Protagonists#

• Short, Lance - Foreign Service Officer (Γιάννης)
• Miller, Liam (Agent Dave / Jocko) - Naval Special Warfare Group One (SEALs) (Παναγιώτης)
• Lensing, Emma - Professor of Philology (Τάσος)
• Bennet, Wendy - Criminal Intelligence Analyst / Assistant Professor of Criminology (Κωνσταντίνα)

Housekeeping#

• Emma learns the Healing Balm ritual from Yelena’s Notes.
• Jocko owns Crystal Killian’s Journal.
• Lance kept Nika’s Thesis

Working Group Masticate Assemble#

On May 27th, 2017, all the agents of Working Group Masticate receive notifications and messages through various Delta Green’s channels. They are instructed to attend a mission briefing, at noon on the next day, at Reno-Tahoe International Airport, in Reno, Nevada. They see each other for the first time in months. Things have change for a couple of them. Wendy started smoking. Liam is on sedative pills.

An unknown woman in a business suit meets the Agents. She instructs them not to go through the public airport. She leads them to the tarmac where a car is waiting and drives them down the runways to a government hangar.

Before entering the hanger, for a moment Lance observes a Mau cat staring at him through the grass near the airstrips.

In a corner in the hangar, stands a foldout table and a few folding chairs. Their case officer, Anthony Pitzerelli is there.

The Briefing - Monday, May 29th, 2017 - Noon#

Pitzerelli informs them on two incidents that have drawn the Program’s attention:

The killing of Howard Peña and the vanishing of Norah Brigid.

The former was ritualistically murdered on Sunday, May 21st, 2017, at Greater Nevada Field. The latter disappeared into thin air outside a house at 1281 Gault Way. She recorded everything on a dashboard mounted smartphone in her car. The Program intercepted and took down the video before it went public on YouTube.

Brigid is one of several people the Program keeps under active watch due to their access to sensitive materials.

Two other recent killings stand out and could be connected to the case:

• The morning of May 25, hikers found the hacked and burned corpse of Geraldo Calderon, a retired Mexican journalist, near the Circle of Stones monument in a park and disc golf course. He had been tortured and murdered the night before.
• On May 27, robbers wearing ski masks and carrying shotguns struck the Western Village Inn & Casino. They took money from the cash cage, abducted cashier Dora Sandoval, and drove a short distance before pushing her out and hacking her to death in the parking lot.

The Agents must determine the cause of Norah Brigid’s disappearance. They should save her if they can. They must keep others from suffering the same fate. And they must determine whether Brigid’s vanishing is related to her work at Persistent Vigil Imaging Solutions.

Pitzerelli has already arranged an appointment for the Agents with Persistent Vigil in about two hours and has informed Mauch that the Agents are cleared for the secret details of the company’s work. The case officer supplies the Agents with false identification to pose as compliance inspectors with the Department of Defense.

Both Agents Jocko and Locke are knowledgeable about GORGON STARE.

At the end of the briefing, Agent Jocko asks Pitzerelli to find out anything related to Dr. Enoch Bowen.

Pitzerelli asks the Agents to provide constant updates via a heavily encrypted satellite phone. Agent Myra is tasked to do it.

Tracking down Norah Brigid#

Agents Jocko and Nikita head to 1281 Gault Way. They find Norah Brigid’s 2014 Honda Civic. The smartphone is still on the dashboard. Unfortunately, the car alarm system is activated. Given the agents do not want to draw attention by triggering it, they decide to head to Brigid’s apartment and try to find another set of car keys.

Brigid lives in Unit 16 of the Green Park Apartments, a bleak, one-story complex just north of I-580. The property manager, Helen Curle, is persuaded to provide access to it. The agents find a friendly Shiba Inu waiting in Brigid’s apartment. The name on its collar is Zen. A water dish is engraved with its name, “Huxian Zen”.

While searching through the apartment, Agent Nikita finds a laptop and an external hard drive. Agent Jocko locates another set of car keys inside a drawer. Zen viciously attacks Helen, giving Jocko the opportunity to grab the key. The dog then goes docile and happy again.

Agent Nikita drives Helen to the hospital.

Agent Jocko unsuccessfully attempts to login using a random password. He then grabs the laptop, the car keys, pets and puts a leash on Zen, and walks a couple of miles to Norah’s car. He gets in it, pockets the smartphone and drives off.

Persistent Vigil#

Agents Lance and Locke gain entrance to an unmarked building. A heavy steel door leads inside bland, dreary offices and large conference rooms whose entire white walls can be turned into projection screens. Expansive server rooms are kept well air conditioned.

Col. Clyde Mauch warmly welcomes them and goes through his pitch regarding the software Persistent Vigil is developing.

Agent Lance spends most of his time talking to VP Russel “Rusty” Loedel about the business side of things. Everything seems to be in order, and nothing seems illegal.

Agent Locke texts the rest of the agents about the surveillance capabilities of the system and then requests an audience with Kim Boyer, one of the software engineers.

Glitches#

Agent Locke intimidates Kim Boyer into showing her what she does during her workday. Out of fear Kim, does what she is told.

Agent Locke recognizes savant-like skill and efficiency in the code. The AI identifies, signifies, and tags visual elements, and assigns a confidence level for each identification for review. Everything is cross-referenced in a huge database.

It’s not perfect yet, but it’s on its way. There are swaths of time in which data is corrupted, times when neither a drone nor Eaves could fly, instances where the pictures were not just right, where there are gaps in data. The system assigns a long line of error codes, categorized as “Series 2,” for the current iteration of the program, for things like flocks of birds or fog obscuring the view.

Brigid and Boyer assembled playthroughs of the violent crimes of the last few days, hooked them into Reno case files and Nevada driver data, and fed it all into algorithms for analysis.

One troubling thing is three crazy images that the system delivered during footage from those crimes. Glitches come up from time to time, but these were extraordinarily elaborate. Strangely, the system tagged them with “Series 1” error codes, a legacy of iterations from five or maybe even ten years ago.

Norah Brigid handled all three herself. She moved footage containing the glitches to an external hard drive that she kept at home.

Boyer describes the glitches as deviant, icy and starry.

Agent Locke asks Boyer for a cup of coffee. She then picks up all of Brigid’s math related notes from her desk.