“Ok,” Stuart relented in a stutter, he didn’t drink coffee, “I mean, yes please, Sir.”
Ken saw his apprehension, “Don’t worry Stuart, there’s no problem. I’ve got a favor to ask of you.”
Stuart relaxed slightly.
“Milk? Sugar?” Ken asked warmly.
“Two please.” Gingerly the lad regained his nerve, “A… a little milk too please,” Ken dabbed at the intercom’s talk button, “Another coffee for me please Nance. One for Stuart, two sugars, milk.” He released the button without waiting for confirmation, shutting off the transmission as he continued to address Stuart in a lowered tone, “You know much about voice fingerprinting, Stuart?”
“I…. I’m sorry, Mr. Torrington?”
“It’s a term I’ve heard, voice fingerprinting. Isn’t that what you call it… when you match a voice to a specimen to confirm identity?”
“Sorry, Mr. Torrington. That’s right, acoustic fingerprinting. I mean your term is correct, I misheard-heard you, that’s all.”
“Have we got the equipment to do that?” Ken asked. He’d never quite come to terms with the precise applications of all the gadgets within the guts of his own facility.
“Sure Sir, we’ve got great stuff, the latest!” On the territory of his beloved skill, Stuart’s personality blossomed to life, his face was an ear-to-ear smile.
“Could you check something out for me?”
“Anything, Sir.”
“You’ve heard about the tragedy with Mr. Angelis?”
“Yes Sir,” Stuart averted his eyes, “I heard he was a very good man. I’m sorry.”
Ken saw that it was genuine grief and it provided him with an opportunity to capitalize;
“Stuart, I’m trying to help the police with their investigation and I thought that our lab might be more up to date than theirs is. Craig was a great man and a close friend to me. Our company is going to miss him and I intend to do all that I can to help get to the bottom of the tragedy.”
Stuart was gazing at Ken, almost hypnotized by Ken’s sham sincerity. He too had fallen in time with the rhythm of Ken’s nodding head and imperceptible horse-gallop drumming fingers.
“The police have asked for absolute confidentiality on the matter and I gave them my word that they would have it. Now I want you to promise me that no one else but you and I will know about this—not even inside the company. Understand?”
Stuart almost did himself damage in his eagerness to ratify the promise.
“Good,” Ken was satisfied, “Take a look here. These four recordings definitely contain Mr. Angelis’ voice. This other recording is from someone’s voicemail and it sounds a bit like Mr. Angelis saying, ‘STOP!’ Think it’s enough to go on?”
“Yes, Sir! Any word, in any language… even humming and I could get a match. I can download an app with a modular analyzer that magnifies… that amplifies… the target sound. We can tease it from any background and eliminate auxiliary static through coaxial logic in a quadratic array of hyper-contained modular fragments that…”
Ken held up his hand to halt Stuart before he could really get going on his pet subject;
“As long as we can get an accurate identification, that’s all the police need…”
He cut it short as Nancy arrived with the coffee and offered her finest maternal smile to Stuart.
Ken waited for her to leave before continuing;
“There’s something else in the background, something that sounds to me like interference, the police want to know if it’s a clue to location. See if you can make sense of it. They also suggest that you may want to see the sequence of the message runs-ins. I don’t know if it would be preserved, but I forwarded the mails either side of this target recording.”
It struck Ken what he’d said, “I forwarded,” and the contents of the message would pin the messages directly back to him. In an instant he decided that the kid was too terrified of him to ever breathe a word about it, but he emphasized it again, to be sure.
“Now, remember… it’s very confidential; I can’t disclose why… But the cops are not too certain that it’s a direct sequence, it seems someone might have fiddled with this and replayed an earlier recording as a prank… can you check for any superimposing or editing… anything.”
Stuart was pretending to sip at the coffee. “When do you need the details, Sir?”
“As soon as possible, Stuart. I want you to make it a priority, and if Mr. Fowler or anyone else inquires, you tell him to talk to me. Now, I’m sorry, but I’ve got another meeting lined up.”
Stuart left the office at a canter.
Five minutes later the software coder, Anton Lim, arrived and Ken was on the phone but he held his hand over the mouthpiece and greeted him “Morning, Anton. I’ll be thirty seconds—organize me a coffee.”
Anton disappeared out the door and moments later Ken heard Nancy exclaim. She was a health nut and Ken knew he’d soon be having his ear chewed for his caffeine intake.
When Anton returned, Ken was done with his call.
“Close the door would you,” Ken asked, still seated.
“Sorry to hear about Craig, Ken. I heard that it happened over at your place,” Anton had been indifferent to Craig as a person yet Ken reckoned that his neutrality would probably have turned to aversion if they’d had more interaction with one another.
“Yeah, a great shame… but life’s a sexually transmitted disease, you see… curable only by death,” Ken shrugged.
“I suppose you want to know about the progress…? The cyber-sex development,” Anton asked.
His voice had a habit of carrying and, as if hushing a child, Ken put his finger to his lips.
“Shhh… This can’t get out, Anton… my connection’s a freak. We don’t want to piss him off with a leak.”
“Shit… Sorry. I’m always too loud,” Anton apologized in a whisper.
“Seriously, Anton. I told you, he’s Saudi royalty—it’s a favor for a favor… I can’t even talk directly to him about it; he hinted, I suggested it could be done… it’s a very delicate arrangement… but if we get it right there’s a lot… a whole lot of doors that will open. Understand.”
“Got it.”
Nancy entered and set the tray down. She pointed at the coffee and wagged a cheeky finger at Ken.
“Yes mom… sorry mom,”
“Yah!” was all she responded in matronly terms.
When the door was closed, Ken went on.
“The guy’s got a kink; he wants something exotic. Think you can come up with something spectacular?”
“Something vintage maybe? Has he got any interests?”
“He’s mad about the Roman Empire, if that’s hint enough.”
“It’s done…”
“Just reiterating… it’s not something I want rigor-mortis sniffing around about.”
Rigor mortis was a nickname Ken and Anton had coined for Max Schneider, Anton’s immediate superior and Vice President of Research.
Neither of the two men liked Max’s painfully serious and staid outlook on life. He was dead but refused to lie down.
Anton grinned; “He won’t know a thing.”
“Treat it as priority Anton and, if Rigor-mortis does get wind of it tell him to come talk to me… That’ll shut him up!”
Max wouldn’t dream of crossing Ken as he knew Ken wanted him out of the company.
But, as one of the foremost authorities in the world of virtual reality programming, he was indispensable. Since LifeGames Corporation was right at the cutting edge of virtual reality technology; neither man could do without the other, yet Ken still wielded the heavier and sharper sword by far.
“Sorry Ken, I haven’t had a chance to mention it. Yesterday I dug around a bit in the Dark Web and scratched up some useful code, it’s A.I. enabled… I can deconstruct and knit into something useful.”
“Very good… excellent thinking.” Anton’s news brought the prospects for Ken’s coming thrill with Cat
herine closer to reality by a huge margin.
“Let me make it run first before the plaudits,” Anton cautioned.
“How long you reckon?” Ken wanted a number to focus on.
“Depends. These things never go smoothly.”
“A week? A month… six months?”
The fresh scent of the chase was making Ken giddy and reckless, so he moderated his enthusiasm; “Sorry, I’m ahead of myself, I just want to impress the guy. Make it happen as fast as you can, Anton. If I can help you in any way… with a little cash boost… tell me how.”
The intercom beeped announcing a message and Ken held up his hand for silence before pressing the on button, “Yes?”
“Stuart Reese in Audio, Ken. He says that he has got a match?” Nancy’s voice was thick with puzzlement.
“Thanks, Nance,” Ken immediately rose and moved toward the door.
Anton mirrored him.
“Keep me up to date,” Ken instructed, reaching for the door handle.
Anton nodded, “Sure. Thanks for the coffee.”
Ken drew pinched fingers across his own lips as if he were closing a zipper. Anton nodded again in acknowledgment.
Stuart’s small empire was a world of humming servers and colorful, dancing monitor graphs. Ken watched the boy’s fingers fluttering instructions into a keyboard, and in response a ream of gibberish data scrolled onto one of the screens. Stuart had been so thoroughly entranced by the data that he hadn’t heard Ken entering the room. The click of the latch closing behind him made the youth leap to his feet, “Sorry Sir, I… I didn’t hear you coming in.”
“Didn’t mean to startle you, son,” Ken gladly assumed the role of master to slave; a relationship Stuart was keen to amplify, “You’ve found something?”
“Sure, Sir. A bunch of things!”
Ken liked the boy’s enthusiasm and noted how, around his own subject, Stuart was a giant of self-assured maturity.
“I’ll cover what I’m sure of first,” Stuart explained as he busied himself in a blur of activity, punching keys and clicking his mouse; “The sequence is affirmative, in other words, there’s no way that it’s a collage or any other kind of superimposition. The cut-on to cut-off pulse of the voicemail was crisp with no shadowing or partial obscuring. Secondly, the voice is without question a perfect match. The dictated recording had the subject saying the word “stop” twice. I lifted each of the utterances off onto a separate file.”
Stuart leaned across in front of Ken to dart a string of commands into another keyboard, but when Ken stepped backward to allow him better access Stuart suddenly leapt to his feet;
“S…So… Sorry Mr. Torrington sir, I lost myself in the data! Won’t you please sit down.”
“Relax, Stuart,” Ken reassured as he guided a chair up next to him, “You carry on and don’t mind me here.”
“Thanks, Sir. Errr… where was I? Yes! The graph that you see on screen ‘A’,” He pointed to a screen stack with its uppermost unit marked by a plaque reading ‘A’.
“That’s the word ‘stop’ frozen in graphic animation. I lifted it off of the dictated recording,” He tapped the appropriate recording on the desk before him, “Screen ‘B’, is ‘STOP!’ lifted from your voice recording.”
Ken felt an icy chill squirt through his veins, Stuart had clearly said, “your recording”; so he definitely knew it was from Ken’s phone; but the boy was under obligation to maintain the strictest security, so Ken forced himself to relax.
All the while, Stuart was excitedly rambling onward with his findings, “…from the dictated recording.”
Ken filled in the spaces he’d missed in Stuart’s explanation as his mind had leapt with diversion; Screen ‘C’ represented the second dictated ‘…stop’ from Nancy’s recordings.
“Even at a glimpse you can see that they’re identical. The small inclusions are noise or static from outside interference.”
Stuart tapped a few keys and the screens re-scrolled in perfect synchronization with one another, making them look even more identical.
“I’ve applied a noise reduction filter, it’s something like the Dolby option on your home stereo… eliminates the ambient…”
He frantically began to key away again, talking as he did so;
“I’m giving you a quick background Sir, but I’ve already run a printout of all the screens and the information is backed up onto disk for the police. I can go around and explain my work to whoever is dealing with the case.”
“Thanks Stuart but that won’t be necessary,” Ken patted him on the back, relaxing slowly as Stuart enthusiastically reiterated that he knew it was a sensitive issue.
Then suddenly, speakers began to croak, repeating the sound of a bullfrog in slow motion. The sound was chilling.
Stuart spotted Ken’s fright and quickly apologized over the sound of the rendition;
“Sorry, Sir. I should have warned you. This is the modular analyzer that I mentioned earlier in your office. I’ve slowed the recording five fold to get a visual on the three files.”
He pointed at the monitor stack where a ballet of graphs was snaking in perfect correspondence, one above the other. When the surreal croak ended, Stuart paused the images, “…as close a match as I’ve ever seen, Sir.”
“It’s definitely the same person?”
“Definitely. Yes, Sir.”
“What about the background sounds?” Ken was feeling jumpy.
“I’m afraid that I haven’t got a firm answer, Sir. That’s why I left it till last. It’s like nothing that I’ve ever heard before,” Ken thought that he could see Stuart’s forearm hair standing proud. “That first pop, which you mentioned, Sir. It’s definitely part of the message.”
“In other words, you’re saying that it must have occurred after connection had been made?” Ken squinted, trying to keep up with the technical details.
“Exactly, Sir! The strange thing is that it is ninety nine percent the result of a static electrical arc… a short-circuit, yet an energy release of that magnitude should have knocked out the entire circuitry! The only way that it wouldn’t have done it is if the static burst had occurred before the connection and we know that it hadn’t. Sorry Sir, this must all sound rather muddled, but technically it makes sense.”
Ken was massaging his head, trying to make sense of what he was hearing, “How would you sum it all up, Stuart?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Torrington. It’s only a small detail but it definitely falls outside of any laws of physics and even quantum fluctuations within the electronics that I’m aware of.”
“And the rest? The background.”
“I’ve identified three separate sources or at least that’s what it seems to be. Listen for yourself, Sir. I’ll first run through them all in real time. The sound will be blended and exactly the way you heard it before, but now you’ll notice that I’ve taken away possible ambient hiss. The response should be a lot crisper.”
Stuart hit the Enter key.
The sound was quadraphonic and underlined by a sub-woofer; pure as stroked crystal, it made Ken cringe as an army of spiders ran up his spine, the most powerful sensation of trepidation he’d ever felt.
And into haunting flute of sound, Craig’s voice spliced through it, ethereal and at one with the underlying reverberations. It was an aurora for the ears—an enveloping sound advancing from all directions enmeshed into a single overwhelming cacophony of dread. The voice was not projected over the sound, nor the sound over the voice. The dragging, ticking and droning possessed a timeless quality. There was no comprehending the strange effects; they appeared to emit from a single source.
A loud rapping on the door sent the two men leaping and their hearts jolted with three beats in one, the empty hollow of a skip. It was Henry, busy with his morning rounds.
“Ken… what brings you here?”
Henry’s cheerful demeanor suddenly incensed Ken;
“We’re busy with a very-private-matter. Would you mind clo
sing the door,” he snapped irritably, immediately turning his back on Henry and proceeding to speak to Stuart. “Run it again Stuart.”
The abrupt confrontation had terrified Stuart out of his wits and without looking at either of his superiors he immediately jumped to the task.
“I-am- all right damned-sorry,” Henry grumbled with affront, closing the door from the outside.
“Sorry about that Stuart, he spooked me, I overreacted,” Ken apologized.
Equally startled, Stuart tried to formulate a response but choked on it.
The prevailing mood of dread that had built up with the swirling sounds, had fled from the room with Henry’s intrusion, leaving a more fertile vacuum of emotion for objectivity.
Ken studied the sound graph’s peaks and valleys frozen alongside a time scale. The total sequence had lasted a shade under seven seconds.
Stuart had regained his nerve enough to talk, “This is the base sound, the one that’s most evident,” he activated the recording.
It had the quality of a low and deep throb not unlike a very large diesel engine, a ship’s engine, idling; its resonance had a timbre so deep it could more be felt than heard.
Divorced of interference sounds, it was unmistakably the dominant tone. When it was finished Ken studied the screen. It showed each pulse length to be 0.96 of a second, with a 0.72 second pause interval.
“Nothing too significant there,” Ken said it but didn’t feel it, his response rational in spite of the hairs at the nape of his neck telling a very different tale. Standing stiffly to attention they echoed a deep superstitious chill that throbbed with caution, chiming to the very hub of his soul.
Stuart concurred with Ken’s opinion, “This is the second sound, Sir.”
It had an accelerating tick-tock characteristic of a mechanical clock; conveying movement and urgency.
Or perhaps insanity? Ken thought, as the crisp and deliberate notes stirred another cocktail of sickening familiarity within him, the origins of which eluded him, “No clues?” he probed Stuart for a hint to the solution.
“None, Sir. Sorry. The third’s the strangest of them all.”
Stuart was right, it was a high-pitched garble of sound; faint, only a whisper that terminated shorter that the other two sounds did. That fact was plain to see on the graphical display. Screen “A” displayed the throb sound. Screen “B” displayed the tick-tock—screen “C” displayed the pitch.
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