| From: | Jeffrey Mach <mach@****.CALTECH.EDU> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Missing Persons |
| Date: | Mon, 3 Nov 1997 13:59:57 -0800 |
>>>>>[When you want to find people who don't want to be found, they
really, really, don't want to be found. I know I was king of slow on
this, but tracking AWOLs from the CZ detachment was not easy. If you feel
like deducting a late penalty from my bill, be nice. I had to
preemptively spend quite a bit of that to the right...persons to get all
the info that I did. I did a little coordinating with Wildthing to split
the load but some of the stuff I found might help him too, so I am going
to share this report. I wanted to report back as soon as I had found the
last of them, but damn, of the people on the list, two of them just
vanished off the face of the earth, as far as any clue I can possibly
think of using to track them: PFC M. Jenner, and Cpl. Wilkins. I know
that this isn't any comfort, but what can i say? Maybe they were eaten,
or died and were buried somewhere in the zone and nobody's ever going to
find them.
Here's all the leads/dead-ends I tracked on them:
+++++include Jenner.report
+++++include Wilkins.report
Alright. The bad news being out of the way, the first ones that were
relatively easy to track were the ones that got themselves swatted:
+++++include Badgerton.pic
+++++include Elwood.pic
[Both are rather gruesome autopsy style pictures of fleshforms that died
violent deaths. The first, who apparently was a man is covered in grime
and scabrous sores as well as the signs of a beetle-like Invae. The
second, presumably a woman, is better kept, and shows signs of being a
wasp.]
Given the data I acquired on Sgt.'s Badgerton and Elwood, I was able to
compare it to some of the autopsy data on bugs that have gotten killed in
the past several months. And no, you really don't want to know how much
cred/favors/firstborn children I had to sign off to get that. So to make
a long story short, the two of them got geeked, and the fleshform (is that
what you call them?) was close enough to the original that I could get the
recognition software to give me a match of 69 and 58% each, but I mean,
eyeballing them and with you already suspecting the bugs go them, well,
that makes it a match in my book. Badgerton was on the dark side of the
sprawl in Detroit only a couple weeks ago, a roach, they think. Elwood
was found earlier in Aurora. Oh, yeah, here's the full dirt:
+++++include Badgerton.report
+++++include Elwood.report
At first, I didn't know if she was just working her way out of the zone
slowly, or maybe some of the buggers decided to stay close to "home."
Luckily that put me onto the trail of another. This one is more
dangerous, though.
Lt. Hawkins, better known as "Sparks" to her unit was part of a
magically-active squad. They thought she was a Coyote shaman, but later
it seems the head-shrinker that all the mage-corps in her unit reported to
began having doubts. Luckily the military shared some of their data with
LSS on all the AWOLs so I got some data on her after burning some favors
to take a peek at them.
+++++include Hawkins.psyche-eval
[The report is filled with the usual medical techno-jargon, highlighted
portions indicate she was beginning to suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder even very early in the containment and showed subtle signs of
"sympathizing with the enemy."]
Looks like they got a rather nasty bad apple on their hands. I think you
can read all that psycho-babble as: for the love of God, I think we've
got a Bug Shaman on our hands. Too bad for the doc, a few days after this
report, the helo he was in was heading too close to the zone border and
got attacked by a flight of wasps and all hands were lost before enough
backup arrived to force the rest of the bugs back. He was supposed to be
doing eval on some of the frontliners, who, from some of the other stuff I
read, weren't doing too well either, although not so much on the
sympathizing other than for the humans that got caught on the wrong side
of the wall. Anyway, I digress, and some of that is in the rest of her
report. But, I've got to wonder, besides Hawkins, how many others were
"protected" by having him get axed?
So anyway, she was pretty smart about keeping a low profile after she
ditched her unit. Luckily for me, she wasn't a pro. I put a few frames
to concentrate sniffing around the old CZ region, just in case Elwood
wasn't the only one sticking close to home. A few days ago, something
popped up. I was looking for someone applying for or using an ID with
hers or a similar name or face or any of the other good data I got from
the LSS stuff including a gene-print. I was also looking for mages
admitted to area hospitals and clinics. From what I've heard, they have
to get special care when they get banged up. Guess what, double play:
+++++include Doe.comparison
[It is a picture of a woman on a driver's license and a military ID for
Sandra Hawkins. Nothing about them is the same other than height and rough
build.]
Not a bad job, probably magical, but whoever did it, they forgot to have
her records changed for the DNA finger print. Seems she knocked herself
out or somebody knocked her out, and some "friends" saw fit to call an
ambulance and leave her where she could be found, sans ID. Some serious
internal trauma "of indeterminate origin" read: she probably fried
herself or somebody fried her. Unfortunately for her, the hospital doesn't
like Jane Does (they tend not to pay their bills), so they gene-printed
her and started looking. They got a quick match with a Ms. Sara Hawker,
and seem to have quit there, or at least I guess so, since the MP's
haven't busted any heads around the hospital, or if they did, they did it
_very_ quietly. Anyway, she got better very fast and was discharged in
only a couple days, but I figure she's still in the area if you want to go
and get her. I've got some frames now sniffing unobtrusively for her new
ID. Don't suppose bugs can deck, can they? Here's the full story on her,
so far:
+++++insert: Hawkins.report
Finally, well, there is this kid, Cpl. Draper that I'm not sure how you're
going to want to handle...which is a good enough reason why I have been
humming and hawing about him until now. The long and short of it is, I
think its just a kid and he really did run away. No fleshform, no
fraternizing with the enemy, the boy was so screwed up watching his
friends get their faces eaten off, or whatever bugs tend to do to people
when they get their claws on them, that he ran. Straight to his sister's
no less.
Luckily, he wasn't so dumb as to run crying home to mama, the MP's were
probably waiting on the front porch. But, damn, I can't blame the kid.
You can't receive two commendations in four months for just being a lucky
enough bastard to survive your platoon being nearly wiped out and be just
fine. And no, he wasn't the only one each time...I'm not so gullible as
to believe that story. No, read his service record for yourself, like the
part where his platoon had to "put down" a riot that started at a supply
LZ, and you'll see why I figure the guy just decided one day he'd had
enough and started walking. Which is why I started poking around his
family. Thank the maker for marketers and dumb meter maids.
It seems whenever his older sister in Providence, RI buys groceries,
Mega-Food tracks what she buys and then sends that data to a local data
clearinghouse, so they can blast specific junk at her telcom instead of
the usual random crap they send as usual. Anyway, so a month or so back
(it's in the report), she suddenly starts buying a little bit more per
month...and well she is married and has a kid of her own who's growing,
but my instincts tell me, not _that_ much. A positive ID with that
little? Heh...and hence the meter maid.
Seems the sister parked in the handicapped zone at the mall, and had a
little row with the public servant she caught scanning her license plate.
Shouldn't have attracted attention to herself and paid the fine like a
good girl...so she get's mentioned in the write-up for being belligerent,
and got her license scanned in, to boot. Now here's the kicker, the
report also mentions that she is with somebody, her cousin, a "male
caucasian, early twenties, blond, approx. 5'10" without ID." Funny
that.... The description not only matches her brother (well he's 5'11"
and turned 20 last June), but she has _no_ male cousins (not that the DMV
gives a crap), and if she was cheating on her hubbie, don'tcha think she'd
go to a better place than the mall? She probably made a fuss trying to
get out of the ticket because she didn't want to have it on her record and
possibly attract the attention of the MP's, but just ended up making it
worse. Since then, I've been checking their local news, and nothing's
been mentioned about it yet, so I doubt the MP's have caught on yet.
Now, I don't know much about bugs, but I doubt they'd run home to their
sister's house and hide out there for a month without something icky
happening. Like I said, it seems to me to be just some scared kid:
+++++include: Draper.report
I don't know what the UCAS Army's policy on desertion is, but it probably
isn't very pleasant. Whatever it is, he doesn't deserve it. But then,
you didn't pay me to philosophize.
That's all I have for now. Anything in particular I wasn't clear on, or
you want more on something, let me know. If anything, I erred on giving
you too much data, although the dead ends are clearly marked.]<<<<<
-- NewzJunkie <14:00:21/11-03-58 PST>
