Xenoman

34 Hummer

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"Xeno, you all right?" Garry could see down the Malborg corridor on the POV Monitor, feeding from Xeno's POV camera on his black box, but there was no response. He watched as Xeno turned around, facing the POV camera down at Lew's smoldering remains behind him, then swung back around, facing the empty corridor as before. "Xeno? Can you hear me?" Nothing. Just the static shot of the empty corridor.

Garry rewound Xeno's POV footage and replayed the sequence of Lew bursting into flames from SHC, charging towards Xeno's POV lens, trying to bear hug Xeno . . . Black for a moment . . . The corridor empty . . . then Xeno turning with the POV camera to Lew's incinerated remains, lying face down behind him . . .

"Garry?" Xeno said, standing over Lew's remains in the Malborg corridor. "You there? Garry? Can you hear me?" Xeno activated his holopane, trying to contact Garry on two-way conference mode. The detail of Garry's face was lost in stop-and-start images, degraded by constant tiling, no sound coming out of his mouth.

"Xeno?" Garry tried to respond to Xeno's two-way holopane conference invitation on the Two Way Conference Monitor, only to get the same degraded image of Xeno's face with no sound. "Dammit." He tried to fade up the audio on the main console. No luck. Any attempt to speak with Xeno was just dead air, until a gentle oscillation began ringing in his ears. The calming low frequencies rolled over his shoulders, giving him goose-bumps on the back of his scalp, humming in the studio from all sides. He tried to keep his eyes open. It was all so . . . relaxing . . .

"Garry, if you can hear me," Xeno began walking down the Malborg corridor, "I'm heading down the corridor, trying to locate the reception desk. Hope you can at least capture the visual portion of the footage."

Garry fought to stay awake in the studio, growing sleepy from the hum of the Hummer, trying to stay focused on the silent broadcast of the POV Monitor, as Xeno walked through the Malborg corridor, the monotonous drywall and ceiling panels beginning to arc into a wide curve. He shook his head, trying to ward off the trance of overwhelming relaxation, forcing his eyes wide open, anticipating Xeno's arrival at the reception desk, yearning to see farther and farther into the interior of the mysterious corporation of Malborg, and then . . . lots of wavy lines, followed by a crisp and clear piracy warning:

ELECTRONIC RECORDING IS PROHIBITED

The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of covert activity obtained inside Malborg is a big no-no. The ugly white font with the bright red background indicates that we mean business! Criminal copyright infringement is investigated by Malborg Corporation, and is punishable by fine, incarceration, community service, forced slave labor, whippings, beatings, the spanking-machine, or this thing . . .

An image of a man appeared, with his head and hands shackled in a wooden pillory:

ALL RIGHTS REVERSED

The piracy warning faded and the POV Monitor resumed with a local broadcast of two masked luchadores pouncing on each other in a wrestling ring. Garry tried to get the POV Monitor back online by turning the UHF and VHF frequency dials in different directions, trying to get the right mix on the main console, then another warning:

ENABLING

MALBORG BREACH RETROGRAM

PREPARING TO DELETE

UNAUTHORIZED FOOTAGE

"No!" Garry accessed the Intellegella operating system from his keyboard, burrowing through the command line with his fingers as fast as he could, unfolding code tree, after code tree, until he was able to force a prompt on the POV Monitor: