Crime

Source: Acquainting Yourself with Guanxi

Crime will always exist, simply because the definition of what crime is changes as society changes. Even in lawless, near-scarcity anarchist habitats, norms can be broken in ways that can be considered a violation of the social contract between everyone. A sufficiently transgressive disruption of tradition, custom, or unspoken rule will result in social sanctions or punishment in even the most lenient polity.

Most factions agree, at least in part, that actions that jeopardize the safety of citizens and habitats are crimes. Capitalist societies protect property and ownership with laws, because these are the foundations of their order. Almost every society prosecute crimes that threaten the economic stability of their preferred financial system. Conservative polities will go so far as to convict people of victimless crimes, sanctifying certain moral or religious principles and believing that people must be protected from themselves. Autonomist factions focus more on crimes that violate the autonomy of their citizens; coercion is anathema. Every habitat enforces a different set of laws, making the distinction between legal and illegal entirely relative.

As many crimes are a function of economics, it is no surprise that law-breaking changes as rapidly as technology does. Crimes considered heinous a century ago are shrugged at today. Let’s examine what has changed.

Bounty Markets

When the first darknet services came online, it was likely inevitable that the first criminal bounty markets would follow. These prediction markets serve as an incentive to specified crimes, notably assassinations or other major illegal acts. Anyone can make an anonymous bet on the details of the crime: date, location, etc. If the crime is committed in accordance with the bet, a large payout is ensured. This encourages a lawbreaker to commit the crime, because they can place an accurate bet on the details in order to receive the bounty.

Violence

Violent crime is still prosecuted, but the penalties for murder are greatly reduced. Murder, to most transhumans, is no longer permanent, so it is typically classified as aggravated assault and/or a property crime, assuming the victim is backed up. Some habitats even allow consensual dueling and murder, leading to the creation of murder clubs, where members can freely murder each other without repercussion. In more traditional polities, especially in the Jovian Republic, where many citizens live without backups of their egos, murder is still a serious crime.

Mass murder and attacks against essential habitat infrastructure are serious crimes in virtually every habitat. While a single murder can be undone through resleeving, there is the chance that no one can be resleeved if everyone is killed or the habitat itself is ruined. Unfortunately, it is now easier than ever for a single criminal to commit such a crime. Between nanofabrication, TITAN and exsurgent weapons, and the sheer difficulty of surviving in space, there are countless ways for a dedicated terrorist to fatally compromise a habitat. Even the most permissive habitat devotes considerable resources to secure itself against such attacks. At a certain point, an attack on a habitat crosses the line between crime and military action, so the criminal becomes an enemy combatant, subject to execution by the habitat’s defenders. Few other crimes get that kind of response.

Property and Theft

Market economies treat property crime more seriously than autonomist societies. Theft of material goods is not usually considered a serious problem for items that anyone can replicate. If a person steals a cheap tool, it is often easier to build a new one than hunt down the stolen item. However, stealing items whose availability is limited carries stricter penalties.

Rare and valuable goods, like morphs, Earth relics, alien artifacts, new prototypes, and bulk raw resources, are frequently targeted by professional thieves. Cartels throughout the Solar System steal morphs, even occupied ones, and sell them to less discerning customers. Carbon reaver gangs plunder raw materials from mining drones and automated carriers throughout the system. Claimjumping remains an issue on isolated asteroids and exoplanets.

However, converting stolen property into wealth can be even more difficult than stealing in the first place. The key is finding a discreet but wealthy customer who is willing to both buy stolen goods and accept any potential blowback from the property’s original owners. Specialist fences make a living just by connecting thieves to the right clients. Even if the right customer can be found, the criminals must also transport the goods without being detected, a difficult task at best. Only the desperate or most driven criminals focus on material theft when other types of crime are easier to pull off.

Theft of habitat resources is treated seriously in almost all polities. Visitors sometimes become inadvertent thieves simply by breathing the air if they have not paid for their allotment of life support resources. Squatting can create real complications in crowded habs, because life support systems can only sustain so many people. It can also be an issue even when squatters occupy abandoned habitats, like many of the derelicts abandoned during the Fall but still orbiting Earth, as they may reactivate TITAN war machines or inadvertently spread the exsurgent virus.

Intellectual Property

In the inner system and Jovian Republic, intellectual property is protected by stringent copyright laws. Trading blueprints or removing the DRM of a file is strictly against the law in hypercorp-controlled polities. Likewise, modifying nanofabbers to circumvent locks and restrictions is heavily penalized. An elite class of criminals specialize in bypassing DRM and trading pirated software and schematics between the inner and outer system, to the chagrin of the Planetary Consortium. While anarchists primarily free these designs by open-sourcing them, numerous Extropian hypercorps make a business out of repackaging blueprints and selling them to inner-system citizens at a discount, undermining their Consortium rivals. The theft of copyrighted data is a major tension point between capitalists and autonomists.

These laws also apply to corporate prototypes, projects in developments, morph genetics, and other trade secrets, but here the hypocrisy of capitalism shines. Industrial espionage between hypercorps is a thriving industry, as competitors seek to gain an edge over rivals. Hypercorps have even been known to extract and forknap citizens of other corporate holdings to gain access to their research and secrets, deriving it directly from their minds with psychosurgery if necessary.

Online Crimes

A substantial amount of crime has transferred from the physical world to online, where traces can be more easily erased. Hacking is a profitable endeavor, including crimes such as insider trading, identity theft, laundering currency, espionage, fraud, undermining security/surveillance, and defacement/sabotage. Malware exists on nearly every mesh network, defrauding anyone that lacks basic infosec skills. Most major cartels rely heavily on hackers to conduct business and protect their interests. Even old syndicate standbys such as protection rackets are handled electronically, with ransomware used to encrypt a target’s systems until they pay to have them unencrypted.

Much black-market activity now takes place on the darknet, hidden by anonymous routers and encrypted networks. Online storefronts sell stolen, counterfeit, and restricted goods, and criminals of various stripes offer their services to the highest bidder. Darkcasters enable egos to pass in and out of habitats unseen, bypassing security and customs. The Guanxi social network ties these together, while providing a forum for criminals to codify their own reliability and trustworthiness. Darknets are forbidden in many polities because they interfere with the government’s ability to monitor and control, but they are also valued and tolerated by authorities that wish to hide their own activities from rivals.

Fraud remains a problem throughout the system, even in near-scarcity economies. Con artists use sophisticated scams and bot networks to build up high reputations under fake identities and then cash them in to acquire valuable goods and services. These same hacker networks will sell their online might to inflate or undermine the reputations of others. In the same vein, propaganda and memetic warfare campaigns are launched to sway public opinions, spread disinformation, and attack rivals.

Vice

Crimes of vice thrive in the post-Fall era, though what defines a vice varies from culture to culture. Drugs and narcoalgorithms have been decriminalized in most habitats, have become more socially acceptable, and can easily be manufactured or acquired online. The more extreme the effect of a given drug or narcoalgorithm, the more likely it will be regulated or banned, especially in conservative polities. Of course, libertine factions allow virtually every drug and some provide them free. Virtually every polity bans drugs that are linked to exsurgent infection.

Gambling is rarely legally restricted, though the industry may be heavily regulated and taxed. Online gambling remains popular throughout the system, but hardcore gamblers are generally only satisfied with illegal sports like deathmatch fighting. Loansharking to pay off gambling debts is typically restricted.

Prostitution is rarely illegal except in very conservative polities like the Jovian Republic. In the Morningstar Constellation and Titanian Commonwealth, sex workers are offered legal and industry protections. Pornography is similarly rarely criminal, except when it depicts illegal acts, which varies from habitat to habitat. Often, what is illegal is based on the ideology of the ruling class. Bioconservative factions, for example, ban porn involving uplifts. The Titanians ban porn that involves indentured workers, considering it to involve acts of coercion.

Ego Trafficking

Though indentured service is legal throughout most of the system, it is profitable enough that numerous cartels have taken on the role of forknapping egos and buying and selling living minds on the black market. Many hypercorps are not picky about the details of an ego’s origins, only what skills they possess and that they are desperate enough to sign exploitive contracts. Uplifts and AGIs in particular are heavily trafficked, given that they are denied basic rights in many polities anyway. Many innocents have been unknowingly forked and sold to soul traffickers when they farcast to another habitat. Hackers target ego backup facilities and infugee storage for theft. Some scavengers loot cortical stacks from ruined ships and habitats or even Earth, despite the risk of exsurgent infection.

There are many potential uses for an ego, aside from labor. Minds can be freely plundered for their skills and memories, making them useful for both research, espionage, or more elaborate criminal schemes. Personalities can be rewritten to make willing slaves. Unethical scientists can use them for experiments. Cartels sleeve them into various types of morphs for underground pit fights. Sociopaths merge egos to create new slaves or just to see what happens. There is no limit to what torture can be inflicted on an enslaved mind.

Indentured service is considered a form of coercion and slavery in much of the outer system. It is illegal on Titan, and most anarchists are likely to treat indentures as slaves deserving of freedom.

Other Crime

There are many other criminal ventures that remain harder to classify. Black clinics provide ware and mods prohibited by local laws, offer healing vats to those injured while committing crimes, and sometimes even make prescribed morphs available. Sometimes their wares are experimental or dangerous, but such businesses thrive on their rep. Smugglers carry contraband items past habitat security: bioweapons, TITAN tech, prototyps, or simply restricted goods that will fetch a high price. Autonomist smugglers help uplifts, AGIs, or indentures escape from oppressive environments to the outer system. Forks sometimes go rogue, or are allowed to extend past their legally limited expirations. Political radicals seek to undermine authoritarian systems and governments. Terrorists wreak havoc according to their twisted ideological or religious beliefs. And, of course, exhumans treat transhumanity as prey.

Red Markets

Red markets are the equivalent to black markets, but in anarchist space. Despite the lack of laws, there are many things that autonomists seek to eradicate from their habitats that are valuable to the right people. This includes private sensor nets, ego trafficking, rep net gaming, blackmail, mindhacking, secrets, coercion, and irresponsible uses of bioweapons and experimental tech. To avoid taking a rep hit or face ostracization, such goods and services are offered through discreet red-market channels. Most red-market peddlers are the same cartels that operate in inner-system black markets, along with a few malcontents, misfits, and inner-system provocateurs. Exchanges are typically made with rep favors, though occasionally currency is used.