I Found A Knife
A Story site from EldonHughes
Willie & Frank--
Shakespeare?
In Nano-Time
Chapter 17 --
The "How"
So, we
looked, for hours, and then for days.
No luck. We went
out in pairs, in cars and on foot.
Shaun, Jamey, even Doctor Kyle and Doctor Marten took a shot
at it. No sign of them.
One
night a couple weeks later Jennifer and I pulled in at my place just
as Jamey’s car pulled up.
It wasn’t just Jamey.
Shaun and Ken were with him.
Jamey and Shaun had take out.
Ken had a laptop bag.
Shaun
held up the bags.
“Johnny say, you no come to Johnny, Johnny noodle come to you!”
“You
know Johnny is from L. A., right?”
Jamey said.
Shaun
held the bags up again.
“Duuude. Got some
bitchin’ grub, man.”
“My
brother,” I said.
“Master of a thousand stereotypes.”
“Hey, I
could take these bags back where they came from.”
“Oh no!”
Jennifer and I said at once.
“We
haven’t eaten,” Jennifer said.
“Since
yesterday,” I added.
“We've been out looking.
How did these guys just vanish?”
“No
kidding. And, if
they’re ok, why won’t they come back?” Jamey asked.
Jennifer
said, “Would you, if you thought some guy was going to try to steal
you away and probe your brain?”
Ken
said, “That's an easy question." He shook his head. "If a
creepy one. I’ve been going through the log entries.
Once we all get food I’ve got some questions of my own.”
He held up the laptop bag, and I nodded.
“We’ll
take care of food,” I said.
“You want to set up in the living room? You can plug that
into the TV screen so we can all see it.”
“We’ll
fix you a plate and meet you in there,” Jennifer said.
“Oh
boy,” Shaun said.
“Movie night with numbers.”
Jamey
suggested Ken wait until the feeding frenzy died down.
Ken
nodded and said, “What’s going on over at the lab since the
experiment went bust?”
Jennifer
answered. “The
university shutdown the experiment.
All the data and reports are filed away somewhere.”
“The
data is buried pretty deep." I said.
"I moved everything to the backup disks, completely off the
University systems.
Doctor Marten took them somewhere else.”
“Probably some secret government lab,” Shaun said.
I
nodded. “We’re not
asking. He’s not
telling.”
“The
university convinced the district attorney to drop the charges,
against Doctor Wizell, in the name of ‘discretion’,” Ken added.
“Hell,
yes,” Jamey said.
“After that wacked out show at his arraignment.
‘But your honor!! The mice talk, I swear!!’”
“I heard
the Weasel moved back east to live with his mom, or some such,”
Shaun said. “Wish I’d
been there when U-City police caught him in the grocery store.”
Jennifer
grimaced. “Three
shopping carts full of that chemical washed ‘Bag-O-Salad’ and a case
of sliced cheese packages.
He never did pay attention to how we fed or cared for the
animals.”
Ken
nodded and put on his academic voice, “Doctor Wizell has volunteered
to leave the university, and academia forever.
It is my understanding that he is in the considered care of
his family physician.”
“Maybe
they’ll put him in a cage and probe his brain,” I said.
“Jake?”
Jennifer put a hand on my shoulder.
“Sorry.
That’s what Weasel deserves for kidnapping Willie and Frank.”
“Which
brings us to our slide show,” Ken said, and turned his computer on.
“Oh
goody,” Shaun said.
“No
worries, Shaun. I
brought pictures, too.
Just for you. I’ve been going over these, off and on, for several
days, and I’ve found some odd questions.”
Ken
raised a hand as we all started to object.
“Wait. I know, I know.
Charts are boring.
I pulled out just the relevant lines.”
His
first slide was some kind of cleaned up version of the line by line
access logs we’d been poring through before. Some of the lines
were highlighted.
“Now, we
all know that Doctor Weasel, er Wizell, faked an account to get into
the lab.”
“Yeah,
one of the gamer kids helped him,” I said.
“He won’t be graduating, at least not from Wash U.”
Jennifer
pointed at the slide.
“So that first highlight is where he came through the door.”
“Right,”
Ken said.
“And
then there’s the line where he went into the lab itself.”
“Yes.
Keep going.”
“The
next lines are where he opened the cage doors and took the animals.”
“Wait.”
Ken, Shaun and I all said together.
“I
didn’t see it before,” I said.
“Hey, it took me two weeks,” Ken said.
“It’s easier now that it’s uncluttered.”
“What?”
Jennifer said.
“The
time codes,” I said.
“The first three are cage doors, one a little after the other. That
makes sense.
Willie and Frank’s first, then a few seconds later another, then
another. He must have been picking up animals and putting them
in the rolling cage with Willie and Frank.”
“But the
rest of them are all the same time,” Shaun said.
“The
exact same time,” I nodded.
“That’s
not humanly possible,” Jamey said.
“That’s
what I’m thinking,” Ken said.
“What do
you mean?”
He held up a hand and grinned.
He sounded like a bad TV commercial. “But wait, there’s
more!” He hit a button
and the next slide came up.
It was a long list of access lines.
“Here’s
all of the door openings from the time that Doctor Wizell entered
the lab until five minutes later.”
“But
there has to be like fifty lines there,” Shaun said.
“Seventy
five. Now watch this.”
He clicked a button and the top third of the page was highlighted in
blue. “These are cage door openings. The first three we’ve talked
about. The rest is
every other cage door in the lab. All opening, all at once.”
“Holy crap,” I said.
He
clicked again and the bottom two thirds of the page was highlighted,
this time in green.
“Now, this is every door with a lock in the building.
Fifty two of them, from basement to roof, lobby to loading
dock. They all opened at
exactly the same time.
Some of them stayed open for over an hour.”
“How’d
he do it?” Jamey said.
“He
didn’t.” I said.
“Jake,
don’t get ahead of my show and tell.”
“Sorry,
Ken.”
He
clicked again and the highlighting was gone.
“Now, watch this.”
Click, and a set of numbers was highlighted in red, on every
line. “This is the IP
address of the terminal where the open commands came from.”
“They’re
all the same,” Shaun said.
“What machine is that?”
“OK,
Jake. Now.”
“It’s
the lab server, the one that Willie and Frank’s word pad and mouse
are connected to.
Willie and Frank opened all the cages.”
“And all
the doors,” Ken said.
“What?
How? Why?”
“My
guess,” Jennifer said, “They were trying to help the other animals
escape from the Weasel.”
Ken
nodded. “I’ve got
pictures that may prove it.”
The
charts were gone, replaced by freeze frames of the lab hallways.
“These are stills, from the security cameras.”
“I
thought the cameras got turned off by Wizell before he went into the
building?” Shaun asked.
“They
did, but some of them got turned back on after the cage doors
opened.”
Ken
pointed to the top picture.
“This is the cage, with Doctor Wizell pulling it through the
front door. You can
clearly see his face.”
“Why
didn’t all the cameras come back on?” Jamey asked.
“The
cameras aren’t like the doors,” I said.
“On-off doesn’t take that much processing to accomplish, so
the doors are all on one system.
Video sucks up huge amounts of memory, processing and hard
drive space. So, there’s several different systems involved.
And, they take time to come online after you turn them on.
My guess is Frank stayed in the cage.
He got as many
on as he could before the wireless connection went out of range.”
“Why
Frank?”
I
pointed at one of the pictures.
“Because that’s Willie leading the mice out to the loading
dock. See the one in
front is bigger than the others?
That’s Willie.
He’s always been bigger.”
“Frank
was still in the cage, running the computer,” Jennifer said.
“That’s why they were at Doctor Wizell’s house.
Willie was there to rescue Frank.”
I
nodded. “He got there
ahead of us.”
“I
wonder if we’ll ever find out how they did it?” Shaun said.
Jennifer
shrugged. “I just wonder if they’re all right.”
“That one I can't help with,” Ken was closing up his laptop, and unhooking it from the TV. “My guess is, since they found a way out of the lab, and Willie was able to find Frank, AND they found a way out of that, too... If they want you to know? They’ll find a way to let you know."
He stood
up. "If they do?
Let me know, too?”
~~~~~~~~~~
At school, I
went back to chasing blinky lights.
The new semester started. Jennifer went back to lab
work; Shaun babysitting a new semester of Gamers.
Doctor Marten had me order a case of tiny RFID chips.
They were to be inserted in all of the lab animals, just in
case one of them ever took a walk again.
Outside
the lab, Jennifer and I ate a lot of noodles and watched bad TV.
The Rams never did get better, and we wondered about Willie
and Frank every night.
That is,
until the night I got the email.
I was on the couch, surfing and watching nothing on
television.
From:
shakspearesbacon@gmail.com
Subject:
Good books.
I’ve
written some good ones.
They are in the Olin Library.
Perhaps you and Jennifer should come read them?
P.S.
We will need a new keyboard.
Something flexible?
This will help.
Next
Monday, 8 p.m.
There
were two attachments in the email. One was a picture of a roll up
USB keyboard. The other
was a small software program.
It was a conversion program, along with a list of about a
hundred words.
Son of a ---
Up Next: Reunion & Farewell
Available Tales
--"Willie & Frank"
~~~~