Wilson Port, Tewanta - 3306-09-21 04:14 GST
Detective Imelda Geldof stood at the large holo table in her department's operations room. It was late. It was very late, so late that in about thirty minutes, it would be considered very early. There was nobody else in the office, which was a frakking good thing in her mind. She was staring at the mind map she had built up of her current murder case. She had been working on this case for nearly five weeks: the murder of a middle aged woman, a quality control automation engineer, in Cromwell Ward. The case had been her obsession for the entire five weeks. The mind map projected in front of her was the holographic equivalent of a cork board covered in newspaper clippings connected by red string. To be honest, it was more like a room full of cork boards covered in notes, pictures, & rumours connected together by a rainbow of coloured strings. Everyone except for her partner, Brendan Freamon, would be seriously worried about her sanity if they saw this, and even he would have some concerns. However, this was her thing: she ferreted out all the useful information and looked for the patterns until insights started dropping out. It was a successful approach and had cracked a few weird cases. However, normally the map didn't get so large or the items on it so weird. Normally there wouldn't be notes about Raxxla, alien civilizations, secret societies, and other Z-Anon whacky conspiracy theories. This was a weird case, however, and a big one. The mindmap had a few clusters in it. There was one for the victim and her online activities. Most of the weirder stuff was in there. There was one for the failure of the security cameras at the time of the murder with links to other cases where the cameras had inconveniently failed: the beverage riot in Armstrong Square, the unauthorized opening of an external airlock, and the rupture of a coolant conduit in a sugar processing facility and subsequent explosion. The last one was possibly just an accident, but it was too close, both physically and temporally, to the murder scene to be discounted. There was a cluster of notes from interviews with victims neighbours, another of Brendan's notes on the teenage cliques that hung out at Armstrong Square, and lastly notes about the message that the victim had scrawled in her own blood.
The mystery of that message and the figure it referred to, The Prime, was the first insight that had fallen out of the case. This mostly likely had referred to an explorer called CMDR Primetime Casual. This CMDR had helped boost the influence and finances of The Protectorate shortly after they arrived in Tewanta with a huge cache of exploration data. Worryingly, around the time of the murder, he had seemed to have disappeared. There were rumours that he had been spotted in deep space near a location known as The View, but in either situation he wasn't able to help her with her case.
The other insight that she had dug up was the identity of the victim, though this took a lot more work. She was Mary Jane Hamillton, formerly an systems engineer for Dell Sendai. She had blown the whistle on a security flaw in Dell Sendai computers that had allowed them to be hacked, remotely, and then she promptly disappeared. Officially, it was a minor issue and Dell Sendai had issued a recall purely as a precaution. However, on some of the more obscure technical forums that Imelda visited regularly, there were rumours that a subcontractor had added a backdoor into the hardware and firmware. The whistle blower's disappearance was put down to her going into a witness protection program. Apparently, that wasn't the case, and Imelda wondered if the victim would still be alive if she was in such a program. She wasn't sure, however, as the victim had demonstrated a high degree of paranoia and care about masking her identity. It had taken about five days of careful technical analysis of the victim's own Dell Sendai computer to identify a unique subset of component serial numbers to identify it as a non-commercial configuration. A little cajoling from Protectorate leadership and some grey area investigations by BPIA, led to her getting Mary Jane Hamillton's personnel file and confirmation that she was the victim. Her body had been shipped to Alliance space for funeral rites shortly after that. The computer itself was with the cryptanalysts of Stable Cryptographic Analysis, though they held out very little hope that they'd be able to get any information from it within the next few thousand years.
Mary Jane Hamillton's galnet activity was equally hard to get hold of, but with local galnet netflow logs, a knowledge of the machine hardware identifier, or rather, identifiers (Mary Jane was paranoid, after all), and a routing clustering and timing analysis algorithm of Imelda's own devising, she was able to put together a record, with 95% certainty, of the posts Mary Jane had made. It wasn't good enough to use as evidence in a criminal case, but it was good enough to get an idea of someone's activity and enough to horrify her captain, who forbade her to use the software again without authorization, as it was a gross invasion of privacy. As if she didn't frakking know that, but the victim didn't care: they'd cut her open to do an autopsy for crying out loud. Digging in to her browsing habits were a tiny invasion compared to that, and far more likely to lead to her killer. Digging into those browsing habits, the picture was of someone obsessed with conspiracy theories, specifically surrounding a shadowy cabal referred to as The Data Brokers. Notes and links relating to that made up the bulk of the whacky portion of Imelda's mind map. The signal in there was faint if it existed at all, so Imelda didn't really focus on it. Perhaps, after the case was solved, it would click into place and provide an obvious clue to the killer, but Imelda doubted that. The most fruitful avenue left was the camera failures.
The detective was furious that Station Maintenance was aware of transient failures in station security cameras and hadn't taken steps to monitor for patterns. Because once someone did check, patterns were visible, going back about two months. She had written some analysis software to crawl through log records and found some interesting things. Prior to two months ago, the failures were random with each camera shutting down about once per week for ten minutes. Then a handful of cameras in Cromwell Ward shut down a few times a day. Then a week later there were sequences of cameras shutting down on corridors between highly trafficked portions of the station. Then the sequences of shutdowns inconveniently lined up with some petty crimes. Finally, there were about a dozen sequences of failures on one day. One covered the riot in Armstrong Square, two around the site the murder one about an hour before hand, and one immediately after, two more affected the sugar processing facility, which included a back to back shutdowns of a single camera in the facility, and then others through out the station leading to the final one at an external airlock. Had the station security service been aware of the patterns, then they probably could have caught the killer. Instead the trail had gone cold. Well, cool, rather than stone cold. The pattern looked like the hack was recently developed and by someone who lived on the station and that the teen cliques of Armstrong Square may know them. If they found the hacker, then they may get back on track of the killer. Her partner, Brendan Freamon, spent his days following that up, observing the various cliques and reviewing the interview tapes after the riot.
Imelda had custom software reviewing all the stored footage from Armstrong Square before and after the riot, looking for anyone acting suspicious. She was hoping to find footage of someone installing the comms laser somewhere in the square. It had been removed during the outage. A small box on the spinward side of the square looked like it could have been the device: it was there before the riot and missing afterwards. Her software was working back through the feed footage. It was three days back so far and should get to the point when the anomalous events started in about six hours. It would automatically update the case files and mind map when it was done. On a whim she brought up result of processing done on the camera logs that her software had completed earlier. It hadn't flagged anything of note, but she hadn't dug into it in detail yet. She plotted the shutdown times looking for anomalies. Until the riot there was no unexpected shutdowns, most happened at a pretty regular interval, though occasionally the interval was slightly shorter than normal. She brought up the log details of one of those slightly early shutdowns. The message read: "Preemptive shutdown to desync. from primary". She brought up the camera firmware source code and searched it for that phrase. Finding it she read the code to figure out why that message had triggered. About an hour latter she figured it out: the cameras had heat sensors near their optic sensors to report their heat levels. The cameras could also be configured to subscribe to other sensor data streams and if that stream was above a certain threshold the camera would do its ten minute shutdown to cool down. The idea being that if multiple cameras were covering an area, then it was better for their overheating schedule to not be in sync and shutting down one of them would be a good way to do that. For a few seconds she sat puzzled: there were no records of any other camera in Armstrong Square. There were no records of there ever being another camera in Armstrong Square. Then it hit her: the weird messages were before the time when The Protectorate had taken control of the station.
"Those sneaky frakkers!", she exclaimed to herself. There was a hidden camera in Armstrong Square! And the Official Tewanta Order had purged its existence for some reason. And if they wanted its existence to be unknown, then it might still be there! She checked the time. Brendan would still be in bed. Besides, Station Maintenance would probably need to grant approval if she wanted to dig around inside walls. Better to go home and get some rest and look into it in the morning. Being a little fresher herself, would help with the search anyway. She wrote a quick message to her partner, shutdown the holo table, packed up, and went home.
Wilson Port, Tewanta - 3306-09-21 10:03 GST
Detective Brendan Freamon collected two bulbs of coffee from the counter in the Human Beans coffee shop on Armstrong Square. He was there to meet his partner, Detective Geldof. He read her cryptic message to meet him here when he woke up and, to be honest, he was intrigued. It was sent late at night, which he knew meant that it was at the end of one of her data analysis sessions so it was likely that she'd found something. She didn't say what the whole thing was about, which indicated to him that she wasn't sure exactly what she'd found, other than it was a lead. It was important, otherwise she'd just have told him when the next crossed paths at the station house. Lastly, there was a people element involved: if it was a pure technical thing she'd have just done it herself. Someone needed to be persuaded, questioned, or observed. He could live with that. He walked over to one of the tables outside the coffee shop itself and sat down.
He took a sip from his coffee bulb and watched the passing crowd. There wasn't many of the teenagers around at the moment, so there was nobody in particular to observe. Instead he just tuned in to the general mood of the crowd. Mostly people seemed pretty relaxed and happy, but there was a weariness around some people. The economy of the station was doing very well, but people were working too hard. There wasn't a risk people would lose their jobs, so that wasn't the reason. Rather, the promise of bonuses drove people to overwork. Greed was a healthier motivator than fear, but only just. The Protectorate didn't pressure people to overwork, but it didn't really discourage them either. He worried about Imelda. She was prone to work long hours, but it wasn't money that drove her. She would say that her mind rebelled at stagnation, that she needed problems, needed work. However she'd phrase it as, "I'm frakkin' bored! Is there a half decent case on the bleedin' server or wha'?" She got results, though, dealt with all the forensics stuff he didn't enjoy much, and backed him up on the questioning side of things, with penetrating questions. They made a good team.
A movement in the corner of his eye brought him back from his musings. It was Imelda approaching.
"Morning Brendan. Is that one for me?", she said nodding her head towards the spare coffee bulb on the table.
"It is indeed! So why are we here Imelda?"
"There's a second camera covering the square."
"What? Really? Where?"
"Don't know yet! We need to find it.", she said picking up the coffee and taking a drink. She remained standing and looked around the square. "The Order purged a camera from the maintenance logs, but missed some more obscure log references in other log files. So, if you were a bunch of fascist arseholes, where would you hide a second camera?"
Detective Freamon stood up and slowly turned his head to take in the entire square. He stroked his whispy beard as he surveyed the area and thought. After a few minutes he spoke. "Well the existing camera doesn't give a good view into the tea shop. Has it been there long?"
"Fifteen years, at least!"
"Then I'd say they'd have wanted the view into that. They'd want to know who was meeting with whom. So I guess if a second camera did exist, it would be on that wall over there."
They both wandered over in that direction. Detective Geldof pulled some form of scanning device from her heavy duty shoulder bag. They two of them paced alongside the wall, with Detective Freamon examining the wall itself and Detective Geldof paying close attention to her scanner about two paces behind him. They had reached a part of the wall that looked newer to Detective Freamon when his partner's scanning device chirped.
"There's some serious electronic behind this section and a small square up there appears to be some form of semiconductor", she said pointing at a part of the all about two meters above the ground. Detective Freamon examined the section of wall she was indicating and it looked like the rest of the wall, though he though he could see a two centimeter square section that was a slightly different shade of grey. His partner made some adjustments to her device.
"Frak me! It's gallium arsenide!"
"And?", he asked.
"It's transparent to infrared. This is a frakking infrared camera.", she said disappointedly.
"That's not ideal for us, though, BPIA will be very interested. And we might be able to get something of use off it."
"I guess so! Frak it! Let's get breakfast."
"I'll just give BPIA a call first. I hope you aren't too disappointed."
"Just a little. Besides, this was just one of the two things I was working on last night. I had an anomaly search working on the archived footage for the main camera going as well."
Detective Geldof's hand terminal chimed. She took it out of her bag and examined it. A smile spread across her face.
"The search just finished. It looks like we have a lead on our camera saboteur!"