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Cupertino, California

October 5th

 

In conversations with Monitor thereafter, the enormity of the problem began to sink in, and I realized the predicament that I was in.  

 

First of all, Monitor was insistent that Padma (or Leonardo, as I had been thinking of him in my mind) had to be found as quickly as possible, although it never gave any particular reasons when pressed; it would just continue to insist that events were proceeding forward quickly and that everything was critical.  Second of all, Leonardo had been hiding for over 50 years – ever since the end of WWII – and had managed to conceal his location from the rest of the Core without problems, which meant that he had eluded the best efforts of the Core for half a century.  Third of all, he could have any name, be any height, and have any appearance.  Fourth, he might be a she. 

 

The information at my disposal was very scanty.  According to Monitor, Leonardo was very likely (88%) to be living in a highly developed area, so I didn’t have to worry about some remote cabin at the edge of the woods.  There was a good chance that there would be an institute of high learning nearby, although this was not as likely.  He would not be isolated or reclusive and would appear to have a normal life.  He was possibly located in a 500-mile radius centered around Norfolk, Virginia.

 

At one point, Monitor and I had a conversation about how Leonardo was hiding:

 

“Explain this.  I don’t understand why you can’t find him.  I thought usage of the Overnet could be tracked?”

 

Active usage can be easily tracked.  Passive usage is much harder to detect, and almost impossible unless a member of the Core is physically close to the usage in question.

 

“Okay, so he’s just not using the Overnet all?”

 

No, it is certain that he is.  He has access technology – we call it grik, or an access key – that allows him to use the full power of the Overnet.  One of the grik’s functions is that it acts a homing beacon for the Overnet to track, and, as a result, it broadcasts its location to anybody that requests that information.   His location does not report correctly, and he must be doing it deliberately.

 

“And somehow he’s managed to beat this?”

 

Querying the location of his grik returns locations that are different every time the query is performed.

 

“Isn’t it possible that he’s just moving around?”

 

No.  On many occasions, two queries only tenths of seconds apart will be separated by a distance of hundreds of miles.  This is physically impossible.  It is my belief that he has managed to interfere with the location reporting function of the grik through some heretofore unknown means.  Hypotheses aside, he cannot be found, and he refuses any contact with the Core.

 

“Okay.  You talked about being able to see through his veil sometimes.  Why couldn’t you get a location then?”

 

That was not positional information; that was more like emotional states, brief thoughts.  It is not useful in providing a geographical location, although I did sense that he was acting true to old patterns:  that is, I believe that he is living in an urban area of high population density.

 

I had called work, and explained that I was taking more work off, and strained my relations with my boss further; we were beginning to get calls from customers, and he really did need me there to deal with some of the higher priority issues, and I couldn’t give him a good reason for why I needed the time.  I mumbled something about a “family emergency,” but didn’t want to push it, because I felt vaguely guilty for lying but didn’t have a better idea of what to tell him. 

 

I dipped into my savings and purchased an incredibly expensive ticket to Norfolk, Virginia, figuring that I might as well be in the epicenter of everything while I tried to figure everything out.

 

Norfolk, Virginia

October 6th

 

The flight had gone without problems, and I had found a relatively cheap Motel 6 to stay at, not wanting to spend a lot of money and really just caring that there was a clean bed and hot showers available.  I had skipped the snack on the plane, and was hungry, so I went down to the coffee shop and had a coffee and a hamburger – the coffee was horrible, the hamburger overcooked and dry, although for some strange reason the fries were incredibly good – and thought about ways to pursue a mythical man.

 

The means and method of his location obfuscation interested me the most.  For a while I briefly considered trying to narrow it down through some sort of averaging procedure; that is, if he weren’t very intelligent, then it was possible that averaging millions of random queries would localize his nexus to a relatively small area, almost like a drunken walk towards enlightenment.  I realized that the problem with that particular plan was that the premise that he wasn’t intelligent was very likely a faulty premise, considering that he had been smart enough to come up with the entire scheme in the first place.  Anyway, the Core had to have tried this before, it was an obvious approach.  I called up Monitor, mumbling into my hand to speak since I didn’t want to seem like a crazy person to the other couple in the coffee shop.

 

“Monitor, has anyone done a statistical analysis on Padma’s location?”

 

Please specify.

 

“Has anyone queried his location many times, and then attempted to localize a nexus that way?”

 

Monitor was silent for a while.  That is an interesting approach.

 

“Could you try that now?”

 

Monitor was silent again.  That… is not workable.

 

“Why not?”

 

It would be difficult to run enough queries to make it feasible.  Each query takes a finite amount of time.

 

“Okay, okay, let me think.”  I broke off communication.

 

Odd, that.  My experiences with the Overnet had been that once I achieved lock, it was extremely fast; it was like the quickest computer that I had used, the first one for which I did not have to wait for the disk drive or the screen to update or anything.  Yet each query had a time boundary… which meant that it was enforced at the Overnet level, perhaps.  The more I thought about it, the more I thought that there had to be some way to try and lock down the randomization and convert it from unknowable to unknowable.

 

The waitress came by to refill my coffee, and I took a minute to mix in another creamer and packet of sugar.  I sipped it slowly.

 

Randomization.  Now there was a thought. Random numbers in a computer are generated by a complicated but predictable scheme; if I knew enough about the way that the random numbers were generated, then there was a very good possibility that I could reverse the random numbers and narrow down his location. I called up Monitor again.

 

“Monitor, is it known what random number scheme he is using?”

 

I do not understand the question.

 

“Well, he’s doing some random obfuscation, or something, right?  So how is he generating the random numbers?”

 

That information is unknown to me.

 

“Well, you might be using the same mechanism, after all – you’re the same technology.  When you need a random number generator, how do you get it?”

 

I would “roll a die.”  Although I do not have a physical counterpart, there are certain equivalents that I can perform.

 

“Okay, when you roll a die, how is the value for that roll determined?”

 

That information is unknown to me.

 

“Okay, thanks.”  I broke off communication.

 

I had hoped that Monitor would be gifted with extensive information about its operation, but it didn’t know anything; the closest analogy that I could come up with was that it was like a human that didn’t know how the neural cells operated, which, come to think of it, was probably everyone.  It was too bad, really. I spent the rest of the day walking around or drinking coffee, and asked Monitor scores of questions, but nothing came to mind.  It looked like the Monitor was right, and that using the Overnet to determine the location of Leonardo was out.

 

Norfolk, Virginia

October 7th

 

I spent today in a local library. 

 

I went to the card catalog, filled with those old yellowing index cards, and retrieved every single book that I could find on Leonardo, including the “V” volume out of three different encyclopedias.  I took the stack of books and sat down at one of the corner tables and proceeded to read everything that I had collected, and it all converged to approximately the same picture.

 

He really was a genius, a man ahead of his time – which made sense, if he was actually from the Core – but which then led to another question:  if that were true, why weren’t there more Leonardos?  If there were a dozen or so Core on Earth, any one of them could have very easily been Renaissance Men, leading civilization forward.  If they were trying to drive mankind to a level of technology that would enable us to create a quantum tunnel, why weren’t we more advanced? 

 

On the other hand, if he wasn’t an extraterrestrial, he was an amazing person, and extremely unusual for the time.  He was a vegetarian and loved animals so much that he would sometimes buy them just to release them; any notes to himself he wrote reversed, as if in a mirror, possibly to make them more difficult to read by others; he was rumored to be extremely handsome; he had a strong, melodious singing voice; he was an artist of the highest caliber, and renovated Renaissance Art with his realistic perspective; he was a total pacifist and hated war, yet designed engines of destruction that were literally centuries ahead of their time.  I spent the afternoon just reading about him, trying to learn whatever I could in the hopes that some of his habits, somehow, had carried through the centuries.

 

As the library closed down, I realized that I was tired, so I walked back towards the hotel, stopped at a 7-11 to purchased something that I ate while walking back to the hotel, and without brushing my teeth, taking off my clothes, or turning off the lights I just collapsed into bed.

 

Norfolk, Virginia

Night of October 7th

 

I had a dream that the only way to find Leonardo was to give personality tests to everyone and try to match them up with what I knew of the historical Leonardo.  In my dream I was reading the Meyers-Briggs test and trying to figure out how it would apply to Leonardo, if he was INTP or INTJ, and I understood even in the dream that even if this worked, it would only narrow it to one sixteenth of the population 500 miles from Norfolk, Virgina, but then figuring that I could somehow use other tests to narrow it further.  Then I remembered that he was a vegetarian, and thought that maybe he still was, so I would do a statistical analysis on meat consumption in all the grocery stores within 500 miles of my location…

 

I dreamt about visiting grocery stores and asking the produce clerks how many oranges they sold, but I soon decided that he would only be one vegetarian out of a population of millions, so it wouldn’t be statistically valid, and then I decided that I couldn’t figure out from his writings if he INTP or INTJ, so I had to give up on Meyers-Briggs.  Without transition I found myself in the coffee shop, drinking coffee, and reading his backwards Italian (but in the dream I was able to read it), and counting words and marking them on a napkin to try and calculate word frequency patterns to narrow down his personality type.

 

I did this for what seemed like an hour while I kept asking the waitress for more coffee, and she kept telling me that they were trying to make it out of tea bags, and it was at point that I realized Italian and English had different word frequencies, and I was trying to see if there was any way to transmute the values from one language to another.  Eventually the restaurant ran out of napkinds, so instead I wondered whether I should just use graphology on his handwriting to see what his personality was, to figure out if he liked his mother or father better, if he was extroverted or introverted, whether he had a good sense of humor, and then I wondered if I could have free comedy shows to try and locate the people with good senses of humor.

 

… and then I woke up in a cold sweat, and one word was in my mind:

 

Handwriting.

 

Norfolk, Virginia

October 8th

 

The next morning, my flash of intuition still seemed worthwhile, so I summoned Monitor.

 

“Monitor, what about his handwriting?”

 

I do not understand the question.

 

“Would his handwriting have changed?”

 

Monitor was silent, again, and I could almost imagine relays clicking in some alien technology beneath the crust.  It is unknown to me whether he would have made a deliberate effort to change his handwriting.  I do not keep records of that.  You will have to check whatever records your society may have.

 

“Has anyone ever pursued this tactic before?”

 

Not to my knowledge.

 

In my conversations with Monitor about the Core, I had been noticing a kind of arrogance or blindness towards human technology.  They used the Overnet and tended to rely on it, and didn’t think about using the capabilities of human technology most of the time. I was betting on a long shot, I knew, but I still thought that it was possible that Padma suffered from the same kind of blindness that the rest of the Core did, and would not have tried to change something so habitual and innately tied to self as handwriting.

 

I asked Monitor for a list of previous aliases, and went to work.  I really just wanted a preliminary look at some handwriting samples, enough to see if the idea was totally unworkable or not.  Armed with the names and dates of a list of aliases in the thirties and fourties, I went down to the local government office, and after asking a nice older lady with horn-rimmed glasses for some help, managed to find the right place to go, which turned out to be a dusty office in the back of a large government building staffed by a very bored-looking person.  I used the Public Information Act to acquire the voter registration rolls. 

 

Diligent searching located a signature for one of the aliases, John Norman.  As soon as I inspected it, a thrill went through me.  Allowing for the different language and text, the handwriting of John Norman, last seen thirty years ago, was in fact very similar to that from the quintessential Renaissance Man living over 500 years ago.  I found another of his aliases, and looked at the handwriting, and it was close enough to John Norman’s that it very well could have done by the same person.

 

I had a thread, then, and if it was strong enough I could follow it through the maze to Leonardo. 

 

Taking advantage of that thread would be difficult.

 

Norfolk, Virginia

October 9th

 

Actually, the more I thought about it, the more that I decided it would be very difficult.

 

First of all, I had to find to find some avenue for the handwriting samples, and they needed to be in digital form; the specter of going through the voter registration books for every county within 500 miles did not appeal to me at all, and it also didn’t look doable in the hurried timeframe that Monitor appeared to be working under.  Second of all, I needed some quick way of comparing those handwriting samples, and figuring out which ones were potentially the man I was looking for.  I thought about it, and decided that I would need to ask around.

 

So, I spent the entire day on my cell phone.  The remarkable thing about the computer industry is that it is relatively small, highly interconnected, and tightly knit, even though it is geographically dispersed.  So: I called a friend of mine that had quit the computer industry and gone into the government, and talked with him for a while.  I asked him if the government kept digitized samples of handwriting for the population anywhere.  His answer was obvious, once he said it:  “Sure, the DMV.”  Apparently, the Department of Motor Vehicles in a number of states on the East Coast had moved entirely to an electronic system eight years ago, and in the process they were digitally storing everyone’s picture and, more importantly to me, signatures.

 

First part solved.  I thought about it, called a co-worker of mine that had family back east, and after a brief conversation got the name of someone doing academic research in handwriting verification for identity validation.  Once I had the name, I went to the web and did a Google search and found a number of papers that the person had written; they were on the web, so I read the papers; and, since the source code was provided, downloaded the source code as well, which meant that I had access to the algorithms and instructions that would allow for the handwriting verification that was described.  (Much of the research in computer is done under the auspices of grants that require the source code to be made to the public; for that matter, much of the research not done under such grants also provide the source code.  For the most part this source code, once submitted for the paper or thesis or project, is never looked at again.)  This was all done by using the phone and the web, without any face-to-face human contact for the entire day, which meant that by 3:00, I was becoming a little antsy, and wanted to see other people, even if I didn’t interact with them.  So I went down the to the corner, bought a paper, and walked around until I encountered a little Indian place where I got some rice and tandoori chicken to go.

 

Getting access to the database was the tricky bit.  After a couple of calls, I verified that the <<three states within 500 miles of Norfolk, Virginia, or whatever>> contracted out to one particular agency for all of their data warehousing, DataStore International, but I also learned at the same time that the signatures were protected under privacy laws by all of the states, and it was extremely unlikely that I would be able to get legitimate access to that database.   It would take connections. 

 

So I started calling again.

 

Norfolk, Virginia

October 10th

 

Over the next day and a half, I had called and sent e-mail to everyone that I knew in the industry.  The conversations always had a similar format:  how are you doing, what have you been up to, what companies have you worked at, hey by the way I’m interested in working at a particular company, do you know anyone there that I could ask to get an inside scoop.  Finally through the friend-of-a-friend I managed to locate one person that currently worked at DataStore as an administrative assistant, and at this point I began to cross that line into unethical behavior.  I had known her three years previous at another company; she was a single mother of American Indian descent with long highlighted brown hair, exotic eyes, and a voluptuous figure that I usually didn’t go for, but for some reason I had found her to be an exception.  We had gone out a couple of times, but it hadn’t worked out – she wanted more drama in her life than I was able or willing to provide – so we had drifted apart amicably.  At any rate, I would use my friendship with her in a way that would probably bother me later, if I was still alive to worry about it.

 

I went onto the web and went to a couple of sites that I knew, ones that were harder to find than just typing the right search terms into Google, downloaded a number of programs, and later that night ran a number of them, giving them DataStore’s Internet addresses.  They told me what I needed to do – if I chose to do it.

 

Through this, the back of my mind, the part that deals with moral issues, was contemplating and mulling over everything that I was doing, and I still paused at times, wondering if there had been any direct proof of any of this.  Voices in my head and a belief that I could see auras was just about it…  and it was starting to worry me seriously, but I resolved to do nothing irretrievable until I had met with Padma.  If nothing else, that would be proof positive, meeting the original Renaissance man.  I had the skills that I needed, although they were long rusty.  When I had first moved into the computer industry I had spent some time with a large software company working on operating systems, which are the basic set of instructions that allow the computer to run.  This had taught me quite a bit about how computers interacted with one another and were protected, and over the years I had managed to keep my knowledge current – not because I had to, necessarily, but just out of curiosity.  In following up I made some calls to some people that I knew, and in a roundabout way learned the general parameters of network security at DataStore.

 

Finally, I was ready.  I called Diana up, and told her that I was in the area, and asked if she was available for lunch; she indicated she was, and I drove to where DataStore was located, and we ended up meeting at a popular delicatessen a couple of blocks away from the DataStore’s main headquarters.  We sat down after ordering, and I realized that it was good to see her again.  I told her that I was interested in possibly working at DataStore, and I pretended to listen and asked questions as she told me about the work environment, but really the only purpose of our lunch was for me to get her trust and plant a seed.  While we conversing I subtly brought up the question of screensavers, and we talked about that briefly, and that was the one seed that I wanted to plant.

 

I walked her back to the headquarters, and she offered to walk me around the place, but I didn’t want to get my face on any of the cameras, given what I was going to do.  I went back to my hotel room, and composed a note to her:

 

Hey, Diana –

 

Thanks very much for lunch, it was good to see you again, and I enjoyed our talk immensely.

 

Hey, we had talked about screensavers; the one that I use is attached, it’s pretty neat. 

 

Peter

 

… and I waited.

 

She opened my e-mail about a half hour later, and ran the attached .EXE at 2:05:04pm, and then it contacted me and I was in.  I had checked DataStore network security, and it was typical for a fast-growing mid-level company:  extremely lax.  The program that I had given Diana was called a Trojan horse, a false front, and one of the latest polymorphic variants that would not be detected by any virus detection software (although in my checking around I had already learned that DataStore didn’t even have virus protection on incoming e-mail), and it was not one but two things:  a cool screen saver and a gaping backdoor into the company network.

 

I would be detected if the MIS department was watching for this sort of the thing, but the truth of the matter is that most MIS departments are bowed under the requirements of keeping their printers running and helping people with their e-mail programs and fixing computers, so unless I did something destructive the odds were very much in my favor that my intrusion would never be detected.  Feeling guilty, I performed a small ethical bow to Diana: I found another computer on the network, checked the OS and found that it used a default configuration of something called the IPC (Interprocess communication) pipe which was vulnerable, took advantage of that, and moved my backdoor over to that computer.  I cleaned up the traces in Diana’s machine; now, in the remote chance that someone did detect and try to track down the intrusion, it would show up on another computer entirely.  I spent some time looking around for something that looked like a server, so that I would be assured that it wouldn’t be shut off at night, and eventually found a print server that I knew was on the first floor of the building (well, it said so, right there in the name), so I moved my backdoor over to that, instead.  Now if anyone checked it would look like the print server was trying to steal company secrets.  I was working through two levels of anonymizers and a spoof, so even if they watched the packets going out to the Internet, they would never be able to tell that they ended up in a hotel room only thirty miles away.

 

Amazingly enough, everything that I had done up until now was relatively easy for anyone conversant with computers to do, and easy to stop, but most computer companies are so chaotic that they just don’t have the time to guard against it.

 

Now it got trickier.

 

DataStore not only stored the information for the three DMVs of the relevant states, but also provided a number of programs that allowed access to them.  A person in a DMV office in Virginia could just log into the web, sign into a DataStore web site, and then see the records; but all of the programs and information that manipulated the DMV record were written by DataStore itself.  Which meant that if I was able to find them, that I would be able access the data that I needed. 

 

A company network is like a large forest; it is comprised of many “trees” (systems), and finding something is really a process of finding all the different trees and inspecting them to try and find the item in question.  This can take a long time, often longer than breaking in during the first place.  What I was looking for in particular were the development directories – the programs that the developers had worked on before deploying the final application and making it available to the DMVs.  These development directories would have the data access routines that I needed.  I pinged the DataStore web site that people accessed, got the IP (Internet Protocol) address for it, and then I looked around for a bit before I found the machine that was assigned that address.  I inspected that machine and found what I was looking for, the development backdoor.

 

It took another hour of searching before I found the source code control repositories for the project – where the developers stored all of the program instructions that made up the application that was used by the DMVs – and it took me another hour of looking at those before I finally pinpointed the data access modules and had studied them long enough that I thought I understood it.  I downloaded portions of the “code” – computer instructions, written in special languages – to my computer. A large software program is a very complex thing, but it is often fairly easy to find the code to do one particular thing; there are wrong ways and right ways to write a program, and most companies choose a mostly right way, which means to a large extent that the purpose of a program often determines its structure.  Metaphorically, I knew that they were trying to build a car, so it was simply a matter of finding the way that they steered the car and the way that they accelerated the vehicle and identifying them in the source code.

 

At that point it was 9:00pm, so I checked everything, made sure that I was still undetected, and logged out.  I walked into the chilly night air and went down to the coffee shop.  I smiled at the waitress there, asked for a cup of coffee and a piece of coffee cake to go, and we chatted about the local baseball time for two minutes while she gathered it all together.  I paid her and left her a nice tip, and then walked back to my hotel room, put the coffee and coffee cake on the nightstand, and then went back to work.

 

What I did over the next three hours is hard to explain, but basically:  I had taken the research program for handwriting verification that I had downloaded and modified it slightly to make it easier to reuse.  It was originally written to analyze two handwriting samples with known text.  I then wrote a quick routine that would access the data in the DMV databases and retrieve the driver name and the signature.  From there it was simple to compare:  (John Norman’s signature, name “John Norman”) against (potential signature, potential name).  To make the number of false matches even lower I also added a number of other checks against the other aliases that Monitor had given me.   I tested it for a while, just enough to make sure it would work, and then submitted the program to a  server at DataStore.

 

It was three in the morning, and I feel asleep, exhausted.

 

Norfolk, Virginia

October 11th

 

I woke up early the next morning, logged back into the net, and checked to see if my little daemon running on the DataStore computers had finished, but it had not yet signaled me that it was completed, which was what I expected.  I had purposely had my program run only intermittently, as I didn’t want it to draw notice by stealing so much computer time that people wondered what the process was doing.  I went outside, and it had apparently rained the night previous, because everything was still wet and there was that wonderfully vibrant smell that occurs after a rain shower.  I walked down the streets into the downtown area, noticed the people starting to get into work and the worms gradually getting squished on the sidewalk and the bright yellow school buses taking children to school.  I stopped at a coffee shop that looked appealing, with nice maple tables set on a brown tiled floor, but best of all it had a fireplace, and I think it is that which finally drew me in.  I sat down and had an espresso and a bagel, and just thought to myself.

 

The ethicality of all of my actions still worried me, although I still felt that I hadn’t crossed the line.  I had broken into DataStore, but with no intent to destroy anything.  Rather, I was just running a program using otherwise unused cycles from their computers.  I wasn’t stealing data, but instead just running a check against millions of driver’s licenses… however, if my guesses were going to pay off at all, it was going to return a number of names, and at that point there were data theft and privacy invasion issues that bothered me immensely.

 

But… while I didn’t believe that the ends justified the means, not always, I had to believe that the final goals moderated what could reasonably be done in the pursuit of those same goals.  It does not make sense to kill the person in front of you just to move ahead in line, but killing in self-defense makes perfect sense to me.  If I was doing all this to locate the one member of the Core that could actually help me tap into the Overnet, and if that, in turn, allowed me to prevent the human race from dying off in 200 years, this was worthwhile.

 

If any of this true.  If I wasn’t insane.  Which was still something that I considered a possibility.

 

Bits are strange things, intangible, and I relieved my conscience for now by just declaring that if all of this turned out be my particular insanity, I would erase the names that I had retrieved from DataStore.  It would be as if the act was not done at all.

 

I went back to my room and checked again on the status of my process, and saw that my daemon had returned with the golden treasure, a list of names.  I looked at the list and read four names;  so, to check, I went to the web, logged into the DataStore site, used a development user name and password to log into the database, and checked the record for one of the names.  I didn’t even look at the face on the record, but just looked at the signature, and while I was not running a sophisticated Markov-chain analysis on the parameters of the handwriting to see if it was more than 98% similar to the handwriting samples of John Norman, I could just eyeball it and rely on the already sophisticated pattern matching built into the human brain, and for all that I could see it was close enough to John Norman’s signature that I could believe that my program worked.

 

I told my backdoor to go to sleep and only wake up for a couple of minutes each day, to reduce to almost infinitesimal probabilities that my entry route would ever be detected by the internal security mechanisms of DataStore, and then took a look at the names that had been returned:

 

There were four names:

 

Nancy Adams

Rich Porzio

Chad Keith

Kevin Brivkalns

 

… and I had to consider which of these candidates was the person that I sought, if any of them.  I brought up the records for them, and looked at the different signatures, but all of them looked equally alike or disalike, however you wanted to consider it, so I didn’t think that I would be able to tell on the basis of the handwriting analysis.  The ages and faces were not helpful at all, since these characteristics were infinitely mutable to the Core. 

 

Just on principle, and betting on Monitor’s intuition (and could I say intuition for an artificial intelligence?  But I knew at that point that I could), I was inclined to check Nancy last.  I just didn’t think that Leonardo would remain a male for thousands of years and then switch to a female, not since he had a different and entirely effective way of hiding with his obfuscation trick.  Rich Porzio was an obvious choice with the Italian last name, but I decided that was either too obvious or too juvenile, so I decided to try him second to last.

 

It came down, then, to Chad or Kevin, and out of an alphabetic fatalism I decided to try Chad first.

 

Norfolk, Virgina

October 12th

 

To learn almost everything about an individual nowadays, all you need is (his or her) driver’s license and (your) credit card.  Twenty-four hours later (or four hours, if you pay for the rush, which I did), I had for all four of my candidates:  current address, last three addresses, current place of work, if they were married and the number of children they had, their social security number, and their credit record.  From the credit record I was able to get a reasonable idea of their big ticket purchasing habits, and from their driver’s record I knew what kind of cars they drove, if they had any accidents, and if they were careful drivers. From that I could have retrieved more, or I could have hired a detective agency, but it seemed a bit much to hire an agency and ask them to tell me if one of the people was, in fact, Leonardo da Vinci.

 

Chad was married with no children, lived with his wife in a rented house in [*]Connecticut, and worked at an insurance firm.  He was a good two hours drive away, so I paid for another couple of days of rent on my current hotel room (damage to the credit card), drove to Connecticut, found another cheap motel reasonably close to my suspect, and then paid for a room for a couple of nights (yet more on my credit card).  I knew where he worked, and it was a relatively small company, so I just went to Starbuck’s, got a latte and a paper, and then sat out on the lawn near the entrance of his company, pretending to read the paper but actually watching the people walking inside closely.  I didn’t have a definite plan of attack, but was just hoping to get a general sense of things.  I had one trick in mind that I didn’t trust, so I was hoping that just observation would give me a definitive answer. 

 

I saw him go into work at about 9:30am, and he looked just like his driver’s license.  I accessed the Overnet without too many problems, checked his aura, but I didn’t see anything unusual.

He was tall, thin, very straight dirty blonde hair, and walked slowly and surely.  I walked around for a bit at that point, just killing time, and when lunch time rolled around I went back to my car, took out my binoculars, and watched the entrance.  He went to lunch with two coworkers at around 12:30, and I kind of tarried along, just to watch.  I managed to sit close enough to them that I was able to listen to the conversation that they had over their hamburgers, and it was an insurance discussion, which was unbelievable boring and made me want to leave right away.

 

After lunch I went to a store that I had looked up in the Yellow Pages to buy a few items that I needed, and then I drove back to his house.  I chose a likely spot fairly distant from his house, and trained my binoculars on his front door occasionally, reading my paperbacks and waiting for him to return.  He returned home about 6:30, and I saw his garage door open as his car pulled into the garage.  I pulled out one of the items that I had purchased, an electronic ear for listening to conversations at long range, and I turned it on and eavesdropped as he and his wife talked about nothing in particular while fixing dinner together.  I stopped listening to them at about 7:30pm, somehow feeling guilty or voyeuristic, but in the end I was left with:  I don’t think so.  But I decided that it was worth trying my trick, so I continued to listen until it sounded like his wife was occupied with something, and then I quickly walked up to the front door with some papers that I had pulled from the back of my car.  I rang the doorbell.

 

Chad answered it.  “Yes, can I help you?”

 

I showed him the papers in my hand.  “Would you be interested in some pamphlets?”  I watched his eyes.

 

He looked at it briefly, frowned.  “I can’t read it.  What language is that?”

 

I bowed.  “Oh, I’m sorry to bother you, sir.  My lists must be out of date.”

 

I walked away, pretending to look at a list of addresses in my hand, and he must have watched me for a moment before he closed the door.

 

Not definitive proof, but I don’t think so.  Next.

 

Washington, D.C.

October 13th

 

My next candidate was Kevin Keith.  He was single and lived in an apartment in Washington, D.C., as an economic policy advisor to the Senate Majority Leader.  I drove to Washington, D.C., checked into a hotel, and found myself outside the Senate Offices at 8:00am in the morning, again drinking a latte and reading the paper.  I saw him, and he had gained weight since his last driver’s license, I think, because he looked heavier than his driver’s license said, about 250 pounds.  He was six feet tall, had very light blonde hair and a light complexion.  I watched him labor up the steps into the office.

 

There are always tourists around the Senate Buildings, so it was not a problem to just spend time and wait for him to go to lunch.  He didn’t eat lunch, or at least I didn’t see him come out.  I killed time until 6:00pm, went to his apartment buildings and waited, and he didn’t show up until 9:30pm.  He went inside, and I listened as well as I could from my vantage point outside the apartment, but as far as I could tell he didn’t make any phone calls or have any conversations or even turn on the TV, just made himself something to eat, worked on the computer for a while, and then went to sleep.

 

Try again tomorrow.

 

Washington, D.C.

October 14th

 

Basically a repeat of the day before, and I was really getting sick of this.  It seemed odd that my bid to prevent world domination by aliens would involve a lot of sitting around pretending to read a paper and drinking cold coffee.  Kevin went into work his usual time, and for lunch I decided to try a different vantage point. This proved to be the correct thing to do.  Kevin came out at about 11:30am, and started to take a walk, apparently just enjoying the sunshine. I followed at a discreet distance, not paying attention to the sights and sounds, instead just concentrating on him.

 

He walked a couple of blocks and into a local café, sat down, and had a salad.  While he was doing this I went into a restaurant across the street, picked a chair by the window, and sipped at a Coke while I watched him.  After about 20 minutes he got up and started walking down the street, and again I followed him. 

 

He walked to the [*]Aeronautics branch of Smithsonian, showed a pass to someone there, walked in, and started to wander around the exhibits.  I lost him briefly as I had to wait in line and pay for entry, but I eventually found him on the second floor.  He was sitting on a bench, just watching the people look at the exhibits, and his eyes especially seemed to follow the children as they ran around and looked at the different items.

 

I had a feeling, that maybe this was it.  I checked his aura with the Overnet a few times, and there was nothing unusual…  but somehow, there was something that I just couldn’t quantify or explain. The salad at lunch, and watching the people, and there was a gentleness to his eyes, but these were hardly proof.  I pulled the papers I had out of my backpack, walked up to him, and smiled.  I said, “Excuse me, sir, would you like to have a pamphlet?”  I watched his eyes, and… I had him. 

 

“I can’t even read it,” he said, shaking his head.  “Sorry.”

 

I put the papers away, said, “I’m sorry to bother you, may I talk with you a minute?”  I wasn’t sure how to begin this conversation, but I was reasonably sure of my conclusions at this point, it was just a question of how to get him to admit that he was the one that I was looking for.

 

“Certainly,” he said, a little hesitantly.

 

“I’m looking for someone that can help me.”

 

“I think we all need a little help here and there,” he countered.

 

“No, only one particular man can help me.  Someone with substantial experience and knowledge.  A modern Renaissance man, almost.”

 

He thought for a second, said, “You should be able to find someone like that somewhere. Have you considered placing a want ad?”

 

I thought a second about what I was going to say.  “I need a man that can help me heat a bucket of water.”

 

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.  But I could see that he did, and he was worried that I knew what I was talking about, as well.

 

“I think you do,” I said.  I waited as a family passed by, not wanting them to hear our conversation.  “You had to train yourself to be able to read reverse writing, and I didn’t think you would lose the ability.  I printed those pamphlets in a mirror-reverse font.  You tried to read it.”

 

“Of course I did,” he said.  “You shoved them in my face.”

 

I paused for a second and then slowly spoke, enunciating every word carefully.  “No.  The key was that your eyes moved right to left.”

 

He looked at me, then, shrugged, and then grinned.  “Nice.  Very nice, that.  Okay, you’ve got me.”