Previous: Chapter Two: The Poop Talk
From the hotel nightstand, a hollow voice said, “What fresh Hell is this?”
It was Rad’s ringtone for friends. Rad rolled over and picked up the phone. The screen glowed brightly in Rad’s sleepy eyes. ‘BENDY calling’. Rad thumbed ‘Answer’.
“Bendy!” said Rad, when MaryLiz appeared on the screen. “What planet are you even on? At this hour?”
“That’s ‘Captain Bendy’ to you! Same planet as you, I hope,” said the astronaut. It was their special ritual greeting. “I’m home, on the Rocket Ranch.”
“Texas?”
“Deep in the Heart of! How are you, friend?”
“Living my dream, or someone else’s. I’m in Kansas City… not sure which one. What time is it there?”
“I’m in Texas, silly, it’s after three in the morning, same as you, no matter which Kansas City you’re in.”
“3:42 AM. Lovely. Should we sync our watches?” said Rad.
“Knowing you, we already have.1 Rad, we have a puzzle down here on the Ranch. Something that made me think you might like a look. There’s time code involved, and so, of course, I thought of you right away.”
“My brain is open. Go on.”
“We are keeping the details quiet, but, consider a hypothetical. Umm… say you’re in a coffee shop, with public wifi, and one by one, everyone’s devices are dragged out of wireless range by an unseen thief. You have a complete record of what each device was transmitting, up to the moment each disappeared. Could you figure out when and where they went?”
“Easily, if I were your invisible thief. But seriously? Maybe, at least the ‘when’ part. Do I have access to the wireless router? I’d want to look at the activity logs.”
“That’s the problem. We don’t have any. Our router was a simple minded radio repeater. It wasn’t set up to log anything. In hindsight, of course, I wish we’d thought ahead.”
“Frances bought it from a thrift store in Houston, I bet. What were the missing devices doing when they were stolen?”
“Sending livestreams. Video with sound.” There was a pause as MaryLiz collected her thoughts. “Again, we’re trying to keep quiet on the details, but it was wildlife cameras. Ten of them. All going at once. We recorded everything we received. All tagged with time code, accurate to a second or so. We have 4.5 hours’ worth of footage, then every camera vanishes within the same three minute time period.”
“How good were the streams, when everything was working?”
“Acceptable, until things went haywire at the end. Now that you mention it, even before the trouble, there were little blank patches in the video, here and there, where we missed a few frames from one camera or another. Frances calls them ‘dropouts’. The repeater was wire-tied to a tree branch with line of sight to our receiver at the ranch, so Frances thinks the dropouts are brief transmission failures from each little camera, talking to the repeater.”
Now it was Rad’s turn to be serious. “Frances might be wrong, but if they’re not, those ‘dropouts’ are signal strength data in disguise. Send me the streams. Warts and all. I want the raw streams, including the dropouts. I need what you saw, on the night.” Rad paused. “I’ll want a diagram of where the cameras were, too, relative to the repeater.”
“I’m sure Frances will be happy to send you a link. I appreciate your use of the word ‘we’.” This is why I called Rad. “One last thing, what you’re going to see is for our eyes only, at least until we know what we’re dealing with.”
“I picked that up the first time.”
“Rad, you’re golden.”
“I’m Platinum-Iridium Standard, Bendy! Takes one to know one.”
They said goodbye. Rad tucked the phone under the pillow and dozed off. What had Bendy said? “Our eyes only….only for you.” Rad drifted into dreams of timecode and unreliable transmission protocols.
The phone chirped. Rad grabbed the phone before awakening. It was a text from Frances. The link to the raw videos from the ten ‘stolen’ cameras.
FRANCES to RAD
Subject: DATA_[0-9].mpx
[10 Linked Attachments]
Rad downloaded the whole schmeer into a new folder called. New Folder.
The phone beeped again.
FRANCES to RAD
Subject: [none]
Download these files and encrypt them. Link above will last for ten minutes.
Rad did, with six minutes to spare.
RAD to FRANCES
Subject: [none]
I have all ten. No one will see them but me.
Rad started a cup of coffee brewing, and cast the first wildlife cam video to the hotel room screen.
There would be no more sleeping tonight.
Next: Chapter 4: Of Niche and Kin
Rad was a time zone abolitionist, believing that everyone should use Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). Time-of-day software written by Rad ran 24/7 on every device Rad controlled, hurling UTC time synchronization messages to any nearby device that asked the time of day. Rad’s software served up UTC, no matter the requested time zone. In Rad’s hometown of Ames, Iowa, this rendered some older citizens’ devices unusable after passing within Rad’s influence. Rad briefly picked up coffee money by ‘helping’ the elderly set their devices to keep UTC natively, in place of local time. “Just memorize the local offset wherever you are, and subtract the difference in your head,” Rad would say. This behavior resulted in Rad’s ostracism from every coffee shop in Ames. Rad chose to interpret the ban as divine inspiration and sold or donated most posessions. Rad then positioned Iowa in the rear view camera of Rad’s electric caravan. Now Rad roamed the country, broadcasting UTC time wherever it might be ‘needed’. ↩