Chapter One

Susan

“Ok Susan, I want you to walk down the street towards me just like we practiced. Remember, we can get away with audio and visual artifacts but will not be able to contain full on physical contact. You are essentially a ghost. Your goal here is to make it through this crowd undetected and to successfully enter the Alpha-Wall at my end. Best of luck Sue, you’ve got this”. The low hum of the ear piece phased out with a small popping sound as if an audio jack had just been unplugged. Although the implantable was no longer in an open channel, Susan was still unsettled by the invasiveness of it. The reason she was here was to participate in an induction for her new role within the agency. Finally she would get her feet wet as an Operator within the elite Oculus unit.

Susan, like every other citizen alive or born after 2030, was fitted with Smart Lens technology that allowed her to interact with the world around her using AI and AR. Although this functionality was largely practical and even goofy, the workings behind these lenses still provided the state with a surveillance network that turned the entire citizenry into what it called the Sea of Eyes. With privacy a thing of the past, new forms of policing were required. Susan was approached to become an operator in this new unit that were tasked with investigating illegal uses of the augmented reality technology. Reports of ghosts, monsters, dead relatives appearing at the end of the bed to request a change in their will etc. were all on the rise. Some of the more sinister crimes such as AR assisted romance scams, catfishing, rape, murder, theft and of course espionage were also becoming the norm. The government were eager to mitigate and suppress these occurrences in order to maintain public support for the Biological Surveillance Act and the covertness of the secretive Oculus program. Susan was a victim turned operator in that regard and was on a mission to catch these new wave of sight-criminals who she herself had fallen foul of. Having a naked man suddenly phase into view in the corner of your hotel room is quite the unsettling and mind altering experience.

“Beep………beep………..beeeeeeeeeeeeep”. The quiet beeps in her ear meant that Susan was now imperceptible, in a state of ‘global’ stealth in programming terms, but in real terms Susan was invisible to the Lensed eye. All of the Lensed in the nearby area were now receiving augmented reality unbeknownst to themselves. Real-time data streams that were capable of rendering operators almost perfectly invisible to civilian class lenses were now pinging from all towers nearby. This was her maiden Ghost-walk, a term used among Operators to describe their furtive endeavors while out in the field. She took a deep breath and stepped out through the alpha-wall, a barrier placed into the environment for the purpose of concealment, and onto the street. She could not yet accept that she was beyond the sight of those going about their business, but she was. The entire environment around her was being regenerated, in real time, and in a radial grid around her. Using the information from cameras and the other Lenses in this grid, Oculus was regenerating the entire environment in near photo realistic fashion but without Susan’s graceful form. People were passing by her, within inches, and they were none the wiser. Their own eyes were being used against them to conceal this benevolent spectre. Already feeling uneasy about the whole thing, another horrible feeling came over her like a wave. There was an immediate sense of technocratic overreach. It felt wrong. She had to take a moment to reminded herself of the reason why she was there.

Still unsettled, she began to walk among the crowded pedestrianized street. Her HUD updated her with the information of all the people and the environment around her. “Congratulations Sue, you are doing great” chimed Kennedy in her ear. Susan was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information populating her HUD and forgetting herself, replied aloud, “thanks Kennedy”. A group of teenagers that were close by lifted their heads. Passively, they looked around for the source of Susan’s voice before returning to their own conversation. After a long tense period of silence, a pensive Kennedy to tried put her at ease. “You will get the hang of it Sue. Just get this out of the way and we can go for drink. We have a lot to discuss”. Susan made her way down the street observing every interaction, movement and conversation as she went. She was already a nosy, detail orientated individual but the information coming through from the various Oculus menus was mind blowing. She was already after passing the OcHud training modules and knew the system fairly well but seeing the functionality in action was breathtaking. She activated thread view, which manifested an ethereal network of strings between the people in front of her. Most of the people had no threads visible but there were varying threads of blues and reds between some of them. Red indicating an undesirable association and blue being an indicator of a good civic relations. She was able to check the status of the individuals association with any other individual that she could look up. This information was sourced by the immense Oculus Cloud which had an AI driven Osint bot among other powerful tools. By the time she reached the alpha-wall that Kennedy was stationed behind, she was hooked. This was nothing like her day job as an officer of the law. She had profiled more than 20 people in her short jaunt down the crowded street. Susan stopped at the Alpha-Wall, carefully making sure nobody was watching as she stepped through it. “They can’t see you you know” remarked Kennedy. Susan rolled her eyes as she came back into view.

After deactivating the Ghost-Walk and gathering her things, Kennedy led Susan to a nearby pub and told her to grab the snug after seeing it was empty coming in. Kennedy grabbed a couple of drinks at the bar and returned to the snug, making sure to close the door as he came in and sliding the prehistoric latch across. “Don’t be nervous Sue, I just need to make sure we are not disturbed.” He was acutely aware of her apprehension in being alone with a man but he had orders to follow and what he was about to disclose to Susan was going to be difficult , even for him. “I trust you Kennedy I am just curious as to what this could all be about?”. “ Sue you are now officially an Operator which means you have clearance to know certain things that have been previously undisclosed to you about your case”. Susan had half expected this conversation to arise at some point but not this soon. “I am bound by a non-disclosure agreement Kennedy and if I am not mistaken I will have the right to view my own file?” She said as she nodded at Kennedy’s briefcase. Kennedy was impressed by her attentiveness which was largely down to the fact she was an accomplished police officer in her past life. “I have been told you will be allowed to view your own file but there are details surrounding the case that were going to be kept from you as they were classified as ‘emerging issues’. We have pushed for full access as we believe in our Operators having the most up to date knowledge of Oculus’s threat areas. You are an outlier as your case is the first of its kind. You need to now how he did it as much as the rest of us”. Susan took a deep, sustained slug from her pint of stout and gestured to Kennedy’s briefcase, “Out with it then”.

Kennedy and Susan spent the best part of two hours going through the case. Eventually they got around to the part that Susan was dreading. Kennedy explained the conditions that allowed the sight-criminal to be invisible in her room with her. Susan welled up periodically as the case was discussed. She felt horrified and violated in equal measure. The hotel had Smart TV’s in each room, allowing the perverted Lens hacker to use these camera angles to capture and generate the backgrounds required to make himself invisible to civilian class Lenses. This required access to the same wifi-router that both the Smart TV camera and Susan’s Lens’s were connected to. Considering the sophistication of his crime, this part would have been child’s play. “All of this you probably get Susan, but here is the kicker; this person still needed administrative access to the Oculus cloud. The individual in question was not working alone. He had next to no tech experience. “The emperor has no clothes” joked Kennedy riskily as Susan cracked a smile. “I get all of this stuff, but how did he manage to get Oculus to make him a Ghost? It is almost like he had the same script as an Opor…..” Kennedy covered her mouth and held his finger to his lips. He made sure nobody was eavesdropping and leaned into Susan’s ear. “He was helped by an engineer. Some one working on the project was part of this”.

Susan opened her front door and stepped inside. She left only an inch or two between herself and the door as she closed it behind herself. She hung her coat and her keys and headed straight for her bedroom. She swiftly went corner to corner waving her arms around like antennas and inspected the floor where she had poured copious amounts of flour and made sure their were no footprints. She climbed into bed and began to relax slightly and mull over what Kennedy had just told her. She pretty much had the same idea, that mid level administrator would have needed to be involved, but the way Kennedy leaned in to tell her this made her think something more sinister was a foot. As first days go, this was an absolute stinker. The few pints had made her tired and slowly she began to drift off. Before she was completely unconscious her phone lit up. It was Kennedy. His message contained a solitary screenshot of a word definition that he looked up. “Faraday cage”. “What do you mean?” She asked in response. Kennedy did not respond. Susan spent the next hour researching Faraday cages and came to a realisation as to what Kennedy was hinting at. She needed to make her house a dead zone to the frequencies used by Oculus.