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DARWIN'S GAME
By Wayne Webb
CHAPTER 49
Agent Levy was staring at the resignation
letter, signed, in an envelope and in his hand not going anywhere.
He had it inside his jacket pocket for days and was waiting for the
right time to hand it in. He had thought that when the last episode
of the Game was over then he'd hand it in, Darwin would disappear
like the ghost in the machine that he was, and the investigation
would slowly be starved of oxygen and end up like the Lindberg Baby
or Jimmy Hoffa, going nowhere and the subject of X-Files bargain
basement conspiracy theories. Best to be out before that happened he
thought, it was good to go out before it became that joke, or before
it could be pinned as the unsolvable case.
There was still an amount of hope and
expectation that there would be a break in the cases, as there were
multiple crimes and multiple suspects and victims under the Darwin
umbrella. Kidnapping and unlawful detention, criminal enterprise and
anything they could think of were being leveled as potential charges
against the man if he ever surfaced. Dan Levy had no such hope that
this would ever be the case. So he wrote his resignation, he had a
private offer for consulting work lined up and it was there for the
taking as soon as he handed the letter to his boss.
While there was less than a day to go on the
deadline and voting could still have gone either way in the hours to
go, and the number of votes did not seem to be slowing. It was over
one hundred million votes cast worldwide and though each of the men
were within a few thousand of each other at most times, the leads
when one would surge ahead was in favour of John Vargas being the
winner, it started to be a pattern that there would be a surge, then
the balance would settle back and Simpson would lead marginally and
then the lead would drop once more. According to the analysts at the
Bureau statistics were favoring the former, John Vargas.
On the final morning with a few hours to go the
voting profiles changed when a number of online sites, hungry for the
predictive bragging rights claimed that beyond a doubt the voting
would swing to Vargas and stay that way in the last few hours. That
held true for a while as people started casting votes for the person
they thought would win, perhaps in the idea that they would be
backing a winning horse or maybe by the idea that in voting to
support Vargas, they would not be voting for someone to die, but for
someone to live. In this case picking the horse that was lengths
ahead seemed like the safest bet.
Agent Levy had heard from sources that Jacob
Edgerton was back in the country, none of the leads that came from
Italy or pointed to it made any headway in the case, and while they
were still live Agent Levy was pretty sure that they would never get
anywhere with them. The State Department was not much help in
pressuring the Italian government to free up the site for American
investigators, and the popularity of the Darwin Experiment, as it was
becoming known in Europe, was very high with the people there. The
chances of them tramping all over protected land to chase down a
criminal for crimes in America, and crimes that no one really thought
were unjustified, were pretty low. Agent Levy had thought that
perhaps his own government was beginning to share that view, approval
ratings had not taken a dive during the 'reign of terror' by this
Darwin character, they had swung the other way.
The same battle lines as always were drawn, the
pro-life people who believed in execution of the criminally violent
and the pro-life people who believed in the incarceration and
rehabilitation of the criminally violent. They all used the same
invective and the same philosophy as the opposition, only the clothes
they wore were separating them. Public opinion was divided on the
Game. Overwhelmingly no one had any sympathy for the criminals, and
over seventy percent of those polled believed that they got what they
deserved. That the Game was the right way to deal with criminals as
violent, recidivist and guilty as this was another matter. Support
for the game was only at thirty percent, but when polled on the
methods of execution and the 'fairness' of the outcome for the
victims of the players in their lives 'pre-Darwin' the support and
agreement shot back up to seventy percent and higher. Most analysts
put true support for the Game at over sixty percent, but the idea of
publicly extolling something so brutal and illegal was a hard pill to
swallow for most people, even with the anonymity of a blind poll.
The call had come in from the office that the
numbers were climbing for Vargas to win, his lead was extending and
that the countdown on the official sites had turned red as the time
was getting closer. He was at his office in San Francisco and there
was less than an hour of time on the clock and he like most of the
office kept working, waiting for the timer to run out knowing that
any of the clues they were working would not in anyway make an impact
on the final result.
When the timer ran out the clock froze and the
votes slowed down, there was over a ten million voter advantage for
Vargas over Simpson. The whole office held it's breath and nothing
happened for around five minutes in deathly silence. The spell was
broken when an agent shifting his weight in his chair uncomfortably
knocked over a stapler and it clanged off the side of the desk, its
metallic thud as it hit the carpet was like a balloon popping all of
a sudden. The noise of conversation started back up and Agent Levy
put in a call to the office of Facts Alone, checking in with the
Agents on site to see if there were any developments there when his
second in command called to him across the office.
“There's a video!”
They all refreshed their screens and sure
enough there was a video there, they all hit play and waited. And
waited. Demand for the video was obviously at a peak and the traffic
caused as millions of people waiting for the update all hit refresh
and tried to see the video overloaded the infrastructure of the
internet in several key areas and a number of sites ground to a halt.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck. We need to see this!”
“Everyone needs to see this, that's the
problem.” Agent Levy scratched his head. “He must have thought of
this, he must have a had a plan, or at least … oh it will settle
down eventually I suppose, but he must have...” Halfway through
that thought his phone started buzzing a message and Dan looked at it
as he was talking. There was a multimedia message service from a
email address with Darwin in the domain name sitting there blinking
it's update at him. “Someone get me a USB micro cable.” He looked
about the room. “Now people, I have the video!” He held up the
phone.
Someone brought the cable an they had it
copying to the server as fast as they could, a few more minutes
waiting for the upload to happen, and finally it was on it's way to a
projector and being displayed on the white board near the
entranceway. Dan turned off the office lights to get a better look at
the screen and they started the video. Some lucky people got the
video in parts before it stuttered to a stop and one or two managed
to cache a download and got that uploaded to other sites promptly.
The FBI were watching the video about the same time as some of the
alternate sites atrted to host it. Blake and Jacob also got a copy to
a mobile phone, and this was loaded to the Facts Alone site, which
promptly crashed due to traffic demands when someone tweeted they had
the video on there.
The video according to the progress bar was
only two minutes long. The quality was grainy and blocky but clear
enough to be seen. The size had obviously been optimized for the
phone transmission and it made Levy think about the time it would
take to process such a thing. The scene was black and the words faded
in:
Episode 10
Series One Finale
The two chairs were not there, instead there
were two hospital gurney arrangements and each man was strapped quite
heavily into position, slightly upright so that the camera could see
them as if they were standing upright, but were on an incline in
relation to the floor. Each man had an intravenous tube attached to
each arm, so that the four lines were snaking across the screen and
showing that the men were clearly lined up and immobile as the tubes
were unmoving.
Below each man was a clock graphic and a
counter, the clock fast forwarded through the 72 hour time period and
the votes moved up and down according to the time, sometimes moving
backwards as if the votes were being adjusted by something the
lessened the numbers only to rise again later. In fifteen seconds the
3 days had been sped through and then the final ten seconds slowed
down to a ten second countdown and the numbers eventually stopped as
the countdown ceased, at the same point that the website counter had
and the decision was made.
The tubes on the Simpson table lit up and the
bright fluid, obviously dyed to make it look more dramatic or maybe
to just make it visible, quickly moved up the tubing in each arm and
into the veins of Evan Simpson. Nothing happened for a few seconds
and then the body started convulsing rapidly and straining against
the bonds holding it to the table, but despite the bucking of his
limbs they held fast and after a short few seconds the convulsions
stopped and the graphic that showed his name changed to:
Evan Simpson, Murderer: Lethal Injection, by
Popular Vote.
The scene changed to a shot obviously recorded
earlier of Evan Simpson strapped to the chair and looking at a
monitor, on it was the increasing number of people voting for him
versus John Vargas. Tears are dribbling on his cheeks as he looks at
the numbers, in the tens of millions of people that want him to die.
The last shot of this is him nodding and sitting his head back in the
chair, looking resigned to his fate.
The scene changes again and the gurney is
still, and for the first time a person other than the players is seen
on screen. That figure is in a Hazmat suit and is carrying a medical
injection gun, standing over the gurney that holds John Vargas. He
holds the gun up to the camera and taps the barrel and then leans
over and puts the Injection Gun to Vargas's arm, and gives him a
shot. Then he repeats the procedure with the other arm, and then a
shot to each leg high on the thigh.
The screen fades to black and then new writing
appears with thirty seconds left on the video duration.
A radioactive isotope tracer has been injected
into the winner
The subject will be released within the hour
follow this website to see a live location
marker
The text stays there as the video runs out the
last few seconds and stops.
Agent Levy is snapping his fingers, and issuing
instructions. “Get a chopper up now, we need to be in the air as
soon as the location is released. We need to get there ahead of
everyone else!” as he starts calling in the resources they will
need, the office explodes into action.
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