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23 – Slightly Brittle

The alarm on his phone woke him at 6 o’clock, just like it did every morning, and it felt unfair given how briefly he’d slept.  He hadn’t thought to turn it off before bed—he’d barely touched his phone since moving downstairs.  There was no cell signal in the apartment.  The cell phone had become just an alarm on his nightstand, and occasionally a calculator the few times he’d needed one.

He shut the alarm off and didn’t set a new one, falling back asleep a few minutes later.  It was nice, he thought, that the lack of windows meant it could be just about as dark as he wanted it to be at any time of day or night.

The ‘new message’ alert from the laptop, still turned up to maximum volume as usual, jarred him awake so severely he got a cramp in his leg.  He looked at his phone.  7:42 AM—it had to be Steven replying to him.

He set an alarm for 8:30 and promptly passed out again, knowing he should read the message immediately but guiltily giving in to his desire to sleep.

He felt marginally more rested after another 45 minutes of sleep, but only marginally.  He could function on very little sleep, and usually function well.  But unlike some people he knew, it took a toll on him and he didn’t enjoy it.  He’d heard of people living on three or four hours of sleep a night for years, simply because they needed to be awake and working for 20 hours a day.  He’d done that before—not for years, but weeks—and hated every minute of it.

Coffee would help, he thought, bringing the laptop into the kitchen with him.  The contents of the blood sample kit were still laid out on the counter and still perplexing to him.  Distracted, he stopped in the middle of pouring water into the coffeemaker and stared down at it.  The instructions told him how to take the samples, but not what to do with them afterward.

He spilled some water on the countertop while he was busy staring at the sample tubes, and that snapped him out of his reverie.

With the coffee brewing, he opened his messages.  Only one and from Steven, as he expected:

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TO: c.glossen@bayshorebank.com
FROM: lapotter@cls.windsor.edu
SUBJECT: RE: RE: Xmas eve
 
Strong work sir. Glad they gave you some goodies, troop welfare lol.
Open the case asap. Left combo last 4 of your ssn, right is 4729. Confirm you got it open and its intact and I will follow up & explain.
 
Steve
 
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He should have guessed that, he thought.  In low-risk situations, using someone’s partial social security number as a combination was common.  It was easy to implement and relatively secure.  Two-lock cases weren’t common, but there was some precedent for them.  Doing it this way was a kind of field-expedient two-factor authentication.

He was suddenly very curious what was inside the locked case.

The coffeemaker burbled noisily.  He quickly put the blood draw kit back into its bag and fixed up his coffee.  He’d run out of good creamer a few days ago and was now down to two options:  powdered creamer and boxed milk.  Neither was satisfying.  Today he tried milk and four packets of artificial sweetener.  It wasn’t bad like that, just not good.

He brought the coffee and the laptop to the couch and set to opening the case.

Inside, wrapped loosely in plastic, was a binocular headset very much like the ones he had in the other room, the ones that clipped to his helmet.  It was tucked firmly into foam cutouts along with three proprietary-looking battery packs, and a few other accessories that weren’t immediately recognizable.  On closer inspection, he thought, it looked almost identical to the packaging his spare night-vision optics were stored in.

He carefully took them out of the bag, turning them over in his hands.  They looked almost identical to the others, perhaps with a few minor cosmetic differences: the mount was a different color, the adjustment thumbscrews had three lobes instead of four.

He checked that the battery packs fit into the receptacle on the headset, but didn’t power the unit on.  He was told to write back when he had them in his hands, and that’s what he was going to do.

The reply from Steven didn’t come as quickly as he expected.  He felt, for reasons he couldn’t explain, like he needed to sit and wait for it.  He knew that was silly, but he still sat on the couch for a while with the laptop open next to him.  He eventually thought better of it.

The reply took long enough that he had time to work out—even though he didn’t want to—shower, eat lunch, and surf the news channels.

The news had become less a well of information for him, and more like fishing—he felt like he spent a lot of time for little actual reward.  He made himself “watch” it at least once a day, in the hope that he’d learn something useful, but he rarely did.  It hadn’t gotten back to normal of course, but the panicked, breathless reports from the opening days had given way to more reserved discussion and updates that almost seemed scheduled.  He imagined there was a scrolling ticker at the bottom, too.

Late that afternoon, whatever channel the TV was on featured a man with a deep voice interviewing somebody who was obviously speaking off the cuff.  After a few minutes it became obvious the interviewee was confidently speculating about aliens, and he changed the channel after that.

The next channel up had a woman dispassionately reading a press release of some kind—from where, he didn’t know.  He changed channels again.

The channel after that was in the middle of a recording or a phone conversation with what sounded like an elderly man.  He lingered there for a minute, listening.  Nobody interrupted, so he guessed it was a recording.  The man was telling some kind of story that he’d missed the beginning of; after another minute of listening he intuited that the older man was describing his experiences on the first day of the incident.  That it was an ordeal, but he’d survived somehow.

The old man spoke evenly and with little emotion.  He didn’t hesitate, didn’t cry, he just told his story matter-of-factly in a voice that was slightly brittle, but steady.  It was quietly chilling to listen to.

The man’s story was interrupted by the laptop chiming loudly on the couch next to him.  He heard the newscasters come back on as he opened the laptop, and he shut the TV off before opening the message.

 

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TO: c.glossen@bayshorebank.com
FROM: lapotter@cls.windsor.edu
SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: RE: Xmas eve
 
They’re countermeasures based on the issued nods. They work in the lab but limited real world testing.
Confirm you have batteries and they power on. Sending you a file right now. Put them on and open it, should be obvious if their working.
 
Steve 
 
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He only got a few words into Steven’s message before the laptop chimed again, a notification popping up on the taskbar.