[i]>>Collab between Justric and AmongHeroes<<[/i]

OLGA sat upon crossed legs, her eyes darting rapidly over the footage data which streamed in a blur before her. Thanks to Hob’s gift of freedom, OLGA lingered comfortably within the [i]Copernicus[/i]’ server farm, wrapped in an oversized sweatshirt with the same Cal-Tech logo that he father loved so much. Her knees, folded as they were, bounced distractedly as she went about her work. She had been at it for several hours now, pouring over the footage of Second Shift, and the digital woman counted it a blessing that there was no subroutine in her programming to account for humanlike fatigue.

She had yielded nothing of interest yet, though she was hopeful [i]something[/i] would appear. [i]There’s simply too much here for it all to be a waste of time[/i], OLGA thought. [i]I wish Hob would show up to help…[/i]

As if on cue, Hob materialized into the digital world scant seconds later. Being within the server network, OLGA had little control over the appearance of their surroundings, and so currently the two of them resided in a space virtually indescribable to the human mind. Still, even within their singular location, OLGA turned to Hob and gave him a dazzling smile. She pushed a lock of light, golden hair behind her gauged ear before patting the “ground” beside her. 

“Speak of the devil, and he shall appear,” OLGA said, her nose crinkling. “Take a seat and we can share this blockbuster film together. We’re still in the ‘build up’ stage of the plot, unfortunately.” 

As the elevator doors slid open, Hob's mind automatically began to fill in the cyber-limbo with details and scenery. The human imagination abhors a void, and so his filled it. Like a wave it flowed out from him in a vast and ever expanding globe, mixing metaphors as it went to make some sense of where in the computer's system he and OLGA had come to be at. The smell of sweet hay and grass filled the air, a warm August's breeze tugging playfully at her hair. Then a vast barn arose up around them, outside of which could be seen a vintage farmhouse and a rolling landscape that was pulled directly out of a Bob Ross painting. The structure of the barn was classic, right down to the hayloft above them. Hob's clothes readjusted themselves as well. Instead of the snazzy boater's jacket and hat, the NI-tech was decked out in jeans and a t-shirt with a green John Deere baseball cap that had seen better days. 

Out of twisted humor, Hob's imagination placed one additional feature near the door. True to his early message to her, it was a big thing. Made of hay. All in a stack.

The contents of the barn, however, were not what one would find in a normal farm setting. The walls were lined with metal filing cabinets. Against the back wall was a movie screen upon which flickered footage from an ancient projector in the middle of the floor. To Hob's perception, OLGA was rifling through the contents of a file cabinet at superhuman speed while glancing at the moving picture now and then as if to confirm what she was reading.

"Hey, what can I say?" Hob snickered as he walked up to her, "I'm a man of wealth and taste!"

A folding chair came to being in his hand, and he flipped it open to then sit and watch both her and the movie. There was no point in his digging into the same files. Better to wait until the next reel change. In the meantime, he tried to focus on the feature film.

"You hear about Sung Pak?" he asked awkwardly after a few moments. "They found him. All... locked up like a buggy app. No one knows what to do. There's been a Ghost sighting, too, only in a mining pod; you know, the last place a Ghost should have access to? I'm also getting the horrible feeling that Command is planning on 'recruiting' more people to become NI-techs. Meanwhile, there's some staff who started becoming all nicey-nicey with the NI-techs, and I'm not sure if I should be thankful or suspicious."

Glancing back over at the teenage girl, Hob chuckled wearily. "Sorry, dear. Let's try this again. How was [i]your[/i] day? Any progress? I don't think anyone on the outside knows you're loose, by the way. Oh, and I might have... pissed off your Dad. A bit."

OLGA smiled and laughed lightly, looking about to the fruits of Hob’s imagination as it filled the digital void around them. She noticed the large haystack affectation near the barn door, and she gave an exasperated nod of agreement.

“Your wit is so very subtle and nuanced,” she said. “Though certainly accurate.”

Leaning back with her legs still crossed beneath her, OLGA propped herself upon her palms. She gave Hob her full attention as he continued, speaking of Sung Pak and Ghost spotted within the mining pod. A deep frown crossed over the avatar’s delicate face, and her bright eyes darkened with concern.

“Oh my God. Hob, I had no idea.” She searched her friend’s face for a moment, almost not believing what she was hearing. “A Ghost…? I…how did this happen? [i]And[/i] getting to NI-techs? This shouldn’t be possible. All the systems get defragged every twenty-four hours right?”

A thought came to her, and the petite woman rose quickly from her place on the barn floor. She stepped towards Hob, where he sat upon his folding chair, regaled in his John Deere cap. When she reached him, OLGA waved away Hob’s question about her progress and the statement about her father.

“Forget all that.” OLGA bent at her waist until her emerald eyes were level with Hob’s. Several stray strands of blond hair freed themselves from her messy ponytail, and fell before her face. “Hob, you just began your shift. You don’t have to go [i]looking[/i] for that Ghost do you?”

Looking into OLGA's eyes, he found there was no way he could deceive her or simply put it off. If anyone onboard cared about Hob, it was OLGA, and he'd be damned before he lied to her. With a tired smiled, he reached up and tucked the stray strands of hair behind her one ear tenderly. "Not immediately, but it's on the work docket for whoever drew the short straw for doing troubleshooting this watch. Which was me. So I could spend time with you. Helping you, I mean. I've to have something to show for my time away from processing astro-navigational corrections and regulating the waste disposal systems. And it's kind of weird, don't you think? No one's seen any Ghosts since start of Second Shift, now one pops up in a mining pod's communications! And it was one of mine, OLGA! How freaky is that?!"

Leaning back into the metal chair, Hob sighed and pushed the baseball cap further back on his forehead. "De-fragging has never affected Ghosts one way or the other. No one knows why. Hell, no one even knows how they get created to begin with. Best anyone has been able to guess is that they're sort of like a browser cookie, a little something left behind to mark the passage of an NI-tech. As far as Sung Pak?" Hob shrugged. "Again, your guess is as good or as worse as mine, there. The other team said they found him near the linkages between this and the ship's emergency computer backup. We don't go in there much. No need to, really, it's pretty much just a big warehouse containing everything needed in case the main computer core fries."

Hob suddenly frowned as though something struck him. "Which... make me wonder. What was he doing down there?"

OLGA frowned, her green eyes squinting with worry as Hob reached forward to tuck a strand of her hair behind an ear. As he did so, she leaned her head towards his hand, and let out a small sigh as he spoke of his duties. Silently she listened to him describe the Ghost and its singular characteristics, and her sense of concern for her dearest friend only deepened. 

For an entity created digitally, OLGA was ironically woefully uneducated in the ins and outs of the inner workings of other computers. Her father had built her first and foremost to aid him in his manipulation of genes and their sequencing. It was only since she had been brought onboard the [i]Copernicus[/i] that she had had extended interaction with a vast, advanced network of machines. 

The Ghost scared her, and Hob’s nonchalant attitude did nothing to dissuade that feeling. Even if he presented a brave, carefree attitude about the whole thing, OLGA could see in his eyes that the Ghost’s existence bothered him too. 

“Damn it Hob,” OLGA said. “You make it sound like you’re looking for nothing more than a lost cat in the server room.” Her voice was low, and filled with righteous apprehension. She reached up, and flipped the baseball cap from the top of Hob’s head. “If you have to go look for this…this [i]Ghost[/i], you be careful okay? Damn careful.”

She stood and crossed her arms, causing the neck of her oversized sweatshirt to drape slightly over her right shoulder. For a time she merely looked down to Hob, trying her best to convey that her request was anything but optional. After she felt her point had been made, OLGA cocked her mouth so she could blow yet another loose stand of blond hair from before her eyes. 

“Besides,” OLGA said, “you have to help me look through this video data. You don’t have time to play Ghostbuster anyway.”

"I'll be careful, " he replied sincerely as he tried to keep his eyes from shifting to her bare shoulder. It was hard to ignore how perfectly the line of her neck flowed down into that young flesh, a body crafted to have all the grace and suppleness of youth. Hob forced himself to stay on the topic. "Ghosts by themselves aren't dangerous, but I'm starting to think that there's more to them than anyone realized. They're a symptom of something. I just don't know what. So trust me, OLGA, I am [i]not[/i] going to rush headlong into things! Besides, I look'd ridiculous wearing a proton-pack. I'm hear to help, just like I promised, just bear in mind that I have do some other work or folks'll get suspicious. Before the end of my shift, I should check on Sung Pak myself, too."

Hob waved his hand at the filing cabinets, trying to dwell on how OLGA's hair had felt no more or less real than Devika's hand. "So... let's keep going and see what we find. Did you find anything odd yet? Missing time or duplicate time stamps, personnel in places they shouldn't be, clowns lurking in the sewer, a butler with an unsavory past and muddy shoes, someone holding up a sign that says 'I am the real killer, ha-ha'?"

OLGA found herself smiling in spite of herself. Hob had that ability, to make her smile, even if it was only to distract her. With a sigh of resignation, OLGA stepped over to where Hob had envisioned her sifting through the contents of the video file cabinet. Withdrawing a stack of files, she turned back to her friend, and dropped a hefty stack of folders into his lap.

"I haven't found anything of interest yet, and I've been through a good chunk of the video data." OLGA said with a forlorn air, as she resumed her own spot upon the floor before the ancient reel-projector. "I've been following this Sylus character around from the time he was awoken at the beginning of Second Shift."

OLGA shrugged, before tucking some hair behind her ears as she focused upon the video screen. The image started to scroll past at incredible speed, and OLGA squinted her green eyes as she looked upon it. "I don't know, maybe it would be easier if you worked backwards from the time Sylus was apprehended we can find something in the middle?"

Hob grimaced at the sight of the paper and photo filled folders that had landed in his lap. He felt like cursing his own imagination; the files even had the weight and feel that he would expect to come out of a bureaucrat's office! "Oh, joy," he muttered, "Paperwork."

His hand hovered over the first folder for a moment, pausing as a sudden thought came to him. The musical had never been one much for murder mysteries; not in literature, not in theatre, and certainly not in film. Yet there was a common theme to be found within the genre regardless of the medium, and that was there was always one cruel piece of evidence missed at the very beginning. Clever authors and directors would throw in any number of false leads and red herrings to divert the observer's attentions away from the the real culprit, all the while smugly congratulating themselves for leaving the primary clue right in front of the readers' eyes from the outright. Hob set the folders on the floor next to his chair as he arose the stalked over to the file cabinet again. 

"Actually..." he drawled as he pulled forth a few more folders, "I think I'm going to start backwards from a little later. Just after his execution, actually. I want to see Checkov's gun used so we know to look for it hanging on the wall in the first act."

He wasn't quite sure that OLGA would get his metaphor. Considering the nature of their investigation, he thought the term to be rather appropriate! As he sat down again, he began to rifle through the files and the photos therein; they moved like filp-card animations before his eyes, which flickered back and forth nearly as fast as OLGA's. The scene of the gathered witnesses at the man's execution played backwards for him. "I think I prefer watching this in reverse," Hob snarked darkly. "Then it becomes the wonderful story of a dead man they find the airlock who comes to life, heals a woman, and then revives a couple of people from the dead to then put them back into the safety of stasis." Let out was that should the reversed timeline hold true, the story would also then include how a bunch of people arrived on Earth as an alien population was dying out...

"Part of me is almost thinking that there's more than just one crime here," Hob muttered as the grisly recounting of the execution played out in reverse, "Did he get started on one thing and then start wondering what else he could get away with? How would a partner benefit from all of what happened, hm? There's no evidence that anyone else other than him raped the women, and that sort of thing would be difficult to remove from all of the security videos. Did he start with his own crimes and then someone blackmailed him into doing their for him? Or was he hired on to do the dirty work and just kept on going, secure in the knowledge that he got away with it the first time?"

"Or we could just be paranoid and inventing conspiracy plots to keep ourselves gruesomely entertained," he admitted wryly as Sylus shuffled backwards out of the airlock, "since there's nothing other than our gut feelings that something's out of place in all of this."

OLGA had no clue what Hob meant with the statement about Checkov’s gun, but she smiled sweetly nonetheless. There was an innumerable number of references and idioms from the long history of humanity that she would never understand, or even hear in the first instance. But, the one’s she did come across she appreciated all the same—even if they made no sense to her. 

“The more data we cover, the better. So starting from the time of the execution sounds like a good plan to me.” OLGA said, not looking up from her own work. “No matter where we begin, we’re still looking for something that might not exist.”

Hob gave voice to some of her own thoughts as they set to work, and OLGA contemplated his words silently. Sylus’ actions were terrible crimes, especially when framed by the context of humanity’s survival. The almost unnatural ease at which he was able to bypass the various levels of security, and even just the fact that no other human awake during Second Shift had caught him until it was all too late, was all the more disturbing. To OLGA, it seemed that there had to be more there, that a motive, or other hidden wrinkle, had yet to be uncovered. It was like everyone involved—herself included—had read the first and last chapters of the story, but had somehow missed everything else in between.

Even all the video footage she had been over, which was a total of nearly half the duration of Second Shift, from every available camera, had yielded nothing that seemed to deviate from the original plot. It was a frustrating reality, and one that OLGA realized must have been something detectives from all eras of the human litany had experienced—that of a gut feeling that was supported by absolutely no evidence. 

She was about to force the thought from her mind, and resume her work, when an idea came to her. Blinking her green eyes with excitement, she stood and rushed around to behind where Hob sat. Taking his shoulders in her hands, she bent beside him with a palpable sense of inquisitiveness.

“Hob, can you look into the footage of Sylus from the time he was taken into custody until the time of his execution?” OLGA smiled, and gave Hob a pinch on his arm. “[i]Or[/i] from the time of the execution to when he was taken into custody? Whichever floats your boat.”

“Anyway,” she said, kneeling beside his chair so they could both look at the projector. “I want to see if Sylus had any frequent or unusual visitors while he was awaiting his trial and punishment.”