It was the day of the exchange. Scott was extremely nervous and also in quite a bit of pain. Whatever Elsa had injected in his arm had caused his bicep to swell up. At first, he had felt really hungry. His arm had seemed noticeably stronger. The second day it looked absurd. He had given himself a black eye when he tried to rub his eyes in the morning and ended up punching himself really hard.
He had trouble getting a shirt on and eventually had to remove one sleeve on the third day. Then he tore the muscle while trying to pull up his pants. It was pure agony. His arm was not only swollen, but the tear made it even more unnaturally lumpy.
Elsa was excited, but she looked a bit apologetic once she realized how much pain he was in. She pleaded with him not to go to the school doctor but gave him a sling and some pills for the pain. He had no idea where she got those pills, but they helped a lot. While no longer in much pain, he felt too loopy to go to class.
Melinda had promised him they would be able to surgically repair the damage to his ligaments over spring break. She even promised there would be a real doctor there named Nittaya Chaikhot. Not wanting to know the answer, Scott had not bothered to ask if this woman was actually certified in anything related to Orthopedic surgery.
Melinda had somehow negotiated the partial exchange. The kidnappers would get a working fusion reactor and schematics for the Dark Siren and mining robots. The Dark Siren was nothing groundbreaking and would be difficult to build without understanding the materials used. The kidnappers apparently thought it was some top-secret warship. The mining robot design was valuable, but she only gave them Matt’s initial working version before all the improvements added by Rafael and Phillip. She had added notes on some of the initial protein encoding chip design. The design would never work without all the changes they had come up with over winter break. She believed someone could get the rest of the way just by knowing it was possible if they threw millions of dollars and a few years of research at the problem. The chemicals needed for testing were fairly specialized, so it was another potential method to track down what organization the kidnappers were associated with.
Theofanis had finished with linking video recognition to the HR database. They had tested it and it immediately identified Scott and his friends, even when they wore covid masks or hats. Scott learned that it could sometimes match people facing away just by their posture and how they walked, but this had a low accuracy...
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Scott and his friends watched a camera feed from Sergio’s van. They were meeting outside the city on a farm road about half a mile from the main freeway. The land was undeveloped and covered with trees. A car had pulled off the side of the road and a man stood waiting 20 yards away wearing sunglasses and a dark mark over his face.
Sergio and another man unloaded a cart with a dark blue tarp covering what looked to be a large device. Sergio was pushing the cart up the shoulder of the road towards the car. The other man had exited from the passenger side of the van but did not help with moving the device. Sergio was a solidly built guy. His hair was dark with some gray in it. His skin was dark, and he was a bit overweight. Despite his bulk, he moved with a grace that indicated he would be dangerous in a fight.
The other man was older, but he was built like a linebacker. He walked stiffly, like he was suffering from some old injuries. Probably a guy like that had a fair amount of scar tissue and shrapnel in him, but it was odd that he wouldn’t even try to hide his pain whenever he was walking. Even more strange, was that when he stopped, a strange smile would spread across his face revealing the perfect teeth of a toothpaste model. The man was very disturbing. What kind of psycho would grin like that in a life or death situation? Scott thought his face looked sort of familiar. Was that Carl?
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“I’m not a cat!” A goofy looking cat wearing a suit was insisting. Carl didn’t understand why this feline lawyer was denying it, but the expressions on its face were hilarious. Melinda had told him not to watch these silly videos while he was on the job, but he was in a lot of pain and it was distracting him from the pain. He had already learned that porn was blocked on his mental computer. That old lady Melinda had told him if he wanted to see someone naked all he had to do was ask. She was so creepy!
He ached all over. Every muscle and joint felt like someone had tenderized them with a hammer. Dr. Chaikhot had warned him he would feel some soreness from some procedure they used to build up his muscles. She had totally understated it - even with pain pills it hurt a lot! No pain no gain, he reminded himself. Ugh! He really should be paying attention to the heavily armed criminals they were meeting.
Name
??
Role
Kidnapper
What the heck? How was that helpful? Carl looked around. He saw a rectangle flash in his vision highlighting a person he hadn’t noticed.
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Name
??
Role
Sniper
This was not a good start.
“OK, we have the device that was promised, and this flash drive has all the schematics we agreed to.” Sergio announced.
Carl tried to play it cool. He had shut down all his internet windows and tried his best to keep alert. Another car with dark tinted windows pulled up about 200 yards away. A man wearing a ski-mask got out of the other car and pulled a girl out from the back seat.
Name
Adriana Foster
Role
Junior Facility Designer, Junior Ship Designer
The slender girl had messy blond hair, but no visible injuries. Carl was building up a simmering anger that these people would kidnap this cute young lady. He wished they had installed some kind of weapons or martial arts training when they upgraded him. He needed to remember to ask for something like that later.
He couldn’t get any information on the masked guy handling her either. Yet another unnamed goon. At this point Carl wasn’t really sure why he was here. His cybernetics were not giving them anything useful.
“OK, you’ve seen her. Leave the cart and the flash drive and get out of here. If you failed to deliver, her death is on your hands”
“We delivered what was agreed,” Sergio replied. “I would like to warn you that this thing is dangerous. You won’t want to disassemble it until you have the schematics. You can verify that it works and confirm the power output but opening it up is a bad idea.”
“Yes, we were warned by your boss as well. After we verify the tech, you will get a time and location for the final exchange.”
“Looking forward to it.” Sergio confirmed. They got back in their car and left, driving away quickly.
“Did you get anything?” Sergio asked.
“Nothing.” Carl said sadly. “It confirmed the girl was Adriana, but no IDs on any of their men. It did spot the sniper.”
“Yeah, I was surprised they only had one. At least one that we spotted.” Sergio said grimly. This mission was a bust and the boss would need to make some hard decisions soon.
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“How did it go?” Scott asked eagerly.
“Not well. Carl didn’t get any hits on the identification.” Melinda replied.
“Why did you send him anyway? We could have just run our software off a camera.” Scott said, a bit confused.
“Carl is kind of unique. His brain has grown a unique structure around his implants and I was hoping biological intuition might have a better chance than just running it directly through a computer. It didn’t seem to help.” Melinda said sadly.
“Didn’t you try anything else?” Scott asked. Melinda knew she should have kept Scott out of this. Ultimately, she judged their best chance was getting a hit on the HR software and Scott understood it the best. Still, if they couldn’t find the kidnappers after this meeting, she knew she’d have to make a hard decision that Scott would hate.
“They put the fusion device in a Faraday cage, so our trackers aren’t providing a signal. The biotech research might trigger some alerts if they buy certain reagents or equipment. It is more likely they will pass that on to someone who doesn’t have an obvious connection.”
“I don’t understand what went wrong with the software.” Scott said unhappily.
“I’m sorry Scott. I know I didn’t give you and Theo much time to perfect it.” Melinda replied. She didn’t tell him that the odds of Adriana’s survival were now close to zero.
Later, Scott downloaded the video feed and ran it through their program in debug mode. Debugging machine learning blocks was basically impossible. The internal state in a neural network didn’t really give you anything understandable. All you could check was that the inputs and outputs made sense relative to what you saw in the training data. He wasn’t optimistic, but he just couldn’t understand why they did not get any match.
The video stream reached where the program isolated the first man from the surrounding noise and hit Scott’s breakpoint. The code tried to match a bundle of data it identified as a person to heuristics compiled from a massive set of video feeds. Scott wondered where Theo had found the data to train this feature. He must have had access to a lot of surveillance feeds to build the training set.
Scott saw something in the code. The algorithm had a threshold before it considered someone a match. Normally it had to be at least 80% certain and even then, it would indicate the match was not very good.
About 500 names were getting discarded because the match did not meet the criteria. Scott pulled up the first match, Felipe Hall had a 42% match. He looked him up in Glitch_HR. The guy had average scores in insurance sales, and a decent rating for a security officer. Contact information had him living in Phoenix, Arizona. So, he was a maybe? Going through this list would take a while.
Scott decided on another approach. He kept the names in one file. Then he requested Glitch_HR return potential employees who could fill the role of “Kidnapper”. He cross referenced the list with the matches from the visual recognition. The order matched closely to the original ranking. It seemed the program was already using this information to correlate a good match.
Then he tried for the role of “Industrial Espionage”. A different name popped up to the top of the list - Andrei Osipova at about a 35% match. He sounded Russian and had high scores in espionage, marksmanship, unarmed combat and wilderness survival. Scott thought this person sounded more likely than the insurance salesman from Arizona.
He worked on this for a bit, also checking the sniper and the man in the other car. Nothing really jumped out for him in these lists. The matches returned for the sniper were a bunch of military types. There were some Russian names, but also a lot who lived in the US, Israel, Europe or China. The match scores were all in single digits.
Scott had been working on this for about an hour before he remembered to share this with Melinda and the others. His friends were excited. Melinda promised she would research some of the better matches including Felipe Hall and Andrei Osipova.
It wasn’t much, but they had a lead.