Tenshy Man!
an excerpt

Episode 7
Infected

Back in the gleaming fortress of Daiaden, Feiguang and the others laughed and spoke about the day’s adventure. Feiguang seemed in particularly high spirits, although Ken still maintained doubts about whether or not he was psychologically fit for duty. The story of the Wranonbologists was shared with Dr. Bulan and he took it under advisement to organizie a team of analysts and collectors to look into the matter more closely. The data haul from Feiguang’s download was also assessed on computer terminals that were physically separate from the rest of Daiaden’s systems. This way, the doctor explained, there would be no danger of virus contamination throughout the whole fortress. Data gleaned from the terminals was not to be transferred to other terminals electronically. All data had to transferred by low-tech means such as printouts, handwriting, and verbal communication. Dr. Bulan even forbade taking personal electronics such as watches, cell phones, and mp3 players into the room with the Inveillocht data for fear that the organization may have found a way to infect tools indirectly or from a distance.
Sydney was one of the hundreds of analysts hired by Dr. Bulan and his mysterious ally to live and work entirely in secret inside the fortress. His background was like many of his coworkers; he led a relatively normal life until something he did ran afoul of secret yet ruthless organization he now understood was actually Inveillocht. Inveillocht’s methods were thorough. Kill anyone even suspected of knowing about their organization without question. Kill their family and if needed, kill their friends. Dr. Bulan had devised a system for saving people thus threatened. He offered to take them and sometimes their families into his fortress if they promised to work against Inveillocht. Or he would use the Collectors to arrange for new identities for the families in a manner very similar to a witness protection program. All Tenshyman teams members except for Feiguang had Dr. Bulan’s grace to thank for their lives. In Sydney’s case, he chose to help, but his family remained planetside cut off from him in a veil of secrecy until the day of Inveillocht’s defeat which, according to Dr. Bulan, was going to come soon or it would not come at all. When the duty of data analysist for the hacks into the Inveillocht system came up, Sydney jumped at the chance. He knew this was going to be a big break, perhaps the break, that would signal Inveillocht’s defeat. He hoped that soon he would be enjoying holiday meals with his family again. He longed to see his brothers and sisters and wondered how they were coping in their new lives.
Like the other analysists working in Daiaden, Sydney wore a labcoat. It swished as he walked down the narrow passageway to the Inveillocht data processing room commonly referred to as “the cell”. At the only entrance of the room, a Collector stood gaurd. Gaurds were nowhere to be seen in Daiaden, but Dr. Bulan had insisted on the added precaution telling everyone to think of the cell as if it was the same as an Inveillocht embassy to Daiaden; once inside, you were in enemy territory. Collectors were always easy to spot with their black and grey jumpsuits and two katana-style swords. Sydney stopped at the door and raised his arms. The Collector frisked him for electronics and allowed Sydney entrance. Sydney smoothed back an errant lock of red hair and went inside. Hardley, another analyst was already inside, examining the data.
“Shoulda known you’d work through lunch,” Sydney’s green sparkled when he smiled. He admired Hardley’s unwavering work ethic.
“It’s my momma’s fault for naming me ‘Hardley’,” he said, “I always felt I had to work twice as hard because people were always coming up to me and saying, ‘Hardley working?’” he said, finishing in a mock stupid voice for the quote. “I told her a black man doesn’t need that kind of intimidation in a wokaholic world and she’d just laugh.” Hardley never took his eyes off his dual wide screen computer monitors. Sydney sat at his terminal next to Hardley’s and clicked on his monitors. There were only two work stations in the cell. Behind their monitors was a large glass pane. Behind that were two computer CPUs floating in a giant vat of liquid firewall. The air around the vat was chilled with deadly amounts of freon gas. The walls of the room in which the vat was stored were electrified. All of this was meant to insure no form of malware contanimation would make it past the cell computers. The cell even had its own energy source; a physically isolated array of dedicated solar panels; and its own oxygen generators. The room was completely self-contained. “I don’t know about this last batch of data,” Hardley continued, “it seems to me they might be on to us about the hack. None of this makes sense. It’s nothing but dead ends and logistical anomalies.”
“Well, it’s Inveillocht,” replied Sydney, “it’s supposed to be cryptic and indecipherable. They’re like five million years old or something.”
“I don’t know. You would think they would be smart enough than to put their entire compliment of tanks on Fifth and Main in Jersey.” He looked at Sydney. Sydney smiled back in defeat.
“It’s too early to quit,” he said, “there’s just gotta be something in these files we can use.”