CHAPTER 17
The bus was halfway to the Intergalactic when reality seemed to snap back into place. My strange disconnected feeling dissipated. Suddenly the sounds around me seemed to gain volume and clarity, as if I had previously been listening through a closed door that was now open.
What the hell just happened?
I mentally played back the events in the parking lot and tried to make sense of them. A panic attack... that might explain my disconnected feeling. And I just happened to encounter a guy on the edge of an emotional break down. And the strange thing I had said was... I have no idea where that came from.
I tried to remember what the guy had been saying at the time, what I was thinking, but it came up blank. Its not that I couldn't remember. I think my mind was literally blank during that weird fugue state, just soaking up impressions and not trying to actively process them. At least that's how I seem to remember it. I wondered if Zen meditation feels like that.
I kept thinking about it, trying to recall details, trying to make sense of it all, but getting nowhere. We finally pulled up to the stop near the Intergalactic, so I mentally shelved the topic and got off the bus. Walking into the café, I looked for Dee and eventually found her at a long table in the back. She was sitting with Katie, Sebastian, and a young man of Asian ancestry... probably Japanese if I had to guess.
"Barry. Perfect timing," she greeted as I approached, "we were just trying to pick a game." A pile of board games and card decks was arrayed in front of them.
"Cool. What do you have?" I set down the bag of pretzels and began looking over the games. A couple of D&D style dungeon crawlers, several card games including classic Magic and a couple of different Munchkin decks, some sort of tile game about a sinking island, and a Firefly themed Monopoly game.
"You know Kate and Sab already, but I don't think you've met Pocky." Dee nodded toward the young Japanese guy.
"Hi, nice to meet you," he said as we shook hands, "It's actually Tatsuya, but I'm cool with Pocky. We've all agreed we should start with something short with a simple rule system. Forbidden Island would be perfect, but it maxes out at four players."
"Munchkin can have up to six," I suggested, "more if we combine decks."
"We might have two more joining us, so that's probably the way to go," Katie agreed.
After a bit of debate, we combined the Star Munchkin and Munchkin Fu decks for a sci-fi / kung fu mash-up of the hilarious card game. We ended up using some of my pretzels for scoring tokens, which worked fine until Sebastian absentmindedly ate half his tokens. It was decided by overwhelming vote that he could not replace those lost points, which immediately plunged him from first to last place. I was then briefly in the lead until Dee won a hand with a well timed Mook card. The artwork was so reminiscent of the muscle bound minion that had accosted me at school, I couldn't help but start laughing. My reaction might have seemed incongruous if all of us weren't already laughing so much. Munchkin is just like that.
Before we finished the game, two more people joined us, a young man and woman. Dee jumped up and introduced them.
“Barry, meet DualCore, the best hacking duo this side of, well... anywhere.”
“Hi Barry,” the young woman responded, “I'm Elizabeth... Elizabeth Claremont. This is my brother Brian.”
“Really, Liz?” Dee exclaimed, “you're just going to open with your secret identities?”
Elizabeth rolled her eyes but smiled as she replied. “Dee, I had honestly forgotten about your silly name for us.”
“Don't believe her,” Brian insisted, “I caught her using that handle on a DarkNet forum just last week.” Liz jabbed her brother with an elbow but did not deny the allegation.
We offered to deal them in to our Munchkin game and even spot them a few points, but they insisted we finish our game before they join in. As we played the remainder of our game, Elizabeth and Brian pulled out their tablet computers and arranged themselves at the end of the table. I caught myself watching them from the corner of my eye. Then I found myself staring outright. I began to understand why Dee had named them 'DualCore'.
Liz and Brian each had their own computer, but a third tablet sat between them. They each tapped and swiped at their own screen with one hand while simultaneously manipulating the middle tablet with the other hand. It was like watching ballet. Their hands danced across the screens, seemingly coordinating their motions, somehow never colliding on the middle tablet. Brian made a swiping motion that seemed to slide an icon from his tablet, off the edge of the screen, and onto the middle tablet. Liz grabbed the icon before it stopped moving, expanded it into a window, then dragged something from her tablet and dropped it on that window. This went on for while, each perfectly synchronizing their motions with the other, neither saying a word. I only stopped watching because the card game demanded my attention.
Our game finally ended with a surprising come-from-behind victory by Pocky as he surged ahead to 10 points. We then all ceremoniously ate our point tokens and invited Liz and Brian to join us in a new game.
“Actually, we need to talk to Dee about something first,” Brian said, “Mind if we borrow her for a few minutes?” Dee pulled me along as we accompanied DualCore to a different table. Sebastian, Kate, and Pocky were already starting a game of Forbidden Island as we left.
“So, dig up any gold for me with your data mining?” Dee asked.
“Yeah, we've something for you,” Liz replied, “but I think we need to show you something else first.” Brian was tapping at his tablet and turning it toward Dee even before his sister finished speaking.
“Look like anyone you know?” he asked.
A full screen video was playing, obviously shot from a phone. I recognized the scene immediately. Dee using her skateboard like Captain America's shield. Dee simultaneously fighting two thugs nearly twice her size. Dee finally defeating both ruffians with almost casual ease. The title of the video was 'Real Life Superhero?'
“Holy. Crap.” I exclaimed, a bit more loudly than I intended.
“It's got almost half a million views on Youtube already with no sign of slowing down,” Brian said, “and the comment section is going nuts. People speculating if it is real or not. People asking who it is. Nobody's identified you, though some people have at least guessed the right city.”
“Oh look,” Liz interrupted, “hashtag RealLifeSuperhero is trending on twitter.” She turned her tablet to display a list of tweets.”
“And you've even got your own sub-reddit... who-is-goggles-girl,” Brian added.
“Goggles Girl?” Dee grabbed Brian's tablet to look at the reddit forum. She scanned the page and then shoved it back in disgust. “My hero name is NOT Goggles Girl.”
“Um, who was it told me that society picks the hero's name, not the hero?” I asked.
“Yeah, but I veto Goggles Girl,” Dee insisted, then turning back to Brian and Liz, “This is unacceptable. I want it stricken from the Internet. You can do that... I know how good you are.”
“Now Dee, that is not really practical,” Brian insisted.
“Oh I don't know,” Liz countered, “I can think of several potential vectors into the reddit infrastructure. Heck, a social engineering approach aimed at...” She fell silent when she noticed her brother glaring at her.
“This is a disaster,” I moaned, “With everything going on with the factory and these Hillsburrow people, the last thing we need is this kind of attention.”
“Oh quit your worrying,” Dee responded, “nothing will come of it. The video was obviously shot through a window using a cheap phone. You can't even really see our faces. By tomorrow it will be forgotten and cat videos will rule the Interweb once again.”
"I really hope you're right," was all I could think to reply.
"Trust me, Barry, it's going to be fine." Then she turned back to Brian and Liz and said, "OK, so now back to business. What have you got for me?"
Liz answered first. "Quite a lot actually. We started with that Hillsburrow ou
tfit. Thin results at first. It's a privately held investment group, so not much public paper trail. Few media hits, either in trad-med or on-line. Dug deeper... did a Lexis Nexis search, sifted court records, turned up some links to other companies including some obvious shell corporations and offshore tax dodges."
"That's when it got interesting," Brian interjected. "We took the few links we could find and cross referenced them against a massive list of money transfers that was leaked to the Internet last year."
"You might remember that from the news," said Liz, "It inspired a big New York Times piece on corporate tax cheats."
"Right. That's what gave us the idea," Brian continued, "We took court records from the resulting Justice Department probe, combined them with that big database of money transfers, mix in a bit of transaction pattern analysis, and we managed to reconstruct the corporate hierarchy."
"And right at the center of the spider web... The Freedom Birthright Foundation." Liz gestured theatrically as she recited it, as if pointing out the name etched on some grand edifice. "Sounds impressive, doesn't it? I'll be darned if I can tell what it actually does, though. Ostensibly it is a non-profit think tank intended to promote freedom and justice and hugs for cuddly puppies and whatever... but considering all the money it soaks up in donations from corporations and wealthy patrons, it does surprisingly little. Mostly it just puts out the occasional white paper or editorial."
"The trail goes a bit cold after that", Brian elaborated, "but one name finally emerged from the murk... Alexander Siegleshust. He seems to be the driving force behind the foundation. He's a relatively reclusive billionaire industrialist. Energy, real estate, pharmaceuticals, even agro-business... He's not the biggest name in any of those, but he's got his hands in a lot of different pies. Hillsburrow Capital Investments is just one of them."
"Our villain?" Dee asked, a gleam coming into her eye.
"Yeah, probably," Brian answered, "though he's managed to stay pretty clean as far as the law or the news media is concerned. An IRS audit. Some allegations of environmental violations. All resolved rather quickly. On paper this guy is nearly squeeky clean."
"Sure, on paper..." Liz's voice betrayed disdain. "Dig a bit, and you find he has his tentacles into all sorts of dark crevices. If it pillages the planet for profit, this guy is on board."
Brian nodded his agreement. "The best example is from last year, and it's the only substantial media piece we've got on him. It seems Siegleshust has majority ownership in an energy corporation planning to mine methane hydrates from the ocean floor. He was briefly in the news when some university professor published a paper suggesting the plan might have, shall we say, negative consequences."
"That's an understatement," Liz insisted, "she said it might kick off global warming on steroids. You see, methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and there is huge amounts of it on the ocean floor, frozen by the extreme cold and pressure. This guy's plan is to pump warm water down onto the hydrate deposits, melt them, than capture the methane gas using big tent like things on the surface. The company published their own research showing a better than 99% capture rate, claiming it would add almost nothing to the greenhouse effect."
"But the research did not include any analysis of possible changes to ocean currents," Brian continued, "So this professor Gwen Simonson from CalTech took a look at it. Using Siegleshust's own research data as a starting point, she built a simulation. It showed warm surface water migrating to hydrate deposits outside the collection field, and worst of all, it was a self sustaining feedback loop. The problem would persist and grow over time even if hydrate mining was discontinued. The result was a climate change nightmare scenario."
Liz again picked up the narration. "Her paper made a bit of a stir when it first came out, and there was even some talk of a ban on hydrate mining until there could be more research on the issue. But then a bunch of leaked emails came out, supposedly showing bias and possibly even fraud in Simonson's work. The Freedom Birthright Foundation broke the story claiming they received it from an anonymous source. Professor Simonson insisted the emails were faked, that Siegleshust was trying to discredit her to protect his business. The university did a big investigation. There was a third party audit of the email system to try and verify the authenticity of the emails. Ultimately the results were inconclusive, but it pretty much destroyed the professor's reputation anyway. She was eventually forced out of her research position and now teaches at a community college upstate. It didn't help her case that she repeatedly accused Alexander Siegleshust of being behind the whole thing. The media played it like she was a conspiracy nut."
"Yeah, they pretty much shredded her," Brian agreed.
"Personally, I think she was probably right. Everything about the professor's history shows her to be a totally by the book scientist. This Siegleshust character, on the other hand, smells fishy as hell. He's a master of dodging blame and avoiding regulations... setting up shell corporations to take the fall for violations, letting them go bankrupt after all the profits have already been sucked out... that sort of thing. I don't think a few fake emails would be out of character. Honestly, this guy is just one white cat and a monocle away from being a supervillain."
As Liz spoke that last word, I could see a subtle change infuse Dee. She had been listening intently up to this point, but now I could sense the gears spinning furiously in her head. A new level of seriousness and purpose seemed to settle over her.
"This guy has to be stopped," she finally spoke.
"All we have is allegations," Brian reminded her, "just rumors, really."
"Then I guess our next step is to dig up some real proof," she countered. Brian and Elizabeth both nodded as if this made perfect sense to them.
I just sat there silently. The situation had inexplicably expanded into something much larger than a bit of local government corruption over back room real estate deals. I felt like I was on a runaway train, one in which all the other passengers were blissfully unaware of the danger they were in. I looked at Dee... the intensity with which she was now discussing things with DualCore. She actually seemed... happy.
Dee had found her Nemesis, and I feared there was now no hope of saving her from her superhero delusion.
Devious Origins Page 23