2175 C.E.

VIII: Footprints in the Dark

Personal Journal: William Aucaman

07/23/2175

At about 9:00 this morning my house got a call from the Ellensburg Police Department. Cynthia's little sister Olivia went missing in a fire some time yesterday morning. Police and Ambience engineers tried to track her Interlink but had no luck. So, the cops decided to open up a search of the city and the countryside and called us up for manpower. Apparently, there were no traces of her body, as if she'd been incinerated in the fire. My brother Adrian explained that they could search for the genetic trace of someone who had been burned, but they apparently found nothing. My mom, Adrian and I went to help with the search. Dad stayed home to work on some deadline projects but said that he'd join us as soon as he could.

Cynthia's house was burned down to the foundation. No fire crews were in the area anymore; the fire had happened early yesterday morning. Cynthia and her parents were there. The police were organizing search parties to fan out from the house in all directions. I almost didn't recognize Cynthia; she was very distressed, and pretty dirty from the fire yesterday morning. I don't think she'd showered or slept well last night. When I spoke to firemen later, they told me that she'd been hit in the head by a falling beam; no permanent damage was done, but it may have given her head pain and may have disrupted certain Interlink functions. I can only imagine how disorienting that might be, based on the things I've heard about the Interlink. Her parents were quite calm, though.

Looking around in her neighborhood, I was struck by how flimsy much of the construction was; it's a shock the whole neighborhood didn't go up in smoke. Many of the newer buildings are like that, of course, but everything I've seen of Cynthia made me think she was far closer to being upper class, maybe even corporate class, than it turns out that she is.

I spoke to Cynthia shortly before we split up to search. I told her I was sorry for what had happened and asked if she was all right. She seemed exhausted and lashed out a little bit.

"Am I all right?" she snapped at me. "My sister is missing, my head feels like it's been split in two, I haven't slept or eaten in 12 hours! How do you think I'm doing?"

I apologized for bothering her. She apologized to me for freaking out, saying that all her senses were in chaos since the beam had hit her. One more reason not to have one of those things, of course, but I didn't say so.

My party went south and kept on in that direction for about three hours, comically close together the whole time, yelling for Olivia and peering at the ground. We had a couple of bloodhounds with us from the EPD and one of the local ranchers, who claimed that his was a far more expert tracker than any that the police could field. We found no trace of her. Some of the older volunteers had to quit after that. The rest of us kept on for about two hours. Then the police called it off. Apparently, the girl had been pretty sick the night she disappeared; they weren't sure how far she could have gotten.

The police gave us all a lift back to the meeting point. My brother was already there, and he was pretty unhappy. Evidently, there had been tracks near the creek, not human tracks, but tracks of something large and bipedal. He described them as "almost human, but with claw marks on three toes and possibly another sticking out from the heel." But then, the police ignored him! They claimed that it was probably some animal of some kind and told him that it wasn't relevant to the search. When he persisted, the told him that he could follow them himself, but that he couldn't bother any of them with what he found. I've always had a solid opinion of the EPD, but this kind of blatant incompetence is beyond what I've ever heard of.

Adrian followed the tracks as far as he could, but he's not quite as good of a tracker as me, so he lost them after about twenty yards in the undergrowth. So, when all the volunteers had left, we stayed behind to check out the tracks. It was pretty late by that time, almost five-ish, so the light was far from ideal, but we went after it anyway. I was able to follow its track for about an extra hundred yards, but it stopped suddenly. I'm not sure what happened to it but finding it after that would have taken a better tracker than me. The tracks themselves weren't very well preserved; they were about a day old, by the size and distance from the stream. They head Eastward into the woods in more or less of a straight line. They start a little West of the stream and cross into the woods. Whatever the thing is, it's heavy; several of the tracks were very deep. It was very tall, too. The footprints were almost three quarters of a meter apart from each other, and it wasn't running, so I'd have to say it was around three meters in height. It definitely wasn't human, in other words.