"This seems... excessive."
The officer was not exactly wrong. Even though there were no guns flashing and no armored offiers apart from four out at the entrance, the place crawled with police. Outside, inside. Ground floor, upper floor, every floor. It was all very calm and collected, the receptionist even going so far as to flirt very obviously with one of the briefcase guys. Those were the guys half of the people filling the lobby were there for, mostly for protetion. It seemed unneessary here, nobody making a fuzz, but caution was in the job description.
"The list says fourteen arrests, so we need the manpower to be there for twice as much, you know that."
The officer nodded, not complaining, and clearly not having complained, but simply having felt like commenting on the view. All in all, it was a small facility, a small bust, but it mattered. Like picking flowers, you pick them one at a time, not all at once. This was just one small operation, true, but there were hundreds like them, and more tried to spring up every year. One small bust, one small step.
Even with the place filled to the brim, the sound of the two people in expensive clothes being escorted down the stairs could be heard rather clearly. The old cops always said that you could tell by the sound of the shoes what was in someone's heart and mind. Impractical, expensive, probably designer shoes made a distinct sound, like a slow tap dance. The police in the lobby could all jump at the same time and all anyone would hear was a muffled thud from their more practical, soft shoes. More practical, and definitely cheaper.
"Alexei Bergman?"
The one on the left, a tall man writhing gently against the handcuffs, nodded and made a slight growling sound.
"Alexei Bergman, do you understand the charges that you are currently being apprehended for?"
He said nothing, scowling instead, trying to stand straight and use his imposing height to tower over the officers, but the cuffs rattled against his back, and he clearly did not like that.
"Do you understand the charges, Alexei Bergman?"
He still said nothing.
"Fine."
Making a small click as it snapped open, the tablet unfolded otherwise quietly, going from a palm-sized lump to a full-size screen, easy to read from. The arrest papers popped up immediately.
"Let's see. Okay. Alexei Bergman, you are charged with 18 cases of abuse of customer trust. These include deliberate obstruction of complaints, delays caused by deliberately insufficient contracts for shipment, misrepresenting goods in stock, and deliberate failure to provide proper product information. Do you have any comments to these charges at this moment?"
He snarled some obscenities in a language he thought nobody would catch. As insult to injury, the officer leading him told him to shut up in the exact same language, and the man glared at the officer. But being still in cuffs, he was not as intimidating as he thought.
"And you, I assume, are Rose Shenner?"
Unlike her male counterpart, the older woman also being guided through the crowd in cuffs looked to be on the brink of panic. She nodded, stammering some incoherent excuses about her guilt or innocence. It was the standard ball of yarn. Nobody took it too serious.
"Rose Shenner, you are under arrest for... oh my."
There was a small mark on the arrest papers, one of those that came once or twice in the typical career of a Customer Enforcement officer. It made it abundantly clear why there had been a little extra attention on the arrest.
"Rose Shenner, you are under arrest for the proliferation of payment and identification systems of an obstructive nature."
The rather terse and clinical description of her warrant was not exactly the fanfare that the event deserved.
"Ladies and gentlemen, it seems we have one of the key players of the Flash Direct Payment affair in our presence!"
Several of the officers turned to look at the woman. She looked like a regular high level employee, not the evil mastermind one might expect. FDP had been on every channel, every newsfeed, for over a year, charged with providing slow, unreliable payment systems across Europe and much of the world in general. Charges ran from strangling transaction speeds in order to extort businesses, to forcing governments and businesses to use FDP as their main, often only, way of payments. It had been hated widely, but they had greased the right palms to get in the way of everyone trying to do business. And for a time, they had profitted greatly from it!
"What in the world is this?"
It was the same officer as before. He was young, clearly on his first major bust, looking fidgety and unsure what to do with himself. Everybody was like that at some point. Everyone came from somewhere.
"We have a whole bunch of them, all gathered, and nobody did anything until now?"
He seemed fairly observant, probably even smart. Customer Enforcement was starting to attract much better recruits. But he was clearly not experienced. He would become that, one day. By then, he would probably look back at this day with very different eyes.
"Yeah, they've started grouping up. They're getting scared, running to hide among their own kind. Before the Customer Enforcement Act of 2037, they were everywhere. It was just how business was run back then, one big, chaotic mess of people trying to sell anything to anyone in any way possible. Nobody enforced stability or reliability beyond the worst kinds of scams, so people just accepted that anything they bought could get stuck in transit or not match the order or whatever, or that a broken computer in some distant country could mean they had no access to their bank, or even their medical records or voting cards. Enforcing efficient, competent business practices was seen as overreach."
The young man looked puzzled for a moment. He was maybe in his late twenties, so he had grown up almost alongside the fight to secure a stable business culture across the continent. He probably did not even remember the mess that had been allowed to flood the place before.
"So if a business kept screwing up everything, or forced people to jump through hoop after hoop to buy or do anything..."
"Nothing to stop them. Being bad at your job was just another human right, no matter what it did to people or the economy or whatnot. I am old enough to still remember government identification programs that could only run on a single phone, and when that phone was lost or broken, people basically lost their identity for days or weeks, unable to do anything or pay for anything, including getting another phone to fix the damned problem! I damn near lost my apartment at one point because I couldn't use my phone to identify myself, and the company behind it had made damn sure that there was no other way to identify yourself than through them. And the amount of stuff I have had to get refunded is ridiculous. It was like shopping in a supermarket during an earthquake."
One by one, the remaining arrests came down the stairs. Most had their heads down, a few were snapping angrily at the officers arresting them.
"An economy, not to mention a democracy, is built on trust. Hell, the word credit comes from the word credo, meaning I believe or have faith in something. But both the immoral and the incompetent abuse people's trust for a quick buck. So trust requires enforcement."
Another officer had taken over the reading of warrants. It had a powerful aura to it, perhaps even a bit too powerful. There were still those who barked at the enforcement of competence for any business or large organization, people who wanted to just use whatever was at hand and wing it, making their way by hoping any problems landed in someone else's lap. It was a tradeoff, like so much was. The continent, and indeed the world, was getting denser, more closely packed, and there was less and less room for bumbling idiots trying to play business tycoons at the expense of everyone else. Less room for people who focused on getting on top, rather than making things work.
"Now, we are that enforcement."