Chapter 10

Bermuda

Hour upon mind-numbing hour Suz had scrolled through the evidence of her father’s destructions. Records of troop decimations had left data holes like uncovered manholes in the street, you’re walking along just fine and then suddenly, nothing. Whoosh! You’re gone and that’s the last anyone hears of you.

It was easy to select for all the places where data had dropped abruptly to zero in a home or business. It was harder to pick out the ones that were the actions of her father’s WEC troops and his campaign to cleanse the human race. People moved. Businesses failed. The WEC murdered. All three left the same footprint in the world of data.

Maybe she should give up this plan, but it was the only one she’d come up with so far. Find someone that her father hadn’t completely destroyed, and help them out. Place quiet, careful patches upon a society that was being torn and shredded from within by her rabid parent.

Suz stopped. Had she just missed something? Scrolling upward through the data revealed over a decade of increasing activity and then three to four years of flatline. No data. But there’d been a break in the pattern. She’d simply missed it in the downward scroll.

There. A tiny blip, but a blip nonetheless. After two years of zero activity, there was a small surge of data. She called up the detail. A small ecological station in the South American rainforest. Biological journals were being viewed at a surprising rate by a single user.

The detail on the user. According to the WEC’s databases, whoever the reader was, she’d been dead for two years. Jackpot. Someone had come back from the dead and was studying trophic relationships, whatever they were, from the center of the jungle.

The woman’s record noted that she resisted questioning during criminal investigation regarding an unregistered family member. Perhaps this wasn’t someone risen from the grave of the deep jungle. This could be the unregistered. It was hard to imagine anybody avoiding that particular requirement of modern society. Where had the unregistered been for two years without the need to access transport, credit, or communications? Of course, safe in the heart of the jungle.

Whoever this person was, she was a survivor. A fellow survivor. It was time Suz sent a little help her way. What did someone living alone in the jungle need? More titles flashed onto her screen: “Mid-story Abiotic Relationships of the Upper Amazon,” “Feeding Criteria of the Venezuelan Losie,” “Evolution of Lecythis.”

This unregistered survivor was continuing their research. Perhaps they needed a research assistant. It only took a half dozen searches to find the perfect person. A Minsk University biologist might find it odd to have his grant request changed from Ecuador to the Upper Orinoco River in Venezuela, but no grad student would turn down a grant. And Suzie’s soft heart wanted to send a young man to the woman of the jungle. Suz wondered if Robbie Enlara might have an interesting spring.