Protagonists#

• Short, Lance - Agent Myra - Foreign Service Officer (John)
• Tucker, Jamal - Agent Sentinel - U.S. Secret Service - Personal Protective Detail Division (Panagiotis)
• Veronica Mare - Agent Artemis - Professor of Anthropology (Tasos)
• Bennet, Wendy - Agent Locke - Criminal Intelligence Analyst / Assistant Professor of Criminology (Konstantina)
• Coniglio, Heath - Agent Blacktail - FBI Intelligence Case Officer (Istvan)

Wednesday, October 23rd, 2019#

Agents Artemis, Myra and Blacktail realize that they have the PICKY EATER app installed on their smartphones.

• Agent Myra disposes of his phone by pulling over on the highway street and tossing it out and having Agent Sentinel shoot at it.
• Agent Blacktail uninstalls the app.
• Agent Artemis keeps it installed on McKay’s Laptop.
• All the Agents have memories of installing it on their phones. The chip was already installed on those devices.

New York – Kerber Wilson and Associates#

Agents Blacktail and Locke find out the whereabouts of Special Agent Fallon Taylor from New York’s FBI HQ. The mention of Audrey Powel’s name prevents them from meeting Anthony Pitzerelli.

Before they proceed:

• Locke decides to write down on a notepad every action she takes.
• Both Locke and Blacktail destroy their infected laptops.
• Blacktail’s and McKay’s smartphones run out of battery.
• Locke purchases a new cheap smartphone. After handling it for a while, PICKY EATER appears installed.

They park in the underground parking lot of a six-story office building. Kerber Wilson and Associates, a CIA front company posing as a New York law firm, takes up the top floor of a six-story office building.

Agent Locke#

Steps out of the elevator and finds the offices nearly abandoned. She sees and hears no one in the impeccable white halls. Doors open to dusty offices and meeting rooms long unused.

Only Fallon Taylor’s office is occupied. It is cramped, with maps and documents spread across every horizontal surface. Taylor apologizes for the state of his office and says his partners are out pursuing leads. He’s barely seen them long enough in the halls to say hello.

Taylor says Powell handles the technical side of the operation. Her office is down the hall. She maintains storage of all digital forensics. Taylor, who prefers old books and scrolls to screens, says he never managed to connect to the groups’ VPN.

Agent Blacktail#

Steps out of the elevator on a lush red carpet leading down the best-lit office hallway that he has ever seen. Pamphlets in a small newsstand identify this as the “National Clandestine Services Museum, New York Collection.”

Navy blue walls hold tastefully framed oil portraits next to office doors. The doors themselves have been removed and replaced with velvet ropes for viewing. The interior of each office has been transformed into a diorama caricature, more suited to the set of a film noir than the office of a civil servant. Plaques on bronze stands sit next to each door. The name “Fallon Montgomery Taylor” is there, listed as a veteran of Working Group NARNIA. He died in the year 2038.

Around a hallway corner, a woman’s voice faintly murmurs.

Agent Locke#

Powell’s office, like the others, is dusty and abandoned. Filing boxes were stacked high and never unpacked. All the desktop computers and laptops are burned out and inoperable. Only Powell’s office has a running machine. The fan in the CPU housing whines loudly, as if under strain. On the computer, there are two videos named “Friday Night Massacre” and “Dabiq”.

The former shows a newscast regarding a recent mass shooting that the media dubbed the “Friday Night Massacre.” On October 6th, 2019, two men, Cavdet Onur and Seyfettin Vedat, fired into the crowd at a high school football game in Oleander, Pennsylvania, killing 23 and wounding 12.

The latter footage shows a small town surrounded by a wide plain of short, dry yellow grass. An Arabic label in one corner reads “Dabiq.” A few hundred Jihadist fighters are dug in behind sandbags, praying. The camera pans in a circle. On one horizon, jets rush ahead of helicopters, tanks, and tens of thousands of American soldiers. On another come the armies of Britain. On another, the armies of Russia.

Other cameras pick up other angles as the miracles begin. A lethal-looking B-21 Raider heavy bomber suddenly turns to scattering salt in the air. A B61-12 atomic bomb that it had dropped, a long gray cylinder with red markings, turns to salt before it strikes the earth. Tanks in the distance and soldiers in their thousands stop in their tracks, made salt by the glory of God. The faithful rise and celebrate. The video ends.

Agent Blacktail#

Around a bend in the hallway, the office replicas are replaced by the woodgrain paneling and track lighting of a gallery. The walls display graphs:

• People wearing Delta Green badges are leading press conferences and receiving public awards.
• Unnatural creatures, killed by soldiers, framed like a Renaissance painting.
• Nightmarish artillery assaults against the surf off an American beach, where something fleshy in the water explodes into frothy red mist.
• A team of soldiers kitted in unbelievable, science-fiction gear, stacked outside the door to a hut. They wear armbands with some sort of green triangle, a Delta Green insignia. In the hut a creature with too many glowing eyes lurks.

Blacktail recognizes a photo of Audra Powell in two of the prints. In both, she’s drastically older than in the photos Agents saw.

• In the first, she’s shaking hands with a wizened slab of an old man. He smiles approvingly under a white mustache as he passes her a plaque.
• In the photo by the door at the end of the hallway, she sits at the head of a giant mahogany desk, staring beatifically back at the viewer.

The hall culminates in one last office replica. A plaque reads, “Office of Audra Powell, First Director of Delta Green.”

Unlike in the other room, the desktop computer in this office works. It plays a pre-recorded speech on a loop:

“Welcome! I’m Audra Powell. Thank you for your interest in Delta Green. We’ve been working behind the scenes since before VH Day to keep you and your family safe. I hope you can join us in vigilance against the Corruption! As you can see, I come from humble beginnings, but every human can help keep the United States safe from the Spawn. Stay pure and patriotic, brothers and sisters!”

Agent Locke#

Locke asks Special Agent Fallon Taylor to leave her alone and hand over his smartphone, but he declines the request. She stuns him with a pepper-spray and then knocks him out with a chair landing on his head.

When she asks Agent Blacktail to assist her, he vanishes in thin air.

Agent Blacktail#

Blacktail carefully step inside the room, avoiding a motion tracking sensor. The computer looks deeply aged, the plastic housing of its CPU faded, scored, and repainted a half-dozen times. The machine is operational. According to the computer’s clock, it is December 25th, 2049. On the computer, there are two videos named “Friday Night Massacre” and “Dabiq”.

He shuts down the computer.

Agents Blacktail & Locke#

Agent Locke sees Blacktail appearing out of nowhere. Agent Blacktail finds himself inside a dusty room with a computer on a desk.

Both work quickly to destroy the devices with the PICKY EATER chip.

Their actions are interrupted by the blare of a fire alarm. Not long after, gunshots and screams of panic erupt from the ground floor. Locke starts throwing electronic devices out the windows. Blacktail throws Agent Taylor on his shoulders. Everyone rushes down the stairs.

Before they step into the lobby on the ground floor, someone hiding behind the welcome desk, shoots and kill a man and a woman who are also trying to get out of the building.

Agent Blacktail recognizes Audrey Powell’s voice screaming “This can’t be real! We won! We killed you, goddamnit! I fucking killed you things!”

Police sirens wail in the distance.

Blacktails tries to calm Powell, telling her that Taylor is still alive. Locke slides Agent Taylor’s badge toward the welcome desk.

She walks over to them, drops to her knees, drops her firearm, and pleads, “Give them back. Please… give it all back.”

A SWAT team bursts through the door, shouting for the agents to drop their guns.

Locke realizes that Powell is about to turn and rush the police unit but manages to talk her out of it.

Bangor, Maine - Frosty Oaks Trailer Park#

Agents Artemis, Myra and Sentinel arrive in Bangor, Maine.

Agent Myra buys a Nokia “dumb” phone.

Talking to Police Officer Kim Bowman, they gather a few pieces of information regarding Robert Wallace:

• Robert Wallace is 19 years old and lives in Frosty Oaks Trailer Park outside Bangor, Maine.
• He lives with his father, Cordell Wallace, in a trailer outside town.
• He dropped out at age 13 to be home-schooled by his father. Officer Bowman doubts any schooling happened at home.
• Cordell repairs cars at his own garage, but he has a mean streak that keeps customers away. Robert sometimes works there.
• Both have records for public intoxication, vandalism, and assault.
• Both are virulent racists, but experience suggests they’re too dissolute to be much of a threat.

Bowman offers to escort the Agents to the trailer park, saying that the Wallaces respond slightly better to locals than to strangers.

Agents Myra and Sentinel#

Agent Myra drives with Agent Artemis, while Agent Sentinel is a passenger in Officer Bowman’s cruise.

The Wallaces live in a run-down single-wide trailer. A Confederate flag flies out front.

The door to the trailer opens. A man steps outside. Cordell Wallace is 40 years old, hefty, red-eyed, and gnarled. He greets them “What the fuck do you want?”

Agent Sentinel pins him down after Cordell insults him with every racist expression available in his limited vocabulary.

Officer Bowman calls for backup.

Asked about Robert, he says that:

• He doesn’t know where the kid is. He even asked “this bitch” pointing at Bowman to find him, but they did nothing.
• He says that when things get slow at the garage, he makes sure “the boy” stays busy getting an education on his computer.
• He bitterly recalls being forced to buy some curriculum software by “those commies at state social services.” He cannot remember the name of it.

He lets them inside the house to investigate Robert’s room.

Agent Artemis#

REDACTED

Agents Myra and Sentinel#

Robert Wallace’s little room is cluttered and filthy. A cobbled-together gaming computer rests on a TV tray crammed in a corner next to the bed. A cheap desk is busy with empty soda cans and secondhand electronics components. Crypto-fascist flags are tacked to the wall

The computer does not power on. The Picky Eater circuit is integrated into the motherboard. It was clearly placed on the board at manufacture, not sloppily hand installed.

Agent Myra takes a photo of the circuitry, zooms in and sees a microscopic label at back of the chip reads “TRUMP INDUSTRIES ELECTRONICS DIVISION,” a nonexistent company.

Agent Sentinel finds that an extension cord runs from the power strip at the back of the computer through a hole drilled in the trailer’s cheap carpet and floor. A second Ethernet cable runs from the modem into the floor, bundled with the extension cord.

Agent Artemis#

REDACTED

Agents Myra and Sentinel#

Agent Sentinel asks Agent Artemis for her assistance in finding where the cables lead. She helps him peek under the trailer’s foundation until he hands her a tool to check the cables, when she suddenly disappears.

The wiring traces back into the house to an HP ProLiant DL380 server hidden behind the living room entertainment center. An HDMI cord suggests a covert connection to the television.

Agent Myra pulls all the cables from the still-running server.

Agent Artemis#

REDACTED

Agents Myra and Sentinel#

Agent Artemis and a mature Robert Wallace appear in the living room, with Wallace holding a white man in his thirties, dressed in a formless white jumpsuit, as a human shield.

Guns get drawn and fired.

The aftermath:

• Officer Bowman is in a state of shock.
• The man in the formless white jumpsuit lies headless on the floor.
• Cordell face down on the floor, a large gaping hole in his chest, a shotgun lying next to him.
• Robert Wallace restrained by Agent Sentinel’s garrote.