Chapter 28
Alex’s back and shoulder blades ached, but nothing seemed broken. Tomorrow, getting out of bed might be difficult. But today, she had work to do.
Con had taken her to a room on the second floor of the field office. It was something of a computer wasteland, full of monitors, keyboards, and all manner of spare parts.
“You’ll probably find what you need here to set up the computer here.”
“Unless you broke it,” Alex said with a half-grin.
Con grunted and in less than five minutes Alex had done just that: the computer was up and running.
The first thing she did before looking through the file names was brought up the same movie that had been playing at Midnight Matinee.
“What are you looking for?” Con asked.
Alex, so focused was she on finding a specific location in Quantum Guardians , didn’t hear her partner.
“Alex?”
Tongue poking in her cheek, Alex paused the movie and leaned back from the monitor.
“Check this out—tell me if you notice anything.”
She tapped the spacebar and the romantic scene played out.
“There! You see that?”
“See what?”
“Watch closely.”
It happened again.
“Yeah, I saw it. Looked like a glitch or something.”
“That’s what I thought at first, too,” Alex confirmed with a nod. “But then…”
The scene continued to run.
A few seconds later, it happened again and even though it was gone in the blink of an eye, Alex was sure she recognized the outline of a person. The rest of the movie was shot in the traditional, saturated superhero color palette, but this ‘glitch’ was monochromatic.
“What the hell is that?” Con asked.
“Not sure. Looks like a person, though.”
Alex rewound the video and then went frame by frame. It was laborious and time-consuming, but eventually, she managed to pause at the exact moment the first ‘glitch’ occurred.
“You’re right,” Con said. “It sure looks like a person.”
Alex squinted at the screen. Although without context it was difficult to know for certain, and it didn’t help that the scene was incredibly dark, but she thought it was a man with dark hair, seated in a chair, his back to the camera. Beside him was a glass table.
“I wonder if…” Alex brought up a list of programs that were loaded on the computer and found video editing software. “Nice.”
With Con watching on, she dropped the video file into the program and then proceeded to splice out the two foreign frames and stitched them together.
Together the new video was less than half a second long, but it did appear to be the first couple of frames from a much longer sequence.
And it indeed showed a man with dark hair.
“Could this be an accident? Just a bad pirated copy?” Con inquired.
“I don’t think so. Maybe one frame, but two? Two that follow in sequence? Highly unlikely. I think someone deliberately spliced these frames in. There might be more.”
Alex went back to Quantum Guardians and began playing the film, from the beginning this time.
As she did, behind her, Con’s phone began to ring, and the man answered.
“AA, did you find the guy in the theater?” There was a pause and then, “Good. Book him for the possession, then. Just hang onto my cuffs.” Another pause, this time longer than the first. “Yes, I know. I know. I owe you.”
When Con hung up the phone, Alex had already found two more frames and had inserted them into the new file.
It still wasn’t enough to decipher what was going on, however.
“This… is going to take a while.” Alex looked over her shoulder at her partner, offering him a look that she hoped conveyed the feeling that if he wanted to leave her then he was more than welcome to.
But Con just smiled and pulled up a chair.
“I think I’ll wait. I guess telling you to sit and watch movies wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Come to think of it, I don’t feel so bad about what happened to your predecessor anymore. I told him that there might be something hidden in the movies.” Something more than Captain Dipshit talking about stolen software code. “I guess I’m not all washed up just yet.
Alex chuckled.
“Guess not. But, hey, if you’re bored, I’ve got something for you to read.” She reached over and pulled The Great California Gold Rush out of her bag. She tossed it at Con and he caught it against his chest. “You know, just so that you can learn the difference between Yerba Buena and the Mojave Desert. Gotta keep that mind, and memory sharp, you know?”