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

Persistent Agents#

Agent Lance continues his audit of Persistent Vigil’s regulations and procedures. Having no discrepancies surfacing, he requests a demonstration of the company’s systems and produces a local newspaper article regarding a recent murder. Major Loedel claims that this is outside his scope and that Mauch handles those matters.

Mauch is more than happy to assist but mentions that the case is still under investigation by Reno PD, and that he cannot disclose any information on the matter. Refers to Lt. Wilstatter as the police’s liaison with Persistent Vigil.

To please Agent Lance, he demonstrates a recent arrest made possible by the local police thanks to their drone surveillance software.

Agent Locke interviews Thomas Eaves, Persistent Vigil’s pilot. He mentions that he flies the companies Cessna airplane when the drones from Nellis Airforce Base are unavailable and offers to fly her over Reno at 20:00.

Both Lance and Locke continue questioning Mauch and Loedel. Lance attempts to gain Mauch’s favor but fails.

Fearing the surveillance systems tracking capabilities, Agent Locke abandons Pitzerelli’s car and rents another one.

Setting the Base of Operations#

Agent Jocko receives a call from Agent Nikita. He then drives to Reno’s Renown Regional Medical Center, leaves Norah’s car at a local parking lot, and then both leave in Nikita’s rented vehicle. After booking room in a motel, they meet at around 6 pm with the rest of the agents for dinner and research.

Digging up Mauch’s past#

Lance informs Pitzerelli of the glitched images that Norah Brigid took home, and requests information on Mauch.

Agent Jocko reaches out to an old contact and during the rest of the day learns that:

• Mauch was a software specialist on the U.S. Army’s Constant Hawk aerial surveillance project in the mid-2000s, known for aggressively pushing underdeveloped technology into deployment, following DARPA’s “80% is good enough” principle.
• His shortcuts led to faulty algorithms that caused multiple friendly fire (blue-on-blue) incidents. Though later named in Wikileaks leaks, he faced no charges and had already retired to minimize fallout.
• The Constant Hawk program was eventually shut down and merged into DARPA’s Gorgon Stare initiative. By then, Mauch had moved into the private sector, continuing similar work with less oversight.

The Skies over Reno#

Agent Lance goes back to Persistent Vigil, meets Thomas Eaves, claims that he’s replacing Agent Locke because of a sudden urgency, and flies with him over Reno for three hours. Even though Eaves doesn’t seem to trust Lance much, the following are learnt:

• Air Force man, Eaves retired as a captain three years ago and immediately joined Persistent Vigil, taking a substantial part of his pay in stock.
• He feels like the company is poised to make a killing and make him rich.
• The hardest part of his job is maintaining a Cessna equipped with the same hardware as the Predators and flying it through blue skies for a few hours at a time when Nellis can’t send one of the drones.
• Once he gets the plane in position, the software and autopilot take over and he can just enjoy the ride.
• He enjoys the flights as a brief get-away from home, wife and four teenage girls.

Western Inn Village & Casino#

Agents Emma and Jocko drive to Western Inn Village & Casino. Claiming being federal agents, they gain access to the casino’s camera footage. They see the following from half a dozen cameras:

• Three men in black coats and ski masks get out of a car.
• They enter the casino with shotguns.
• They threaten a young woman who fills their duffel bags with cash.
• They grab and pull her over the cash cage, and then drag her on the floor.
• Twenty seconds later, they emerge pushing the terrified woman into the car with them.
• They drive to the far side of the parking lot and push the woman out of the car.
• Two men get out with her. They hack her to death, look up, and wave at the sky and get back in the car.

The case is being handled by Detective Clint Vargas, the lead investigator for the Sparks PD Detectives Section.

Glitches#

Agent Locke manages to unlock Brigit’s laptop and hard disk. The password was “HuxianZen”. She then untangles the unique filing system in the external drive. Brigid’s work is complicated by obscured data and unfinished proprietary code, things that she had planned to keep to herself rather than deploying for Persistent Vigil.

Locke sees all three glitches, named by Norah Brigid:

Deviant Glitch#

Timestamp: 2017-05-21 03:31:40

The still frame of footage shows mouths, flesh, polyps, and stalks from one end of the 100-square-kilometer image to the other. Mouths gape inside mouths, more and more and more as the viewer zooms in. Shapes float near the surface or fall toward an expanse of consuming flesh so massive it would have its own gravity in space.

The coordinates that match Greater Nevada Field, when mapped against this flesh-scape, reside on the tip of some beaklike protuberance big enough to swallow the stadium whole.

Ice Glitch#

Timestamp: 2017-05-24 11:50:11

The drone switched to its infrared camera to record in darkness. But the image seems to have so little heat differentiation as to be almost indecipherable, well below freezing. It is an icy wasteland which does not at all follow the topography of Reno.

Starry Glitch#

Timestamp: 2017-05-27 21:21:15

This glitch shows a broad, shadowy lake wreathed in fog. The water reflects stars. Gaps between stars appear to be shoals. For an image taken at night, when stars would be visible in a dark sky, the drone should have used its IR camera. Perhaps the shift from day to night was so quick that the microsecond detections between frames did not register it in time. Or maybe it was just a malfunction. Assuming the glitch is anything but a glitch.

The glitches’ timestamp match the dates of the killings.

Theorycrafting#

At 23:00 all the agents meet back at the motel. They are all shown the glitches.

Wendy posts an image of the Starry glitch on Reddit, but no one was able to decipher it. Lance attempts to write a favorable audit report, but being tired from all the day’s activities, achieves the opposite.

They all spend some time together before retiring for the night to theorize about what is going on, and plan ahead their next actions.

It’s been too much for everyone#

Just before hitting the bed, Wendy goes out to smoke.

Jocko lets Zen out of the room for a few moments, and the he gets attacked by a bat that was hanging from the motel room’s ceiling.