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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 4957418" data-attributes="member: 143">Interlude: Buzz Olloff (Week of May 13-18, 2008)It had come to him in the shower: a clear image of the alien navigation control panel. Buzz sat in his bunk dripping wet, a towel loosely laying over his lap. He was enthralled with the alien symbols he saw before him that felt like a pattern, like a new code that needed to be hacked. The adrenaline of the realization that he could decipher the symbols made his mind sharpen to a level of focus that not many could achieve. He tapped the buttons on the on his xPhone.  The little device had considerable power, and he’d been hacking it since a few minutes after he’d first gotten it.  Over that time he’d improved its function considerably.  He hoped it would be enough to run the three algorithms he had in mind simultaneously. He knew that the alien language could be deciphered, but he couldn’t guess how many hours it would take. It was a risk to overclock a device as small as the handheld, but he was used to taking risks, and he didn’t want to expose his work to the X-COM network, not yet. As soon as the program was running, he got a tone indicating that he had a new e-mail.  Switching the language program to the background, he opened it up to see a message from Joan Beauvois.  It was addressed to the entire team, not just to him. He shook his head.  Maybe he shouldn’t have hacked Inise Drake’s account, or used her information from the Social Security Database to open up a credit card in her name.  X-COM’s network had supposedly been secure, with a potent firewall limiting access to the World Wide Web, but he’d gotten around that by the end of his second day here.  Once he had Drake’s personal information, he’d opened up one of his old hacks from back in the day, a backdoor into Vicky’s Online Adult Novelties.  Five thousand dollars of purchases, overnight delivery of course, a quick wipe to cover his tracks…If she’d put some of the things he’d sent her to use, maybe she wouldn’t be such a…  Ah well, in hindsight, maybe it had been juvenile.  After seeing Drake’s messages about security breaches, it looked like she hadn’t taken the joke very well.  Still, there was no chance—almost no chance—that they’d trace anything back to him.  This wasn’t his first time he’d used the Internet and his hacking abilities to deliver a comeuppance to someone who deserved it.  The two feds had found the alien device he’d kept in his locker, but it didn’t matter.  He’d already stored the important data he’d need in a few places.  And there was one database they’d never raid, no matter how many head-shrinkers they turned on him.  With a smirk, he turned over and went to sleep, letting his xPhone do his work for now. * * * * * A few days passed.  First Catalina returned to the duty rotation, then Vasily, still a bit tentative in the way he moved.  Buzz was wary of the Russian at first, for he’d heard that he’d been treated using the new medical techniques derived from the alien biological technology.  His own scars had healed completely, but he still rubbed at them sometimes, a gesture that had become almost subconscious. Buzz’s optimism was always short-lived, and multiple failures in decoding the language had depleted the best of his most useful algorithms.  But he tossed and turned in his sleep every night since viewing the alien control panel.  It had gotten so bad that Cat had threatened to strap him to the bed to keep him still so she could sleep.  That unnerved him.  The woman slept on the other side of the room, so he knew his thrashing must be disturbing them all. He went to bed that night trying to think of anything else but aliens and code, hoping he would not disturb the others.  But yet again, around midnight he awoke with a start.  Images had pulled together in his head and he just knew why he had been unable to crack the language. He jumped out of bed and flew, not so quietly, out of the room and headed for the computer in the community room.  After agent Drake's email he hadn’t dared tamper with the network settings on his xPhone.  He pulled up all the pictures everyone had taken of the alien interior focusing on the different views of the control panel he had so voraciously tried to decipher…it is not words at all!"It can't be." he said aloud.  His mind sharpened and his fingers flew across the keyboard typing unnaturally fast. "Who would have thought that Google Earth would help in battling aliens!"  He typed in the pattern he’d derived from the symbols depicted on the alien display, and zoomed to the points he had entered.  He clicked back to the images of the alien control panel again,  somewhat befuddled.  Then he looked back to where Google Earth had stopped.  "Shasta County, California.  What in the hell is there?"  His overlay on Google Earth pointed out critical sites, power stations, infrastructure, military bases.  The rural part of northern California did not seem to have anything important, as far as he could determine.  But he was sure that his instincts were right.  He ran to wake up his companions. Entering the barracks, he yelled, "Hey guys!  Guys! It's not language!  It’s numbers!"  He shook the bunk beds, "It’s numbers!  Numbers, guys!  Coordinates!"  He smiled, pleased with himself.</blockquote>

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