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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Audrik" data-source="post: 7517335" data-attributes="member: 73653">Observer Effect - Session 1cAn external security kiosk stood outside the concrete wall. It was manned by a single guard – a fit Hispanic man in his forties whose name tag on his khaki uniform identified him as Officer Gonzales. The man smiled out from beneath a tan Stetson hat as he approached the sedan. He checked ID badges and returned to the security kiosk. A few moments later, the steel gate slid open. Gonzales gave the agents a thumbs-up.Beyond the gate, a short drive through the woods led to a wide, paved clearing with a small, gravel parking lot to the right. There was a large, main building with another security kiosk outside the front doors, and beyond that was what Inspector Hua said was the Array itself. The Array consisted of a cluster of small, plain concrete buildings connected by an intersecting set of 60-foot-long tubes arranged in a ‘T’ shape.The agents hadn’t noticed security cameras outside the wall, but inside, they were everywhere, and they were obvious. They decided to check in at the second security kiosk. This one had a bank of video screens, and as they approached, the woman monitoring those screens came out to greet them. She was in her thirties, and while she was polite, she wasn’t quite as cheerful as Gonzales had been. She identified herself as Officer Henson, and she checked IDs just as Gonzales had.Once Officer Henson confirmed everything was in order, she told them where to find Dr. Campbell’s office. Dempsey and Inspector Hua followed the directions and entered the main building through the front door. Clark and de Jaager asked to see security footage for the day. Officer Henson made a quick call to Dr. Campbell’s office to clear the request before showing them to the security kiosk and the bank of monitors.Even at 4x speed, a full day of recording from a dozen cameras would take more time and attention than they could spare, but fortunately for the agents, they could limit their search to the time between two specific points. They checked the grainy footage starting at 10:00 AM, and at the moment the Array was activated, every camera showed nothing but static for a few seconds.To a less-tech savvy observer, it might be easily overlooked, but Clark and de Jaager were both computer guys. To them, the static stood out as strange. If the signal had been dropped, there would be no image at all, just blank frames. The static meant electromagnetic interference, but there didn’t appear to be anything strange happening at the time.Once the video feeds resumed, everything appeared normal. There were static interruptions again at 11:05:47, 12:11:34, 13:17:21, and 14:23:08. The timecoding on the security footage evidently used the 24-hour clock. Each static interruption lasted for a few seconds each time. At 15:28:55 – while the agents were nearing the end of the operational briefing – the feed went black, but the black screens still showed the same static interference for a few seconds. That shouldn’t happen if the power surge had knocked out all the electronics and the cameras weren’t operational, and yet, there it was.The video feed resumed at 15:50:58 when power was restored. At that point, the camera in the engineers’ office showed a man sleeping or unconscious on a couch. Officer Henson identified him as Dr. Takagawa, one of two engineers at the Array. One other thing stood out to de Jaager: someone was missing. Before the power surge, there had been eight people on-site, six staffers and two security guards. Now, there were seven.Clark rolled the footage back to just before the power surge, paused, and counted. De Jaager was right. A woman was exiting the lab just before the surge, and when power was restored, she was gone. Officer Henson identified her as Dr. Helen Klinger and said she hadn’t seen Dr. Klinger leave. Dolf asked her to radio Gonzales at the front gate, and Gonzales said nobody had left the facility. That meant this Dr. Klinger was on the Array grounds in an inconspicuous place, or she had actually disappeared.De Jaager thanked Officer Henson for her time and tried to keep her attention while Clark made a few quick clicks and keystrokes. He was able to find out the computer had a subroutine in its programming which would transmit the day’s footage to a particular IP address at midnight every night and then delete the oldest day of stored footage. It stored 72 hours of footage at any given time. Clark made note of the IP address, and then he, too, thanked Officer Henson for her time.</blockquote>

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