[Story] The Eye In The Sky

[Kokuten]

I first encountered these smallish spherical satellites when one knocked on my window.
I'm not joking. My normal 'apartment' on Hephaestus is totally underground, but I keep a 'sitting room' sort of affair for people who need to see _something_ other than screens and displays and four rock walls. I know I need it, on occasion.
So I'm racked out in a Brady Bunch orange La-Z-Boy, reading some absurdly trashy military-scifi novel, and refilling my 'relaxation' meter, when I hear the stereotypical tap-tap-tapping upon my chamber door. Not on the door, actually, but on one of the bayed windows that this room is blessed with. I cocked an eyebrow and dog-eared my page, setting the book aside and getting up. I could see a silvery spheroid outside the window, with some sort of manipulator extended to tap against the glass.
Bemused, I waved, and the spheroid bobbed in place once and tapped the glass again. I glanced over my shoulder at the terminal built in to one of the bookcases, and opened my mouth.
"Hermes, you there?"
"Yeah, boss, what's.. WOAH!, what's that?!"
Hermes was apparently as startled as I am, and judging from the visual cue (her avatar abruptly being clad in jungle fatigues and clutching a rifle), significantly more worried about our visitor. "I'm not sure what it is, but why didn't you catch it earlier?"
"Well, I hate to admit it, but I'm burning enough CPU on the new 'waved Osmium alloy that I disabled video monitoring, and that thing doesn't show up above the noise floor on anything else."
I hrmmed, and the sphere outside the window tapped again. I considered it, and it tapped out S O S in morse, the single red 'eye' on it flashing along with the taps. That changed the situation, and Hermes made a startled noise as I opened the window. (note - the dome's been repaired and pressurized by this point, thank you Kevin). The silvery orb floated into the window, retracting his manipulator, and rotated away from me, allowing me to see a rather nasty dent in the 'back' side.
"I think we've got a 'little lost robot', Hermes. I'm gonna head down to the machine shop, just in case, alert Mr. Sparky, this thing might need to be 'handled'."
"Righto."
I tapped the little globe, and he spun around to face me with his glowing red eye, which on closer examination had a family resemblance to an IR transceiver with an LED behind it. I smiled and tossed a thumb over my shoulder at the door. "C'mon, little guy, let's take you downstairs and get you fixed up."
The little machine bobbed once, which I assume was it's equivalent of a nod, and we headed down to the machine shop.
As near as I can figure out, this poor little drone got whacked by a tiny asteroid and squished his radio, and he's been wandering around for quite a while on his inboard 'backup AI', looking for help. To make a long story short, I was able to fix the damage to the poor guy's shell, but I wasn't able to repair the radio that got squished.
He's got a fairly impressive sensor array, primarily optical. Hermes ran some rough calculations, and says he's well into the 'read lisence plates from orbit' range. He's also got a pretty damn impressive data radio, judging from the wreckage, a reactionless drive with fairly low power but impressive efficiency, and an ID tag.

Property of the Illuminati, if found, return to geostationary orbit, or 42 W. 23rd St., Seattle, WA, USA, Earth."

I'm a little weirded out about this. I saddled up V, and now that I know what to look for, I found several of these little probes sitting all around Earth in geosync.
More later, we're heading down for Seattle now.

Edit: changed title of post, swapped paragraph order on the 'conclusion' bits to make more sense. Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979

[Duane Peters]

Oh, my stars and garters, I want to see where you're taking this...

[Kokuten]

why, to Seattle, of course!
*G*
Gonna try and post some more tonight.Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979

[Kokuten]

Ahhh, Seattle. I've been to quite a few places in North America pre-'Wave, and quite a few places all over the world since then, but Seattle is.. special. I've always enjoyed my time here, and always been conscious that I could never actually _live_ here.
This was made clear once again as I came down in a friend's yard in Bothell, shot the bull for a few minutes, and drove into town with V pretending to be a car, and ran directly into rush hour traffic.
"you sure I can't just.. fly _over_ this crap, boss?" V grumbled, rolling at thirty in heavy traffic.
"You know why not, V. If we didn't piss off the _ground-bound_ police, I'm sure we'd torque off those nice folks running Sea-Tac. Until there's some rulings and test cases hammered out, I don't wanna play fast and loose. We've already been a test case once, and it lost us our first dome."
"Yeah, yeah, but The Jason patched us up just fine from that, better than original, even."
"Sure, V, but I don't want to have to go crying to him, or any 'Fen, every time I get my tail in a twist. Easier not to get twisted in the first place. You want me to drive? You can play WoW or something."
"No, I'm good, it's just.. hey, here's a downtown exit."
We peeled off of the pseudo-laminar flow of commuting traffic, and proceeded into the heart of downtown Seattle, tall, grey, imposing, and forever under construction. Working our way through the tangle of one-way streets, suicidal pedestrians, migrating land-whales of city busses, and the odd bit of other traffic, we soon arrived at the W. 23rd street address, which proved to have a parking garage underneath an understated glass-and-chrome monolith.
The building itself was nothing special, but the sign above the entrance more than made up for it. Gold lettering on a black background proudly surrounded the traditional eye-in-a-pyramid, stating that this was "Illuminati Earth Headquarters". I didn't get it.
V parked in the structure, grumbling about not being able to come with or at least monitor from outside the building, and I settled a few bits of collected electronics comfortably on my person. The Motorola Blade in one pocket actually would place and receive calls, sure, but it was mediated through V instead of the local cellular system. The nondescript Motorola earbud I wore had a bluetooth connection through the phone to V, and a wee fiber camera, allowing her to see and hear what I saw and heard. A couple of other sundry items of a defensive or offensive nature, and I shrugged into my overcoat, dark grey wool doing it's best to dignify my gnarled, lumpy figure. I complemented the effect of the coat with a matching fedora, and closed V's door.
"Keep an eye on me, V, and be ready to come a-runnin if this goes south, please." She flashed an assent with one blip on her headlights, and I moseyed into the front door of the Illuminatus building, keyed up enough to shatter glass with my nerves, and armed for Ninja Bear.
It was awesome, in the Grand-Canyon sense, not the Really-Good-Hot-Dog sense. It was, however, as stereotypical an Important Corporate Lobby as I'd ever seen. The monolithic-slab reception desk was quite spartan, and the gold-flecked obsidian tile of the floor might have come from the quarry just yesterday. The only thing breaking up the shining, austere expanses of Money and Power were several high-resolution images of various landmarks, as taken from orbit.
I wandered for a few minutes, noting the cheerful young professional secretary behind the desk as he kept his eyes on me.
"V, you got good imagery on any of these exhibits?"
"Of course, and Hermes says that they're well within the capability of our little spherical pal. In fact, he could do better, if our estimates of his capability were at all close."
"OK, Ask Hermes if these exhibits could have been taken from a drone like our lit-" I stopped in mid-think as I tried to glare at my right ear, which didn't quite work. I gave up, and approached the front desk.
"Good morning, Sir, welcome to Illuminatus corp, I'm Derek, how may I help you?"
"Hi, Derek, my name's Nick, I run a little mining platform in the Asteroid Belt, and peeled one of your drones off my front door a few days ago, was wondering who I'd talk to about that."
"That would be Mr. Giles, let me see if he's available." The immaculately groomed secretary pressed a couple of buttons on the slablike phone concealed under his monolithic desk, and spoke quietly into a hush mike. He smiled and pressed another button on his phone, then looked back up at me and smiled. "He's just out of a meeting and would be happy to see you, go ahead and take the elevator up to seven, and he'll meet you there."
He pressed another button underneath his desk, and with a subdued 'ding!', a section of the glossy black wall slid open, revealing a conventional, though upscale, elevator. I thanked him, walked over to the elevator, and pressed for the seventh floor. The doors slid shut and the elevator started to rise, and I considered the muted gold eye-in-a-pyramid roundel on the inside of the door balefully as we swung silently to the seventh floor.

On our Next Episode, meet Mr. Giles, and See The Wonderous Assembly!Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979

[M Fnord]

---

On our Next Episode, meet Mr. Giles, and See The Wonderous Assembly!

---

...why am I getting a Neal Stephenson vibe off of this whole thing?---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[Kokuten]

The elevator dinged to a stop at the seventh floor, and the doors slid open, revealing a slender, tallish man in a rather natty checked grey suit. He extended his hand, and I shook it briskly as I stepped out of the elevator.
"Hello then, you must be the gentleman who found one of our Eyes?"
"Yes Sir, I'm Nick Casler, one of your drones showed up at my front door about a week ago. You are?"
"J. R. Giles, I run PR for our little company here."
I arched an eyebrow, and couldn't resist. "Indeed.. How's the band?"
Giles blinked for a moment, then grinned slightly. I grinned back, and he shook his head before replying.
"Fine, thank you, though I'm not _that_ Giles, more's the pity. Shall we adjourn to my office?"
I acquiesced, and followed Giles to his office, past a couple of glass-and-chrome-and-hardwood conference rooms with excitingly expensive AV systems prominently displayed. His office door was a dark smooth wood, his name in restrained silver lettering on the wall next to it. The inside was more lawyer than PR hack, wall-to-wall bookshelves covered in leather-bound books, executive chair, leather, one. Executive desk, featureless black, one. Executive picture of family, framed, one.
I frowned. Nothing was out of place in this building, nothing at all.
"So, Mr. Giles. What exactly does your company _do_?"
"Well, it's refreshingly simple. We operate an orbital photography service. At any given moment, at any given place, we can usually arrange to have high quality imagery made available in whatever framerate and resolution our clients desire."
I pondered this a moment, as Giles smiled reassuringly from his side of the desk. "Ok. I can accept that, but topping Google Earth didn't pay for the shiny fake lobby, the shiny fake secretary, the shiny fake elevator.. I could go on sir, but I'd still like to know what you folks actually have going, and why I should return part of that to you, instead of posting the contents of its drive to the 'net."
Mr. Giles' face dropped from it's reassuring smile into an immobile and impassible granite bulwark. He leaned forward slightly and opened his mouth, then froze. A moment passed, during which I somehow kept my expression politely interested, and refrained from either punching him in the face or bailing out the door.
I've never shown any signs of psychic gift, but I swear I could feel a switch click over in his brain, and he sat back in his chair and smiled. I smiled back as he crossed one long leg over the other, and folded his hands over his raised knee.
"I give, Sir, and congratulate you on a well executed, if simple, deduction. We make a few dimes and pennies selling orbital imagery, but the big money is in.. not selling.. orbital imagery."
I frowned, confused and offput by his easy answer. Unsure if I was facing truth or another layer, I leaned forward slightly myself, and left the frown on.
"Not selling, Mr. Giles?"
"Indeed. If you would do me the favor of doffing your hat and ear transmitter, and placing them in this box.."
Giles held a cardboard box over the table, a UPS label still visible on one side. It was my turn to blink, and I fingered one of the buttons on my overcoat as I considered.
"It would be perfectly acceptable for you to keep your 'panic button', Sir, we just need to eliminate your digital image acquisition equipment for a moment, so that all may be made clear... without risking the anger of our clients."
I gave in, my curiousity getting the better of me. The hat went neatly into the box, and before V could talk me out of it, so did the earbud. Giles paused a moment, glancing at the underside of his desk, then nodded.
"Alright. First off, you need to understand something of the environment we exist in." Giles laid his hands upon the featureless surface of his desk and typed something on an invisible keyboard. Immediately, a holographic image formed beside us, the Earth sans clouds and darkness.
"Information wants to be free. This is a tropism of the world we live in, your hacker culture deifies this concept and makes it happen over, and over, and over again." Giles slid one finger forward on his desk, and the holo-globe expanded to fill the floor-to-ceiling space, and further. I was now looking at an incredibly detailled projection of the U.S., as clear and sharp as I could never see it in reality.
"Information wants to be free.. But entrenched organs of government, in their greed, their fear, their millions of tiny threads controlling the lives of their populace... They want information to be controlled." Giles now tapped on his desk, again at no visible control, and bits of the image flipped to squares of blackness.
"So, we dominate the earth-viewing market by providing better, faster, cheaper imagery of this lovely planet. This brings in.. some.. money."
"The exact amount being unimportant." I said with a smile on my face and a magnanimous wave of my hand.
"Yes, precisely." Giles said with a matching smile. Again with a slid of one manicured finger across the desk surface, and the globe flowed outward, sending us hurtling down towards the surface of the Earth, towards the Nevada desert. I grinned wolfishly, and Giles cranked a few more notches onto his own smile as the zoom stopped, wrinkles of Nevada in glorious crystalline clarity at the edges of our vision, which was nearly filled with a single featureless black blotch.
"So, we then turn around and make.. exclusive availability.. for some of our imagery available to certain clients." Tap-tap went the finger on the desk, and I sat in awed silence, considering the panopoly of runways and lakebed that composed the Groom Lake testing facility. I glanced down at Giles, and he had leaned back in his chair again, smiling and confident.
I turned back to the projection, noting the concealed hangars, the visible hangars, the long straight runways and gleams of chainlink. Mr. Giles left the image up for a moment, before a tap on his desk zoomed the Earth out to a single point, which winked out as the lights that I hadn't noticed going out, slid back to full intensity.
Giles reached down behind his desk and came back up with my hat and earbud in his hands. He offered them across the desk, and I rose to accept them. As I settled the earbud into place under the hat, he walked around the desk and to the door.
"I believe we're done here, then?"
"Indeed. Thank you for the.. Illuminating.. experience." I smirked my way out the door and headed back towards the elevator, Giles striding along behind me. He followed me down to the lobby, and tapped my shoulder as I turned to head for the front doors.
"Need to get you some compensation for your trouble." He said, with a small smile, as he lead me to the cheery young receptionist. "Derek, see that Mr. Casler here gets, mmm, a Level Three Whole Earth pack, and a level Six pack for Alaska, would you please? He'll need our shipping information and FedEx account, too, he has a package for us?"
I nodded my agreement to Mr. Giles, and he shook my hand again and strode back across the lobby, raising one hand in an ironic salute as the elevator doors closed him away. I recieved a small folder of discs from Derek, as well as a business card with a FedEx number on the back. I made my farewells there as well, and escaped back to my car. As V wove her way outside of the city under her own control, I pondered the events of the day.
"We just punctured the first sacrificial layer of a concealed conspiracy that could very well be everything the Illuminatus traditionally are, bounced off the second layer, and were stone cold outfoxed by a guy who looked like the fucking librarian Watcher from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, V." I bitched, rubbing my eyes to soothe away the incipient tension headache. "I think it's time to call it a day and go home."
"Yeah, I think you're right on the last bit, boss. But why do you say that there was more there than what I saw, I mean, aside from the obvious?"
"When we get back, ask Hermes about superstitions and the thirteenth floor. That building didn't have a 23rd floor..."
V fell silent as we got out to Bothell and shot off from a handy parking lot, into the silent night. Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979

[CattyNebulart]

..., your hacker culture deifies this concept and makes it happen over,...
deifies is probably not the word you are looking for. Other than that it's quite good.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

[robkelk]

---

deifies is probably not the word you are looking for.

---

I've corresponded with enough folks who seem to worship the concept that I think it's exactly the right word...

-Rob Kelk
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Proginoskes]

Please forgive the thread-necromancy, but I just had to ask:

Derek is totally undescribed. Does anyone else picture him as quite overweight and prone to (and capable of inducing) absurd levels of hilarity?

[robkelk]

I hadn't (my image of him was more that of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Fowlds]Derek Fowlds, but I'm a fan of Yes Minister), but I can't see why he wouldn't be.

And I don't mind the thread necromancy. Maybe this'll remind WG to finish the story...?
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Black Aeronaut]

"When we get back, ask Hermes about superstitions and the thirteenth floor. That building didn't have a 23rd floor..."

Heeeeehhh? What does a thirteenth floor have to do with a twenty-third?

[Foxboy]

It's an Illuminati reference. 23 is important. *says a word that sounds like "fnord" but couldn't possibly be because "fnord" does not exist. "Fnord"*
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll

[robkelk]

I don't know where, if anywhere, Kokuten was going with this story, but I had a thought last night...

In one variant of Fenspace, there are two organized groups of people who are very interested in learning everything they can about the planet, but their usual tactics of orbiting a cloud of inexpensive satellites won't work because there are so many people passing through LEO. But somebody came up with the idea of pretending to be one of the local myths, using that as a cover for what's really going on; adding some name plates to the satellites completes the false-front. (And that means the satellite that literally bumped into Hephaestus wasn't really lost - it was supposed to be out there, watching the Main Belt, and it ran a "misdirection" program when it was discovered.)

Which leaves one question: Did Wire Geek and V just visit the local base of Homeline's Infinity Unlimited detachment, or did he meet Centrum's Interworld Service agents-in-place?
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Duane Peters]

Or, were they *exactly who they said they are*, and lying by telling the complete, unadulterated truth?

[robkelk]

Now that's Illuminated!
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012