Day 59 - Darwin's Game - Chapter 8 (1965 words)

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DARWIN'S GAME

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 8

A mammoth effort had taken several hours, a couple of lawyers and reporters calling from the major news media outlets before they were let go again, there were no charges laid. By the time that Jacob and Blake were released from custody, and that was the next day, the new episode had been seen by everyone else except they themselves. They waited as various interrogators, all watched the video before questioning them, and the demands of their lawyers for charges were met with stony silence as they considered their options for charging them with some very minor crimes versus the uproar of the heavy handed nature of the FBI to ostensibly suppress information obviously in the public interest.

They came of out the Federal offices to a welcoming crowd of questions, flashes and accusations, none of which hit home at all. They were no strangers to the arrogance and bullying nature of a free press, it was this very behaviour that drove them to make Facts Alone the organisation that it was. Just because they were concerned with the facts, without the commentary, without the baseless assumptions and without the presumption of guilt over innocence, it meant nothing to the opposition.

That was how Blake and Jacob referred to the press, not as competition, but the opposition. The polar reverse of what they wanted to do and what they believed in. Facts Alone wanted the medium to be a secondary concern to the message, in this case the news, but in stripping away as much of the medium's influence as possible to deliver a purer form of content where that delivery mechanic did it's best not to shape that message, but to deliver it uncut by opinion and bias. To that end there was a lot of news that did not get reported and the facts that were assumptions or extrapolations were mostly avoided. Ultimately in the desire to divorce the mechanism from the object it delivered they played right into the paradigm of that being a message in itself, but hoped once that simplest of messages (don't look at me, look at my message) then the focus would be back on that which was actually news.

Of course it was not plain sailing and they copped as much flak for perceived breaches of their own intentions from the people who were diametrically opposed to having unfiltered news being delivered to the public.

Darwin's Game was an interesting diversion for them and they understood why they had been targeted and chosen as the port of call for delivering the content, they were in the middle of the road and above all carried no extra content to bring context. Neither right nor left, fact and fact alone was what they were all about. In this case though they were unsure, as were the traditional media that Facts Alone fitted with the unstated expectations that Darwin obviously had.

Darwin had a point, he must have had a point otherwise why do it? There was no statement of intention, but each of the two quotes both from the original and most famous progenitor Charles Darwin, one of the fathers of the Theory of Evolution, along with the lesser known Alfred Wallace, though not many people would have got the reference had it been Wallace's Game of course.

Jacob and Blake did not return to the office, instead they went to Blake's apartment a block or two away from the office and swept if for bugs. Blake was a paranoid type with technology and regularly checked this residence every week, when they came up empty handed they logged onto the VPN to mask their traffic and checked out the latest episode online on their own site.

The site was straining under the traffic load, even though there were now copies promulgated all over the web, Facts Alone did nothing to protect their news feeds, they wanted the facts out there unfiltered and unfettered, so standing in the way of sharing the details was antithetical to their beliefs of better and less cluttered news. They had seen the charts, the tables with mountains of facts and data they had been compiling and disseminating over the last two years appear uncredited in all sorts of reputable channels, on the same shows and sometimes the same segments where they were targeted for criticism or naivete. They were used to it, it was the price you paid for cleaning up what they could, it meant nothing to the massive media machines that continued to churn out opinion dressed as fact, but that was irrelevant, it was better to do what was right to little effect that to subsume your belief system into your successes.

When the video was finished they sat back and poured themselves a drink from Blake’s liquor cabinet, finding a smoky Islay Malt, one that Blake would drink when he wanted the burning distraction that an overpowering and full experienced whiskey would bring him.

They sipped in silence and looked at each other.

“So there's ten more of these? Or is it 9?” Jacob was trying to do the maths in his head, twelve contestants, twelve episodes, or was it eleven losses and eleven episodes?

“Eleven, if he follows the patterns in the first two episodes, he may not do that, it looks to me like he wants to unsettle and surprise us, and has no intention of letting anyone run the show except him.” Blake tapped the glass absently on the arm of his replica Eames chair, feeling the comfortable style of leather and wood mixing well with the charring sensation moving through his chest.

“Do we want to go through all that again?” Jacob was smiling, despite his complaints this whole exercise was exciting and thrilling to be a part of.

Blake mulled the question over but did not reply.

“Do we even get any say in the matter?”

Blake still said nothing and they sat their a little longer thinking the future through and what it may bring for them.

Meanwhile the media machine was working overtime condemning, supporting or critiquing everyone involved. There were now Darwinian Experts that were ready to comment on the videos at a moments notice. Enterprising producers hired lip readers to determine as much as possible about what was being said in the video when there was no sound. A curious effect was discovered when the lip reader was re-watching and making notes about the dialogue that she could see. Most of it was as expected, Thomas and Jackson spent a lot of time begging the others and framing each other in the best and worst light possible. None of that was a surprise to anyone, it was exactly what anyone would do in that situation.

It did raise the question of why the sound was not provided though, when the voices were so easily replaced with a spot of judicious lip reading. Forensic specialists suggested that perhaps there were background noises in the environment, ones that could provide clues to the location. A method the FBI were well versed in when analysing ransom demands and extortion, this way Darwin was actually ensuring his own survival.

Then in the latter half of the tape, when Jackson was frustratedly accusing Thomas and trying to draw attention to how much less of an ongoing threat he was to the group by comparison, his mouth suddenly blurred out. He had been saying something, stopped mid sentence and then opened with “Here we...” then the shape of his mouth was every so subtly blurred before he came back with … sake!” and then changing tack to plead again with Wilson, minutes before his change in strategy lead to the Rest Home Killers death.

Wild speculation grew about what happened in the 2 point three seconds that his mouth was blurred, and what words he said in such a short time. Maybe he named who Darwin was, maybe he named their location, or gave another clue about the game or who was behind it all, The scene was examined and re-examined and a raft of new experts and digital effects people were brought in to decipher what happened or what was said in that short time.

People were so focussed on what may have been said, on what they didn't know about that one line and those few missing words that they stopped talking about wrong or right of the situation and spoke about what was in the gap and how it fit the narrative side they were aligning with. The next day the digital experts, the body language and lip readers were no closer to agreeing on what was in that missing period and they moved on to the second player to be eliminated, Wilson Smith.

Much had been said about the Rest Home Killer in the media over the years, while he had been originally acquitted over a lack of direct evidence, an excess of procedural abuses and mistakes by police in his case, the was undoubtedly guilty in everyone's mind. He never did a thing to contradict the impression that he got away with murder, with the exception of using his vast fortune to fight legal battles against the relatives of dead seniors, ones he had a hand in the deaths of. The estates he had inherited on their deaths were tied up in courts, but in a one or two cases they were released to him with no opposition and they funded and fuelled other defences of other inheritances.

The basic question of right or wrong was on everyone's lips, and the justice being done outside of the official channels was condemned rightly by most of the media that did not lie in wait on extreme fringe, trolling audiences with their outrageous statements.

Audiences though overwhelmingly supported the Game. While polls and on the spot questions all showed that people were concerned about the ethics and the moral right of the Game itself, every show and feature article about it rated higher than anything else on the television and internet.

They ranked numbers one through five on Google searches, and the gap between them and other topics only lengthened the more people condemned, disagreed or supported it. The position did not matter, the message did not matter, the Game was all that mattered. There were already winners and losers in the Game, they all knew it.

Now they wanted, needed, to know how it ended so it fit with their narrative for or against, now everyone was watching.

“We know who he is.” Blake finally spoke while Jacob had been reviewing the various pieces he could find in reaction to episode 2, he was not interested in anyone's views but he was interested in finding out more about Darwin and finding out who was behind it.

“What now?”

Blake had been running the scenario through his head. “He knew I would know about Arguello, he knew that I run past it daily, and I have only been doing that recently.”

“So he is watching us, and he's uber prepared none of this is news man.”

“But he knew that I knew who Arguello was, and that means he knows more about me than could be found in my Wiki page right?”

Jacob saw his point, but remained unconvinced. “He found, captured, held and manipulated twelve dangerous and heinous mean for possibly months at a time to prove his point, whatever that may be. Making educated guesses about what you know seem hardly beyond his level of ability.”

“Maybe. Or maybe he knows me, and therefore...?”

They looked at each other, neither of them saying it but both searching their mental Rolodex for potential Darwins.