“I was talking with one of the third-year students and he told me about this Anki flashcard app that’s used by med students. It’s really great for learning human anatomy and physiology. Here’s my phone. You can use it to test me.” Eva handed me her phone and I looked over the app. It really was a good tool, but I had a better one for her to use in studying for her test on Thursday.
Being with Eva and James this weekend had been fantastic. We slipped right back into our old ways without regard to the missing months apart. Eva even managed to drag me to a few fitness classes. We were back in her dorm room on this chilly Monday morning and waiting for James to rejoin us after his morning class. Eva had classes all afternoon and was taking the morning to continue her studying.
“How about I show you something better?” I got up and started for the door to her dorm room.
“Where are you going?”
“I’ll be right back. Just getting something from the car.” Five minutes later I was back in her room and setting up a VR rig for each of us. I logged on and set up an account for Eva.
“Put on the gloves and headgear and I’ll show you some of what my company is doing to help medical students learn and become better doctors.” Eva put on the gear. I logged her on to the system and brought her into a group with me. Now we were in a classroom with posters of the human body and all of its structures on the walls. In front of us was a human body and as I manipulated the settings, I was able to shed the layers of the body until only the skeleton remained.
“You can use these controls on the side or you can just say what you want to see. Just say ‘Show me’ before your request. For instance, show me the muscular system of the right leg.” The right leg of the virtual body suddenly filled in with muscles. “You can ask it to highlight the muscle groups and name them or you can go into test mode and tap on anything and name it yourself. You’ll get a score at the end of the test and get a review on anything you missed. Also, what you’re seeing now is what I call textbook mode. You can toggle it to real-life mode and see exactly what you’d see if you opened up a person, only without the spraying blood.”
“Holy shit! This is awesome, Abby. You’ve got way more detail than anything I’ve seen. This beats the hell out of my textbooks. I can follow the muscles all the way around the body.” Eva started playing around with the system, adding muscles all over the body by naming them. She tried test mode and got an eighty-two percent. I showed her how to get the information on what she missed and a tutorial that was geared towards those areas that she needed the most help in.
“I have a few guys working on the next upgrade with you in mind. We’re going to have the body simulate all sorts of exercises and show which muscles are worked and how improper form can cause injuries.”
I told Eva that she could keep the rig that she was using now and that she’d have access to all the latest downloads, as they came out. Eva hugged me, in real and VR, and thanked me for making learning fun.
In the afternoon, James came over to help Eva with her studying and I let him use my VR rig. He was blown away and I left the two of them to study while I took off for some overdue espionage work.
My target today wasn’t corporate America, it was the US government. It was odd that I’d been asked by a one government agency to infiltrate and spy on another governmental body. Helping Kevin with his fishing expedition into the computer systems of the seven politicians on his list that he suspected of being blackmailed made sense from one perspective, but I wondered if I was starting down that slippery slope that dad was talking about. I’d convinced myself that breaking into politician’s personal computers and phones would help the FBI take down more human traffickers. What would I convince myself to do next? How far would I go?
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Thoughts like that, and a very busy schedule, had kept me from pursuing Kevin’s request for the past two months and I finally made my decision. I would spy for the FBI. If I found no evidence of blackmail, I would tell the FBI that. I wouldn’t hand over any copies of the politician’s private information. Likewise, if there was evidence, I would only let them have the exact items relating to that evidence and nothing else.
With that decision, I set out to Raleigh to plunder the offices of the senior US Senator from North Carolina, Sean Daniels. He had a Raleigh office, along with offices in four other cities in North Carolina and one in Washington. He was one of the politicians that called in to the FBI to find out more about the arrest of one of the Hollywood slavers, an arrest that he should not have been able to know about.
My usual sweep of the office computers and servers yielded nothing and I headed off to his home to see if he had anything on his computer there. Having just left his offices, I knew from Sean’s schedule that he wouldn’t be home for another two hours. That would give me sufficient time to search his office and go through all his papers. Once he got home, I’d need to get his computer password and copy over his phone.
Mr. Senior Senator’s house made Edgar’s look like a shack. I wondered if he had this kind of money before he went into politics or if he was using his position to gain insider trading advantages. I’d have to see about adding a little extra program to his computer so I could have the same information that he was using to make his trades. Scanning the mansion, I noted where the desk and computer were and headed directly for that room. It was good that I’d scanned the place, because it would have taken me at least twenty minutes to find his home office otherwise.
Reviewing the scan of Sean’s office, I noticed that he had several hiding places. The obvious one was the safe behind an astonishingly realistic painting of a camera. The painting took my breath away and I snapped a picture of it to find out more about the artist. Besides the wall safe, there were two hidden areas inside the antique wooden desk and there was a thin concealed drawer on the underside of his chair. Donning my gloves, I set to work.
The contents of the safe and the hidden caches in the desk were fairly mundane; securities, deeds, a will, legal documents, and some money. I left it all as it was and turned towards the chair. The latch to open the secret compartment was located under the lip of the front of the seat and the drawer opened towards the back. There was a single yellow business envelope inside.
I slid out the contents out and looked at the three pictures I found. Each was of a child. Two of them I immediately recognized from the family photos on the Sean’s desk. They pictures were of his son and daughter. The third was vaguely familiar and I took a closer look at the framed photographs covering the far wall of the office. I found the boy in the fourth picture I examined. Sean was on a boat with another man and a boy. It was a fishing trip and the boy was holding up his rod in one hand and a fish in the other. It took me a few moments to connect the dots in my brain and realize that the man standing next to Sean was the governor of North Carolina, Jacob Marlow. I searched on my phone and saw that the senator had married the governor’s sister. That meant the boy with the fish was the Sean’s nephew and the reason he looked familiar to me was that I’d seen his picture on the Marlow’s desk when I’d stolen into the governor’s office a year and a half ago to piggy-back on his insider information.
Attached to the photos with a paperclip was a small piece of paper that read, “Keep them safe”, in bold, typewritten, script. This certainly seemed to fit with Kevin’s theory that some politicians were being blackmailed. I took pictures of the pictures and of the brief note. It looked like I’d be making some trips soon in order to follow up on the other politicians.
I waited for the Sean to arrive, so I could access his computer and phone, and once I was finished, I headed back for Edgar’s house. Having read some of the messages on the Sean’s phone, I had a lot of thinking to do.
My thinking led to a decision. I’d planned to stay in Raleigh for the rest of the week and hang out with my friends. Instead, I was going to pay a visit to the other six politicians on my list and see what I could find out. Three of the politicians were close by on the east coast, while the others were all the way across the country. I was going to find out who was doing the blackmailing and shut them down.