Graham
"What? Are you fucking serious?”
“Yeah! And he told me after that to ‘Don’t bother with that call to Percy. I know where she is,’ and then he just fucking hung up! What the fuck was that supposed to mean? He didn’t even say where they fucking were!”
Skyler slumped back on the couch. “Oh, my fucking god. This… this has never happened before. What the hell are we going to do?”
“You think I fucking know? We’ve nearly gotten our asses kicked before, but nobody has ever tried to kill us! And I didn’t even know Finn was capable of self-defense, everything about this is fucking insane!”
She repeatedly smacked her hands together trying to think of something. “Uh…. Fuck, could Brice help us? Or Adrian?”
“Help us do what? Launch a fucking rescue mission? Blow their front fucking door down and shoot the place up?”
“What other option do we have! If you can’t contact either of them, then we have no other way of resolving this!”
“We also don’t know where they are, so we’d have to comb the entire fucking building down to find them, and given how Eclipse reacted to us just snooping around discreetly, there is no chance they’re going to let that happen with no fuss.”
“Which is why we get Brice to help! His people have guns, and if the guy that Finn fought in the elevator didn’t have a gun, then the rest of the security there probably doesn’t either.”
“Probably! Probably don’t have guns! We know next to nothing about what’s going on in there, do you really want to risk starting a fucking shootout in the middle of the HQ of a tech company? We’re trying to rescue our friends, not make international fucking news!”
“What the fuck should we do then? You’re always quick to tell me what won’t work, so what will?”
I nearly blacked out trying to think of how I was going to answer that. The silence made my vision turn foggy and my ears were ringing loud enough to deafen me. I had to sit on the floor to keep my body from collapsing, and re-straightened my thinking.
“God…” I muttered. “Dammit. I’m going to try calling Percy again.” I had to wait a few seconds for my head to clear and my vision to come back before pulling my phone out to call her. Twenty seconds passed, and the ringing stopped. I dropped it from my ear. “Nothing.”
She leaned closer. “Wait… do you hear that? That doesn’t sound like her voicemail.”
The white noise in my ears was still blaring. “Hear what?”
“Put it on speaker.”
I did. There was a muffled voice on the other line, but it wasn’t Percy’s. It sounded like it was coming from a distance.
“...minutes… still… two… can’t… straight… again… What… the fuck… doing here!” A different loud and inaudible voice drowned out the other one. There was a loud shuffling noise in the mic before the call suddenly cut out.
Skyler and I were speechless for what felt like an entire minute. The feeling of nausea quickly returned and my stomach twisted in knots. I mumbled every swear word that I could think of while trying to comprehend what the fuck it was we just listened to. No answer presented itself besides that Percy and Finn were in immediate danger in that building. After another few seconds of deliberation, I finally folded.
“Fuck it. Let's just go to Brice. There's nothing else we can do.”
---
“So, what’s the scoop on Eclipse, G?” said Percy the very second she planted her ass at the Roundtable.
“Can we at least wait for the others to show up?”
“Hmph. Alright. Yeah, let’s do that. Let's see how long it takes for Finn to show up.”
Finn had been standing by the front door eating a bagel for the last five minutes, behind Percy. He opted not to tell her that. Adrian showed up soon after, but Finn waited for five minutes until Skyler finally left her room to join us.
“So is there a big government conspiracy that we should invest the next three months of our time in?” Finn predictably blurted as he sat down.
“Well, I’ve spent all of the last two days researching Eclipse to figure out some kind of an answer to that, and I think can confidently say now that I have absolutely no fucking idea.”
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
“What?” everybody said in unison.
“Yeah, I know I’m supposed to be a tech god who can summon access to all human knowledge at the snap of his fingers, but even though Eclipse is a financial giant in the tech industry, I could find little to no information of value about them at all. There’s no information on their taxes, their employees' LinkedIn profiles reveal absolutely nothing and the few of them who messaged me back seemed deliberately sketchy on details of their workplace, they don't do tours of the HQ, the $1 billion startup in 2016 doesn’t match up with their combined 22,000 followers on social media, and their website is almost comically minuscule. There are only three hyperlinks to be found, and one of them is an FAQs page, which doesn’t answer raise nor answer any meaningful questions regarding the company and its purpose. It’s essentially clickbait, only it’s for a fucking multibillion-dollar company. And despite the fact that they’re a self-described AI developer, there’s no mention of them in any prominent tech news outlets, except on business sites when they report on its stock prices. And I think it’s also worth noting how nothing about those said stock prices adds up.
“In one minor story on Forbes I found that briefly mentions them, it said that a majority of their shares are owned by just a small handful of investors, and yet nobody seems to know who the fuck those people are. The prices have also been stagnantly growing for the last five years the company has existed, which also makes no sense given that its main source of revenue is completely unknown. But because they’re a low-profile tech company that pays their dividends and there isn’t legitimate evidence they’re doing anything illegal, they’ve managed to stave off any questions about their business practices. But on another note, I also found a few message boards about them online which were mainly on Reddit, and it seems like the rumor of a secret government project did not originate with Adrian’s army friends. All we have to go on right now is a few fringe rumors and the presence of dark money.”
“So… is that it?” Adrian asked awkwardly.
“Yeah. There is nothing else to find about them. Absolutely nothing.”
“Do they have an HQ somewhere? Are there any other places they operate?”
“The HQ is in Cincinnati, but I don’t know of anywhere else they can be found.”
“Cincinnati?” Finn leered. “That is a weird choice for the HQ of a tech company that big.”
Skyler leaned in to join the conversation. “So what should we do with them? If we want to gather more information on them, it would be a four-hour drive to get there, plus we will have to pay for a hotel depending on how long we take.”
Finn retorted, “Hold on there, I think we should at least come to some consensus on whether or not to investigate this at all.”
“I think we should,” said Percy. “This is a multibillion-dollar enterprise shrouded in mystery and dark money. If there’s something spooky going on behind the scenes, then we could seriously cash in on this while also kind of being independent whistleblowers. If done right, this could be a really good opportunity for us.”
“Okay, but what exactly would we be doing? We could investigate everything they’ve ever said and done and still find nothing. We can’t just start an operation against a company this massive based on nothing but a gamble. Plus, have you considered that there’s a reason so much about them is secret? That rumor about working with the government could very well be true, and whatever it is they may be up to—unless you want to end up like Edward Snowden—we don’t want to intervene in that.”
“But it is just a rumor,” Adrian rebutted. “The only way to find out the truth is by looking for it. If their problems don’t go beyond the scope of mismanagement and money laundering, we could act on it. If not, we stay the fuck away from it.”
“So you think that if we find out that there’s a government conspiracy, we’re just going to leave with that knowledge of government shadow money going to an obscure tech company and move on with our lives in peace?”
“As I said, this is all merely speculation. We don’t know anything that is absolutely certain.”
“For God’s sake. Skyler, what do you think about this?”
“Uh…” She leaned back in her chair. “Well, I don’t really care what we do. If we do nothing just out of sheer caution, I’m fine with that. But if we do decide to intervene, we’re gonna want to be extra careful in how we approach them. I’d prefer we don’t disappear under mysterious circumstances because we accidentally discovered a huge CIA cover-up to start the robot apocalypse.”
Finn sighed. “Okay. Graham, it seems you’re going to be the deciding vote here, so what should we do?”
The question came as a bit of a surprise. Normally, I would just tell everyone what the facts are and then they would make the choice on what to do about it. I rarely have had to contribute to the decision myself.
“Well, we’ve dealt with a lot of shady companies and business owners before, but they were generally people who were provably in the wrong and deserved what was coming to them. This here is a little more complicated, since we don’t know for sure if there’s any wrongdoing going on. And yeah, we don’t want the CIA to snatch us out of our beds and ship us to Area 51, but if there is something to find, we could potentially be on the brink of a massive breakthrough, not just financially. And if we do end up finding evidence of a government conspiracy—which is a massive 'if'—why would we just put it back where we found it and walk away, never to speak of it again? Don’t we bear some kind of responsibility in what we do to tell the public about what their government is doing, even if we end up like Snowden?”
I let them sit on that for a moment to reflect on the philosophical bomb I just dropped. Finn responded first.
“That’s a surprisingly nuanced take there, Graham. I’ll accept it.” His wording of that was a bit offensive, but it’s far from the worst thing he’s said about me.
“So that’s it? We’re all in agreement? We’re moving forward with this?”
“I suppose we are.”
“Alright. And remember, this isn't a full lean-in. This is only the opening info-gathering stage. So, probably the only place to start is at the HQ in Cincinnati, which as Skyler pointed out, is four hours away and would require a hotel. We could pay for that out of the savings we just earned from Solaris, but we’ll have to figure out how much we need.”
“I’ll pay for it.” Everyone looked at Percy. “I still have my 47 thousand that I don’t plan on spending, we can use that to cover any expenses.”
Skyler asked, “Are you sure you want to do that? There’s nothing else you want to do with the money?”
Percy looked her dead in the eye in the most serious manner she could pull off. “Yes. I’m sure.”
Skyler glared at her, then once again leaned back. “Okay. Then let’s get searching.”
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