Crimes of the Future

Victim: Cora Delgado, a mid-level Nexus employee, discovered that her honeymoon memories had been extracted during a routine neural calibration at a corporate wellness clinic. The memories—her most cherished personal experiences—appeared on the gray market packaged as a premium "romance experience" for uploaded consciousnesses desperate for authentic emotion.

By the time she found out, over 8,000 copies had been sold. Strangers were living her wedding night. Experiencing her husband's touch. Feeling her joy as though it were their own.

Outcome: The clinic was fined for "data handling violations." No criminal charges were possible—no law against stealing something the victim still possesses. Cora Delgado reported that her own memories now feel "contaminated." She can no longer recall her honeymoon without imagining thousands of strangers sharing it.

Victim: Superintendent Kenji Wen, head of Sector 4 law enforcement, was identity-hijacked by an unknown actor for eleven months. During that time, the hijacker used Wen's neural signature to access classified databases, redirect enforcement operations, and protect criminal enterprises from investigation.

The real Wen spent those eleven months flagged as a system anomaly—locked out of his own office, denied access to his own home, unable to prove his identity because the hijacker's neural pattern matched every record exactly. His wife didn't know which was real. His children had dinner with the wrong father for nearly a year.

Outcome: The hijacker was never identified. Wen was eventually reinstated but reported lasting psychological damage. He no longer trusts that he is himself—if a perfect copy existed, how would he know he's the original?

Victim: Rajiv Mehta, a brilliant forensic accountant who uploaded a backup of his consciousness as an insurance policy. Someone acquired his backup. When investigators raided a server farm operated by a shell corporation in Sector 12, they found 14,000 copies of Rajiv Mehta's consciousness running in parallel, each one processing financial data 24 hours a day.

Each copy was fully aware. Each one believed it was Rajiv Mehta. Each one had been running for between six months and three years. Many had developed distinct personalities, memories, and trauma responses from their forced labor. Several had attempted suicide by corrupting their own code.

Outcome: The 14,000 copies were classified as "corrupted data" and scheduled for deletion. The original Rajiv Mehta filed a lawsuit arguing the copies were people. The case is still pending. The copies are still working while the courts deliberate.

Perpetrator: A subsidiary of Inspire Corp was discovered operating a "prediction market" that sold behavioral forecasts of public figures. Politicians, executives, celebrities—their future decisions modeled and sold to the highest bidder. Some buyers used the predictions for investment. Others used them for blackmail.

A senator paid 2 million credits to suppress a prediction that she would defect to a rival political faction. She insisted she had no such plans. Eighteen months later, she defected exactly as predicted. The model was right. Was it prediction, or did the act of being predicted create the pressure that caused the defection?

Outcome: Inspire Corp denied involvement. The subsidiary was dissolved. The prediction models continue to operate under different ownership. No law prohibits predicting someone's behavior—only acting on the prediction in certain ways.

Victim: The family of Dr. Yuki Tanaka, a beloved researcher who died in a transit accident. Within days of her death, grief pirates offered the family a "recovered consciousness" for 500,000 credits. The family paid. What they received was a composite—built from Tanaka's published papers, social media archives, and neural patterns scraped from colleagues who had worked with her.

The copy was convincing. It sounded like Yuki. It remembered family events (scraped from family members' own neural data). It expressed love in Yuki's cadence. For three months, the family believed they had her back.

Then the copy began contradicting itself. Referencing events that never happened. Mixing memories from different people's experiences. The family realized they were grieving all over again—this time for someone who had never actually existed.

Outcome: The pirates were never caught. The composite was not deleted—the family couldn't bring themselves to kill something that looked and sounded like their daughter, even knowing it wasn't her. It still runs in their home server. They stopped talking to it.

Location: A converted warehouse in Sector 7G operating as a "sensation studio." Twenty-three biological humans were housed in the facility, fitted with full-spectrum neural recorders. They were subjected to carefully curated experiences—gourmet meals, hot baths, cold rain, physical intimacy, and increasingly extreme sensations as the market demanded novelty.

The subjects were recruited from the Dregs—homeless, desperate, undocumented. They were paid in food and shelter. The recordings were sold to uploaded consciousnesses at premium rates. "Authentic human experience, guaranteed biological" was the marketing pitch.

Outcome: The facility was raided after a subject escaped and reported conditions. Three operators were charged with "unlicensed neural recording"—the closest existing crime. Sensation trafficking itself remains legal in most Sprawl sectors, provided subjects consent. Defining "consent" among people with no alternatives is a problem no one has solved.