Inward

One Week Later "What's bothering you", the Analyst Alexi asked Tricia as they sat in Tricia's office having reviewed the latest work on their new computer forensics project. Tricia shook her head No at first, and then acknowledged the truth, "It's this Southview thing" she said. In typical fashion Special Agent Richard Hastings – or as Tricia Master's liked to go call him: Hasty Dick – had opened and closed the case on Shaun Bennet a 22 year old UT Dallas grad who months after graduating with an engineering degree had bought a gun, drove 8 hours to a small run down mall, and shot 4 people. It didn't make sense, Dick just chalked it up to "mental health" issues but Tricia wasn't so sure. Heck half the analysts in her field office were on some sort of mental health medicine - ADHD, OCD, Anti-depressants, it was like working in a veritable DSM manual. Tricia herself was pretty sure she had ADD but it was hard enough being a female special agent specializing in computer forensics, she didn't want to be the "crazy female" special agent. "Do you want me to have a look at the case?" Alexi asked, Tricia had to think for a minute. Sighing she punched some commands into a terminal on her laptop and turned the screen to Alexi. "The problem is", she explained, "that what they found on the phone is just what we already know about, the reddit, twitter, and discord posts" she pointed at the periods of furious activity. "What we don't know is what he was doing during these times", she pointed at the blank date entries in the table. Alexi nodded understanding, "You think he was on the dark web?" he asked. "I don't know?" Tricia said, "Maybe he was trying to quit social media and he just had some lapses, but it doesn't seem like it. Think about what we know, he's just out of college, delivering food all day alone by himself in a car. He has room mates but they say he's never there except to cook a weeks worth of food. What is he doing all day?" "What about the phone?" Alexi asked, Tricia gave a little snort then started "They pulled data..." "But we could get more" Alexi said finishing her sentence, so let's do it. Tricia shook her head, "You don't know the special agent in charge down there, Di- Richard. He's not going to let his evidence out of that building – at least not for us." Alexi thought for a moment, "Then let's go to it" he suggested, anticipating Tricia's objections he added, "If we leave now, split the drive we can be there in time to get some cheap hotel rooms and be in the office tomorrow. We bring our gear clone the phone and then get back home by the next day." Tricia liked the idea – with a clone of the phone her team here could work the case for real, but to what end filling these gaps in the life of a lonely young man who seemed to be barely scrapping by delivering food. Her intuition told her there was more to the story, more to these voids of online activity, but at the same time it was probably just a angry lonely person lashing out at the world and no grand conspiracy. "Fine" Tricia said with a relenting tone, Alexi's face lit up but Tricia continued, "But we do it my way. We're going to take a look over everything, each piece of evidence we can get our hands on, Dick is sloppy, he missed something, always does, so we'll find it and then we'll go down and demand the phone. When he says no we'll have something to go to his bosses with" Alexi nodded and then eagerly got up and left the office, "Let me see what I can find" he said as he headed out. Tricia knew that a challenge like this, one upping another field office was like crack to Alexi. The analyst was young but a genius with data, and he had a lot to prove. The son of a "mail order" bride Alexi and his mom had been deported to Russia when his father decided that the woman he "bought" online wasn't subservient enough. He'd been the best student in his class in Moscow University and then found himself on a full ride with a Masters program in the US. Tricia knew there was more to this though. Alexi's dad was long estranged, his mom had remarried and had a new family in Russia, a family that Alexi wanted nothing to do with, in part because of their views on the current regime, in part because of their reactions when Alexi had introduced his boyfriend. Tricia had dragged Alexi out to the middle of nowhere and while he never said anything she knew that he was lonely and he filled that void with work. On paper at-least Alexi and the gunman didn't look too different, Alexi would understand that at a deep level feel the need to prove the media narrative about lonely young men wrong. In the end the analysis was done before the next morning, Tricia found the finished report in her inbox timestamped at 2am. It was just as she expected - Alexi had pulled on a few threads and then just like and old sweater the whole premise of Dick's assessment unraveled. What Alexi had done was not particularly novel, Dick's report had listed Shaun Bennet's primary profession as a delivery driver and given some aggregate stats for drive time from each of the apps, but it was in the raw data appendix that Alexi had found real story. Lining each of the trips up on a timeline a disturbing picture emerged. On any given day Shaun would be picking up deliveries from 2 to 6 different applications, a few months ago it had been 1 or 2, but as the summer progressed the story of someone falling into a routine emerged. Awake early, in the car picking up orders, then a break before the lunch rush started. Another break after lunch before dinner, then a break before the latenight orders before taking a break and starting it all the next day. The breaks themselves were troubling to Tricia, at first they seemed normal, probably just not enough demand, but by the end they were regimented - "He's got to be sleeping in his car probably in a parking lot somewhere" Alexi said pointing at the last month of data. Tricia looked at it, "Why sleeping?" she asked, knowing the answer but wanting Alexi to explain, "He has to be", Alexi said, adding, "By the end of the summer Shaun Bennet follows a very strict schedule, there's some slight variability but it's likely that he's passing up on good work in order to stop - and that's not surprising, in the course of a given day he seems to be taking only 6 to 8 hours of time off of working in one of these delivery apps. Optimistically he's getting at-most 5 hours of sleep, not all at once mind you but as these little cat-naps throughout the day.", Tricia nodded asking, "Do you think that would explain the shooting?" Alexi shook is head, "No, there's plenty of studies on the impact of a lack of sleep and nowhere does it say that it turns people into mass murderers." Alexi paused for a second. "Here's what I think" he said then pausing again, "If I may?". Tricia hated the question, she knew it was a byproduct of Alexi's upbringing in a authoritarian society, only further encouraged by the traditional gap between the analysts and special agents at the FBI. Still she humored him, nodding and said "Go on". Alexi pointed to one of the timelines, showing the end of a delivery drive at around 2:30pm the day before the shooting. "The lack of sleep may have made him highly suggestible, but something happened here that threw off his schedule. We would have expected Mr. Bennet to have stopped for approx. 1 hour and 30 minutes, instead what we see is a gap of over 2 hours. After that he doesn't return to delivery driving, but we know he's back on his phone because we get the timestamped search records for gun shops. By that point he's already broken his routine, whatever it was that set him down that road seemed to have occurred 2:30 and 3:30 when we would normally have expected him to take a nap". Tricia nodded, the analysis was good, Alexi could work a bit on the delivery but she'd be there supporting him in Dallas. With that they grabbed their bags and headed to the car. "Do you want me to drive the first half?" Alexi asked eagerly. Tricia laughed as his enthusiasm, "Let me" she said crossing to the drivers side of the car. Then turning to Alexi she added, "Don't worry, I got us a jet". The small private jet was one of several that the FBI maintained for just this sort of thing, the airport was only a few minutes from the office and Alexi and Tricia were wheels up and bound for Dallas in less than a half hour. One Week Before Shaun climbed out of the shower, he'd been training himself to take showers fast and cold. It was better for your circulation, kept you ready to fight. His phone sat on the bathroom counter with a stack of unread notifications. Grabbing it he swiped away the texts from his sister – it was something stupid she was complaining about again, something about wanting him to move to Colorado. There with a nondescript logo featuring a large capital A was the Apex app. He tapped it open, punched in his code and found the thread. Apex was invite only, just for people who really loved the Apex Pod and were willing to pay the monthly fee, but you can't account for taste, and there were some absolute idiots in the app. This one - SpicyNugget2000 - was one of the worst. Shaun expected he was probably just trolling but the Apex rule was pretty simple: don't spare the weak. Shaun launched a broadside against the stupid point this guy was making, his handle WelcomeToMyJungle appearing above the post with his post stats: Premium Member, 2 months, 3500 posts, 6000 Karma. As Shaun dressed his phone buzzed, people liking his post, giving him karma, 350 in total - a few people let him know that the next time they see SpicyNug in person they'll make sure to bring some cream for the burn. In the car that morning Shaun switched on Apex Pod via the Apex App - the pod had some listeners on Spotify but real Apex fans (Preds or Predators they called themselves) would subscribe and get the app. Cole and Wells were at their usual table, mic and mixing board setup between them. Apex Pod wasn't like other pod casts, they didn't have guests or any agenda. Just two guys who used to have to hustle just like Shaun did before they figured it out and became Apex. Now they'd do 5 - 6 hours of live streams a day. Some of that would get clipped and edited for Spotify and other channels, but it was the raw stream that most Pred's listened to. When he was driving late at night Shaun was working through the old back catalogue of episodes. Cole and Wells had started the podcast when they were doing delivery apps. Recording a nightly phone call and then editing it when they got home. Somewhere along the line they had figured out how to get out of that way of living, and that was something that Shaun very much wanted to learn. There were rules. If you know the secret you don't tell anyone, the only way to survive in nature is to learn on your own. That meant that there was no easy mode, you had to listen to all the old episodes until you learned. Once you learned the secret and got out of the grind you would be verified Apex. Verified Apex got special rules in the app, they could brag post, and they could ban anyone. Anyone with a Verified Apex badge was not someone to f' with. You had to have the App. Cole and Wells pulled old episodes after a week. If you wanted to know the secret you would need to subscribe Once someone had tried to break rule #3 by building an archive of old shows, Cole and Wells had their lawyer seize the guys computer and melted it with thermite on a live stream. So Shaun did the grind, he drove the delivery apps and he listened to the old episodes. He'd been deep into the Apex world now for 2 months. He knew he still a had a ways to go, but he was getting traction now. There was idiots like SpicyNugget who had to be put in their place but there were also friends like Games4Life who would be there and have his back. A few times Shaun had gotten Karma from a verified, one time a verified even responded to a post he'd made, just a "Yep" not much but seeing the verified icon under a reply meant a lot to Shaun. The thought about asking the guy to ban SpicyNugget, but then he remembered that a real Apex Predator fights it's own battles. Better not to ask than to piss off a verified and get banned. Lately Cole and Wells had been going on a crusade against against "public private partnerships" these scams were often setup by corporate interests and lobbyists to ensure that people would be taxed to make some company wealthy. Usually the company would take as much money out of the system as it could and then dissolve leaving the public - that's everyone else holding the bag. "Someone's gotta hunt these fuckers" Cole would say. As far as the Apex world was concerned companies that stole money like this weren't apex, they were scavengers, scavs. You couldn't be apex and a scav, apex hunted scavs. "Here's one", Cole said, "127 Million to build a stadium, except the team never existed, the developer took the money didn't build anything and got off scot free". "What to you mean it didn't exist?" Wells was asking - Wells was the more analytical of the two, Cole would just speak his mind. Shaun often found him self agreeing with Cole but now and then Wells would actually make a good point.