Conspiraco

“Your personal ‘investigator’ will be with you shortly.” I handed a stack of dusty manila folders to my party. “Take a seat, and start looking through these case files.”

Eager fingers tore through old sheets of paper, reading the details for the evening’s analysis. “Do we have to read all of this?” the group asked.

“That’s up to you,” I answered. “When it comes to cases like these, the smallest detail can make the biggest difference.”

“He means ‘yes,'” her husband announced. No further instruction is needed. He’s speed-reading through the history of a centuries-old conspiracy. Lots of work to set up at first. We fed the plot lines of a thousand movies, a million books, into the local AI to generate our stories. AM – that’s what we call it – comes up with new ideas every day, so no matter how many times you come back, there’s always a new conspiracy to uncover.

“Here it is,” the other man brightened. “Renegade church dating back to the 1700s, they’ve held the key to the Fountain of Youth. It really is in Florida. But, unfortunately, only the rich and powerful get to drink it.”

“Fountain of Youth?” the first man complained. “I did that last time!”

I smiled. When I started, challenges like these used to throw me. Now I see them as softballs. “It’s a question you have to ask yourself: is this the real conspiracy, or just a false flag? Sometimes they put fake news into the record so that when you show up asking questions, they know you’re on their tail.”

“Oh my God, he’s right,” the wife squeaked. “Harold, you need to be more careful!” Back into the case files, reading more while I make a note to AM to alter the story.

It’s a busy night. Not only were we open for business, but I also had a new Research Associate to train. A young kid in his early twenties named Randy, now in the back office, watched me work through our camera bank. I heard my partner Sheila explaining how things worked through my neurolink audio link.

“They’ll be pissed if they aren’t really will be looking for something besides the Fountain of Youth,” Sheila says. “The CRM isn’t perfect. Sometimes it forgets what the clients do. AM doesn’t run our customer relationship management system.”

“Where do the case files come from?” I heard paper shuffling and knew Randy was looking at thick stacks of yellowed paper. Text documents, heavily redacted, and laser prints of old crime scene photos.

“You ‘age’ them by rubbing them with old coffee,” Sheila explained. “You can do the same thing with a hot oven, but coffee is cheaper and faster. Simple but effective. We kill time on slow days making new case packets for clients. Gimme a second; I need to get in there.”

Sheila joined me in the AR cage, where clients spend most of their time. She’s been doing this for a few more years than I have; has the game down to a science.

My character is the ‘front office guy,’ the good cop. Sheila stays in the background, the bad cop, a femme fatale with a heart of gold. Both of us are connected to AM’s story through our neurolinks, just read off the details from our eye-mounted HUDs.

Sheila was totally in character that night. “I just found something … they need to see this.”