MINIMCOM - CSI

Yesterday, Rome had learned how to access the Essessoni computer but to her disappointment, there was no crew manifest on it. Rei had showed her how to attached the slab reader which worked perfectly well even though Bonnie had said "it was on the fritz" - clearly not true. Rome, Rei and MINIMCOM had to walk around to the next hangar when MINIMCOM shouted "Stop!" and Rome wanted to know why.

     “Allow me to illuminate the floor using ultraviolet.” With that, MINIMCOM lifted his hands, palms outward. Rei didn’t see anything but with Rome’s u-cones, she certainly did.
     “Footprints,” she said, pointing to the floor. Rei shook his head indicating he could not see them.
     “Two different pairs,” MINIMCOM observed. “However, they are old. They are buried under most of the dust.”
     Rome surveyed the room. There were open air filing cabinets, white boards, peg boards made out of woven cane-tree bark and several desks. She determined that most of the activity by the parties unknown took place near the two desks pressed up against the side wall. She walked over to the first desk and found another computer frame propped upright. She doubled-tapped the upper-right hand corner of the frame and the computer awakened. She sat down and examined it closely, quickly moving her fingers about the screen. Finally, she turned in place.
     “There’s nothing on this one,” she said. “It has no data, no documents, nothing.”
     Rei came over to where she was sitting and tried a different approach, using a sector editor to examine of the contents of the directory. “It’s been wiped clean,” he said, finally. “Whoever was here, everything has been erased.”
     “Can you retrieve anything?” she asked. “I was able to, I don’t know the proper word in English, ‘un-delete’ things on our storage units. Do you have the same ability?”
     “No,” Rei said. “This thing uses a secure delete which scrambles the sectors when a document is removed. There’d be no way.”
     “What if you deleted something by accident?” Rome asked.
     “You’d better hope it was backed up,” Rei said, knowing that Rome would be disappointed.
     Rome shook her head. She surveyed the desk, moving papers aside. There was nothing of any importance and certainly nothing that looked like a crew manifest. She was about to give up when she looked to the right. The desk had several drawers built in. She pulled on the top one and found it was locked tight.
     “MINIMCOM, can you open this?” she asked.
     MINIMCOM made a noise that sounded like a tsk and with a sharp tug, snapped the lock and drew the drawer open.
     Rome pulled out the yellowing papers stored there, examining each one. Once again, she found nothing of much importance. She was nearly at the bottom of the drawer when she felt something solid. She pushed the remaining few papers aside and found a slab that was similar to the black data slabs except this one was white. She lifted it up and inspected it from all angles. It was much lighter in weight than the jet-black slabs and had no label on it.

One of the really fun parts of writing this novel was to include elements of modern detective fiction (novels, TV, movies) so I had to throw in a CSI moment.

Let's see. Two sets of footprints and two rogue members of the Darwin Project running around. The computer has been wiped clean? Can all of this be coincidence? Of course not. Also note that the "extra" slab that Rome found was white, not black. Hmmm. Could that mean it was read/write, not read-only? And why would that be important?