Deciding

Deciding, originally uploaded by Aaron Dodd.

Another play with photographing projected shots. I'm not sure I like the composition so much but its a start.

Crinkled (Self Portrait)

Crinkled (Self Portrait), originally uploaded by Aaron Dodd.

A projection of a self portrait over crinkled wrapping paper, re-photographed.

Closeup

Closeup, originally uploaded by Aaron Dodd.

I'm experimenting with re-photographing pictures. This is a re-photograph of a self portrait projected over top a pencil drawing of the same.

Broken

Broken, originally uploaded by Aaron Dodd.

Chief Inspector Maiken Ludvigsen

Something that's been sitting until I did some revisions tonight...its tied loosely to some existing snippets, I'm trying different angles of an idea I've outlined but not yet gotten the focus to fully dive into.

Chief Inspector Maiken Ludvigsen pushed a stack of files to the edge of her desk, ignoring the stapler and pens that fell.  She sipped her coffee as she flipped open the folder it had been resting on and wiped the ring of coffee from its cover with her sleeve.  In the corner of her office, the unranked military hack stood sulking and she could feel his eyes and their disapproval.  This made her smile all the more genuine when she looked up at the young Lieutenant that came with him and the file she pretended indifference towards.  Neither had given their names when they barged into her office, which amused her since she already had their full biographies before they’d made it out of the elevator.  Well, a full bio on the lieutenant at least, but the lack of information on the other was in itself telling.  The adversarial stance to intimidate her was cute.

“I still don’t see why you boys think this is any of my business,” she said.  “Protecting the President of the Coalition of Remnant Nations is CRN Military jurisdiction.  As is any investigation of their failure.”  She flashed a conciliatory smile when the lieutenant shifted his weight.

He opened his mouth, but it was the one without rank that spoke.  “Less games.  More talk.”

“I see both manners and multi-syllabic speech are no longer requirements for service,” she said.  She sighed then flipped through the file quickly.  It had was nothing her people hadn’t already downloaded from the military network.  In fact, it was missing quiet a bit, but since this was stamped “classified” she made a passing attempt to look interested.  When she was “done” she willed her chair to pull back and hovered over to her coffee maker.  From her periphery she watched the lieutenant’s discomfort as he saw her complete form.  Her green coloration got the initial reaction from people who didn’t know her.  To his credit he had no reaction on entering her office, but even those fully aware of her condition rarely hid their repulsion when first seeing her shriveled legs and the chair grafted into her back and torso.  His companion, however, was as stoic as the wall.  He was definitely the one in charge here, and likely not from any of the standard service branches.

“Coffee?” she asked, reaching for two cups.

“Ah, no,” he said.  “Thanks.”

“You?” she nodded to the wallflower.  He only glowered.

“Ma’am,” the Lieutenant said, “We know you’ve been investigating the assassination anyway.  We just want to cooperate.  Trade notes.”

“I get the impression from your friend over there that our ‘cooperation’ isn’t a choice.”

“He’s, ah, he’s an interested party, nothing more.  If we could just go over a few of the details—”

She waved him silent and tapped her armrest.  “Dobson,” she said.  “We have some friends from CRN military that would greatly appreciate it if you could bring them some coffee.  Perhaps the same brew we just discussed?”

“Of-of course,” came a nervous young man’s reply.

“Ma’am, I really don’t—”

“I insist,” she said.  “Now, lets start with what you know about the blast.  What you’ve left out of the official report.”

The two traded glances.  Wallflower nodded and the Lieutenant glanced at his feet.  “We know it’s not conventional,” he said.

“Obviously,” she said as she hovered over to the round table in her office and motioned both to have a seat.  Only the Lieutenant complied.

“Initial scans showed massive energy output but we can only find one blast site.”

She nodded.

“The amount of energy required to vaporize the entire lower five floors plus basement level and to leave that crater would take several mini-van sized transports loaded with conventional explosives.”

“That was our analysis too,” she said.  “But obviously there weren’t several minivans parked in the reception hall next to the President’s podium.”

He smiled, “Right.  And there’s no radiation traces to indicated nuclear or M-Tech.  So the question is—”

The door opened and Jeremy Dobson walked in, paused a moment when the man by the door rested his hand on his sidearm, then brushed past and placed a tall coffee cup on the table.

The Lieutenant waved him away.  “I really am not interested.”

“You’ll like this cup,” she said flatly.

He raised an eyebrow, then picked it up.  It slipped out of his grasp and thudded to the table.  Picking it back up, he turned it in slowly.  “Its quite heavy for coffee.  But if you’re going to tell me this is what exploded you do know there was a complete transmission  dampener in effect, and with no published agenda a timer would have been very haphazard.”  He stopped and looked at a small glass knob on the side of the cup.

“Jeremy Dobson,” she said making formal introductions, “is our resident electronics expert.”  She nodded for him to continue.

“Right, right,” he said.  “Its a coffee cup, standard size and from a common big brand store.  Same type of cup any number of dignitaries would be drinking from.  In fact, the president himself had a small coffee from the same chain and—”

The Lieutenant raised an eyebrow.  “There were no transmissions in or out,” he said, staring at her.

Jeremy stammered a moment.  “Quite right,” he said.  “I uh, well this is a mockup, of course.  Inert.  I’m using a lead and ceramic mixture to approximate the density of the explosive, not that we’ve identified the compound as yet but—”

The man against the wall walked over and took the cup.  “A explosive the size of a coffee cup created a crater the size of a football field?  I think I’d like to see this compound of yours.  And I’d like to know how you obtained it from a quarantined crime scene.”

“Information,” the Chief Inspector said.  “Is all we’re sharing.  For now.  Jeremy?”

“Uh, yea.  Right, its pretty nasty stuff of course and yes you’re right, there’s no timer or receiver.  It wasn’t triggered by anyone directly.”

The Lieutenant tapped the glass knob.  “Optical sensor?”

“Yes, its the same thing you find in high end camera equipment.  Its a flash slave, designed to be triggered by a remote camera flash, a way to synchronize multiple light sources.”

The two men exchanged a look. 

“Yes,” she said smiling.  “The fire alarm.”

“We tore through the entire system looking for a hack,” the lieutenant said.  “Its clean.  No remote triggers, no timers, no unexplained energy readings.”

Jeremy said, “That’s because no one hacked the fire alarm.  There’d have been no need.”

The Lieutenant cocked his head.  “And all fire alarm panels are watched, none were pulled.  We have the footage.”  After a moment’s hesitation, “An actual fire?”

“An actual fire,” she said. 

“We’ve found no other evidence of burns aside from the explosion itself, and any attempt to start a fire anywhere that day would have been seen, if not by surveillance or the building’s AI, then by any number of reporters or dignitaries.”

“Surely the whole building isn’t that insecure,” she said.  “Surveillance nor the AI extend into, say, the bathrooms.  Or the President’s quarters.”

“The bathrooms are staffed for that purpose.  And the President’s quarters are sealed, only he and his private guard have the access codes.  His guard do routine sweeps hourly.”

“Including his bathroom?” she asked.

The wallflower grunted, then said, “Why do I get the feeling you know who did this and how?”

“Not who,” she said.  “Only how.  The personal guard sweep his suite every hour but they only check that his bathroom is locked.  It is, in fact, the only place in the entire building not actively seen by someone on a regular basis.  The President was delayed that day on arrival and never made use of his suite.  Someone planned that, and took advantage of it to set off something in the bathroom.  Something small, possibly itself on a timer to go off near the assumed start of the speech, and probably not a real fire but only an approximation of a fire’s air ionization, just enough to trigger the alarm but not enough to alert a passing heat scan.  It didn’t need to be accurate, within half an hour or so would be fine.  This means it could have been planted days in advance.  I doubt any longer than that unless this speech wasn’t really a last minute decision as was said.  Then, someone with access to the event itself walks in, mingles with the crowd while pretending to sip on a coffee.  Close to the time the speech is to start, he or she sets the cup down with the sensor facing the fire alarm and then excuses himself or herself.  Then leaves the building.”

The Lieutenant smiled.  “So, we’re looking for someone who left the building just before the speech?  That’s easy, building is on lockdown from thirty minutes before until after the President leaves.  No one left and we’ve crawled up the asses of every survivor, much to the consternation of member nations.”

“That was our determination as well,” she said, sighing.  “But someone had to, unless we’re talking a suicide bomber, which I doubt.  That sort of religious fervor died out in the last war and I don’t think any hired gun with this sort of skill would be willing to die for something as mundane as politics.  But, without access to the building’s AI or satellite coverage of the time, we can’t rule that out nor can we help find someone leaving by unconventional means.”

“So, you want access to military networks and AI?” the Lieutenant asked with a laugh.

His companion said, “I think she means more access.”

She stared impassively at the two of them.

The Lieutenant clasped his hands together and thought for a few moments.  He glanced to the other man who nodded.  He sighed and said, “Okay, what the hell,” and slid a tablet out of his bag.  He tapped the screen and then nodded to her.

She pressed the table’s surface.  A set of controls displayed overlaid on the marble and she began tapping.  The wall to their left shimmered and the window, clock, and painting disappeared replaced by a ceiling-to-floor display.  She pulled up feeds from the building’s security net as well as its floor-by-floor scans.  They tracked back from the moment of the explosion to a day prior but found nothing.

She nodded to Jeremy, who smiled, sat down, and eagerly started scrolling through the data.  Within a few minutes he discarded most of the footage and scans, narrowing down to a minute and ten seconds of time about three minutes from the explosion.  The images started fluctuating, the colors changing seemingly at random and switching between normal, infrared, radiological, and various other scan types until he said, “Bingo!”

The other three stared at the screen as a circle surrounded a blip on the seventh floor.  It zoomed in, but there was nothing there.

“I don’t understand,” the Lieutenant said.  “There’s nothing there.”

“Exactly,” Jeremy said.  “Absolutely nothing shows up on scans.  And that nothing is moving.”

“Chameleon field?” the wallflower asked.

“More advanced.  Even that registers as distortion on certain scans.  This is just emptiness on everything.  Here,” he adjusted the view and all the scans collapsed into one jumbled view with everything incoherent aside from the building’s outline and a perfectly blank oval shape proceeding down a hall, through a door, to a window, then gone.  “Its too perfect and only works because no one usually looks for a complete absence of scan data.”

The Lieutenant stared at the screen, then started tapping on his tablet.  “You have sat images now, can you track that?” 

“No problem,” he said and the image shifted to an outside view from above, zoomed in and panned to the window.  “We have less scans available, but enough to track it I think.”  The image zoomed back out and he put a dot where the oval was then advanced the feed.  The dot fell, seemed to land on the sidewalk, then moved at a very fast running speed for a few blocks and down several alleys before Jeremy said, “Ah we got him.”  The image wavered to a close up of the alley.  A form shimmered into existence, shook its hair, then glanced around before walking into a building.  The image zoomed in further to just the head and rewound.  The four of them watched as the form shimmered in again, shook its hair, and then a woman’s face turned and stared almost exactly up at them.

Chief Inspector Maiken Ludvigsen gasped.

The wallflower turned and with the first smile she’d seen from him said, “Would you care to explain why your sister assassinated the President?”

Pantograph Lines, Reflected

Pantograph Lines, Reflected, originally uploaded by Aaron Dodd.

A rain-puddle reflection of the Jersey City Light Rail's pantograph lines.

Deconstruction

Deconstruction, originally uploaded by Aaron Dodd.

An abandoned building being torn down near Liberty State Park as seen through a mud puddle.

Red leaf in front of sun

Red leaf in front of sun, originally uploaded by Aaron Dodd.

Bird in the rain

Bird in the rain, originally uploaded by Aaron Dodd.

Wrought Iron Shadow on Dusty Window

Wrought Iron Shadow on Dusty Window, originally uploaded by Aaron Dodd.

It looks to me like a mask or a scultpture; two eyes, neck, hair...

Silhoutte Through Styrofoam

Silhoutte Through Styrofoam, originally uploaded by Aaron Dodd.

Butts in Pier

Butts in Pier, originally uploaded by Aaron Dodd.

Walking along a pier I noticed cigarrette butts shoved in every nook, cranny, and crack of the wood. This is a closeup of one in the rain.

Pier Lamp

Pier Lamp, originally uploaded by Aaron Dodd.

Southstreet Seaport pier lamp as reflected in the rain.

Bird on Streetlight

Bird on Streetlight, originally uploaded by Aaron Dodd.