Society (eBook)

Jay Middleton (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
300 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-7365991-6-7 (ISBN)

The Society, the first in a series, serves as a map for the curious, and a reminder for the enlightened. From interests in Astronomy and Geometry, Jay's subsequent works will reacquaint the reader with aspects of the Trivium and Quadrivium-aspects that will be both a source of light and something of a treasure to the perceptive reader. Revisit the past now in search of our future in The Society-it's time.

JOSEPH LOOKED out his office window as the light of dawn began to drown out the fluorescent light from the ceiling above. Feeling refreshed, he returned to his desk. The office floor was empty except for two roaming security guards. At this hour traffic in Mexico City was tolerable. His trip in was uneventful. The only distraction was from his subconscious as it routinely threw to the surface possibilities regarding what he had seen the day before. Mere fleeting thoughts like seeds unable to take root despite fertile ground. Joseph sat down and turned on his computer.

While it was booting up, he opened his leather briefcase and took out several accordion file folders. As he undid the cords keeping them closed, he paused and surveyed the office. That tugging feeling he felt in the temple he felt again. The connection was there, but he could not make the link. He entered his password, logged into the network, and launched his browser. He sat and stared; his mind was blank.

He took out his antique pocket watch, and opened the outer sterling silver case. His father had found the case in Virginia while visiting customers, and gave it to Joseph along with the pocket watch as a graduation gift. The watch was held in place by two clasps and a cover. It sat in the outer case to the right. To the left was the outer case lid. Inscribed on the inside were the four lines of the nursery rhyme Sing a song of Sixpence.

The ornate text was interesting in that certain vowels were underlined, as was the entire word song and both of the “y’s” were changed to “i’s”. Twelve piano keys, seven white and five black, starting with “C” were drawn below the last line of text. Below the keys was the word Largo. Above the five black keys were the following vowels: E, I, O, U, A. Each black key was assigned to a specific vowel—namely, C# to vowel E, etc.

As Joseph looked at the inscribed folk song,

Sing a song of Sixpence;

Pocket full of rie;

Four and twenti blackbirds,

Now baked in a pie.

he remembered that these traditionally were four lines long and were either prose or poetry. Some of them rhymed, while others were songs. They also usually contained the information within the text required to answer their implicit question or questions.

Joseph knew the two straight-forward questions: “The first, how many grains per bird? The answer is six. And the second, how many grains per pence? Twenty-four.”

Going further, he thought, “How many grains for sixpence? The answer is 144.”

Joseph paused and looked at his computer. He wondered if he still had this song on his music player. Clicking through his files he found it, and double-clicked. The melody began to play; its time signature was 2:1—two whole notes per measure. The twenty-two vowels, or notes, played as follows:

He played with the rhythm control until it was just right and then hit loop to repeat the song. As it played, he thought back to an English Literature class in which the professor kept droning on about how those who compiled the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works knew nothing about how the plays should be grouped. While others in the class were playing with magic squares, he had taken out his watch and opened the case to see if he could find anything else in the song.

Joseph remembered working with the five vowels. Assigning numbers to the underlined vowels—one for E up to five for A, he had totaled up the value of the twenty-two vowels. The total was sixty-four.

He noticed that five vowels were not underlined: “One, one, four, one, and one, nothing.”

Slightly disappointed, he continued with the measures as anything was better than the lecture. He added up the vowels of each measure … the first ten, the second six … and then started playing around with the numbers. Nothing special emerged. He then multiplied some of the measures, and got the following values: 60, 40, and 168—again nothing special.

He thought to himself, “a 2:1 time signature, twenty-two vowels, and the weight of a pence?”

Then with a concealed yawn he looked over at his neighbor’s magic square; it looked like more fun. He did one last addition: two hundred sixty-eight. Nothing, he had gone as far as he could go. Joseph then started drawing magic squares.

With a smile, he remembered musing, “If I can’t make sense of a simple nursery rhyme, how am I supposed to understand Shakespeare?”

Joseph turned off the song, closed the case, and placed the watch back in his pocket. Looking up at the wall map of Mexico City, he was quickly reminded of his meeting today with Bill. Joseph had promised to pick him up at 1:00 p.m. at the hotel for lunch.

Bill, an old friend and fellow member of the Bureau, arrived from Washington D.C. before dawn; and was currently in route to Teotihuacán to see the largest pyramids of the Americas. He was an Egyptologist and something of an amateur archeologist. Joseph felt sorry for the tour guide, as he knew Bill would relentlessly pepper him with questions regarding not only the ruins but also the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, as well.

Joseph, still distracted, checked his e-mail. As he scanned for must reply mail, his eyes stopped on the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Joseph had got added to the distribution list back in ’95 while he still worked in the U.S., but had not been able to find out how to get off the list since moving to Mexico City. The daily e-mail was a CDC summary report of the data it received from state and local health agencies reporting on infectious diseases in their area during the previous day. It told where people were sick and from what.

Joseph opened the e-mail and out of habit quickly scanned for Ebola, Marburg, Hanta, and the Black Death—nothing. Looking through the unclassified cases, he noticed several. He clicked through the links to the supporting reports. He noticed two backpackers had been found dead on the Appalachian Trail. They were found asphyxiated in their tent badly ravaged by mosquitoes.

“Likely carbon monoxide,” he thought as he opened the last e-mail from Bill.

“The flight was fine, driver found me at baggage claim, and we are off to the pyramids. See you today for lunch.”

Joseph replied, and then closed his browser.

While taking out several files to set up the agenda for tomorrow’s meeting with General Castillo, Joseph looked back at the wall map and wondered. He quickly got up, grabbed his keys and security badge, and headed for the service elevator. His office door locked behind him. Something finally took root.

Joseph turned his key for the elevator, and within seconds he was inside. He unlocked a maintenance panel and then swiped his badge through the reader behind the panel door. A yellow light blinked, and he placed his thumb on the biometric scanner. The light turned green. He then keyed in the code for his destination. The elevator descended into the subbasement of the FBI field office. The elevator door opened to a small room; surveillance was everywhere. Walking off the elevator, he approached a solid steel door. He swiped his badge and the door buzzed. Joseph entered a long corridor. A door was at the other end. A lone security camera stared at him from above his destination. Once at the other end he swiped his badge. Two wall mounted biometric devices lit up, both yellow. He placed his right hand on one—green light. He then looked into the other. After a brief alignment on both eyes, another light lit green. He entered the pass code on the numeric pad beside the door, and with a buzz Joseph opened the door.

The door closed and the magnet seals engaged. The room was all white, well lit with broad spectrum light, and was about ten by twenty. Its furnishings consisted of a chair and a desk—a terminal, keyboard, and mouse sat on top. The terminal plugged into a lone outlet on the wall. The outlet had one plug for power, and one to connect to an unseen server. Joseph saw no security cameras in the room, but sensed other types of surveillance. The server location was reportedly in a secure room with automatic data destruction capabilities should the room’s security be breeched. The terminal was on—a password was required for activation.

Joseph entered his password, and in a brief second the FBI’s classified records and documents were available to him searchable by document number or keyword. He entered document number 24934. After little more than ten seconds, he was looking at a scanned copy of the document—Biological weapons: A history with current concerns.

Joseph skimmed through the executive summary to refresh himself.

He paused and thought to himself, “In a generation, only vain hubris will stand in the way of Smallpox.”

He turned to the index, and quickly reached his destination—Anthrax. He clicked back to the section, a section he was already familiar with, and began reading....

Erscheint lt. Verlag	8.9.2021
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
ISBN-10	1-7365991-6-X / 173659916X
ISBN-13	978-1-7365991-6-7 / 9781736599167

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