The Second Floor | Unhappy Accidents, pt. 7 (63.20)

[mragland]

5.25.2063 – Richmond upon Thames, Greater London


The club began their series at the Pilots the night before. It was a game that seemed to prove that Spaniard Germán Martínez was not yet ready for the big stage; he couldn't get out of the third inning and gave up five earned. It also proved that the bullpen was no less unfit for purpose, as a trio of relievers gave up another eight runs in London's 13-3 road loss.

Alastair was contemplating the club's pitching woes, and the fact that there seemed to be no solution on the horizon, as he entered the general manager's office. There, he saw Arlo, head of security, seated across from Grant, who was busy prodding something that lay on is desk with a ballpoint pen. Seated to the side at a small table and staring into a laptop screen was the club's head of IT, Derryl Groves.

“Morning, all,” said Alastair as he headed for the chair next to Arlo's. Along the way he got another look at the object on Grant's desk. “And what are we doing?” he asked as he took his seat.

Grant looked up at Arlo. “Alfie said that the cat did this?”

Arlo nodded. “The shell is a fairly thin resin. The cat's teeth punctured that and also one of the SSDs inside the body. Unfortunately, it looks like that was the drive that contained the drone's programming, which might have given us some clue about where it came from.”

Grant sat back and put the pen down. “Maybe we should make the cat head of security.”

Arlo winced and shifted in his chair a little.

Alastair leaned forward. “So that's the electronic mousy I've heard about?”

Grant nodded to Alastair and turned to Derryl. “And what have we found on the other drive?”

Derryl cleared his throat. “Looks like the drone was busy making downloads from the workstation in player development that Alfie discovered to be still running last night after hours. It doesn't look like it was being picky, just gobbling up whole file folders of stuff before it got interrupted. I'm comparing the files on the SSD to the files from last night's backup. It was downloading the folders in alphabetical order, just as they appear in documents window.”

“How much could it have taken?” asked Grant.

“Not that much,” replied Derryl. “It would have filled up it's onboard drive somewhere in the Cs. It was grabbing a lot of video, which takes up a lot of space.”

“This seems on the one hand incredibly sophisticated, but on the other, pretty crude,” said Grant, looking over at a monitor. “Whole Bream games from last season, for example. Every club in the GBC and BBA already has this video.”

“This would seem to support the dress rehearsal theory,” added Arlo. “A quick and dirty grab of data, and then retrieval of the disk, probably at a dead drop somewhere.”

Grant got up out of his chair. “We're trying to run a ballclub, here,” he said. “I've about had it with this off-brand William Gibson shit.”

“So we're going to turn over what we've got to the authorities?” asked Arlo hopefully. He didn't seem to much relish sitting on evidence of criminal behavior.

Grant looked down at the inert device on his desk. “Soon,” he said, with a sigh.