Episode 6 - Buggy

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“Something’s happening, it may not be your friends the Fislers, but we need to figure out who this group is.” Jeff handed Al the phase-linked glasses and a report. A few weeks had passed since the start of the operation and Jeff was glad to have any development, but he was taking a risk bringing Al to his temporary office, even if it was a nondescript storefront with brown paper over the windows and a back entrance. Not knowing who your enemy was didn’t mean they didn’t know who you were. However, moving these reports around more than necessary was more of a risk.

Jeff tried to wait patiently laying his hands on top of other reports he couldn’t read until he got the glasses back. Of course he could go code another pair, but the process was long and tedious, and he wanted to see Al’s reaction. When he started playing with the corners of the paper he caught himself and watched. Finally he was rewarded, Al grunted.

“What part are you on?” Jeff thought he knew

“They are definitely referring to the DOD moss project. I am pretty sure that this line talking about the infrared properties wouldn’t be common knowledge, I guess that was why it was flagged?”

“Yeah, but it is a a bit stale. The date was from two weeks ago.”

“Are they monitoring these communication lines? Who’s voice was it originally recorded in?”

“No and I don’t know.” Jeff shook his head and curled a fist on top of the documents on his desk. “The connection was a burner, it’s been dead since this communication, and of course it will take awhile just to figure out where it broadcast from. The voice is artificial, but very flat inflection, essentially just transmitting data.” He forced his fist to relax.

“So it wasn’t broadcast from the Lab? But why would someone do a data dump this way?” Al tried to stay hopeful.

“It was an outside line of communication, the source wasn’t near the lab.” Jeff watched Al’s face fall with his acceptance of the logic. “Though we could still do a bug sweep.” He left the other question unanswered, and tried not to fidget.

A bit of hope crept into Al’s knit brows. “Can I do that without alerting them?”

“I have some multi-spectral bug kits, basically bugs themselves, but built to listen for devices not on normal frequencies, or riding other carriers. I’ll bring a kit tomorrow.”

“Oh good, I think they are taking Edward to his first day of school the day after tomorrow.”

“Sounds like the perfect time.”

“Yes, speaking of a perfect time I had better get out of here and walk back, I don’t want to look too fresh after one of my ‘exploratory walks.’”

***

The kit was delivered as promised. There were several options, but Jeff had included a note indicating that the multi-spectral radio interceptor model would probably be the best thing. Al spent the evening reading through the documentation and committing the setup to memory as the noises of the Fisler’s big day preparation echoed softly through his bedroom door.

After doing a short trial run, spreading out the foil, attaching the tiny circuit board and then calling a friend in Hong Kong. He then attached a device that wasn’t just powered from the radio waves it was listening to, and pulled out the strongest signal, which he ran against the encryption that the call was made through, it was a match.

After carefully folding away the bug into a pocket of his bag he prepared for bed, the noises of the house settling down as the family attempted to get some rest before tomorrow’s major disruption to their normal routine. He thought about how much trouble he was going through in order to clear their name. “They were my favorite students.” He almost slept soundly.

***

The backing on the foil that kept the stickiness protected must have expired, that or the adhesive was also used to patch battleships.

The Fislers were out, just as expected, taking Edward to his first day of class. As usual these days it was expected that anxious parents would attend the first day of class with their children. If there were any stay-at-home parents they were often known to stick around for a week or more until firmly guided to the principal’s office and then carefully told to leave. Kids these days were coddled, he idly wondered how the Fislers had ever dealt with his brusqueness in school.

He had just managed to peel off half the backing when the door lock beeped. He quickly opened a bench drawer and shoved the bug in, closing the drawer and moving toward the microscope to adjust a knob as though he had just been taking notes. The door closed and he looked up.

It was Mr. Smith, the custodian, who waved cheerfully from beyond the second set of doors. “Is this all of your trash for this week?” Of course he had a high security clearance as well, but all he knew about the lab were the phased windows and the sealed bags of trash. He didn’t have access to the interior and was just assuming that someone was in the lab.

Al looked at his watch and realized the man was several hours early for his Wednesday run, he cursed himself and went to the door, he punched a button that cleared a “window” that looked red to him but hazy except for Al’s face to Mr. Smith. “Yes, that’s it for this week. Um, how are things going?”

“Pretty well, but we are only halfway through the week, no telling what might happen in the next few days!” He was altogether too cheerful for Al’s taste.

“Um, yes. Thanks, have a good day.”

“You do as well Prof!”

Al released the button and cursed himself again. He was getting jumpy trying to help his friends, why should he be so jumpy hiding perfectly harmless things from them? “Because, how am I going to explain it to them?”

He opened the drawer with the bug inside of it. He tried to gently extricate it, but it was stuck to several automatic pipettes and a test tube stand as well as the interior of the drawer. He had been planning on putting it on the back of a ceiling tile, but between the adhesive and his force to remove it the foil antenna tore in several places.

No amount of patching got the electronics to give him any good data. He gave up and wadded it up in frustration and threw it at the phased glass wall. It bounced and he went to pick it up, berating himself for getting upset when he saw a trash bag by the door. It was mostly empty and unsealed, he thought about chasing down the custodian, but just chuckled and then went to throw chuck the defunct bug in the bag.

It only had one thing in it, an organic mass not much bigger than his big toe, mostly brown with a few silver wires wrapping it. He stared at it for a few minutes before gingerly reaching in and picking it up between finger and thumb. It wasn’t slimy, in fact it was dry and fuzzy to the touch. It was a bit hefty as though a small chunk of hard wood, and there weren’t any obvious ends to the wires sticking out.

He considered what to do again with the failed bug and the now empty trash bag. The bug couldn’t be thrown out here and an empty trash bag would be too conspicuous for whoever had forgotten to take it any further. He folded it, lifted the edge of a bag already in a can and set it below on top of the few extras that made emptying a can that much easier.

He was just moving the pipettes and other items back into the drawer when he heard the door beep. Rather than jump and go to the microscope, he pulled out the petri dish, spritzed the moss and was walking back to specimen storage when the Fislers came in.

They greeted him and talked about how well Edward had already adjusted. They told of their little rebellion too, they and another couple snuck out before lunch and went to celebrate at a restaurant by themselves. It wasn’t just for the exclusion of Edward, they temporized.

While they were happily talking, Al unhappily decided not to confront them with the unknown object burning a hole in his pants pocket. Just the thought of a lab item not on a bench, or at worst, in his lab coat was slowly killing him inside.

“Are you alright?” Gus paused from describing the small chocolates that each student had received.

“Uh, yes, sorry.” Al grimaced, and then regained his composure. “I don’t think my lunch settled well.” His non-existent lunch, though it wasn’t the only time he had worked through lunch and left it in the fridge, so it would be hard to prove his lie, he smiled and asked another question about their school experience.

Phyton: Episode 5 - First Report

Previous Episode

Airports on the receiving end were just as nightmarish as the sending end these days, Al thought as he pulled his suitcase from an old fashioned belt.  Anyone could grab luggage if they wanted to. The security was terrible too. So many uniforms jostling to look closely at you, your bags, and a suspicious mustard stain if you had the misfortune of spilling lunch.

Back before the purge the entities had monitored from afar with others delivering your luggage directly to you, no mess and fuss of people crowding the belt. Now the security gap left by the entities felt unfillable, all of the personnel seemed frustrated by the number of people milling around and the occasional raised voices of people arguing over similar luggage or trying to convey just how important their lost luggage was to a harried worker.

Al found Jeff already in the crowd as he trundled his decidedly unresponsive luggage away from the chaos.

“You got yours, well that gives me hope. I’ll see you at our first meet. If anything arises, let me know.”

“Will do.” They shook hands and Al headed out to the taxi stand.

The study in contrasts always made Al smile, airports and their security had regressed where cars still were entities. Highly regulated entities, but entities nonetheless. The new government was crazy in its attempt to give more people jobs by scrapping 10 years of entity development, but it wasn’t hopeless, in some areas.

The estimated 20k to 50k people per year that didn’t die in car wrecks guaranteed that those entities driving weren’t going anywhere. Also they were the least quirky and some of the least human-like entities. Hence why they replaced human drivers. They were also still hooked into the info-grid which made arranging for one to meet at the curb extremely easy.

After getting in and telling the car where to go, Al sat back and closed his eyes. Although the fallback to old-style security made him anxious to fly, he was not less anxious after this flight. If anything he was more so. The Fislers knew he was coming, but he was coming in to investigate them. That felt like it was a violation of their trust.

He certainly didn’t want to find anything, and from what he knew they both followed rules very well, but the fact that the FBI and the DoD were investigating meant that something was happening. He just hoped it was a case of target misidentification.

***

The taxi pulled into the driveway of a large house with a xeriscaped yard. Other than a few lush green plants and a few palms by a small pond the yard was rock and cactus. He double checked the address on his phone and the one in the taxi’s navigation system. They matched, but certainly they would have a kid friendly yard, right?

***

Jeff sat in the sedan watching people pass, nearly everyone looked busy which made him feel like he should be doing something. At the moment he waited for Al so they could talk about any developments, but he also waited in general. His message inbox was clean, contingency plans for all occasions were stacked neatly on the desk back at the warehouse he was based out of, and his personal plans once done here filled his calendar.

Of course the agency had a much more glamorous image, many movies growing up depicted dramatic scenes where hero agents solved crimes despite vast odds while wooing or seducing the love interest. The only interest anyone showed was with their jobs back at HQ, no-nevermind love interests being more human than crime.

He spotted Al walking toward the car, and stopped fidgeting. The boredom and anxiety evaporated as the man who was the anticipated antidote knocked on the window. He unlocked the car and Al got in.

“How are things?” Al asked as he settled in.

Jeff paused, wondering if he should do the socially acceptable thing, but decided against it, “Boring.”

“Well then, let’s not keep you waiting any longer.” Al reached for his phone as the car started to move onto a predetermined route. “Though, I am not sure that the news is going to be very exciting either.” He opened a list on his phone, “They seem like a normal family as far as two high-caliber scientists can seem with a child. They are looking forward to Eddy going to kindergarten and spend plenty of time in the evenings working with him on things. During the day they work at the lab. Are you cleared for what they work on?”

Jeff nodded.

“Right, so they are mainly working on a moss-like plant that can be grown in the lungs without causing a pneumonia reaction. It’s pretty interesting since it works off of micronutrients in the lungs and the infrared heat from the body in order to grow and break CO2 back into oxygen for the host. But enough of me getting excited by their work.”

“Are they over protective of anything? A room in the house or lab equipment?”

“It doesn’t seem like it. This last week I’ve been working and living with them and they seem to have nothing to hide, no wariness around me once the DoD clarified my cover, they definitely understand that the things they are working on are quite sensitive ecologically too.”

“Any unknown people that they talk to?” Jeff interjected.

“Not that I have seen, but I’ve only been around for a week, and I can’t keep an eye on both of them all the time. On the other hand they don’t disappear for long periods of time without reasonable excuses, though I haven’t gone grocery shopping with them yet. They really care for Eddy.”

“Anything out of the ordinary about their parenting?” Jeff barely suppressed a squirm. He didn’t have a terrible childhood, but there were some events that he still wasn’t quite willing to confront. Asking about a child seemed to always bring up those feelings, maybe it was also the reason he never went on a second date.

“Other than seeming to be really attentive parents, no.”

“Are they anxious about him going to kindergarten?”

“Yes, but I think that is normal? Since neither of us has kids I don’t think we know, right?”

“I guess my parents seemed quite anxious when I first went to school. But after I told them about the first day they relaxed.” Too much, no inquiry ever, Jeff thought, it amazed him in retrospect that he had done so well.

Next Episode

Phyton: Episode 4

**Previous Episode or First Episode**

Jeff sat down next to him and pulled out a stack of papers, of course they were all blank to Al, but he saw the glasses peeking out of Jeffs shirt pocket. “Aren’t you worried that even knowing that there is alot more information on this case might bias my ‘expert analysis’?”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way.” Jeff’s realization and maybe a bit of consternation showed. “But surely knowing that you could be biased would cancel that out, right?”

“I’m not a psychologist, but I already suspected that the agency wasn’t sharing all it knew,” Al shrugged, “Seems to be standard practice.”

“This is the first time I’ve been on a case like this. Have you seen it before?”

“Yes, back during the GMO ban, they used the same tech for documents back when I was part of a team investigating the relevance of the ban. They must have squirreled away a warehouse full of that paper so they could go back to after the secure entity tablets were removed from service.”

“Someone had the foresight.”

“Or the bureaucracy.” They both chuckled, someone near Al’s age was probably being rewarded for keeping the paper around when it had really just been a case of procrastination.

Jeff put on the glasses and started reading. Al watched the countryside flash by below, just a few more years and the cross country hyperloop would open, no more need for long distance flights across the continent. But by definition the hyperloop was a vacuum tube system, so there probably wouldn’t be any views during the journey.

“What do you know about the Fislers?” Several minutes had passed along with the Rockies. Al couldn’t quite read Jeff’s face, what did he know that he was asking this now?

“What the public knows?”

“No, how you know them.” Of course, but then the public probably didn’t know much about them.

“They’re both nice people. I knew both of them before they met. Bright, probably some of the brightest assistants I ever had. They had opposite scheduled days and near the end of the term there was a scheduling situation which brought them in together. They hit it off and it seems to be working for them. They were married a few months after that, quite remarkable the amount of talent between them.”

“They weren’t actually in your field though, right?”

Al nodded, “Gustaf, Gus, was studying to be a medical doctor, but could easily switch realms from human physio to plants in a blink of an eye. I would catch him doing homework in the lab. After the first few times I gave up asking him if he was finished since he was already done. I just gave him more to do.” He paused getting lost in remembering how smoothly and quickly experiments were put together and completed. “And Angela, she was a marine biologist interested in plankton, she also had such a dexterity with machines and programming. Entities that had slowly become useless to me were quite responsive to her. I was there when they met. To me it seemed they covered all the subjects in the world, coming to a consensus and yet somehow getting all the lab work done.”

“Did you attend their wedding?”

“Yes, it was quite the to-do. Lots of appreciative family, both were thought to be too driven to ever reach that point, and the families were happy to be proven wrong.”

“Did you stay in contact with them afterward?”

“Can’t say that I did, saw some posts on the usual sites, about them having a kid, what was that, three years ago?”

“About four and a half, actually.”

“Well time flies. From what I’ve been told, it seems they are doing very well for themselves. And with…”

“Edward, a pretty uncommon name these days.”

“Edward, no kidding, but he’s probably just about ready to go into kindergarten this fall, right?”

“It looks like it.” Jeff tensed.

Al sighed, “What else do we know about them?” He hoped to get a bit more out of Jeff, but it looked like he needed to catch up a bit on the “usual websites” before the Fislers picked him up at the airport.

“A bit.” Jeff glanced at the older man, and back down to the pages.

“Well I guess we'll just have to see, won’t I?”

“Yep.”

The rest of the flight continued in silence.

**Next Episode**

Phyton: Episode 3

Previous Episode

“Good work Field Agent Devney, your new clearance will allow you to access information you will need in California.” Agent Flind pushed a couple of manilla folders across a clear space of desk. “Sir?” Jeff Devney couldn’t help being excited, but he thought he kept it to himself. “Well we can’t send out a ‘green’ agent, so you are promoted to a field agent. For now your AO is just for SoCal and surrounding region. There are a few standby teams that will provide backup.” Flind leaned back in his ancient office chair, “If you need any other agency resources, let me know. And of course if you need any warrants we will have contacts for the appropriate jurisdictions.” Jeff eyed the stack of folders and then picked it up, pretty weighty, despite the digital paper. “Nearly four years ago I would have touched a button and cleared you to look at the info without all this paper, my desk was all but clear if you can believe that.” Flind motioned at the desk as though he wanted to sweep the stacks into the garbage can. “Any other questions?” Jeff thought hard, he didn’t want to sound dumb, just after being promoted, “I guess Dr. Ingram must be getting help, how soon is that?” “Dr. Ingram had two candidates in today that a consulting scientist and I have vetted. Hopefully he will take them, the sooner the better. Oh yeah, with the new clearances, you are actually cleared to know the case, obviously,” Flind indicated the folders, “It’s much more info than we gave the good doctor, but let him figure out most of it on his own. What we gave him will be marked so you know your talking points.” “Shouldn’t he know too?” “It might bias him at this point, and we really need a clear view by an expert. It is a touchy subject because we are dealing with the DoD.” *** Jeff tried not to think too much about traveling through the airport, sure the flights were much faster than when he was a kid, Virginia to LA in two hours, but security had become less efficient, and certainly much less enjoyable with the removal of automatic security agents. He didn’t remember the time before the tall gentle robot giants roamed the free-flowing, traveling masses, silently mixing with the crowd until they noticed something suspicious. A robot would confront the person of interest if they weren’t an imminent threat, or direct a blast of foam to envelope a possible suicide attacker. Jeff had seen a demo in school with a dummy and explosives being engulfed in foam, then the thud of the explosion and a slight distortion of the bubble. Foam was gone too, no one trusted a human to be able to differentiate as well as a well trained system. Manual scanners now throttled the flow of travellers causing them all to bunch into lines, waiting for permission to get on their flight. The number of successful attacks had rebounded to pre-artificial intelligent agent days, the decade and a half that the agents had been in place had only seen three successful attacks on airports, mostly because a large rush of extremists overwhelmed the systems. The party in power poo-pooed the idea that there was a correlation in the rise of successful attacks and their ban on using learning AI agents. Except everyone was an extremist these days, even the extreme normalist, or the extreme consideration-ist, one of whom tried not to have an extreme opinion on anything, or the one who would try to understand every single extreme they came across. Fortunately only a few religious extremist groups practiced violent attacks. Everyone’s views divided them into their own veiled worlds there were far fewer of the violent converts than 30 years before. Jeff wondered about the Fislers, other than the nominal extremism, were they fanatics of a cause? Would it be a bad ending? He spotted the doctor and waved, time enough in the future to consider these possibilities.

**Next Episode**