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Part I
5 Rachella
Amsterdam, June 7, 2035"Atrobe ! I swear if I see one more screen of gorditos!"
Rachella was talking to herself as she always did when things didn't go quite as she wanted them.
As Rachella pushed the page-down button on her keyboard, her own face appeared in the middle of another matrix of chubby faces.
"Thirty-One! Well, at least I am in the top hundred now."
Apart from her own face, the second screen, like the first screen before it was filled with a matrix of obese ladies of sub-Saharan-African descent in their late teens and early twenties.
"Well, at least it got the bleeding gender and ethnicity right; conjo!
I could always hack the ranking, but what I really need is access to the juvenile delinquent database. No! I'll never get clearance for that. I need someone with top-level law enforcement clearance to retrain the facial generators."
Rachella's work had been on the subject of combining modern broad-spectrum genetics with stochastic biometric modeling, or as she had to refer to it to her law enforcement sponsors: DNA-based facial recognition. The idea was that facial generators could be trained to generate stochastic facial features from a broad-spectrum DNA profile and that these stochastic facial features could then be used to recognize the suspect on surveillance footage purely based on his or her DNA.
"No! I'm not going to ask that pendejo! No way! Nunka mas! But who else with sufficient clearance and stochastic modeling skills was there? Damn!"
"Well, then I'll just have to …"
"Lage nek! What am I even thinking! I am not going to hack the ranking. I'm a scientist, not some shabby workplace engineer!"
If asking that pompous prick was the only way to properly complete her research, Rachella had no resort but to ask him for help. 'Not now just yet though!' Rachella thought. Not before she had completely assured herself that Inspector Meijer couldn't pull another one on her, like he had done during her internship many years ago.
"Asshole ladrong!" Rachella shouted out as she remembered the Inspector.
In the end, it might all have been for the best, yes it was. Given that their blockchain investigation had ended up sparking a global war, not giving her due credits for noticing that transaction; the discovery that had been the reason for starting the whole investigation, to begin with, had still been a weasel move.
Rachella got all upset all over again just thinking about the time she first watched Inspector Meijer's TED talk. Oh, how she had wished she could have punched that smug poker face of his when he stood there telling the world how he had discovered that the long-lost Mt-Gox money in the Bitcoin blockchain was moving. Her blood was practically boiling just thinking about it again. A bleeding TED talk of all places!
"Wait… if I use a cut-off point high enough on the stochastic model I could …"
As Rachella was frantically typing on her keyboard, her phone, that was lying left of her keyboard, rang. The always smiling face of her aunt Shirley appeared on the phone's screen.
"Aunt Shirley, so nice of you to call. How are you, aunty?"
"Not so good Rachella, not so good. And you know how much I hate it when you call me aunty. It makes me feel old. Why don't you call me ruman grandi; big sister, like when we were kids?
You know Steve, your dad, has never been too much of a listener. Always preaching, always forgetting that I'm his little sister and not one of his flock. I really need a sister to talk to right now Rachella."
It took Rachella a moment to switch emotionally and mentally. Both her mind and her heart were working overtime. Shirley's call, no just her voice instantly brought back the full perspective of the glory the inspector had stolen from her. Shirley knew. She knew the whole story, for as Shirley reminded her just now, they really were like sisters. She knew how her Mt-Gox blockchain discovery had led the Dutch police force to discover a large-scale blockchain heist. How further investigation of the blockchain heist had revealed the long-term existence of large-scale quantum computing used for the real-time slicing through public key encryption by the PUPR conglomerate. She understood how the public exposure of PUPR had sparked the global war, a global war that had ended up killing Shirley's husband. Rachella remembered how she had felt like it was she who had personally pulled the trigger. That she had killed Shirley's husband. That she had pushed over the first domino stone, setting off a chain of events that eventually had led to Shirley's husband becoming the first casualty of war back home.
Rachella remembered the first time she had revealed her role in this to Shirley.
"That is a stupid white man's analogy Rachella" Shirley had responded. "You know perfectly well that is not how domino is played. You need to come home soon Rachella, before you turn into a makamba pretu. He was a hero to our people Rachella, and what you started makes you a hero too in my eyes. Hell, they should put up a statue for you in Punda as well as far as I'm concerned."
Rachella remembered that that had been exactly what she had needed to hear at that time.
Whatever Dad had thought about himself in terms of being the Padre Familia, and no matter how well he did or how widely respected he was as minister of the local Methodist congregation, as far as the family was concerned, Aunt Shirley had always been the one that always kept things working in harmony.
"What is wrong Shirley? Tell me everything, big sister!"
"It is Junior Rachella, he is not coming home. The war, our war is over. The New Babylon cowards fled into space and are freezing their hind sides off on Mars somewhere. Most our people are coming home, but Junior is not coming home."
Junior had been almost like her own child to Rachella. She had been his babysitter for many years when he was still little. She loved him very much, but he was a bit of a rascal. Always had been and probably always would be. Always getting himself into all kinds of trouble.
"What has he done this time? Don't tell me he got some poor girl pregnant while stationed on Jamaica. Don't tell me he is in jail because one of his silly pranks went out of hand!"
"No Rachella, the silly boy wants to become an Agent. He has applied for Agent training, and he was accepted Rachella. You know how glad we were that we won the war, that New Babylon fled before Junior was shipped out to fight on the mainland? If he finishes his training! I'm afraid of all the dangerous assignments they'll send my little boy into Rachella, I don't know what agents are supposed to do now that the war is over, but I'm sure it is dangerous. More dangerous than serving at the front. Rachella, what can we do?"
"I don't think there is any real reason to worry yet Shirley. Junior has a knack for getting himself into all sorts of troubles in school. I'm sure he'll do something stupid to get himself kicked out of agent training before finishing the track Shirley, I'm sure of it."
"I hope you are right Rachella, I so hope you are right. I wish there was a way to talk this silliness out of that thick skull of his. But you know Junior, always such a stubborn little boy."
"I promise I will try Shirley, I will talk to the little big brat as soon as I have a chance. Sending a DM straight away, saying that I need to talk with him urgently. I can't promise you anything yet other than that I'll try as hard as I can to talk this silliness out of his head."
"I don't think it will help much Rachella, but the effort is appreciated. I'm clinging to straws right now little sister. Pray for him Rachella, pray for him to come to his senses before he comes to an unfortunate ending."
"I will pray for him Shirley, and I will talk to him, but please don't go and wind yourself up like this Shirley, be strong, OK?"
"I will Rachella, I am so glad I could talk to you about this. So glad."
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