Chapter 63 — Back On the Front Stoop
The Curve of Time, Chapter 63 —— Back On the Front Stoop, in which Saskia and Mica seek out Zeno.
Followed by musings on evergreen content.
Listen to full episode :
— 63 —
Back On the Front Stoop
Mica and Saskia flew to Dallas, figuring that their best shot at getting access to the oil rig was to appear on Zeno’s doorstep again. Unfortunately, they couldn’t find him. Mica tried his office on Monday, posing as a reporter interested in the spill. But Zeno wasn’t there. He was supposed to have been back after his site visit to the Deepwater Black Gold rig, but no one had heard from him.
Zeno’s secretary, Shelly, took Mica’s number down, to call if she heard anything, but she wasn’t prepared to give Mica Zeno’s cell phone number, not given the harassing calls the DBG spill had precipitated.
That roadblock was hardly an impediment for Mica, who demonstrated an adroit ability to skirt the back roads of a conversation with one executive assistant after another, all while slipping between the fictional personas she adopted.
Saskia marveled as she watched her fiery redhead in action. It was clear that the corporate professionals and support managers on the other ends of the line were sublimely oblivious to Mica’s true motives and goals. So much so, that it left Saskia wondering how often in life she was the unaware dupe.
“Where did you learn to do that?” Saskia asked.
Mica described a stint she’d spent as a corporate intelligence operative, the trade name for someone tasked by one company with figuring out a competitor’s org charts, the employees with the biggest books of business, or which products really moved the needle on the corporate bottom line. Apparently, if you learnt how to utilize company software better than most personnel, it was astounding what someone on the other end of the phone would read off their screen; show them an IT shortcut useful in their day to day life, and they went out of their way to help you.
It had been during her first year out of college, and it did more than make her financial ends meet. Mica credited her time with the firm as the greatest investigative journalistic training she’d had, better than anything she’d gotten at college. “Though it did sometimes feel a kind of icky,” she admitted. Despite never having been asked to impersonate a government official——that was illegal——she had had the awkward experience of being connected with the person she had just been impersonating.
“What?!”
Mica laughed. “Yep. Learnt how to back-peddle fast: ‘Oh, Jane. Hi! I’ve been trying to reach you. So glad I’ve finally gotten you on the line.’ It was before phishing was something the public really thought about.”
Saskia shook her head, her mouth agape. Partly she was impressed, partly she was horrified.
“It was my first job. Beggars can’t be choosers, right?” But before Saskia could answer, Mica jutted her chin across the plaza at a spry man in a suit who’d just left Zeno’s office. “That’s Alex. Strategic analyst. Supports Zeno.”
Saskia followed Mica’s indication but Mica was already hoofing it.
“Hey! Alex!” Mica Cooeed as she closed in on the man.
Alex turned to her.
Mica barreled ahead. “You haven’t seen Mr. Williams have you? I was supposed meet with him this morning——he’s not answering his phone. He’d asked me about the DBG exposure——”
“Sorry, who are you?”
“Suzy Hamilton. I started in legal a month back.” Mica let her face crumble, as if Alex had made a strong impression on her and she, only now, realized she’d made none on him.
“Right, sorry. He was supposed to head down to the gulf to run coms on this mess. He should be back soon though.”
“You don’t know who I could call in Houma do you? See if he left already?”
Alex thought a moment. He only had two phone numbers in his phone, but he happily furnished Mica with both.
“I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to take up your whole lunch hour,” Mica apologized as she left him. “Thank you so much. You’re a doll.” With that, Mica swung her tornado away from Alex. She winked at Saskia as she passed her, and subtly indicated for her to follow her around the block.
In a cafe a couple of blocks away, Mica posed as the secretary of yet another oil exec, skirting a fresh ruse altogether. Finally, she dropped her actual request in at the end of the call, presented as an afterthought: did the executive assistant she was speaking to happen to have Zeno’s mobile number? “I can’t find his cell and Mr. Simmons expects me to have him on the phone any minute now. I’d be mightily appreciative if you had it.” Mica mouthed “Bingo” to Saskia. To the person on the other end of the line she said: “Thank you. Thank you, so much. You’re a doll.” She ended the call and her eyes met Saskia’s again. “And the best part is she’ll never even know how helpful she really was.” She held out the digits she’d just jotted on her notepad. “You want to do the honors?”
Saskia called Zeno’s number, but he didn’t pick up. She left a message, but by dinnertime both women suspected he wasn’t going to call.
Mica also tried calling Zeno, and for good measure, she too, left him a voicemail, but it surprised neither of them when he didn’t return her call either.
∞
Mica and Saskia returned to Zeno’s offices again the next day, but the story hadn’t changed, except that it was no longer so clear that Shelly hadn’t heard from him, merely that Mica was unlikely to hear from him.
Still, Mica and Saskia well knew that Zeno hadn’t been home; Mica had left a delicate strip of tape in the top corner of his front door when they first tried ringing Zeno’s doorbell, and that tape was still unbroken as of Tuesday morning. Nobody had opened the front door since Mica had left it there on Sunday. There was also the mail in the mailbox, and the Amazon box that hadn’t been brought in. Zeno’s, was a house without a tenant.
They got off the elevator, and Mica slipped into the rotating airlock door that exited to the street. As their feet hit the pavement, she caught Saskia’s eye. “You know, this might actually be a story,” she said, raising her own eyebrows significantly.
Mica called her paper’s assignment editor. In part she was worried that someone at Zeno’s office might call to check her credentials, but now that there was maybe a there there, why not ask for the story?
Her editor had some vague sense that something was afoot, but given that no one else was asking for the story, let alone in Dallas, he acquiesced. The scoop was hers. “I’m giving you the story, which risks encouraging you to make this sort of trip again. Just don’t try expensing your Texas travel!”
“About that——”
“Not happening.”
“No, I know. But here’s the thing, Williams was last seen in Louisiana. At the staging facility for the rig. It’s not even a couple of hundred bucks from here. So I’m offering you a bargain!” The smirk was easy to hear in her voice. “Come on, big oil exec disappears. Right after a major spill. Did he do a runner based on potential criminal negligence?”
Her editor sighed in resignation and before the day was out Mica and Saskia were on a plane to New Orleans.
That was chapter 63, Friends, I hope you enjoyed it!
You might be curious to know that Mica’s erstwhile job was based on one a good friend of mine had many years ago. It would probably look quite different in today’s day and age, especially with everyone well aware of phishing. On the other hand, impersonations could be done on the fly with technology too.
One thing I didn’t include here though, which I think might have been interesting, was how it relates to a podcast I listened to last year. The podcast was called Shell Game and it was about a journalist’s experiments coupling LLMs with AI voice software. Specifically, the journalist used the pairing to make crank calls and impersonate … well, himself. Well worth a listen. It’s another of those wonderful little elements that felt connected with our story, but which I somehow couldn’t naturally squeeze in.
It’s funny, because such a podcast feels very much of the moment, and generally I feel that my interests are kind of evergreen in nature. That’s certainly true for mathematics, and even if machine learning is likely to change dramatically over the next few years, the underlying neural network structure … well that’s kind of the underpinning mathematics, and I’m mildly optimistic that having a rudimentary knowledge will only feel more relevant as AI further permeates our lives (the basic ideas have been around for over half a century at this point). At the very least, the human emotions and philosophical quandaries at the heart of The Curve of Time feel pretty timeless.
Anyway, let’s hope my content is evergreen, because I’m not the fastest at getting things out. Either way, with my content usually lacking an of-the-moment context, I sometimes me feel like a bit of a living anachronism, as if I’m living out of my place in time. Of course, it has occurred to me——with not a little trepidation——that this is what it means to be getting older. Nah, I’m not admitting that I’m old.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. If you think of someone who might enjoy joining us on this experiment, please forward them this email. And if you are one of those someone’s and you’d like to read more
