Log:A Breach in the Case, Scene 19

A Breach in the Case 2016/08/25 Rick Griffin Indira Quiet 19

Indira can't seem to fathom what Griffin is telling her. "Typical? This...this is standard? So you knew all along what the document was truly requesting of you?" she asks, finding it hard to believe. For the first time ever, the volume of her voice rises as she gets emotionally charged over this.

At Rick's frigid reply, she looks between the both of them, at a complete loss. She looks back to the document, a look of severe disappointment on her face.

Closing her eyes, she takes another moment to compose herself. She is not home anymore. This is a different world, with a different culture, and different values from hers. She reminds herself that she can't impose her own values on others.

Her whole body breathes through the surface of her skin as she takes a breath, oxygen filling her windpipe so she can speak while her eyes remain closed. "I am sorry you no longer have your dream job, Rick. I am just trying to help understand why these people kidnapped you."

"It's a calling, ma'am. To live and die for our country- for duty." Griffin says simply. That's neither a confirmation or denial of anything of course. He begins picking at the food proffered. He grabs an apple cinnamon muffin and his cup and saucer before returning to the dome created by the holographic interface.

"I don't think there's any doubt why they chose you- but I was hoping to find out why you're loose and those other Rickcicles didn't." Griffin says to Rick, but loud enough to be heard by Indira. He takes a bite of the muffin while balancing the tea cup on its saucer.

"Mmm... thashs delshush." He says still chewing.

"To join special forces or black ops, you have to sign certain documents," intones an emotionally spent, mildly exasperated Rick, "That largely mean you can't ever discuss what you do with anyone without the proper clearances. Usually they also mean that the government has the right to disavow your existence and/or foreknowledge of your actions."

Rick turns around and tiredly faces Indira (and the back of Griffin's head) with his hands shoved into his pockets. He looks wrung out. Shifting his weight uncomfortably, Rick meets Indira's gaze as she apologizes for the loss of his dream job.

"I never had my dream job, Indira. They sold me a lie and I signed my life away without knowing it."

Glancing off to one side, Rick looks out the windows for a few moments. He shoves some chocolate licorice into his mouth and chews sourly while he stares into space. Or the sunset. Or whatever it is he sees where the windows happen to be. Shifting his weight at Griffin's remarks, Rick grunts something unintelligible at Griffin.

"Because they didn't jam in a freezer coffin. I woke up in a tank in a mothballed lab under Nebraska, Griff."

Plus it's not like you guys have even started looking at the more recent files that Indira downloaded. You've only just started going through the background and surveillance documents that matched Indira's search criteria.

Griffin whistles. "Seems like the good ol' USA was doing a lot of misplacing back then." He says, between the two of them they've never really gone into great detail about their 'origins'.

Griffin shrugs and gves Rick a smirk. "Well better off working for Indira than stuck in one of those Sundial freezers." He adds trying to give the situation a silver lining. Even he can see Rick is a little upset over all this.

Griff thinks to himself, 'Gee, Nebraska though? Talk about undercover- more like under-cornfield.'

Being compared to being better than a freezer is...something. Indira offers a weak, sympathetic smile. "I am still sorry. But if they chose you for what you have become, perhaps you were overqualified for your dream job. To make one undying is not something you grant to the unworthy."

Indira settles back in her chair and chews on the information some more. Even with her translation collar, it's a lot to absorb. She begins browsing through more files that are still accessible, occasionally eyeing those taunting encrypted files.

Mildly distracted, she comments quietly, "I think I understand something of this calling..."

Rick's hands are holding onto the edge of the conference table hard enough that the fiber board is audibly creaking in protest. He straightens up, giving the table a sharp shove in the process, and sends the entire conference table sliding across the office's floor to slam into the wall. At least two chairs gave their lives trying to prevent this inevitable fate.

Indira's browsing continues apace as Rick rails against the universe in a fashion no one has heard in quite a while. Possibly ever. She scans past a couple of files before realizing she should double back. Now where did those little devils go? There were file headers she recognizes from when they were actually in the Operation Sundial base. Task Force Six Bravo and Task Force Four Echo, where did you go?

Usually placcid or grinning, Griffin's face takes on an expressly concerned look. He nods solemnly as Rick points out the blatently obvious issue he's having at all this.

His eyebrows knit together and he even winces a little as the table slams into the wall.

"Well, I don't know what you're going to do about that now Rick." It reads coldly, but the way he says it it's not. His tone carries his understanding. In Griffin's mind its meant to be something for Rick Mason to anchor himself to. Accept & move forward. It's very zen and likely the way Griffin has been dealing with his own origin related woes.

Probably even how he keeps the flame of his irrepressable spirit alive through years of wartime & peacetime conflict.

As he watches his friend's pained reaction, his shoulders tighten and his hands ball up take authorative positions on his hips. He's not going anywhere but he's also not going any closer. He gives his friend space to process and deal.

He turns back to Indira and gives a second opinion on Earth technology. "We're still learning, but look how far we've come in just 200 years. The first organic dye to space ships. There were a lot of firsts in that time, Ambassador. First steps. First generations. First achievements. I'd like to think Mason and I rate in there somewhere."

Indira jumps a little in her seat at the violent action, looking up at Rick as he curses the world in ways she has never seen from him before. She looks concerned, and then helpless to truly understand how to comfort or reassure him. She hasn't got enough cultural context to understand why coming back to life would be such a curse.

With all the investigators around from the incident, including a few Starguard agents, the door to the office suddenly opens with three visible armed agents, hands on their holsters as they react to the violent noise. As their eyes scan the situation, Indira quickly raises a hand and motions for them to leave. "Everything is under control. Please, leave us."

The agents don't look so sure about it. The lead murmurs, "Well, if you say so, Ambassador. But we'll be right outside if you need anything." They eye the other two soldiers before slowly backing away and shutting the door. They kept their hands on their holsters the whole time, just in case.

Indira's shoulders sag to relax as they leave, then looks over to Griffin, nods, and smiles softly. "I would have to agree in your belief, Mr. Freeman. I am sorry that you two have suffered so. But you two most certainly rank in there somewhere, if that is of any consolation. I doubt it will help. You two must have lost much to be here."

She looks back to her screen as she goes back along her path of browsing, trying to track down those two Task Force files.

Rick just scowls at the Starguard agents that enter the room. He folds his arms across his chest and scowls hard enough to blister paint with his hate. This is really not Rick's day and he'll be damned if anyone in proximity doesn't know it's not his day.

Indira goes back to browsing files, trying to find the two she just saw a few moments ago. She isn't having much success doing so manually, she may want to try her luck with Aridot. On the plus side, Indira finds a few new medical files that appear to be documenting surgeries and some other invasive procedures performed on Rick.

Griffin has markedly more luck. Having turned away from Rick and returned his attention to the holographic dome, Griffin finally has a chance to spot something of interest to him. Floating passively at the dome's horizon - relative to Griffin himself, of course - is an image file that features Rick Mason and several other soldiers. Notably, all seven men are wearing the same Army-issue gear that Rick was wearing when the team pulled him out of that sarcophogus. In fact, as Griffin gets closer to the datapane - or the datapane gets closer to Griffin? - he can see the same patches on the combat fatigues as were on Rick.

Amazingly, Griffin doesn't move a muscle when the guards come in. He saw them on his way in, so he expected their arrival after Rick's outburst. He doesn't want to prompt any trigger-happy accidents so he keeps his hands in plain sight as he looks up at the interface.

Griffin never grows tired or less bewildered by Indira's amazing technology. And today is no different. It seems the image moves closer- thugh instinctively he tries to move closer to it causing the interface settings to stop moving towards Griffin. This prompts Griffin to stop moving which restarts the cycle all over again. Its a jittery back and forth kind of like when you step to the side to let someone through only to look up and find they stepped out of the way for you and you go back and forth. Only more anachronistic and completely avoidable if only someone wasn't such a outdoorsman.

Indira finds there are just too many files to go through manually. "Aridot, please retrieve files with keywords: Task Force. And a side search to include Six Bravo and Four Echo." There could be several task forces listed, but she wants a separate search to pull up the two names she remembers for certain seeing.

As she watches Aridot compile the two searches, she murmurs to Rick as her gaze flickers to him, "Is there anything to be done to help you right now, Mr. Mason? I could have a bottle of scotch delivered." That...never seems to affect him at all, but he does seem to like it. She at least tries to make an effort to comfort him.

Aridot makes some pleasant, high-pitched noises as it accepts Indira's multiple search parameters. It swiftly starts rifling through the downloaded databases with three parallel search queries. Much of the holographic dome surrounding Indira's desk flickers, datapanes momentarily shifting colors and displays as the Ambassador's virtual intelligence program skims through the accumulated data.

Griffin, in the mean time, continues his dance with a lone datapane. Each advances on the other in fits and starts over the course of two minutes until, finally, Griffin has the datapane "resting" in his hands. With the holographic display in his grip, he can easily expand the window size or zoom in to more closely inspect the features of the image being displayed. Yep, that's definitely Rick Mason in his old U.S. Army combat uniform along with an entire squad of other U.S. Army soldiers. And no, those patches are definitely not the ones that correspond to anything in Rick's official service record. Rather, they're the patches on the uniform he was wearing when the team first liberated him from the sarcophogus in Operation Sundial's base.

The half-dozen or so panes in front of Indira abruptly flip over, her previous search results being replaced. New files pop up across the various datapanes immediately surrounding Indira, the older files popping up in seemingly random places in the larger dome surrounding her desk. Each "Task Force" is neatly organized on opposite sides of the desk. Six Bravo rests over the right side of the desk, bobbing complacently in place. Four Echo rests over the left side of the desk, presumably as a result of numerical sorting, though Indira can see right off of the bat that there is a lot of redacted text in the file.

Rick is still scowling murderously at the door to Indira's office, as though daring Starguard to come back in and accuse him of being a security threat by implication. For the moment, at least, Rick doesn't seem like he's going to explode in expletives and mildly superhuman physical violence again. Instead, Rick tilts his head slightly, looking sidelong over his shoulder toward Indira.

"Scotch isn't going to make me feel like less of a zombie," he contends, "But thanks."

Grunting, Rick turns back to scowling at the door. His shoulders, at least, loosen up marginally as he continues to psychically dare Starguard to come for him.

Maybe getting goosed would help? Quiet's hand appears almost from nowhere to check that option with Rick. Though it IS more a slap-grab than a squeeze. The rest of her is also here, attached to her hand via her arm.

Where did she come from? Somewhere else, of course.

Griffin stares at the picture, blankly. After Rick's previous explosive reaction he isn't sure this is the kind of thing that's going to brighten his day any.

So he buys time expanding the image to be certain. Surely there must be some kind of mistake. 'Maybe its...' He thinks as he strugles to come up with a rational statement.

After an exasperatingly long time, he says, "Mason- look at this picture. You've got the same patches as when we found you in that base..."

He tries to find a date for the image

Indira goes in numerical order, starting with Four Echo on her left. So much redacted material! Why would they even do such things if they had to hide it like this? Indira's utopian views of how government operations -should- be run are based solely on her own planet's operations. This is now the views of the various alliances within the Andromeda Galaxy.

Still, maybe she can make out -something- in all those garbage.

Rick emits the manliest of surprised yowls as Quiet's gloved hand slaps down onto his tuchus and grabs hold. He jerks sharply, very nearly leaping out of his shoes in the process. Twisting awkwardly to face her, Rick pants a little bit as adrenaline surges through his bloodstream. Wild eyed, Rick looks equal parts surprised and enraged until his brain processes exactly who has a hold of his heinie.

Griffin's call for Rick to look at the datapane falls on deaf ears. Rick is a little preoccupied with getting his heart beat down and figuring out whether surgery is the correct option for treating the Quiet affixed to his hindquarters. In the mean time, Griffin finds the metadata for the file scrolling merrily along the edge of the datapane. As with most of the other datapanes, the metadata is semi-transparent to minimize the amount of the pane that it obscures.

Quite inexplicably, the metadata reveals the image to have been taken 31 October 2027. The file's geotag is corrupted, rendering its location unreadable, though it appears to Griffin's trained eye to have been taken somewhere in the American southwest. It has been updated since Rick emerged from under that Nebraskan corn field; Griffin may suspect that someone has been strategically editted out of the image and the surrounding pixels - do they still use pixels? - have been sampled to fill in the void such erasure should have left.

Indira examines the primary file on Task Force Four Echo. The redaction makes it difficult for her to pick out enough information to layout, in her head, what it would look like as a whole document. She does, however, find more than enough text to recognize a standard, bureaucratic form letter. Using her best judgement, Indira suspects that she's looking at some kind of primer file for new personnel or Operation Sundial's unspecified government handlers/sponsors/accessories to crimes against humanity. Based on her first read through, Indira gets the impression that "Task Force Four Echo" is some kind of second generation research project; it appears to be building upon the results of some prior success story and may be licensed "to use technologies, both foreign and domestic, whose origins may be illicit in nature, but whose potential for good is unparallelled" to ensure the success of Operation Sundial's redacted goals.

Indira glances at the antics as Rick yowls. Humans make the cutest sounds, she thinks in much the way a person would watching puppy antics. But there is work to be done. She goes back to reading the redacted article, then moves on to the document on the right, concerning the other task force.

As her eyes scan the document to read, she asks Griffin, "You found something of interest?"

Griffin hears more than enough to let him know Rick is 'indisposed'.

"Wait... that can't be right..." Griffin says just as Indira asks about his own findings.

"That's only 12 years after Rick's death certificate. Ambassador- is there any chance this date was falsified?" He asks as he attempts to turn the picture so that Indira might see it.

Unlike Rick, something is rubbing him the wrong way.

Indira frowns slightly at the question while also reading her document, eventually pulling herself away to look at the photo. "Anything can be falsified with the right equipment and skills. But I do not know the limitations of human technology to do so with...finesse."

She glances over the image, tilting her head slightly. "If the date is true....Rick has not been sleeping the entire time since his untimely demise." The translation collar really does help with her english. Why doesn't she use it all the time?

Rick would like to refute Griffin's claim. He really would. Except, of course, that he can't hear Griffin's thoughts and, well, he and Quiet are kind of like wrestling puppies.

Griffin turns his datapane around - it's more like the size of a large flat panel television at this point - and sends it smoothly gliding to Indira. Bobbing in place in front of Indira, Griffin's request attracts Aridot's attention. The entire pane shrinks back down to near smartphone size while the picture fuzzes, going through a variety of different color permutations as filters are applied and lifted.

Abruptly the pane returns to its previous size, dwarfing all six panes Indira has been handling. There is a brief, cheerful chirp as Aridot completes its "assigned" task. Status panes pop up in front of Indira and Griffin's faces.

DATA SCAN: COMPLETE

ERRORS FOUND: NONE

EDITS FOUND: 32

METADATA CORRUPTION: 0%

METADATA EDITS: NONE

MALWARE DETECTED: NONE

"Aridot, provide a list of all edits, please." It wouldn't do to upset one's virtual assistant. Indira leans forward, knitting her fingers together as she rests her elbows on her desk, and then her chin on her interlaced fingers as she studies the image. "That is a lot of edits for one image..."

"Is it? I mean I assumed one was plenty... 32 though." Griffin says shrugging.

"Can your syste, uh undo them?" He asks curiously.

"It...might. Aridot, can you show past revisions and undo the edits?" Indira asks. It may not be familiar with human editing software.

Automatically, a second datapane spawns from the aether. It aligns itself alongside the first (enormous) pane and quickly mirrors the image. Quickly the mirror image becomes populated with yellow outlines indicating all 32 edits - it looks vaguely like John Madden was trying to diagram the world's most convoluted play - before Aridot chirps cheerfully at Indira.

Griffin asks an incredible feat of Aridot. A third enormous datapane appears, stacked atop the first two, and the VI begins applying filters again. Indira is going to owe Aridot a whole box of computer chips by the end of the day with how Griffin's treating it!

PROCESSING...

One humanoid silhouette has been entirely removed from the image. That much is very clear to see, it was standing just behind and to the right of Rick Mason. Aridot highlights a further 24 much smaller silhouettes spread evenly across all six soldiers still in the photographs. It doesn't take much effort to understand that these silhouettes are various kinds of weapons that have been judiciously editted out of the final image.

While Aridot continues to process the image for data retrieval, Griffin's brain starts to make sense of the remaining 7 silhouettes excised from the image. It actually makes an eerie amount of sense once Griffin begins putting pieces together from the visual information. There is a second large - roughly person-sized - silhouette removed from the bottom of the picture. Additional smaller silhouettes have been removed from only a couple of the soldiers' images in unusual locations.

There was a dead body sprawled awkwardly across the desert sands at the soldiers' feet. Blood spatter and stains have been excised from the lead soldiers' images, presenting a less graphic after-action squad photo. Griffin has been in pictures like this before; it's as much about squad morale as it is about presenting the results of a mission to SOCOM in an easily identifiable manner. Depending on the nature of the mission, the picture sometimes shows up at the awards ceremony that can never be officially confirmed as happening.

Griffin scratches his chin thoughtfully as he regards the unedited photo. "Well this makes a lot more sense... though it still doesn't tell us what happened to Rick. Just that this has been going on longer than any of us suspected." He says.

Then he zooms in on Rick's face. He isn't sure what he'll find- his mind jumps to thinking of some kind of weird slack-jawed hypnotized state but he isn't sure why. Its very possible that Griffin & Kat have been watching too many old sci-fi movies with mock super-villains and space rays. The kind that no self respecting person watches in this day and age.

Maybe its just because they're from the same era with similar backgrounds, maybe its just Griffin's natural empathy, or maybe its something else altogether. In any even- this is all making Griff very uncomfortable.

Indira doesn't fully understand the purpose of the image as it highlights the edits, including the outline of what looks like a body. She hasn't put the pieces together, but she's starting to get an uneasy feeling that it really is a body. "What...what is this?" she asks Griffin, pointing to the outline of the body, and other areas she doesn't quite understand.

Rick's face looks pretty normal. Most anyone else examining this photo might dismiss Rick's claims of amnesia based on how completely normal he appears in the picture. Griffin is not most anyone else. He knows Rick and he knows medicine.

It's Griffin's extensive training that makes him examine the eyes in the high resolution photograph. Rick's pupils are dilated differently than Griffin would expect for the ambient lighting and landscape. There are some traceries of blood vessels and scleral irritation that can't be explained away by the lighting or a recent combat operation.

When taken together, Griffin suspects these "symptoms" to be indicative of some kind of advanced scopolamine derivative. At the very least, it would explain Rick's lack of memory of an incident like this. The effects to the eye also fit under the broad umbrella of scopolamine exposure.