The Change is Yet to Come - Knowledge
#6 of Change is Yet to Come (TF, Sci-Fi Themes)
Knowledge is a dangerous thing for Robert.
The Change is Yet to Come - Knowledge
by
Gruffy
2017
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SIXTY-NINTH DAY
Robert knew that Tim did not leave his home for any flimsy reason. He knew that the almost painfully thin man's personality had traits of what used to be called the autistic spectrum, which meant that he had trouble navigating social situations. Considering that he spent most of his time on the internet with people who had even less social skills than he did, and who had developed rather useful workarounds on the matter, he did quite well for himself, Robert thought. He knew that Tim had been hired by his workplace for that very fact. They needed obsessive people. The thought amused Robert, for he knew that he needed one of those as well to do what he needed. They had known since college. They had a close trust of one another, and on this occasion, Robert hoped that their carefully cultivated relationship would pay off.
"You look like a bad skin mod for SteelSpace," was what Tim said looking at Robert on his wheelchair.
Robert chuffed.
"I feel as cobbled together as I look," he said. "You're not wrong."
"Cool, though."
"Thanks."
"What does that feel like?" Tim asked.
"Not much."
"Cool."
"I knew you would think so."
"So can we talk here?" Tim asked. He sounded impatient.
"I suppose we can."
Tim took out something from his jacket pocket. It wasn't much bigger than a mobile phone, but had an air of homemade construction to it. There were colorful wires poking out of the shell. The man waved this device about himself and poked at it.
"Some things never change," Robert observed.
Tim did not appear to pay attention to the comment. He continued to fiddle with his device for a few moments longer. Robert almost expected to feel it on his artificial limbs. Tim's bug searcher was known to disturb local electronics.
"Now it will be safe," he said. "Where can we sit?"
"Over there," Robert indicated the table where he usually did his peg and board homework.
"Okay."
Robert buzzed himself over on the chair that was still loathe to accept his commands. He blamed his very jerky, awkward robot hands for it. Tim sat down on the empty chair and pulled out a pad that he set onto the table.
"The stuff I've got on this is so hot that it's like...nuclear!"
"I trust you to know the magnitude of things," Robert said.
He knew that Tim easily got single-mindedly excited about things, but this did not sound like one of those occasions. He was talking seriously, albeit hopefully not literally.
"Okay, show me," he said once he had parked himself. "The fact you're here means this has to be interesting."
Tim set out to open the pad with a combination of a retinal scan, a fingerprint scan, and a hideously long password that he tapped into it without a hitch.
"This stuff is seriously good," Tim sounded almost uncharacteristically enthusiastic, "I had to do a lot of digging but it's good stuff."
"I trust your assessment on that."
Tim's slender fingers moved eagerly along the surface of the pad.
"The police server has a ridiculously bad firewall," he said. "It took me only an hour to get all this."
He tapped open a series of photos that became thumbnails along the top of the display.
"Are these incident photos?" Robert asked.
"Yes!"
There wasn't much to see, Robert thought, and he didn't like the little there was.
"The motorbike fell off the bridge and landed here, with parts flying as far away as 90 meters to all directions. There are pictures of the bits and pieces too if you wanna see."
"No, thanks."
Robert was looking at a picture of the main wreck of the motorbike. Both wheels had been torn off and there was a great amount of blood staining the grass by the underpass where the jangled mass of man and his machine had landed.
"Anything they can tell about what happened?"
"Little," Tim said. "The forensics report on your bike was inconclusive. But look at this..."
The new pictures were from the highway, the bridge especially. Tim quickly opened a series of closeups that had been enhanced with drawn arrows and other markings.
"There's a bump on the fence where the bike collided with it and then went through the jump barrier," Tim detailed on the picture, "this is where it happened."
Robert tried hard not to look at the suspiciously man and bike-shaped hole on the plexiglass.
"Any signs of what could've caused me to go over?"
"They think they might've found some paint from a foreign object, or so they call it..."
Tim's quick tapping brought out pages of a written report and more photos, in their own thumbnails.
"...gas chromatography suggests black paint not matching the bike but an extremely common polymeric compound, so it's hardly something specific that can be pinpointed, but the police thinks that it could belong to a vehicle you struck or that struck you."
"...that I struck?" Robert sneered. "They think I clipped onto someone's tail and went over the fence? Yeah, right."
"The cops think it's one choice," Tim said. "Or someone hit you and ran."
Robert's robotic fingers twitched on his lap.
"And didn't stop to see what happened?"
"No," said Tim. "There were no associated braking marks on the road."
"Figures."
"But there is more," TIm noted. He began to tap again.
Robert almost smiled.
"I know you have home."
The next image Tim brought up was a map. Parts of it were highlighted.
"I've been going through the area to plot the most likely route anyone would have taken through the area," said Tim. "I extended my radius to within 20 miles of the crash site and searched everything that could have recorded a passing vehicle."
"Didn't the cops do that?" Robert asked.
"If they did, they didn't try hard enough," Tim said. "Or didn't want to."
"You think someone's been deliberately sloppy?"
"I don't think anything, I just read the stuff," Tim said.
Robert chuffed.
"I trust you when you say that," he said. "What did you find then?"
"I created an algorithm to go through the available records, based on the timeframe and the visual parameters," Tim explained.
"You made the computer look for every black car that passed through the area?" Robert guessed.
"From every security camera around, from Google, from automatic traffic and toll control booths, ATMs, everything with an eye, sure," Tim said. "I had to slip into a lot of systems to get everything I wanted."
"I can only imagine,"Robert said. He knew his way around his own computer systems, but what Tim did was much beyond his skills or knowledge.
A few extra taps on the pad highlighted parts of the map.
"There were 47 vehicles in the area during the given time period, out of which 28 passed through the accident site," Tim said.
"And?"
"Six vehicles out of the 28 were visually identified as black and three of them matches the spectroscopic profile of the paint recovered from the bike."
"So one of them has to be the one who hit me?"
"Yes."
"Is there a way to be sure which one, or...or I mean, to track them down or..."
"There's no need to, because I already know which one it was."
Tim opened a picture. There was no flair to the gesture, it was a rather matter of fact way of doing it. The image wasn't the best quality. it was quite fuzzy and dark, perhaps a still from a video. It showed a sleek car, caught in motion with a hint of blur. It was most certainly black, although you couldn't tell much more about it from such a view.
"It's a drive-in lane security camera for some fast food restaurant," Tim explained, "according to the news it's been robbed a few times over the years so they've got pretty good cameras. The security company they employ doesn't know shit about their own security."
Robert craned his stiff neck to see better at the screen.
"Are you sure this is it?"
"It's the only black car recorded at the right distance at the right time," Tim said. "This place is only three miles away from the bridge and this car pulled onto the parking lot a minute after the emergency call was made to dispatch from a car that was driving on the highway and found your crash site. It means just enough time for it to get from the bridge to the fast food joint."
"Can you identify the car based on this picture alone?"
"No," Tim said. "This one is too blurry. But the one from the parking lot is much better."
"You've got more?"
"Sure. The drive-in lane camera was shit but the one overlooking the parking lot gave me some sweet shit."
Robert felt an excited clenching in his belly. He was quite pleased by that. The epinephrine being pumped into his blood made him feel more roused. The bridge was working. Not as good as he hoped, but it was working.
"Okay."
The next photo was much better, just like Tim had said. Robert could tell that the black car was a BMW. Expensive, not the kind that you usually saw parked outside a fast food joint like the one in question he remembered passing so many times on his bike drives, right after the bridge.
"The light is low but I tweaked the contrast..."
Tim swiped the screen and the same picture came up, but this time in false color.
"Even I can read the license plate now," Robert said. "And my eyes aren't what they used to be."
"Yeah, it wasn't too difficult to get into the DMV files either," Tim said.
"Show me," Robert heard his voice turn cold.
Tim tapped open a picture. It was heavily posed, obviously retouched, and showed a middle-aged man in a black suit posing against a background of a vague grey and the American flag displayed proudly alongside a state flag.
"Senator Heywood Preston," Tim said. "He represents - "
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