Part XII

      "Em blue boys done fount 'im out Emma!  Ha haaa, sure did!  I'n give up my erv'rythin just ta see what he'n been up ta all'is time.  Jussa li'l peekaboo 'sall."
    Four other cruisers had joined Richie's and the apartment was filled with police.  Chief Brennan looked around wondering just what in the hell he was looking at.
    "Can someone explain this?  I mean, it's obviously not a drug lab."
    "Well sir, I think this looks like a terminal with the computer there."
    "Can it Richardson, I know what a computer is.  I want to know what it does, ALL of it.  Call Drexler and get their engineers down here NOW!"
    At tall order it was, without Jarvis, for anyone to really understand the purpose for the equipment in the room.  A group of resident staff arrived within the hour and stood looking at each other blankly before calling the Dean of Computer Sciences himself, Dr. Harold McCabe.  Aging well for sixty, he didn't have a gray hair in the stubble that was left on the sides of his head and and tan complexion made him pass for a man in his 40's.  Called Mr. Big Hands by his students and secretly by the staff, it made a person wonder how he could have had such agility with his fingers when he first started in his field.  
    "You guys must love my weekends more than I do," he said to the four faculty members and police that had preceded his arrival.  "But I have to admit, this makes me feel like a kid again with this setup.  Avery and Stephen, get on the computer and see what you can dig up.  Sarah and Phil, check out the servers."  The chief asserted himself although he was uneasily aware that this could shortly be taken out of his hands.
    "Listen Professor, we just need to know what all this s**t does and whether it'll tell you where this guy went.  We need to know if there is anything more criminal going on than illegally altering city property with those solar panels out there.  No one here has seen anything like this before."
    "Well Chief, Brennan is it?  You've got the brightest minds Drexler has to offer so I'm sure we'll be able to let you know one way or the other.  Just please have your guys relax, don't touch anything, and we'll let you know as soon as we do. "  The bureaucratic, official response to call someone stupid and to make them stay out of the way.  The chief sighed undertone insults with "s***s" and "a******s" before having the guys step back towards the door to watch.
    The computer itself was a little more than that.  Three monitors sat beside each other in hibernation with four tower stations wired together.  The cords from this super station ran to the back wall and joined up with a row of servers.  A glass monolith stood beside the table wired as well and connected to both the computer and the servers.  A table made out of a wooden door and held up by books carried tools and other computer repair accoutrements.  Mostly organized with bins for parts, some were still strewn about the desk in partial disarray.   More cords ran outside to the satellite dish and to solar panels attached to the roof and the bridge itself.  Dr. McCabe walked out to the balcony taking in the configuration running every conceivable purpose through his head while his staff worked inside.  There was reception or broadcasting of information occurring, maybe both.  I mean, he's not watching HBO off this getup, that's for sure.  The solar panels were a secondary source of power likely to not draw too much from the grid and risk exposure.  It looks like he's altered them to what, increase output?  Possibly.  So this person clearly knew what they were doing, intelligent in multiple fields, possibly even gifted.  
    "Professor, um, there aren't any security protocols on the terminal,"  a voice said from inside.  Harold turned and went back in.
    "Are you sure, Avery?"
    "Yes sir, the computers were in hibernation.  He apparently left them on before he disappeared.  No passwords, encryptions or anything that I can find.  We, hypothetically, have full control over this system."
    "Ok, well then get answers.  What are we dealing with?  Sarah? Phil?"
    The two had plugged their tablet PC into most of the servers and looked at each other before turning to Dr. McCabe.  "Sir," Sarah hesitated pushing a few strands of brown hair from her face, "these servers are full of data with exception to the one on the end at about 85% capacity.  I've never seen code like this.  It seems to be informational data rather than programming but it's really hard to tell without knowing what language was used."  She pointed her head in the direction of the wall separating the two rooms.  "You can take a guess from what he's got over there, but I think a new language specific to the purpose here has been created.  I can see bits of C++, and others but it's nothing near readable by anything we've got."
    Books were piled up the wall in stacks approximately 70-80 across mostly concerning programming, but manuals on network operations, laser mapping, and light spectrum analysis dotted the stacks.  Harold looked at this stack defeated.  This guy was a genius.  "Avery, do you have anything else?"
    "I don't know what to make of it sir.  I don't know what to tell you.  There are symbols here that I've never seen.  I can tell he's been hooked into a network although it's not a known TCP/IP.  I would think something this large would be used in mega-corporations, government even, but I not aware of a system this large.  And to be contained in this small of an area..."  Stephen broke in to expand on the general confusion pushing his glasses back onto his nose before speaking.
    "All of this, everything you're looking at, is built from the ground up.  If I would have done something like this, I would be getting parts from electronics stores, looking on Craigslist for anything I could find.  This person obviously had the skills to build, repair, and configure anything he needed.  If he didn't know something, he learned it.  To think that someone has read and understood all of these books is unthinkable.  Maybe not impossible but this guy would have had to been at this for a long time.  We're talking years and with assistance.  You can't expect someone to do this on their own.  But from the look of this place, you can't tell that anyone else has been here.  Even with that mattress on the floor beside the servers.  I would guess that he's been sleeping in here instead of in the other room just based on how each are made.  One OCD neat and the other looks like he just woke up.  I don't even want to speculate how he got those servers in here.  Pieces at a time as to not draw attention?  That's my most logical guess.  If those had been complete systems, you could check with area businesses to see if they have upgraded their servers in the past few years but that's probably not going to get you very far.  There's not much on here that can be traced.  These towers here aren't individual systems either.  They're all wired together to be one computer.  Upgraded RAM, data storage, video cards, you name it and he's upgraded it either himself or through a secondary market.  He's got about 16TB in this system alone and at least 32GB of RAM.  He's running some serious stuff here."
    The professor knew where this was headed.  Right out of his hands and that disappointed him.  He was not the preeminent mind by a long shot, though he wasn't sure if even the most capable thinkers could solve this massive riddle.  He stood to the right of the desk in thought, looking at this glass monolith comprising an ever more puzzling device.  It was nearly the height of the room and about four feet square in width and length.  A door door stood closed on the far side.  Its base was a blue kiddy pool with roughly three inches of what looked to be water.  A clear stool sat inside.  The corners of the encasement were framed with black rectangular prisms that spanned the entire height and connected with opposite corners on the top and bottom.  Approximately four inches apart, black spear-like devices protruded out and pointed downwards to the center of the encasement.  Each had a wire that extended down the outside, joining with the others and extending to a main line that ran to the servers.  This device was also connected to both apartment and solar power.  
    "Does anyone have a guess as to what this does?"  he asked almost sarcastically.
    "If it's anything like this small one on the desk, I would think it has something to do with laser mapping."  Stephen looked at the smaller version of the glass case on the desk as he talked.  It was generally the same only situated in a cereal bowl and was a little more crudely designed than it's bigger brother.  "This one has 12 modified class 3 lasers that run into the computer itself.  It's not my major, but it looks like this could be an attempt at 4D laser imaging, mapping, whatever you want to call it.  It's a fairly new advancement but generally limited to laser shows and entertainment venues.  Traditional 3D mapping is used primarily for topographical purposes and only maps the surface of whatever the laser happens to hit.  With the confined nature of these containers, he might be trying to map an entire object, both surface and subsurface."
    "Can you be sure?"
    "Well, no, sir.  There's really no way to know unless we either translated his code or he was here in person telling us what this is all for."  
    Avery had stopped his clacking on the keyboard and listened intently through headphones until an explosion of realization seized his whole body.  He fumbled with the mouse clicking frantically and then yanked the wire out of the headphone jack.
    "It-it's all, all of it, here..."
    Everyone turned to him and a few of the police officers went for their holsters on instinct.  An evil eye from the chief settled them down.  "What are you talking about?  What do we have here?" Brennan asked having grown impatient from all the technical talk that didn't include solitaire and internet porn.  Avery looked at the chief and then to the Dean.
    "I still don't know half of what he's talking about, but it's all here.  He documented everything.  There are years of audio files here.  Listen, here's one from the beginning..."  He turned the volume up, clicked on the first file, 080497.3bp, and a soft but firm voice came through the speakers.