John Krygelski - The Aegis Solution

There was a brief pause. When he spoke, all of the former levity was missing from his voice. “I have. I know.”

“Then what’s the explanation?”

She listened to another pause, visualizing Rusty sitting at his console, staring at the map. Finally, he admitted, “Erin, I don’t know.”

She turned on her swivel chair and, using her free hand, clicked on the surface observation map fed to her computer from the National Weather Service. She had to zoom out from the default location of the Tucson area, select the desert region to the west, and zoom in. As she read the numbers, she gasped. “It’s worse.”

“Yep. It sure is.”

“Rusty….”

“I know, Erin. I know.”

“It’s… what I’m looking at, from everything I learned….”

His voice was flat as he finished her sentence — “Impossible.”

Elias had awakened at around 3:00 a.m., his neck and back stiff from his sleeping position against the wall. Shaking it off as much as he could, he climbed the ladder and found the delivery. The materials sent had been specifically packed into a box which would fit through the hatch. A twenty-foot length of rope had been left attached, which he used to lower the parcel through the opening and down to the floor, fighting the winds through the entire process.

Now equipped with the surveillance gear he needed, as well as other materials dictated by the assignment, Elias spent the next three hours roaming the raceways of Aegis, completing various installations, and positioning microscopic cameras and microphones in what he had designated from his brief visits as key areas in Walden and Madison. The electrical raceways and conduits had provided an ideal environment for this work, taking him directly above any room in the complex and providing him with several penetrations where he could piggyback his devices. He had also found the section of Aegis used as a home by the ZooCity dwellers and had positioned monitoring equipment there, choosing the spots as best he could from the available vantage points.

Elias then returned to his base and set up the laptop provided in the drop. Since all radio frequencies were jammed at Aegis, his method for monitoring all of the surveillance devices was elegantly simple and utilized the miles of interconnected conduit in the raceways. The devices sent their data via an FM signal which was transmitted through the conduits themselves. He screwed a conductive clamp to one of the pipes closest to the laptop. The clamp had a wire soldered to it with a converter and a USB plug at the end of the wire. He plugged it into the port of the laptop and opened the monitoring program. After a minute or two of searching and identifying all of the feeds, the program displayed a menu with each microphone or camera listed by number. Elias reached into his pocket, pulled out the sheet of paper he had used to jot down the locations of all of the devices, and edited the feed menu so that it displayed each microphone or camera by location.

Clicking on one of the ZooCity feeds, he heard nothing but silence. The camera associated with this location showed an empty room. He continued clicking from location to location until his ears were rewarded with the sounds of several excited voices shouting at once. Checking the video, he saw one of the young men put his fingers to his mouth and whistle loudly. They all stopped talking. Once silence was established, the whistler, who seemed to be the leader, contended, “We don’t have no choice.”

One of the others spoke up, his voice confrontational. “I don’t like it, BQ. Those dudes are bad.”

“You’re right. They’re bad. Okay. But we hook up with ’em or we die. Which one you want?”

There was no answer.

After a brief pause, as all of the group fell silent, the punk who had expressed his dislike for the situation asked, “So what they want us to do?”

The one they called BQ answered, “It ain’t nothin’. They want us to do the same thing we been doin’. They want us to grab newbies right when they come in. Except instead of doin’ what we used to do, they want us to deliver ’em to them.”

“And what do we get out of it?” one of the others asked.

It was difficult to tell from the wide-angle view on the laptop but it looked to Elias as if BQ smiled and said, “Mostly, we get to live. There be some other good things, too. They be makin’ some crystal and some blow over there. We get some of that. We get some booty. You know, the ones they don’t want.”

“This ain’t right! I like it the way it’s been. We had our own game. Now we gotta play theirs?”

It appeared from the video feed that BQ glared at the talker. “We play their game or we be dead.”

The talker did not look as if he agreed, but failed to respond.

Elias listened to the entire discussion, trying to glean additional insights. Other than what he learned at the beginning, very little came out of what he heard. As the group broke up and scattered, he rocked back on his heels and thought about this new information. His guess was that it was Kreitzmann, or one of his people, who had contacted this group with the intent of putting them to work for him. That was obvious. What was not obvious was why he needed the ZooCity culprits. The other point mentioned which disturbed Elias was the offering of a supply of methamphetamines and cocaine. The effect of distributing deadly drugs of that nature in an environment like this one, already stressed due to the pre-existing mental state of the entrants and the bizarre nature of the institution itself, would have wildly unpredictable results. The obvious question was how Kreitzmann was able to produce drugs while having no access to an outside supply of the materials needed.

The one other fact Elias took away from listening to the discussion was the abject fear visible even in the grainy image of their faces and audible in their voices. This was a group, whose whole social structure was based upon their bravado and generally macho attitude, talking about their own demise as an inevitable consequence of noncooperation. At least from the moment he began to monitor them, there was not even a hint of their opposing or resisting the overture, not a hint of defiance. In Elias’ mind, that could only mean one thing. Whoever had proffered the deal to the gangsters in ZooCity, and he assumed it must have been Kreitzmann, must be the same party connected to the deadly show he witnessed upon his arrival: the blur.

He clicked on the configuration menu of the monitoring program and set it up so that the laptop would record the video and audio feeds from all of the sources on a voice- or motion-activated basis, for his periodic review. Next, using another USB cable, he connected the smartphone to the laptop and downloaded the message which was received at the same time his message was uploaded in the flash transmission.

Within moments, the text message from Faulk’s office was displayed. Since this message was transmitted to him essentially at the same time as his went out, there was nothing in it referencing his comments or questions. That would have to come tomorrow. All it contained was a list of the drop shipment, a statement telling Elias that they did not yet have any luck identifying the two men who had accompanied Kreitzmann into the facility, and a comment from Faulk that he was glad Elias had made it inside and was able to check in on schedule.

His next several minutes were occupied opening one of the MREs from the drop and eating a tasteless meal, washed down by a bottle of energy drink. Still stiff and sore from his sleeping position, Elias stood and did some stretching exercises before once again striking out.

“At least tonight I’ll sleep more comfortably,” he said aloud, unpacking the flattened and compressed air mattress included in the shipment. With all of his self-assigned tasks completed, Elias typed a final command into the laptop and a password screen appeared, locking out anyone who might come across his base camp; then he returned to the access ladder.