The Hunt for Knowledge

Jude was not entirely convinced he could figure it out. He wasn't really a computer expert or anything. But he took the offered hard drive anyway, looking it over and considering. If it really did have access to the code... Well, he wasn't entirely convinced it was a glitch. That was too obscure a glitch.

More like an offering. A puzzle. Something like that.

"Alright. I might not be able to do it immediately. I'll look into it, and... I don't know, get back to you this weekend with what I find?"

Jude spent the next few days reading. Not even looking at the puzzle. Because once he'd pulled a spare computer out at the school and plugged it in, he'd gotten a massive wall of numbers. He'd read through the whole thing, handed them off to Giltenn, and then he'd gone on with his life.

Giltenn spent time crunching. Considering possible ciphers. Decoding. Jude had his classwork, reading through textbooks for the coming school year so he'd have more free time later, and more or less didn't peek back in it.

Or at least he didn't until Giltenn told him they'd figured it out.

theredking.

That wasn't a coincidence.

Jude popped the hard drive back into one of the school's computers, punching in the password to see what it gave him.

It was nostalgic. He'd done something similar, once upon a time, and he regretted the loss of all those files. Regretted that his perfect memory hadn't existed at the time, and so many details had been lost.

He wished he could have remembered the exact things his father had said in those files.

The idea that Altizica was connected to the facility was not terribly surprising to Jude. If he was going to guess, he'd assume that Altizica had been summoned to earth by the facility. Maybe to stay. Maybe only temporarily.

But Aren had asked for his own file, so Jude had focused on that, skimming the file and finding the general overview. Very little he didn't already know.

Of course, he had a massive hard drive, so the first thing Jude did was flip over - searching for facility theta and the incident labelled 13PA.

So Altizica had eaten the facility. Good to know. He filed that mental note away for later, but he wasn't sure how relevant it would actually be. Aren would probably know about him, but... god, Jude realized. Was this going to be another Syrra? Another person who Altizica had eaten the friends of?

He pinched at the bridge of his nose for a moment, and then turned to 13PA.

The trick with flashing things up was that Jude knew them. His memory was perfect. No one else could have read it, but all Jude had to do was see something, and then he could just rewind it in his brain to read the whole thing.

Which he absolutely would, frowning at the screen and it's little message.

Giltenn was good and irritated at that.

It was a lot of information, but Jude would have had a hard time calling it good. It just was, and without a grander context, he didn't know what to do with it.

So instead, he texted Aren, letting him know where to meet--a little park not far from the school--and then went to wait, the hard drive in hand.