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Chapter 143 - The Glow of a Worm inside a Child's Eye[]
You have to wonder...
...how she ended up here. Lena Grolsch has a record that would make her a security risk normally, and has had since she sliced into a Bank at age 13...from a terminal on New Capetown, stealing somewhere upward of six hundred million Kroner from a broad selection of accounts, half a phennig at a time per account.
Her conviction was six years ago, and the sentence at the time was life imprisonment in Blackgate.
She was met by the recruiter right at the intake, they gave her a 'test' of the sort that gives people nightmares-breaking into a government database-at gunpoint, with the understanding that her 'life sentence' would be significantly shorter than expected if she failed.
She didn't fail, and thus, found herself drafted into the Navy and sent to Spider Moon to train as a "Radioman" or RTO-really an electronic warfare officer. Her first trip through was at sixteen, and now, she's here...on the far side of the Commonwealth, with the Baroness of Spider Moon her own self, staff to the FedCom's Science Minister.
"Can you clean it up?" Kommandant Ries asked.
RTO 1st Class Grolsch shook her head, "Can't clean up a fabrication, Mum." she said, "These vids were doctored the easy way-they inserted them in place of the actual recordings after-the-fact."
"WHAT??"
"I said, someone chopped out a section of the memory, inserted a fabricated recording, and used machine language to phake the timestamp-these recordings from the quarters are no good." Grolsch spoke with a clipped, germanic accent common in some areas of the Coventry province. "The work was good, but not good enough. see here? this is your discontinuity-the fourth decimal place was repeated at the beginning, and at the end, and the digital fingerprints are different from the base's automatics. I think it may be a newer machine, or an older one. There's also leftover videoediting artifacts scattered throughout the record itself, this record is useless for identifying the perpetrators, though if I can narrow down the perpetrator of the fraud, it's one more to the list of suspects."
"Such as anyone with access to edit the surveillance?" Ries asked.
"That's a good place to start. A better one, would be to find out who has physical access to the security servers-and look for physical trace evidence there, because to do this kind of work, you need to actually lay hands on the storage media." Grolsch stated, "which will leave fingerprints or body-shed unless they were in full body environmental suits-which would stand out to anyone in the facility."
"So you can't recover the original?"
"Not without the physical media they removed and replaced, Mum." Grolsch stated, "You can't ****** a recording that hasn't been copied over-someone was aware of standard forensic methods-at least, digital forensics and file recovery, so they removed the blerry farl and replaced it with a tailored fabrication physically."
"See what you can strain of how they created the false images and files, see if you can find the software they used, and the hardware...I have to give Her Ladyship the news, and then, abuse my position and lock down the base."
"Ayeh, mum...on it already."