The sobriety chips were a way to curry favor with Alexandra. Later, the mysterious government guys returned while I was at home and Alexandra was away. They were two guys in their 30s wearing suits. NSA, I thought.
“Mr. Murphy? Hi, I’m Bob and this is Jim. Do you have some time to talk?”
“Sure. Alexandra won’t be back for a few hours.”
“Perfect. Do you mind if we record our conversation?”
“No, but I’m wondering how you’d get a tape recorder through the door. Those things are huge.”
Jim opened is briefcase in my face as if to say behold! or ta da! It was the smallest tape recorder I’d ever seen.
“How did you guys get that?”
“Nice weather we’re having today, Mr. Murphy. How about we sit at the kitchen table?”
“OK. Please, come in and have a seat.”
“Now, Mr. Murphy. Tell me a bit about yourself. Your hopes, dreams, fears, favorite color, anything you like.”
“I love olive drab, AKA Army green. I like beer, but I shouldn’t drink it anymore. Or at least drink way less. By the way, who are you guys with?”
“Uncle Sam, just like you. What makes you happy?”
“I like nature, poetry, history…just learning in general, I guess.”
“Very interesting. Ever had an IQ test?”
“Yeah, it was good but not off-the-charts good. I like to say it doesn’t matter if you have more degrees than a thermometer if you’re sharp as a marble.”
“That sounds like a Foghorn Leghorn quote.”
“Yeah, I watched a lot of cartoons as a kid. And WW2 movies.”
“Alexandra said you speak Vietnamese and Russian. How well?”
“I’d call myself fluent in Vietnamese. I can translate written Russian, but I’d need a dictionary.”
“Do you have a job? A source of income?”
“I’m unemployed, but I saved up enough in the Army that I will be OK for a while. I have few expenses.”
“What was going through mind during the incident in Amity? How did it start?”
“It was a perfect storm of stressors. I had just gotten back from Vietnam, proposed marriage, found out a dear friend died, and then was told to hitch hike 40 miles when I was hungry.”
“Anyone would feel overwhelmed in a such situation like that. Can you explain your reaction? Why you did it?”
“My threshold for fear has steadily declined my whole life and I got used to trusting my instincts in dangerous and confrontational situations.”
“That’s a great thing for combat. Do you still feel you are at war? If so, who with?”
“A fish forgets it’s in water. Maybe that’s what happened to me. My body returned from the battlefield, but my mind is still there, so to say.”
“Interesting theory. Do you mind telling me about any traumatic experiences you had?”
“The worst part was when I was chained upside down and tortured with scopolamine. I spent hours in nightmarish agony. Then I had to kill two guys quickly to escape. I stabbed and strangled the first one, stole his pistol, and shot the other. Then I ran into the jungle until I found some friendly villagers.”
“You’re an exceptionally brave and capable man. We want to help you adjust to civilian life so you can be productive and happy.”
“Sounds good to me. I’ve been working on that. I’m in therapy and AA.”
“Have you thought about teaching Russian or Vietnamese at the college in town here?”
“That could be good, but I’m under house arrest now and will be for months.”
“What if a courier brought Vietnamese or Russian documents here? Could you type up translations and reports on them? We’d pay you.”
“Sure, that would be easy. At least for me, not sure about the courier.”
“Fort Meade is not far from here, Mr. Murphy.”
“Now I know you’re NSA.”
“I see nothing gets by you.”
“I notice little things and connect the dots. It’s called hypervigilance.”
“Please elaborate.”
“You came here with an advanced piece of technology after Alexandra told me about you and your curiosity about my foreign language knowledge. You asked me questions about my personality and intelligence and then mentioned Fort Meade. Putting all that together makes it clear you work for NSA.”
“How did you learn to think like that?”
“I read all the Sherlock Holmes stories as a kid and tried to apply them in real life. I got very good at it after a few years.”
“Have you ever had a polygraph test? Are you willing to take 1?”
“I’ve heard of them but have never taken one. I’m open to it.”
“We can do it here. It’s important for the subject to be in a quiet, comfortable place.”
“This place is very quiet late at night on weekdays. And I’m a night owl anyway.”
“All well and good. We’re very interested in bringing you on board. You’d be contributing to national defense and the battle against communism.”
“I like the sound of that. And my schedule is wide open.”
“How about this? We’ll come back a week from now. It’s called a full-scope polygraph, meaning will be asking you about many aspects of your life.”
“I have no problem with that.”
“Well then, it was very nice meeting you and we’ll see you next week. Have a nice day.”
And so they left. Later that day, Alexandra returned.
“Those government guys came again today. I spoke with them. I was right. They are with NSA.”
“What did they say?”
“They asked me some questions and scheduled a polygraph here for next week.”
“What is that and how do you feel about it?”
“It’s sometimes called a lie detector test. I feel good about it. I’ve been through far worse. Not worried a bit. How was your day?”
I was expecting a very detailed answer. Every word she spoke and who with, etc. A minute-by-minute account of her day.
“Do you really care or are you just trying to be nice?”
“It’s the thought that counts, isn’t it?”
“Do you really believe that?”
“It depends. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
“And the human fortune cookie strikes again.”
“How did you learn all these snappy comebacks?”
“Short answer, mean girls in Catholic school.”
“Sounds like a verbal bloodbath. Glad you survived. What are we eating for dinner?”
“I’ve been at the college library most of the day researching Vietnam. I found a few recipes. Want to try them?”
“Fabulous idea, though I didn’t cook anything over there.”
“Not a problem. All you have to do is eat and tell me if it tastes right.”
Hmmm, I never got the story, I’m too deranged I guess
It’s an interesting coincidence that the FBI came to my apartment to question me about 2 months after I wrote this, though I don’t think this story is the reason.
I got counterintelligence polygraph back in the spring of 2018 right before I started working at NSA. That one is short and only has 4 or 5 questions. Full-scope polygraphs are sort of the ask-me-anything variety, which I imagined in this installment.
My first day at my new teaching job was postponed on account of a storm. It rained all last night and most of today. No flooding near me though.
Jeez, good on ya, take care
Congratulations on the teaching job Derpe.
Democrats stuck on an escalator:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWttKddn_Hw
That’s fantastic
Good morning all.
Stolen from the old “Why did the two rednecks drown in a pickup that ran off into the bayou? They couldn’t get the tailgate down.
*Dont know how many of y’all know but it used to be common for people to ride in the back of pickup trucks.
The joke is funny but what is even funnier is that a substantial percentage of Dems probably wouldn’t get it.
I can see a time, given our current DEI trajectory, when people who refuse to ride elevators would no longer be thought of as having irrational fears.
The Lift
While it may seem funny to us, when my brother was in decline he got locked “in” his truck on the passenger side. That was the day his wife/kids took his keys away. He was 75 at the time, died a year later.
Congrats again on your new job!
The story has taken a dark twist. Going to an alphabet agency? I did not see that coming.
Still has the return to VN and then AFG…
The NSA guys should both be named Bob.
Not Daryl?
Good morning, everyone. I was super busy yesterday and couldn’t post much (if at all), but I wanted to drag something in from Animal’s latest story.
As a result, the Sonntag Nebula was surrounded with a series of hyperphone warning beacons and placed legally off-limits to travel by civilian vessels.
This sort of situation in sci-fi always stretches verisimilitude to the breaking point for me, because of math and physics. If you wanted to put signs around a spot on the ground to keep people out, you can do that way easier than if you wanted to put signs equally spaced apart around a point in space, given the same radius from the points in question.
Let’s say you just want that radius to be a mile in both cases. If you just had to ward a circle, you have to cover 2πr of distance — in this case, still 6.28 miles. If you want to ward a sphere, it’s now 4πr^2 of area, in this case 12.56 square miles of area you have to place beacons. Scale that up to astronomical units of measurement (a parsec is roughly 3.26 lightyears long, for example), then you’re talking some seriously large regions of space to cover. Surely the beacons are emitting a signal of some sort for ship sensors to pick up, so that mitigates the number you would need. But you still have to consider three dimensions.
Then there’s the problem of positional stability. Everything in space is moving in some direction or another. The galaxy is traveling in a more or less straight line away from the Big Bang, everything in the galaxy is rotating around the galactic center of mass, planets and stars are rotating around their own centers of mass, and moons and planets rotate around their centers of mass. So dropping beacons around anything means those beacons cannot just sit still, but have to move along with whatever they’re warning against. It’s possible you can drop enough beacons around that all orbit the nebula but then that leaves the possibility of ‘gaps’ forming in the protective net, so you need to have more than otherwise. Or you give each beacon a propulsion system and some kind of fuel source and have them constantly maintaining the same relative position to the thing they’re warding and each other, which is fine if you make substantial energy out of the vacuum of space or something.
To me, it always made more sense for whatever interstellar governments that exist to merely make it known that the area in question is dangerous on all of the galactic star charts they make. I’d imagine any ship being built will have information on known galactic point of interest loaded into the computers before it’s ready for its first launch. Even an illicit ship builder is probably going to use readily available information for the ships they might make.
Ultimately I should just shut up and keep reading, but scenes like this always break immersion for me.
In fact, I would love it if some author writing up such a situation would say “The government initially thought to put warning buoys around the Zone of You No Go Here, but once a physicist grabbed a calculator and showed them how much area they’d have to cover and how they’d have to create a virtual Oort Cloud of beacons swarming around the Zone like a flock of space gulls, they decided to just mark a note on every galactic star chart they provided to all the ship builders in the quadrant and instructed them all to force an update whenever any ship came in for repairs.”
My car gets over the air updates. You telling me a spaceship wouldn’t have similar capabilities?
But seriously, why do you hate the hyperphone makers?
My grandpappy was a superphone technician and hyperphones took his job.
I own stock in the Ansible Manufacturers.
Those beacons would be powered by renewable solar and wind.
suh’ fam
Hey from lovely Youngstown, OH
TALL STEEL MILL CANS!
Good morning, homey, Grumble, Suthen, Chip, and Ted’S.!
Good morning.
Morning.
Good morning, U! And how are both you gentlemen this fine day?
It is a cooler, drizzly day out, but my washing machine has developed a very loud spin cycle I can’t easily attribute.
I both need my upcoming vacation and am not ready for it.
Morning. Was up in Dayton to get a quote on some repainting for the truck. Nice little downtown area, too many homeless at 3pm.
Good morning, OBE! You’re right about the homeless. And I bet there was a panhandler at every highway exit.
Really too bad. That Oregon District has real potential and maybe mid-day isn’t the best time. I will admit, we parked and were approached with a sad story about something or another…we stepped into a store for a minute and moved where we were parked to be closer to our destination: The Troll Pub.
Which…food was terrible, but service for the one beer we had was good. The one in Louisville is much better.
Yeah, the Oregon District is really known for nightlife. Of course, there’s always some tension between the bars/patrons and the residents in the lovely old homes on the adjacent streets.
Good morning you lovely people!
🌞☕🍳🎩
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qkk5wViJo-I
🎶🎶
Good morning, Sean! What’s on the agenda for today?
Same thing we do every day – try to take over the world.
I rewatched the original Animaniacs and amazing how much they skewered the industry. Barely a joke was for children.
More off-road action. Today is the RZR.
And some glass making demonstration.
Not sure what else. I don’t plan our schedule.
https://www.wfmz.com/entertainment/festival/musikfest/spotted-at-musikfest-rare-mythical-musical-saxsquatch-comes-out-to-play-on-the-southside/article_9fa74480-539b-11ef-b52a-b7ca5f591847.html
Sax Smith.
“Air Marshal National Council says Tulsi Gabbard has been put on a watchlist of “suspected domestic terrorists” by the Biden-Harris admin, has multiple agents follow her every time she flies”
https://notthebee.com/article/air-marshall-whistleblowers-reveal-tulsi-gabbard-is-being-surveilled-on-a-watchlist-of-suspected-domestic-terrorists-by-the-bidenharris-administration/
Not much on this out there but heard Taibbi talking about it and he says the story looks legit. Cut the funding and throw the involved agents in prison…the dogs too.