Part 1 of 3
Read the full text at http://flashpulp.com
Tonight we find a contributor to the Collective Detective, KillerKrok, investigating a nearly forgotten life, as he also conducts major changes in his own.
The Collective Detective theme is Dance Of The Urbanite, by Tryad
[music] Welcome to FlashPelp Episode 146. Tonight, we present Layers, a collective detective chronicle, Part 1 of 3. [music] This week's episodes are brought to you by the ladies' pen dragon. [music] A redneck midget with a baby and a shotgun. A farmville addict who majored in psychology to make people worse. A disgruntled cosplayer with degrees in biochem English and shredding arguments. A velvet-throated herald of astrological deviants, whose grandmother offered to contact a rat from the beyond. A verbose in C, living in Japan, was occasionally possessed by Gollum. And a single librarian with a cat named Darcy, and a penchant for zombies and barbecue sandwiches. These are the unlikely writer heroines of pen dragon variety, an audio literary magazine and round table discussion podcast for genre fiction and poetry writers. Plug in your earbuds every Thursday for sage advice. I will give my sage advice to anyone that asks, and my advice is just don't suck. Ineffable eloquence. Degue, character development, yes. And relevant examples. So you can be dream record, and Raven can be reality checker, and you even rhyme now. I want you to say, now we need a theme song. Oh God, Scooby, you promised me if we ever write a graphic novel, those are going to be our superheroes. Have you seen the penis trap, cause that one's scary. What? Alright, if we promised not to put it in the podcast, you'll tell us about it, right? Visit pen dragon variety.com to learn more. And try not to suck. [music] Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age. Three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings. Tonight, we find a contributor to the collective detective, Killer Croc, investigating a nearly forgotten life, as he also conducts major changes in his own. Layers, a collective detective chronicle. Part one or three. Written by J.R.D. Skinner. Art and narration by Opopon X. An audio produced by Jessica May. [music] For Kyle, 14, summer was screaming to a close. He'd spent the last month dividing his energies between conquering an obscure series of Japanese role-playing video games and contributing to the project known as the collective detective, both of which he'd been introduced to by his best friend Monty. Although Monty's love of battle passion one through six still outpaced his own, the collective had become Kyle's great obsession. He'd already provided assistance on several occasions, including having sorted reams of posts for a case involving the suspicious disappearance of a member of a forum dedicated to Danish metal bands, and even turning up a nugget which had eventually led the group to unearthing a girl who'd been buried and forgotten in a train yard. 48 hours before his first day as a ninth grader, in a desperate bid to ignore the impending demands of school life, he found himself rifling the site's open projects. While flipping from wiki page to wiki page, he was brought to a halt on the case of Morris Cox, which had seen some activity, but few results. It was an attached Facebook photo which sold him. Despite Cox's smile, his eyes appeared hollow. The notes were minimal. Six years of traffic had been traced back to the case, which meant they had information on Morris from age 12 through 18, but the majority of it had gone unsorted, and the annotations seemed to indicate a lot of teenage nonsense, and a little more. Sitting in his basement bedroom, at the rickety white table his parents had provided to support the humming weight of the PC he'd purchased with his own funds, Kyle felt a kinship to that teenage nonsense. Reaching into the darkness beside the glow of his monitor, he retrieved his half-empty bottle of Mountain Dew and redirected his browser to the collective's main website. When prompted, he logged himself in as killer crock, then pulled up the primary tool of every member, the search page. He initiated a trio of queries, a general trawl for all the logs related to Cox's known IP addresses, a second seeking any mention of Morris's name in his school library's traffic, and a third inquiry looking for text messages involving the missing boy's name, as no cell phones had been associated with his file. Rubbing at the stringy patch of hair he'd been cultivating on his chin, Kyle considered his selections, then nodded. Being only a lowly contributor, he knew it would be some time before his request moved to the top of the heat to be processed, so he popped in Battle Passion V and cranked his lead Zeppelin soundtrack to the level he knew to be just below the cusp of his parents' patience. Three weeks of scrutiny had left the amateur detective feeling very familiar with Morris's life, and yet little closer to discovering the key to his disappearance. School, and thoughts of Ellie Landry, had taken heavy tolls on the amount of time Kyle had to dedicate to the project, but he found the investigation considerably preferable to algebra homework, and often spent his days and notebook pages sketching out speculative webs of accusation instead of focusing on essays regarding Hamlet. He had a single tantalizing clue, an unidentified encrypted application which the lost boy had started using regularly at 15. Although the collective could provide the raw data of what was transferred and could even give basic information on how it was concealed, it had no method to circumvent the password behind which it was hidden. Crock had easy access to the necessary tools to make the translation, but without the missing phrase, they were useless. Still, while watching reruns of the newest reimaginings of SpongeBob Squarepants, he'd spent the better part of a Saturday, guessing at any possibility that might have come to Morris, including the details the unaccounted for youth had used on other services, character names from his favorite films, and random combinations of his own moniker and birth date. The cast of people involved in Morris's communications had fluctuated from year to year, but their wiki entries had grown into cow's nurturing, and now included a positive identification for a best friend from the age of 12 till a messy falling out at 17, as well as the entrance of Bailey, the case is first and only obvious love interest. In getting to know the major players through the digital fingerprints they had left, the sleuth had also begun to see connections from Crock's life within his own. Although he'd vanished at 18, it was at the age of 14, Killer Crock's, that the seeds of dissension between the missing and his compatriot had been planted, and, as puppy love mentions of Bailey, largely in anonymous forums, increased, their comradery had decreased. Oddly, however, the apparent girlfriend never seemed to be discussed. The ninth grader was considering the point when his phone rang. "Hey," said Monte. "Ola," Kyle replied. "Still smacking the dead pony?" "Yeah, I'm sure this encrypted stuff is the answer." "Uh-huh." "You're gonna get that thing opened up and it'll be nothing but his porn collection." "It's funny you say that, because the data transfer would be about right, but, I don't know, it could be a bunch of audio recordings discussing his Colombian drug views." On a whim, Kyle tried "Columbian" as the password. He was greeted with the familiar failure warning. "Have you ever seen him say anything in Spanish?" asked Monte. "No." "Uh-huh." "Anyhow, what are you up to tonight?" "Forget whatever it was. Guess who just got a hold of his imported copy of Battle Passion 7?" Kyle cleared his throat, mousing down to his desktop's clock before replying. Seeing the late hour, his palms suddenly began to run with moisture. "Nah, listen, I actually need to go... help my mom with something. But I think I'm gonna just spend the night cracking this thing. I'm right on the verge, I can feel it. Start without me, and I'll catch up with you tomorrow or something." Morris made his goodbyes with a note of dejection, but the fourteen-year-old had little time for consideration of his friend, leading his keyboard to blink endlessly on the empty password field. He ran to the shower. He was while shaving off his ratty facial growth that the solution came to him, and he called himself an idiot, allowed for not having tried it earlier. With his face still covered in a necessary shaving cream, he ran to his machine and triumphantly typed, "Bailey." There was a pause, and then a progress bar appeared. It began to count upwards. With a hauler, Kyle moved into a stomping dance. After a moment, however, he caught the time on the PVR's digital display and quickly scooped up the rogue foam on the carpet. Hovering over his computer, he submitted the case revision in a rush. The movie started in an hour, and he didn't want to leave Ellie waiting. FlashPulp is presented by HTTP colon slash slash Skinner dot FM. The audio and text formats of FlashPulp are released under the Canadian Creative Commons attribution non-commercial 2.5 license. [MUSIC] (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
