Day 57 - Darwin's Game - Chapter 6 (1684 words)

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DARWIN'S GAME

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 6

Blake knew he was being followed on his daily walks, he knew that Jacob was being watched as well. There were people in the office, their were checks on their incoming mail and packages as well. They didn't object too much, it came with the territory, but as Darwin, or whomever the Darwin identity represented, had taken great pains to hide any identifying marks or locations in the video then it was unlikely they'd be caught so easily.

After the second day of being followed, Blake decided to take up running again, he go for walks and runs a few times a day, making a few people in suits take up a sudden interest in staying in pace with him before they realised what he was up to. They knew that he knew, but ultimately it was not about ensuring that Blake or Jacob, or anyone related to the Facts Alone website knew if they were being watched, it only mattered if the source of the video knew.

Blake was beginning to lose faith in the idea that they had been singled out for receiving the videos when the week expired and there was no new contact. No one else was getting the video either though plenty of people were claiming to have it online, all of the turning out to be frauds. Pirate-bay and the illegal download sites all claimed to have copies, but they were as usual time wasters and trojan horses for virus dispersal.

After the eighth day went by the FBI were still watching them, but expanding the search, and checking aggressively into the remaining players in the game. Rewards were offered, the embarrassment of the agency was quite keenly felt, publicly roasted on the conservative and liberal media commentary programs, no one able to make any headway into the game, the players or who and what Darwin was. Every lead a dead end and nothing more to go on except episode one.

Blake was running through the Mission District, no longer watching the tail that shadowed him constantly, he assumed and accepted the presence and just kept on moving. They went back to normal news after a very short time, staying true as possible to the ethos of Facts Alone. They had episode one and there was no new information, they had nothing else to report, and the reporting of “nothing else to report” was a waste of everyone's time. The cable company shows, the online presence of all types of media and interpretation had content and supposition enough to fill a lifetime of twenty hour news cycles, it was time for Facts Alone to move on.

He came around a corner, faster than he expected, his mind elsewhere and almost collided with a cyclist cutting through a laneway near the Mission, its towers and imposing bulk was shadowing the afternoon sun from the pavement where he ran. A child ran from out of the church and hand Blake a note, then sprinted away again a blur of blue and grey disappearing back into the church. A track-suited man, the agent assigned to him that day moved quickly after the child as Blake read the note and a car pulled up to the curb by him. There was a single name on the paper and he handed it to the men who came from the car silently and he walked away from them and continued on his run.

He ran around the block, and back to the church again as the meaning of the name came back to him, Luis Antonio Arguello. The FBI were probably searching for him now, but Blake could put the name in context, and he wondered how it was that Darwin knew that about him, how long had he been watched? How much did this mysterious figure know and was it even a person or was it an organisation?

Luis Antonio Arguello was in the Mision San Francisco di Asis, he had been for over a hundred years. He was buried alongside the church itself, a tombstone and wrought iron fence surrounding the plot was a singular point of reference that he would know. When he was running for exercise alone, before baiting and leading the federal surveillance he would run to here and rest, looking back along the church and gardens, and think here. It was occasionally overrun with tourists and the religious fans, but it was a grounding place for him. Here it all seemed like the city and the world with all it's excesses and stresses, were meaningless. Here it made no sense at all to hold on to anything, so he would come here, let it all bleed out of his mind and then run back to the treadmill to wind it all up again. The respite in between he found here, looking at people who had been dead for over a century, putting them and their lives and all the importance they placed on the daily existence into perspective.

He came up to the tombstone and he saw the envelope immediately, and his name was on the outside the same as the one that had been marked for Jacob. He pocketed it fast and continued on to the garden to think about the best way to get this without it being intercepted first. He was more than happy to hand it over to the authorities, but had no intention of it disappearing into a government black hole, ready to be censored or sanitised before anyone could ever see it.

He sent a text message to Jacob and gave him the code they had thought of if they ever needed to access anything urgently, they had never had to use it before and he hoped that Jacob would remember what it meant. Then he sent him a location and then ran to it in a leisurely manner, picking up the federal surveillance team as he left the grounds again. They had not clicked as to the meaning of the note yet, but it was only a matter of time.

Blake ran and picked up the pace to get to the pick up point, he could see the car ahead of him down the street as behind him he heard the agent closing in and telling his team mates that he was about to grab the target. The agent was calling his name, they had realised what the name had meant. Maybe someone finally took the obvious step of googling the name and seeing that it was not a live person, but a location, and a quick look back in the grounds would have netted them nothing, in a spot where he had gone out of sight for a minute or more.

He was sprinting towards the car, having the advantage of knowing where he was going while the agent behind him was playing catch up.

Jacob could see him barrelling down the road towards him with a man in a track suit running like only a trained agent could do, looking official and efficient at the best speed possible. He opened the car door and as Blake leapt in he hit the gas pedal and sped away.

“It's already on, we've got maybe three to five minutes.” Jacob was turning into the side streets and taking his time away from the bigger roads, where the Feds would undoubtedly be waiting for them. In even less time than he expected a car was running them down the alleyways, hastily stuck on siren atop the car, wailing and flashing it's authority over them. Jacob ignored it and struck out into traffic, buying Blake a few more minutes of time to get into the contents of the disc.

“Pull over, NOW!” a loud hailer was shockingly loud as three cars zeroed in on their location, two police cars and a black sedan pincering the car they had jumped into and were desperately trying to stall for time in. Jacob slammed on the brakes and avoided plowing into the black sedan suddenly stopping and blocking him against the other two cars.

“Thirty seconds Jake, thirty more seconds!” Blake was staring at the screen willing the progress bar to move faster, ducking his head and sitting in the foot well of the back seat, a laptop with a high speed cellular modem uploading on the LTE network to a secure server as fast as digitally possible.

Jacob flung open the door and started screaming at the agent.

“Hey we have fucking rights you know!!” he rounded on them quickly, getting right up into his face, earning a sudden twisted grip and being thrown flat on his face still protesting the whole time.

“This is all being filmed man, there's no way you can get away with this! We are not breaking any laws!”

Across the road a small crowd was gathering and the cell phones were out and recording the detaining of the car and it's driver, the cops forcing the doors open on the car and shouting at Blake to come out with his hands up.

“Don't shoot! I'm unarmed!” Blake called out and he raised his arms clearly as he left the vehicle, police guns trained on his exit. “I am unarmed see?” Blake was yelling this and looking directly at the onlookers with cameras and he knelt on the ground like he was being held hostage, playing it up for the cameras. He knew that this would make for good footage, but that soon no one would be talking about it.

The disc had been marked “Episode 2” and was already uploaded to an anonymously proxied service where their IT staff were copying, encoding and linking live to the internet without even watching it first.

Before Facts Alone, before the FBI, before anyone else that supposedly mattered and before anyone except whomever or whatever Darwin was, had seen it, one hundred people downloaded, copied and rebroadcast the hottest ticket in online entertainment and news.

Darwin's Game continued without interference, direct to the audience and democratically dispersed.