Starcosmo

Chapter 12: Coincidences

Reno, Nevada

Zero hour +4 days

"That's it," Chaz Frederick Little snapped in frustration, throwing his headset to the desk in front of him. "She's gone."

Wan stood up from his own terminal and meandered over, stretching.  "What do you mean, gone?"

"Gone," Chaz repeated. "Disappeared. Poof. Into the belly of the beast. Into the NRO."

Wan wrinkled his brow, still uncomprehending.

“Emily Banner,” Chaz hissed.

"Her NASA address is no more," he went on, pointing to his screen and tabbing through various records they had on Ms. Emily Banner, PhD. "Her personnel record no longer exists in the database. Her personal email no longer exists in any records. She's not searchable on the State database." He paused for emphasis and looked up at his partner. "Disappeared, Node. Erased."

"All from accepting a job offer?"

"Not just any job offer, man," Chaz said, "The National Reconnaissance Office job offer. Come on, you know them? Deep-black ops, the evil little sister to NASA? They siphon off NASA funding to build stealth satellites and ground-penetrating radar. The ones with the 5 billion rainy-day slush fund?"

"Oh, yeah," Wan was finally coming around. "And they haven't declassified anything since, what, the nineteen-seventies?"

"That's right," Chaz warmed, "Glad you're finally online. Yeah, that's 50 years of classified deep-black work, UMBRA or above. These guys just ate my girlfriend."

Wan looked down at his friend with a wry smile. Even in the bleakest situation, he could be counted on to crack a joke.

Chaz was mildly obsessed with Emily Banner, ever since she’d disappeared off their radar about a week prior to The Event. They’d been trading info, back and forth over the secure FreeNet Node, on the frequency of about once per month.

Then The Lights showed up, and all that stopped.

"Yeah, I don't think you had much of a chance with her, good buddy," Wan said, walking back over to his own terminal. "I'm pretty sure she was just cultivating a marketing channel for her book."  

Chaz wrinkled up his nose in disgust. "Whatever, man," he said. "Emily cared about the truth. And she knew I'd do anything to help her sell that damn book."

Wan looked at his own screen. He'd been deep in a coding project. He was putting the finishing touches on FreeSend, an application that could run within a FreeNet Node or in a stand-alone mode on most handhelds. FreeSend would allow citizen journalists to send pictures and video in an encrypted format over almost any part of the wireless spectrum. It was a major part of FreeNet.

It made sense that Emily had disappeared. This Lights thing had totally thrown everything into a tizzy: the black world, the white world, the grey world, and the virtual world that tracked both. Hell, even the renown billionaire Chadwick Coltrane had launched his own "observation satellite," which had completed several orbits through the exact region of the atmosphere the Lights was supposedly occupying, with zero results.

Well, zero results that he was releasing to the public, Chaz thought. He could very well be a tool of the black world. Maybe he got compartmentalized.

"She got compartmentalized," Chaz realized aloud.

"Say wha?"

Chaz spun his chair around to face his friend. "Node, she got compartmentalized," he realized. "Above top secret clearance? Special access programs? They put her in a compartment, man. That's why her identity was, like, erased."