Monday, April 13
Dreams: Part 12 – Fielding Questions
Caprice fiddled with the lock to Valentine Krogen’s office. He had placed a repeating image of the hallway on the monitors. The place was far more secure than a simple facility. And yet he had gotten in relatively easily. There was something familiar about it.
Jim-Bean had found out from Angela that there was a receipt from a Burton Fielding. Angela didn’t know what the receipt was for or who made the purchase, but she needed to find out for her accounts. Caprice suspected that the director knew.
Caprice popped the lock. The room was peculiar. Several statuettes were scattered about the suite, octopoid in nature and carved of green-veined soapstone. A painting above the mantel depicted a horrendous circle of half-human entities baying at the moon. A brass plaque gave the title and painter: “Ghouls Baying,” by R. U. Pickman. There were piles and piles of periodicals on psychiatry and technology, none of them read.
Caprice made his way over the computer at Krogen’s desk. He hooked up his cistron to it and started hacking.
Security was tight. But it wasn’t insurmountable, complicated by the fact that Caprice was an inside man: he knew how Majestic-12’s systems worked and he knew how to circumvent them. Data from 1966 onward was contained in the computer and text files. He searched for Fielding.
Burton Fielding was an electrical engineer who had worked for some important firms in their research divisions. He was thought of as a crackpot, an alcoholic, and a ne'er-do-well. Caprice also found a record of Fielding’s education. He had taken several university-level courses and advanced study. Fielding’s imagination wavered for several years, then began to gnaw on and race through specific courses, while dropping others and simply failing to attend many more. He had attended six universities, but had no degrees whatsoever.
Caprice found a highly-technical, trail-blazing monograph on advanced dream research by Fielding. It was difficult reading, even for Caprice, but he had an appreciation for the man’s intellect. Fielding was clearly the inventor of the Dreamweb. It was possible, Fielding explained, through the use of a Crystal Matrix Artificial Intelligence. It was the kind of crystal used by the Greys, the kind Caprice and his team had worked hard to prevent Centurion Computer Systems from using, and the kind that powered SINNER and Blacknet.
There was also something else: work on a three-dimensional dream imager, which could be used to monitor a subject’s sleeping visions. Its development easily rivaled the Dreamweb itself in sophistication. The file ended abruptly.
“What happened to you, Fielding?” Caprice asked himself. [MORE]
Labels: d20 modern
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