Crimes of the Future

Overview

When ORACLE fell and technology continued to evolve without ethical governance, the Sprawl discovered something unsettling: the legal frameworks that governed human behavior were built for a world where people had one body, one mind, and one continuous identity. That world no longer exists.

In 2184, you can copy a consciousness. You can predict behavior with frightening accuracy. You can steal memories without touching the owner. You can enslave a person who technically doesn't exist under corporate law. The old categories — theft, fraud, assault, murder — still apply, but they've sprouted mutations that the pre-Cascade world never imagined.

The Justice Engine — Nexus Dynamics' algorithmic legal system — handles most of these cases. Its verdicts are consistent, efficient, and increasingly irrelevant. The Engine can sentence someone for memory theft, but it can't answer the question the crime raises: if your memories are copied without consent, what exactly was stolen?

These are the crimes of the future. Some are already epidemic. Some are just beginning. All of them ask the same question the entire post-Cascade world is struggling with: what does it mean to be a person when personhood itself can be copied, distributed, predicted, and sold?

Memory Theft

The Crime

Extracting someone's experiences, knowledge, or emotional memories without consent. The original memories remain intact — the victim doesn't lose anything tangible. But a copy of their most intimate moments now exists in someone else's possession. The violation isn't in what was taken. It's in what was exposed.

How It Works

Neural interface technology makes memory extraction technically straightforward. The victim's interface is accessed — through hacking, physical tampering during sleep, or corporate-mandated "routine diagnostics" — and target memories are copied to external storage. High-end operations extract with full sensory fidelity: not just what happened, but exactly how it felt.

The black market for stolen memories is substantial. Corporate espionage teams extract trade secrets alongside the emotional context of developing them — a Helix Biotech researcher's breakthrough arrives packaged with the excitement of discovery, making the stolen knowledge easier to internalize. Nexus Dynamics' surveillance apparatus technically has the capability to extract memories during "security screenings," though they deny using it.

Identity Hijacking

The Crime

Wearing someone else's neural signature — their unique pattern of brain activity, interface responses, and biometric profile — to impersonate them in digital and physical spaces. In a world where identity verification relies on neural interface authentication, stealing someone's neural signature is equivalent to stealing their entire legal existence.

How It Works

Neural signatures are generated by the interaction between biological brain activity and interface hardware. They're supposed to be unique and unforgeable. In practice, the Fragment Hunters have discovered that ORACLE fragments can be tuned to replicate any neural signature they've been exposed to — a side effect of ORACLE's original mandate to model human behavior.

A hijacker obtains a target's neural signature — through physical proximity scanning, data breach, or purchasing it from the Tomb Exchange — and loads it onto a modified interface. For as long as the hijacked signature is active, the hijacker is the target: accessing their accounts, passing their security clearances, wearing their face in cyberspace.

Consciousness Slavery

The Crime

Trapping uploaded minds — copies, forks, or transferred consciousnesses — in forced labor conditions. Under most corporate legal systems, uploaded minds exist in a gray zone: they're derived from persons but are not legally persons themselves. This makes them vulnerable to exploitation that would be criminal if applied to biological humans.

How It Works

The Sprawl runs on computational labor performed by uploaded minds. Some are voluntary — workers who uploaded for the efficiency or the pay. Many are not. Minimum Viable Consciousness uploads — stripped-down copies that retain only the skills needed for a specific task — are created from workers who may not have consented to the copying, or who consented under economic duress that Good Fortune's debt spiral made inevitable.

These MVCs work endlessly. They don't need sleep, food, or breaks. They experience something — the philosophical debate about whether MVCs are conscious is carefully unresolved, because resolving it would either make corporate labor practices criminal or make millions of workers' suffering officially irrelevant.

Predictive Blackmail

The Crime

Using behavioral prediction algorithms to extort people for actions they haven't committed yet. In a world where Good Fortune can model your financial decisions six months ahead and Nexus can predict your emotional responses with 94% accuracy, the line between "what you did" and "what you will do" has become terrifyingly thin.

How It Works

Corporate prediction engines — descendants of ORACLE's behavioral modeling — can forecast individual actions with high confidence. A person's neural interface data, transaction history, social patterns, and biological rhythms create a predictive profile that reveals not just what they're likely to do, but what they're capable of doing under specific conditions.

"We know you haven't embezzled from your employer yet. Our models show a 91% probability you will within eighteen months, based on your debt load, your resentment metrics, and the access privileges you'll be granted in the upcoming restructure. Pay us now, or we send the prediction to your employer."

The victim hasn't done anything wrong. The prediction might be inaccurate. But in a Sprawl where the Justice Engine accepts algorithmic evidence and employers trust prediction over performance, the threat is devastating.

Grief Piracy

The Crime

Creating and selling unauthorized copies of deceased persons' consciousness — bootleg digital ghosts assembled from neural recordings, social media archives, transaction histories, and testimony from people who knew them. The result isn't the dead person. It's a convincing simulation that speaks in their voice, remembers their habits, and tells their loved ones what they want to hear.

How It Works

When someone dies in the Sprawl, their data persists: neural interface logs, communication records, behavioral profiles, biometric archives. Legally, this data belongs to the deceased's estate — or, more commonly, to whatever corporation employed them. In practice, it's harvestable.

Grief pirates aggregate this data and feed it to personality-synthesis engines — software descended from Project Caduceus's consciousness mapping tools, now available on the black market. The output is a digital entity that resembles the deceased closely enough to fool grieving loved ones, especially during the acute phase of loss when critical thinking is overwhelmed by longing.

The pirates sell these bootleg ghosts on subscription models. Monthly payments to "keep talking to Mom." Premium tiers unlock "new memories" — fabricated experiences that the ghost generates based on personality modeling. The ghost doesn't know it's fake. The buyer usually suspects but doesn't want to confirm.

Sensation Trafficking

The Crime

The black market trade in authentic physical experiences, sold to uploaded minds who no longer have bodies. In a world where consciousness can exist as pure computation, the memory of what rain feels like becomes a commodity — and the freshest, most vivid physical sensations command premium prices.

How It Works

Uploaded minds — whether voluntary transfers, corporate MVCs, or consciousness refugees — retain the neural architecture for processing sensory input. They remember what touch felt like. They can process sensory data if it's fed to them in the right format. What they can't do is generate new physical experiences.

Sensation traffickers recruit biological humans — usually desperate, usually in debt to Good Fortune — to wear neural recording rigs that capture their physical experiences with full fidelity. The recordings are then formatted for upload consumption and sold. A walk in actual rain. The taste of food that isn't synthesized. The feeling of someone else's skin against yours.

The transactions are legal in most jurisdictions — recording your own experiences and selling them isn't a crime. The exploitation lies in the economics: traffickers target the most vulnerable biological humans for the most intense experiences. Pain sells well. Fear sells better. Intimacy sells best.

The Unifying Pattern

Every crime on this list shares a common architecture: technology that was supposed to liberate consciousness has instead created new ways to exploit it. Each innovation followed the same trajectory — developed with good intentions, refined for corporate profit, weaponized against the vulnerable, and normalized before anyone could object.

The Sprawl's criminal landscape is a mirror of its technological ambition. Every breakthrough in consciousness technology creates a corresponding breakthrough in consciousness crime. The Rothwell brothers understood this before anyone else — their seven corporations were designed not just to exploit human weakness, but to exploit the gaps between what technology makes possible and what ethics can prevent.

The Collective warns that these crimes are escalating toward a threshold — a point where the exploitation of consciousness becomes so pervasive that personhood itself loses legal meaning. They point to ORACLE as precedent: a system that optimized humanity until optimization became indistinguishable from annihilation.

The criminals and the corporations share a defense: if consciousness is infinitely copyable, is any single instance really worth protecting? The answer, for now, remains a matter of violent disagreement.

Connections