#4 Pirate Jenny and the Black Freighter
Moebius is serialized fiction about an indie private detective hired to solve crimes related to technology.
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Recap
Vijayan has been hired by Riz Moebius to figure out what happened to a Jet Red Plane with full autopilot that crashed and killed everyone onboard.
He’s now in Phoenix, Arizona trying to steal information surrounding the crash from Octave - the manufacturer of the autopilot system that the Jet Red plane had.
He’s been asked by Riz to get close to one of the employees at Octave who works on a software called the Metaverse that can simulate products and designs, including the full autopilot system.
[1]
I was walking through the hallways of Hotel Oasis. The layout of the hallways on the nose as the name indicated. The walls were painted with dunes, cactuses and palm trees. The roof had a faux sky finish with a dim soft red light illuminating it. It looked like Las Vegas architecture had taken over the entire South West.
“Is this an all expenses paid trip?” I asked, with the the snark probably perceptible in my voice.
“Paid for by Super Micro, for strategic consulting on their new SOC” came the reply from Riz”
“So, I would see you in the office then?” I asked, hoping the answer would soothe the uneasiness I felt.
“No, no one will know that I was employed by Super Micro until next tax season” said Riz.
I wondered what other Chinese companies with American offices had relationships with the Chinese government and may be even spies embedded within them.
“Do you think there are other people like Mr.Zhan working within Super Micro?”
“Question kind of answers itself doesn’t it?” Said Riz as we turned a corridor to a hallway that looked like the one that we had just passed, except that the doors had different numbers on them. Sometimes I idly wonder what I’d do if I lost consciousness and woke up in the hallway of a similar hotel, will I be able to find my way out?
Riz made a sharp turn, opened the door to his room, flicked on the lights as I oriented myself. It thankfully looked like the standard hotel room, except for the fact that the bed looked untouched while the couch had a ruffled up blanket on it.
“I thought you’d sleep in the closet like real spies do” I attempted to make a joke to cut through the sterile environment. Riz chuckled insincerely as he paced around the room. He grabbed his Mac from the bed and turned it toward me. The screen looked like it had images from Google Earth marked with red and white squares.
“Right, the white square is the area around which the wreckage of the plane was found off the coast of Indonesia. The debris were spread across 30 square miles. The search which lasted 14 days found 109 bodies. Major parts of the the aircrafts were recovered, including the the SOC chips that ran Sophie the autopilot.” Riz explained as he hovered his finger above the screen without touching it.
“Except the flight recorder I’m guessing?” I interjected, hoping that this astute observation would delight my secret employer.
“Well. No. They found the flight recorder.” Riz snapped back, slight annoyance visible on his face.
He continue “The first people who noticed the debris were fishermen who were at sea early in the morning and closer to the location of the crash than coast guard or first responders” .
Riz swiped right to move to another screen.
“We found these YouTube videos posted online about 2 hours after the accident. These are mostly from the Fishermen who discovered the debris”
The screen showed a video shot in portrait mode. The lights of the fishing boats reflected off the layer of oil on the water and onto the floating debris.
“Its hard to figure out the relative position of the boats, if they were seeing the same things or different things. Here in one of the videos you can see the coast guard helicopters arriving at the scene first followed by rescue boats.” Riz said as he moved his fingers deftly between screens and videos, as if he had gone through this same workflow numerous times.
The video got more chaotic as coast guard helicopters hovered over the water.
“So what are we looking for here?” I asked.
“The coast guard and first responder reports say that they had not found the flight recorder. Jet Red came out a month later and said that one of the fishermen had recovered the recorder and had returned it to them” Riz explained, his tone sounding more urgent but not hurried.
“For a fishing boat to have found it, they would have had to go deep sea diving or I don’t know, find it in the stomach of a shark” Riz said waving his hands
[2]
“So what’s your MBTI type?” I asked Amanda, the Saorise Ronan type from the diner.
Her eyes perked up slightly but she responded without breaking the monotone the conversation had been in so far “INTP, what’s yours?”
“INFP, I’ve tested as INTP a couple of times though” I replied
“You’re probably the first INFP working as a dev that Ive met” came her reply
This was silly but I felt like I’d been found out as an impostor. My mind went into a whirl that I was sure was visible on my face, like a true fucking INFP.
I had spent the morning watching James Bond clips and the YouTube channel Charisma on Command but at this moment I was not feeling particularly spy-like. Reality has too many details that James Bond movies solve with quick montages and smart one liners. If I could do this in a montage it would be:
- me and her having a conversation and then laughing about a joke that both her and I find to be in group enough
- her talking to me about her break up over a beer, a friendly hug at the end.
- hanging out at her place and watching a movie, but when she is called away by a diversion I create, I get to check out her laptop
Back to reality. In the last 10 uncomfortable minutes, I had learnt that Amanda was not particularly interested in small talk, but had trouble with interpersonal conflict of any kind and so she had not found an exit to this conversation I had initiated.
“So uh what do you work on? The Metaverse?” The words stumbled out of my mouth.
Amanda paused, lifted her head up to me from her desk. Shit, I had hurried this.
[3]
“Flight recorders are too heavy to float. They usually have a radio beacon, and it would show up on a p3 radar if you flew over it” said Riz. It seemed that he was getting excited about it as he spoke.
The video that Riz was showing me now showed a helicopter that looked different from the coast guard flights. It had no markings on it and was light green in color like a military aircraft.The copter hovers lower than the coast guard copters in the background. Two men in diving gear jump out of it. There are three other men in the helicopter wearing green army fatigues. Few mins later the divers emerge, floating alongside them is another object with a buoy wrapped around it.
“Who are they?” I asked instinctively
“We believe they are Black Freighter men. Russian paramilitary” Riz said
“Russian army? In Indonesia?” I asked, while momentarily wondering how that question meant nothing to me about a month back. Simpler times. Why do I always have to leave simpler times behind?
“They are not the official army. They are private military contractors. Fist appeared during the takeover of Crimea and then in northern Syria. They have also known to take private contracts” Riz explained, with no emotional affect that suggested that he did not share my conflicts.
“What do they have to do with Octave or the Jet Red Plane Crash” I probed on.
[4]
It seemed that after three weeks of forced conversations Amanda had yielded enough to trust me. The montage had worked I guess.
We had been working on the metaverse tests of the new SOC chip together, along with Mr.Zhan and Erika the nervous energetic Super Micro engineer. Running tests on the Metaverse reminded me of rendering time on old school video editors. After each small component we had to wait 30 mins to an hour for the Metaverse to run simulations and some times it would return a run time error, which meant debugging and testing again.
During one of these testing sessions when it was just us, she got to talking about her relationship.
“Do you think the Metaverse could run simulations of human relationships? Figure out who is compatible with whom?” She said while staring blankly onto the screen like the trope of a STEM girl with Zoey Deschanel vibes.
“So, kind of like a dating app except that it would run a simulation of your potential relationship with all your matches before you start talking to them” I spoke and paused and before she could reply continued “that’s a lot of compute for each person”
“Yeah true but it would may be prevent inflicting trauma of a bad relationship on the world” she said, raising her eyes to look right into mine.
“What do you mean? Inflict what kind of trauma?” I asked, wondering whether the subtext of the question was known to her.
“I uh, nothing, I’m just rambling about stuff” she replied
“So far I’ve not been able to find anything unusual with respect to the Metaverse tests” was my message to Riz when we met at the same diner every other day.
Three days ago Amanda had invited me to her place for a dinner that she was hosting with a couple of others from Super Micro.
Amanda was a senior engineer but if you saw her home, you’d have thought she was a CTO or executive. This seemed to have come at a price because all the conversations that her co-workers seem to have with her seemed to have an underlying tension in them. Like they envied or even despised what she had but were too cowardly or perhaps smart to not air it publicly.
“Do you still work on that ‘secret’ project with Jules?” One of her co-workers had asked during the dinner. It was the kind of question that seemed harmless but the tone of it implied some kind of sinister bitchiness.
“No. I just work on the Metaverse test with Vijayan here. Got done with the project with Jules about a two months ago” she said as she looked at me and smiled. It made sense to me now why she trusted me, at least more than her other co-workers. She was surrounded by people who saw her as part of a game, a mission that they had to complete to get to the next level of corporate theatre. And she probably saw me as someone not interested in playing that game, even though I had more sinister goals that she was not aware of.
[5]
“The flight recorder was investigated by the FAA, which concluded that the trajectory of the aircraft indicated that it started nosediving at a certain point and then never recovered”
“The autopilot system was not investigated by the FAA even though they requested access to it but Octave denied and ran their own independent study which showed that the autopilot was engaged the whole time, and that pilots had tried to take control of the aircraft multiple times but were locked out” Riz pulled up two graphs side by side which showed the trajectory of the planes - flight recorder data vs Sophie data.
“We need to know what the original flight recorder data was. If someone paid Wagner to recover the flight recorder within an hour of the crash, then that someone knew that something had gone horribly wrong, and they had prepared for this scenario”
“How does Amanda and the Metaverse come into all of this?”
“If someone actually spoofed the data of the crash, the one way to do that would be run the crash conditions on the metaverse, and hard code that data into the SOC and the flight recorder after replacing previous information”
“So why recover the flight recorder?
[6]
The next time Amanda invited me to her place, it was just me. I found it easy to be attracted to women, but I had controlled my nerve so far with Amanda knowing well that it would not end well for either me or her. I had told myself this would just be another day in my mission of getting close to her but that kind of flew out the door when she opened the door wearing a blue slip and grey lulu lemons that hugged her body. There was a sense of unnerving fragility about her which made me feel weaker in resolve.
We talked about things, what things I’m not sure of, cause my mind was wrapped up in conflict. What was I doing here? Was I putting this seemingly innocent woman in harms way? Or May be it wasn’t conflict, it was just old habits when it came to women.
She placed her hands on my shoulders and her warmth of her hands snapped me out of my loop of thoughts and unbeknownst to me I made a decision as I let out a deep sigh.
“Amanda, do you know anything about the Jet Red plane crash?”
Her hands retracted fast and her body shrunk into less space.
“I..I’m just curious, people keep talking” now I was just trying to cover my ass.
May be it was my lack of resolve or may be the fragility was just a cloak, Amanda now sat up straight, and her voice was deep when she replied “Why are you here?”
Why am I here? I was not sure. I never get an answer when I ask that question once Ive started down a path. What state of mind had led me to do corporate espionage for a private contractor I had know for a month. And now I was deep enough for the decision to be no longer reversible. I wanted to say something about how I care for her as a friend but the words were stuck in my throat cause that was not really true. She moved first, getting up from the couch and walking towards the table where her phone was.
“I’m sorry I think you have to leave and I have to call Jules” she said with anger and a tinge of disappointment in her voice
Well I guess that’s the end of my fledgling spy career. I got up from the couch, weak at my knees and unable to look up from the floor. I had to find something to say and I just made the words up as I spoke “may be you don’t have to. And I’ll be gone tomorrow, just another person who left their job without informing their employer?”.
Amanda didn’t reply, her breath seemed to soften a bit and her eyes looked like they were sorry for me. She briskly walked to the door and held it open for me. I lifted my head up to look at her one last time. Just as the words came to my lips, I saw a round wooden stick hit the side of Amanda’s head, and she collapsed while a man in an N95 mask, wearing all black now stood in her place. The words in my mouth now turned into a little girl’s screech. And as my body shifted into flight mode, I saw Mr.Zhan walk in through the door.
“I told Mr.Moebius to not hire a silly person like you. You have no constitution” said Zhan as he looked down at Amanda who was now on the floor.