacancy, Mateus’s rig screamed into the silence, broadcasting a duplicate BAN signal that mirrored the target’s own neuroelectric markers bit-for-bit. The target’s wearable loopdrive—blinded by the reset—searched for its master and found Mateus’s phantom signature instead.
“Handshake established,” reported Orson.
Mateus gritted his teeth as Semeter shared a hijacked QKey with the executive’s hardware. The QMesh accepted the lie, the entangled photons snapping into a deceptive alignment that bypassed the Directorate’s physics-based firewalls.
A notification flickers on Mateus’ augmented periphery; INVITE GENERATED. FREQUENCY: 3.9332 Hz.
“The back door is open,” Orson said, “This is a government employee… a bureaucrat.”
Mateus stopped walking, watching the executive walk away, seemingly unaware that her digital soul had been detached from her body. “Not a good idea,” he said.
“Thetan band is stable,” stated Orson. “I’m going in.” He no longer needed Mateus to shadow the target, now that he had an invite, he could enter the target’s mindscape as a guest.
“Wait,” he said, but he knew it was too late. Mateus turned and broke into a run, rushing to Orson’s location. The scanbob would be vulnerable, sitting on a bench somewhere, deep into a theta sleep cycle.
Scan and Penetrate, that was the role of the first scanbob.
Stalk and Protect, that was his role.
But Mateus had a hunch, if this were indeed a government employee, a member of The Committee, he feared he may not get to Orson’s location in time to protect him.