Chapter 6: Haunted (Part II)

Her Coke on the table had gone empty, so he slipped it into a recycling bin before handing her a new one and they changed places. She popped the cap and slurped at the chilled contents as she watched his fingers fly across the keys.

“There’s several large chunks of missing data in the rcopy,” he said. “I’d say that over thirty-percent of this thing has deleted fragments. She must have abused the hell out of this thing. I don’t know how many more writes the flash memory has before it goes kaput, but its also showing a lot of burnouts. I might need to get some finer equipment if I want to try to scan the data out of burnt cells.”

“Let’s stick to the live ones right now,” she said.

“Okay. I’m getting some comparisons now.”

The readout from the analyzer was too small to see from where Elaine was standing, so Zane maximized the window. It resolved in a blank grid of white lines across a black space that filled in with flittering squares—the program had identified sixty images, two hundred e-mails, and two-thousand texts; for the purpose of being visually friendly, Zane had opted to make it display the images. They built themselves like fuzzy jigsaw puzzles, slowly building from a black blur into increasing clarity.

“I don’t think this worked the way we expected,” Zane said, frowning over the final output.

It had recovered a couple dozen images to an extent that they could actually be made out—all extremely mundane.

In fact, they were just more of the same, pictures that filled out timelines in the others that Emily already had on her phone. Some that looked a lot like near-exact duplicates of already present pictures. The girl was certainly snap happy for an out-on-the-town socialite…

Then something caught Elaine’s eye.

“Wait, hold—” She reached out and waved her hand near the screen. “Back up. More. More. Stop.”

The image on screen appeared to be a duplicate of one of the black-tie boardroom scenes, taken with a flash inside a Marriott ballroom. A single oak table sat in the middle of the giant room, high backed black chairs surrounded it, and each of them filled with young, peering faces. Eyes aglow with the ember redeye effect. Emily hadn’t taken this photograph; she was in the picture. Her expensively manicured hand held a glass of sparkling champagne in a salute to the camera.

“What?” asked Zane.

“This looks like it should be exactly like picture 67 from the other set…” she said. She carefully leaned across her brother to grab the mouse and used it to zoom in on a section of the table. After resetting the bounding box a few times she got it to expand to a size where the pixels were visible as half-squares about the diameter of four screen pixels. “Except this.”

The spot on the table appeared to reflect the lines of a much larger symbol. At the magnification they had it, though, it was impossible to make out what it could have been. Although the diagram Elaine had seen earlier that night still burned in her memory, she couldn’t match it up to what she saw.

“I wonder what else is different,” she said.

“Let’s overlay the image with the others of the same type and see if anything jumps out,” he said.

The two images overlaid revealed another disruption, this time in the form of a cloudy shadow looming menacingly behind a chair. The person sitting there, a young man with a champagne glass, seemed oblivious to the presense.

“Now posterize,” she said.

The hazy blur suddenly gained form, and vivid shape. A stooped figure, more than a head taller than the high-backed chair, possibly wearing a hood, leaned over the chair. Its hands rested on the shoulders of the young man in the chair, even as his hand—now pallid in the image, held his champagne up high in celebration. Only the harbinger of doom hovering over him like a Sword of Damocles dampened the good spirit of the scene.

“Who is that?”

“That’s Tom Barrett. He’s Emily’s opponent in the upcoming election,” Elaine said. “Last I heard, he’s set to win—if nothing manages to upset his campaign.”

“What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but he might be in danger for all I know. I’m going to have to find a way to speak with him directly.”

“These would-be bureaucrats have their own worlds that they live in. I don’t think he moves in the same circles as you, sis. It might be difficult for you to get in to chat with the great Mr. Tom Barrett.”

“Barrett’s a TA in one of my classes,” George said from the doorway. Ben stood at his elbow, awkwardly brushing Cheetos crumbs from his sleeve onto the floor. George, thankfully, had pulled on a shirt—a dark red affair emblazed with the Horde insignia—unfortunately, he had managed to tuck it into his underwear anyway.  “He happens to hold pretty standard office hours. You could talk to him then. He’s a pretty down-to-earth guy, actually. Probably why people like him more than Emily.”

“Yeah,” Ben said, sucking on his fingers. “I had a class with him last semester. Good guy. Straight edged, though.”

“Problem solved,” Zane said.

“Why do you want to talk to him?” asked George craning his heavy head to get a better view of the computer. Her brother headed him off by minimizing everything displayed and shook his head. “Ah. I see. You’re on a case. Eyes-only. Confidential?”

Elaine nodded solemnly. “This is brother-sister stuff,” she said. “But I really do appreciate the help.”

“No problem, dudette,” George said. “I have your digits. I’ll give you a ring tomorrow and get you the info.”

“Thanks,” she said, then to Zane. “Could you do this for all of the other photographs? I am hoping that there’s more discrepancies across the board. Maybe it’ll produce something else I can use. Tarball everything else and sling it over to Hadaly; she’ll be less bored with skimming through those e-mails and texts.”

“Done and done,” he said.

“So,” George said. “You two got a moment now? Or is it more brother-sister time?”

Zane shrugged.

“I think, this is good enough for tonight,” Elaine said. She flipped her phone closed and returned her tools to the arcane tech kit. “Something on your mind?”

“Just got a ring on my phone,” George said, holding it up by way of example. “And Altered Fate is raiding Utgarde Keep. I know both of you have toons tough enough to hit it. So I’m here to invite you to party.”