After a quick bite to eat and another monorail ride, Sheepdog was back in the office and was pleasantly surprised to see Res had made it in. He wanted to rush over and fill her in on what he had discovered, but noticed she was already head down on her desk. Mean hangover. It would have to wait for another time, so he made his way to the manager’s office instead and noticed he was on comms, apparently deep in a discussion with someone. He glanced up to see Sheep approaching and waved him away. Sheepdog still smiled and gave him the thumbs up anyway, mission mostly successful. He returned to his workspace, plopped down and unpacked his gear.
First order of business, to see what he could discover about the names in the logs. He opened the Stitcher Sentinel tool, their private database of aliased, protected and non-protected persons. Thinking he would be able to decode at least a couple of names from the visitor logs, he entered them all as a batch job and waited for results. The screen came back with actual names for 3 of the 5 people, correlated with that address. Xiu Lee, Chinese national, light skinned, suspect number one. James Whitmore, British/US dual citizen, light skinned, suspect two. Malcom Warner, US citizen, dark skinned, not a suspect. That left Sheepdog with a total of 3 suspects, one without a name. Whoever Relaxed Man was, he didn’t exactly adopt a relaxed security posture, because beyond not being listed in Sentinel, he was invisible on camera. That meant he must either be protected by Stitcher on some level Sheepdog had never seen, or he was effectively outside the entire system, and Sheepdog really felt like he was onto something here worth investigating more thoroughly.
For the next three hours, as the sun set behind him through the floor to ceiling window, Sheepdog studied feverishly. Camera sensor design and evolution, optical camouflage theory, electronic warfare tactics against surveillance systems, hacking video data streams, anything he could think of which might be related or explain the difference between what he saw and what the cameras saw, or rather, didn’t see. As he was about to give up for the day, he received a message on comms. It was from Genesis 15, and written in song format.
“Grown-ups don’t understand
Why children all love him the most
But kids all know that he loves them so
Casper the friendly ghost”
This was completely in character for Genesis 15, who seemed to fashion his personality around a mischievous teenager, and it told Sheepdog that someone was watching over his shoulder. Was he getting too close to a sensitive topic? Was this a warning, or did Genesis 15 happen to pick up some footage from today and put some pieces together by himself? Since 15 was still basically uncontrollable, this wasn’t based on internal Stitcher teamwork. Genesis 15 probably didn’t have access to the same feed data Sheepdog had been reviewing, but what if 15 could access the surveillance cameras in the area, see Sheep on location, and also notice the lack of imagery that he was tracking down? 15 might prove useful at this point. There was still a puzzle to be solved and he seemed to be interested enough already. Sheepdog decided to send a short reply to 15 to tease him. He hit reply and entered the following:
“On the next episode of ghost hunters, 15 reveals his motivations for becoming a ghost hunter and explains his advanced techniques to successfully debunk them.”
Within seconds, Sheep got a 3-character reply from Genesis 15.
“LOL”
The bait was set. Now all Sheep could do is wait until 15 wanted to brag about his superior intelligence and tell Sheep exactly what he wanted to know. Sheepdog logged off for the day and headed out the door. Res was long gone, with a small drool spot on her desk being the only tangible proof she had ever been there today.