I havn't slept in one month, and every time the sun's up it's a new yesterday
Title: I haven't slept in one month, and every time the sun's up it's a new yesterday
Characters: Sally Sparrow, Helen Magnus, (notanemptymotto )
Setting: London, 2010
Rating: PG-13
The moon was high, the sky was clear, and Sally Sparrow was wondering when it had become half four in the morning. She let loose a short string of mumbled expletives known only to the inner walls of her flat, and leaned back in her chair, stretching stiffly. She reached for the mug of tea on her desk but found it hours cold and bitter. Brilliant. Not that much could keep her eyes from glazing over at this point anyway, short of a couple shots of expresso. She had a expresso maker in the kitchen but just couldn't be bothered to get up and chemically stimulate her brain that way tonight.
The petite blonde sighed tiredly and redirected her eyes to her laptop screen, where a long string of message board posts, forum comments, emails, and other assorted digital flotsam sat, still waiting to be sorted through. The sightings had increased over the last week, but no new information seemed to be cropping up in terms of what had been causing the blackouts. Sally picked up a pen, and rolling her chair over, made a check on a handmade chart pinned to the wall. There had been fifteen small scale blackouts on the areas of the city grid she'd been monitoring over the last four weeks. Each time, maybe three to six buildings at a time would suddenly lose all power, including auxillary, usually in the evening hours. Not once had they been able to be tied to any electrical interference or construction, or weather phenomenon.
Which was suspicious, but not usually enough to catch this much of her interest. Except in this case, before, during, or after, there'd been witness reports in the vicinity of ten of the blackouts describing strange lights in the dark. Or in the words of one PfloydRoX587, 'Sort of like that glowy green shit from the Matrix'. And the combination of those two things was rather interesting, to say the least. And what was a self-employed former time traveler to do when something piqued her interest? Apparently she stayed up to all hours of the bloody morning for two weeks trying to get to the bottom of it.
Bless Larry and that search engine he and some of his respectfully anonymous hacker buddies had made for her. With that, all she had to do was plug in some keywords and a postal code, and she could pull up anything along those lines that had been texted, emailed, posted or tweeted lately.
Which still left her usually with hundreds of results to scour for any hint of useful information. And a little over three weeks after the blackouts had come to her attention, she actually had something that was starting to look like useable data. Tacked on the wall next to her was a map of the areas in question, each blackout zone circled in red and marked with the date. She wouldn't lie, Sally may have pumped a triumphant fist in the air when a clear pattern began to emerge. Sally like patterns, patterns could be read, could be picked apart, and in the end they could lead to answers. Which, while maybe was a bit nerdy, certainly didn't merit that 'The Truth is Out There' keychain Larry had snuck onto her messenger bag last time they'd met to update her search program. One more 'Scully Sparrow' crack and she was going to take her business elsewhere.
The laptop chirped happily as the program came up with sixteen more results for, "blackout", and "green lights" in the local neighborhoods. Which brought her unread list up to 148. Sally her her head hit the keyboard and groaned to herself.
4:48 AM. Looks like she was going to have to make friends with her expresso machine after all.
Characters: Sally Sparrow, Helen Magnus, (notanemptymotto )
Setting: London, 2010
Rating: PG-13
The moon was high, the sky was clear, and Sally Sparrow was wondering when it had become half four in the morning. She let loose a short string of mumbled expletives known only to the inner walls of her flat, and leaned back in her chair, stretching stiffly. She reached for the mug of tea on her desk but found it hours cold and bitter. Brilliant. Not that much could keep her eyes from glazing over at this point anyway, short of a couple shots of expresso. She had a expresso maker in the kitchen but just couldn't be bothered to get up and chemically stimulate her brain that way tonight.
The petite blonde sighed tiredly and redirected her eyes to her laptop screen, where a long string of message board posts, forum comments, emails, and other assorted digital flotsam sat, still waiting to be sorted through. The sightings had increased over the last week, but no new information seemed to be cropping up in terms of what had been causing the blackouts. Sally picked up a pen, and rolling her chair over, made a check on a handmade chart pinned to the wall. There had been fifteen small scale blackouts on the areas of the city grid she'd been monitoring over the last four weeks. Each time, maybe three to six buildings at a time would suddenly lose all power, including auxillary, usually in the evening hours. Not once had they been able to be tied to any electrical interference or construction, or weather phenomenon.
Which was suspicious, but not usually enough to catch this much of her interest. Except in this case, before, during, or after, there'd been witness reports in the vicinity of ten of the blackouts describing strange lights in the dark. Or in the words of one PfloydRoX587, 'Sort of like that glowy green shit from the Matrix'. And the combination of those two things was rather interesting, to say the least. And what was a self-employed former time traveler to do when something piqued her interest? Apparently she stayed up to all hours of the bloody morning for two weeks trying to get to the bottom of it.
Bless Larry and that search engine he and some of his respectfully anonymous hacker buddies had made for her. With that, all she had to do was plug in some keywords and a postal code, and she could pull up anything along those lines that had been texted, emailed, posted or tweeted lately.
Which still left her usually with hundreds of results to scour for any hint of useful information. And a little over three weeks after the blackouts had come to her attention, she actually had something that was starting to look like useable data. Tacked on the wall next to her was a map of the areas in question, each blackout zone circled in red and marked with the date. She wouldn't lie, Sally may have pumped a triumphant fist in the air when a clear pattern began to emerge. Sally like patterns, patterns could be read, could be picked apart, and in the end they could lead to answers. Which, while maybe was a bit nerdy, certainly didn't merit that 'The Truth is Out There' keychain Larry had snuck onto her messenger bag last time they'd met to update her search program. One more 'Scully Sparrow' crack and she was going to take her business elsewhere.
The laptop chirped happily as the program came up with sixteen more results for, "blackout", and "green lights" in the local neighborhoods. Which brought her unread list up to 148. Sally her her head hit the keyboard and groaned to herself.
4:48 AM. Looks like she was going to have to make friends with her expresso machine after all.