Chapter Twenty One: Digging for Skeletons

When the Overseer had 'requested' that the medical staff be turned inside-out Butch got a knot in his stomach. What was Al up to? He hated snooping around Jo's past without her knowing. He thought of telling her but didn't want her to worry about Al's interest.

The next day he and Paul got to work on the digging.

Luckily the only things to find on Jo were the BB gun, her make shift shooting range and the night hunts of radroaches. All of which came out during the shooting incident which she had already served time for. After that she was dark. The Security Vids only picked her up here and there, and only when she was in the company of someone with a working tracker chip. Since they'd been 'visiting' he'd been careful to erase any vids with them together.

Things got weird when he couldn't find any record of her birth. He checked other's her age to see if maybe there had been a corrupted file erased or misplaced but everyone was there, just not Jo.

There was also no information on her mother. No birth record, no death record, no marriage record, nothing. All they could find was her name …Catherine.

When they started looking into her father he began to think something shady was going on. There'd been nothing on him until almost nineteen years ago when he just appeared out of nowhere. About the time Jo was born. It was like his whole past before that was erased, gone. He dug deeper to find cryptic notes on his personal about some project that he went to a lot of trouble encrypting.

Was he working on something for the Overseer? What was the significance of Jo's birth? What the fuck was going on?

Looking into Jonas' past was a piece of cake and almost boring. Almost. He of course was involved in supplying Jo with the range and the BB gun but he also rigged the G.O.A.T. test. Seems he wanted to be sure Jo ended up in the clinic, like that wasn't going to happen anyway.

Then there were the pictures.

Paul was usually up to date on the latest porn, what with his little fetish and all, but these were new. Or maybe they were just here, on Jonas' personal and no one else's.

Weird.

Who had he gotten these from? How could he keep these from circulating? They were obviously taken by a security camera from the Core.

Fuck. Those were supposed to be off-line.

"Do a thorough search Paul. I need to be sure I'm not in any of these."

Who did he get to take these? Did they keep a copy for themselves? Hell he would have, she was hot.

Two days later Paul tells him they found something. It was a vid of Jo and Butch that first time in the Core.

"The Core security camera feeds were wiped clean. We got it off a drive in Jonas' personal. He hasn't downloaded it to anything else."

"So some security goon took the stills and recorded this for Jonas, then wiped the feed to cover his tracks. I bet Jonas paid something for these too but what? We don't know who made the original vid or how many other copies there are."

"Nope."

"Fuck."

"We're doing a vault search of all the personals with the face detector software. It will scan all the images on their drives. We'll have a lot of shit but we will get it all, unless who ever has it kept it on their Pip-Boy. You know we can't jack into the Pib-Boys unless they wire in for a hard update."

"Yeah, yeah, corrupt what you find, all of it, Jonas' too, fucking pervert."

"He sure has it bad for your Jo, huh?"

"I should beat the fuck out of him."

" Are you going to tell her?"

"Hell no. This whole research has opened up some very weird shit I've never seen before."

"What do we take to our Almighty?"

"Let me know what you find and where. Then we'll decide."