The blank steel doors of the lift did nothing to stop the pain in Shannon's leg. All the fragments of her shattered femur had been removed and the artificial one had been successfully implanted, but the fragments of bone and bullet had torn much muscle in and around it's trajectory. She adjusted her sitting position in the wheelchair and tried to breathe deeply.
Her first mission with the corporation had not gone well; it hadn't been her fault that her handler had left her for dead after she had confronted the agent about the suspicious recordings inside their target's mansion. The agency had believed her, and fixed her up as best they could. But it would still be at least eight months until she was back in the field. The doors to the left slid open, there was an agent standing next to the exit.
"Agent Shannon Bailey?" she asked.
"Yes, that's correct."
"As you will be unable to act as a field agent due to injury, we are assigning you to the IT analysis department in accordance with your skillset." The agent said, and handed her a transfer notice. "You are to report to the room on this order, and you will be serving under Department Head Barnes."
Shannon thanked the agent and proceeded through the block to the department of IT Analysis. She didn't often come this way and took some time to look through the clear plexiglass doors into each of many departments. The robotics lab was nearly finished their nanite project, the R&D department was cleaning up some pink stains with the consistence of bubblegum, and the PR department had already finished their first orgy of the day. Shannon rolled up to the door of the IT analysis lab and tapped her ID card to the electronic receiver, the door slid open.
"Hello?" she said, pushing her chair inside the room. It was brightly lit, like the other departments, and had pigeon holes filled with laptops and other computer hardware, each article was labelled with a case and item number. "Is anyone there?"
"Hiya!" said a man with a southern accent as he extracted his curly blond head from the guts of a pc tower that looked like it was from the 80s. "Are you..?" he paused and shuffled through some notes next to the pc. "Shannon Bailey?"
"Yes, would you be the department head?" she said, rolling up to the desk and extended her hand to shake his. He took it and grinned.
"Lenny Barnes! But you can just call me Lenny, no need for formalities here." He said and reached into the inbox on his desk. He extracted a file and laptop. "You'll be getting to work right away; I read your file and figured you might want an exciting case to keep your spirits up. This one is real weird, girl found in her room with a clean bill of health, except for the fact that she was dead. The agency wants you to have a look at her pc, see what sites she visited, social events, if she was planning anything with stuff the docs haven't thought to check, that sort of thing. That's basically all you need to know; although, we don't have permanent workstations here so just choose a desk and get to it."
"Thanks," she said, grabbing the laptop and putting it on its namesake. She wheeled over to a mostly empty desk and started going through the file, it was basically the same as Lenny's summary, except for the picture of a red haired and freckly young woman. 23 year old Catherine Yates had been an IT specialist at a local school while studying part time at college. She had seemed normal until one day her mother had went to her room to ask for computer help, her father had been too proud to ask her himself, and found her dead in her chair, her laptop open but out of power in front of her. Shannon was supposed to file a report on anything strange or suspicious that she could unearth from her internet history or files. She took a deep breathe, found a universal charger for the computer and began to work.
Despite the exciting description that Lenny had provided, the work was frightfully dull. Everything that she could access pointed to Catherine being a perfectly normal woman, facebook, Instagram and various other social networking sites were the norm across her internet and account history. Shannon had been starting to think this was almost too stereotypical, until she unearthed history from a computer construction and programming forum, as well as many favourites on her browser for specific parts. They were mostly normal things, graphics upgrades, a premium account for C++ that she had, no doubt, sworn to obtain legally one day, if the cracked copy installed on the hard disk was any indicator. Some fell further outside her purview, like a number of what looked like the sticky things that hospital patients wore on their chests, but smaller and opaque. Weird.
What was weirder though, was that there was an encrypted folder buried in the OS files. She used a tonne of tricks that usually worked to open files, but it didn't even have a password, let alone a way in. Just the methods that she could think of on the spot took her working to nearly 4:30, with only a quick break for lunch. This single file was a real challenge. Another weird thing was that the monitor seemed to be on the fritz, it seemed like it kept diming for a few minutes every now and again; also, the hue balance seemed kind of weird.
"Heya!" Lenny said, startling her so much that she jumped. "Ohh, sorry." He said, watching her rub her painful thigh. "I'm heading off for today, you made any progress?"
"Just internet history, nothing out of the ordinary." Shannon said. "I might head home too, maybe brush up on my skills."
"Good thinking. Need some help down to the car lot, or the lobby?"
"No thanks, I'll be fine." Shannon said, and shut down Catherine's computer, preparing to head home.
