Disclaimer: NUMB3RS and its associated characters, etc., belong to the show's creators and to CBS, wonderful people whom I have never met and have no connection to. I hope they don't mind me using them here; no legal infringement intended.
Author's note: Hurray, here comes chapter 4! To make up for Chapter 3 being so short, this one's almost twice as long. This chapter has some Larry for all you Larry fans.
I've placed a link in my author profile to a webpage where you can listen to (in midi) and view the score to the music box song, for anyone who wants to try to 'decode' the message (and there is one). It actually turned out to sound less odd than I expected, definitely patterned within the maj-- wait a minute, I'm going to give it away! Ha ha ha ha. That's the only clue you get. :) I won't promise that it's errorless; I did it all by hand before entering it into the computer and sometimes my f's look like l's. And that's the only second clue you get!
By the way, if you think you have found the message, send me a private email at ierneATexciteDOTcom, and I'll publicly praise you in the last chapter for the genius that you are. :)
Second Author's note: This chapter also introduces my OC, a linguist by the name of Andrea Gajewski. I am going to try my darndest not to fall into the trap of Mary Sueism with this character (though I admit, she does resemble me a bit), but I need you guys to let me know if she's getting annoying or unbelievable.
Pitch Perfect - Chapter 4
by Deichtine
Charlie wheeled his bicycle over to the front office in the physics department, where the departmental secretary was photocopying a tall stack of what looked like vector diagrams. She looked up at the sound of his entry, and smiled warmly when she saw who was entering.
"Charles! Long time no see, stranger. Larry will be so glad you're here - he's been complaining non-stop about the equations he's been waiting for."
Charlie forced a grin, resisting the urge to clench his teeth. It was not the sixty-year-old secretary who irked him - he loved Carol, who was like a grandmother to the grad students and younger faculty and like a mother to the rest. He had forgotten to bring Larry's equations with him. They were finished - he had finished them the day the music box had shown up. But he hadn't yet gotten them off the boards and camera and sent them to Larry. He resolved to avoid his mentor if he could. The music box investigation had completely hijacked his attention.
"Actually, Carol, I'm here to see you. I was wondering if you could book me some time in the Acoustics lab today."
"The acoustics lab? Charlie, you're branching out." Carol had been grandmothering Charlie since his early days as a teen grad student, and kept track of what he was working on, even though he wasn't in her department. She began rummaging in a drawer to find the lab schedule.
"It's just kind of a pet project, a personal thing. I'd only need an hour or so."
She raised her eyebrow at him, obviously curious, and paged through until she found the proper week, then shook her head. "I'm sorry, Charlie, it looks like Adam has the lab booked for the rest of the week. He's been examining the 'possibilities of enhanced spectrographic representation for extremely low frequency sounds'."
"Oh." Charlie frowned. Now how was he to do the recordings? He could do it at home with a computer and a microphone, sure, but he wouldn't be able to get anything near the acoustic purity he wanted, nor could he take other measurements.
"Well, if it isn't just the person I was trying to call," said a voice from the doorway, and Charlie turned around.
"Larry!" he said, with false enthusiasm. Larry just studied him glumly from beneath his eyebrows, his chin resting on his fist.
"You don't have my equations, do you, Charles." It wasn't really a question.
Charlie winced. "Not with me, no. But they are finished. I finished them day before yesterday, I just haven't had a chance to -"
"Day before yesterday? You finished them two days ago?" Larry asked incredulously. "And you didn't get them to me?"
"Larry, stuff's been happening - I got sidetracked."
Larry sighed. "You know, Charles, unless the interdimensional creatures have arrived and asked you for a tour of the physics facilities, I don't want to hear it."
Charlie winced even harder. Larry seemed really disappointed. "I'm sorry. I'll email them to you as soon as I get home, I promise. But I can tell you that they completely back up your theory."
"I don't need to hear the excu- what?" Larry blinked.
"You were right. The math completely works for your hypothesis."
Larry, his annoyance forgotten, smiled. "You're sure?"
"Well, there's always the possibility of human error, but to me it looks sound."
"That means I can start readying the paper for peer review."
Charlie nodded, his smile now genuine and warm as he watched the elder professor brightening. "Yes, Larry, it does."
Larry stood there for a moment, smiling broadly, then took a ninety-degree conversational turn without batting an eyelash. "Speaking of sound, what do you need an acoustics lab for?"
"Just a side project. I need to make some good recordings, do some frequency analyses, some spectrographs, that kind of thing."
"Doesn't the FBI have equipment for that?"
"This isn't for the FBI. It's personal." Larry was plainly mystified, but ready to let it pass for now.
"Well, is anything you're recording in the super- or sub-sonic range, or similarly unusual?"
Charlie shook his head. "Actually it's a bit of music."
Larry furrowed his brow. "I can see we're going to have to have lunch so you can tell me about this in more detail. But it sounds like the new phonetics lab would be more than adequate, if you can get in there."
"Since when does CalSci have a phonetics lab?"
Larry shrugged, and yawned, speaking through the yawn. "Since the computer science department started working with the UCLA linguistics department. They've started a massive project in the race to make really useful natural vocal interaction with computers a reality. It's housed in the CS department - you know, the room that used to house the old card-reading supercomputers before they were completely outdated. Carol, are those oatmeal cookies?"
Charlie beamed. "Larry, I could kiss you."
The older man stepped back, hands raised defensively, as though Charlie were ready to make good his threat. "Please don't. But I appreciate the sentiment."
"All right, people, huddle!" Don clapped his hands once to get his colleagues' attention (loud noises being necessary first thing in the morning, before the coffee really had time to kick in), then led the way to the common area where the boards were set up to display the particulars of the fraud case. Pictures and bios of suspects and people they had questioned were connected by a complicated network of lines. Yellow post-its with comments and notes added colour; pictures of the two murdered men, both high-level employees of the companies under investigation, gave a grisly reminder of the seriousness of this case.
When everyone was gathered, Don took his place in front of them, hooked his thumbs in the belt loops of his jeans, and began.
"Okay, let's summarize what we know so far. David, you want to tell us about the companies involved?"
David gave a start - Don hadn't given him any warning he'd be helping with the briefing - but to his credit, he nodded and came forward and began without giving any further evidence of being unprepared. Don was sure the younger agent was probably a little uncomfortable, but it was all part of the unobtrusive, unofficial mentoring Don had quietly been giving Agent Sinclair since Merrick had assigned him to his team.
"Ahh, okay. Well, as you know, our investigation centres on the Globecorp corporation, a group of semi-independent investment companies; specifically, we're focussing on the top executives, the president and various vice-presidents of the corporation. We believe that it is these five men who are directly benefiting the most from the fraud scheme, but we have reason to believe that knowledge of the plot runs much deeper, through most of the support staff."
"Why hasn't anyone come forward, then?" one of the newest forensic accountants, a man named Griers, asked. "Surely they can't all be comfortable with being accessories to fraud without even getting a decent payoff."
"Someone did come forward," David answered. "We got our start on this case on the basis of some detailed anonymous tips, which we believe to have come from inside the company. However, we believe the staff are now being encouraged not to talk to us - "
"Intimidation," Don announced, breaking in. "Which leads us to our two murder victims, Marcus Sudre and Frank Rice, both killed by single gunshots to the head, execution-style, in their own homes - in Rice's case, in front of his family. Both were high-level employees of Globecorp. Voiceprint analysis of the tip calls lead us to believe these two were among the ones giving us information, and that they were killed as an object lesson to keep anyone else from talking. So far we have no leads to the killers – probably professional assassins."
David began pointing out pictures on the board, tapping each as he identified them. "Donald Wolfe, president of the company; Ray Chrissom, Miles Crystal, John Fa, and Solomon Lansing, vice presidents of the four major corporate subsidiaries. We've questioned each more than once and found that their stories, though plausible, have minor inconsistencies. Bank records - that we could trace - are showing completely clean, but the spending habits we've observed don't mesh with what they should be capable of given their annual salaries - as impressive as they may be."
"Mr. Chrissom, for example, is a compulsive gambler, who has been seen several times over the last year betting - and losing - huge amounts at casinos in various cities, yet his bank account never registers a hit," Don added.
"Up until now, we've been concentrating on the numbers, looking for definite inconsistencies in the company's financial records and these men's bank accounts, but we haven't found anything there yet," David continued. "We have to assume that the real records, the uncooked books if you will, do exist and are hidden."
"Why do we have to assume it?" another agent challenged from the back of the room. "The first rule of financial crime is never write anything down."
Don nodded. "In small schemes and petty crimes that's generally true. However, these men are, we suspect, amassing millions of dollars between them by siphoning it in tiny amounts from their investors; that money has to be stored somewhere, physically or electronically, and with amounts this big and a scheme this involved, they'd have to be keeping records."
"It's also a trust issue," Terry pointed out. "If there were no records kept, they could easily start fighting among themselves, each accusing the others of cheating him out of his share."
"No honour among thieves," David added.
"So, as of today, our priority is shifting from analyzing the numbers - though we're not going to give up on that angle - to trying to find those records. We need to compile comprehensive files on each of these men and their immediate coworkers and support staff - friends, relatives, anything that might lead us to a good hiding place for these records. It's going to be a huge amount of information," Don said, nodding sympathetically to his teammates, "a lot to sift through. So let's get started."
It took Charlie about twenty minutes, and two oatmeal cookies, to ride to the building where the CS department was, find a place to lock his bike, and locate the new phonetics lab. When he arrived, the door was closed, and he hesitated. Barging into a room where sensitive sound recordings were being made was never a good idea, and even knocking could disturb an experiment. He peered through the wire-grilled glass of the window set into the door and tried to see if there was an experiment in progress.
There was - he thought. A brown-haired woman of about thirty was sitting in front of a computer, speaking slowly, word by word, into a microphone. Thin pink wire tendrils were protruding from either side of her mouth, dribbling down her chin as though she had a mouthful of strawberry ice cream. He would have to wait until she looked up at him to get her attention, and so he watched her work. She was pretty in what Charlie thought of as a 'realistic' sense - not a supermodel, but sweet-faced, with inquisitive eyes behind thin-rimmed glasses. Her hair was drawn back from her face in a short ponytail, and locks too short for the ponytail holder fell forward to frame her face softly. Charlie decided he didn't mind having to watch her work for awhile.
Suddenly, moved perhaps by that instinctive sense that prickles the back of the neck when one suddenly realizes that someone is watching, she looked up and saw Charlie standing there, and startled visibly, jumping in her chair. He gave her an apologetic wave and smiled.
Regaining her composure, she blushed, hit a button on her keyboard, saving her work Charlie assumed, and came and opened the door, trailing the pink wires behind her, apparently unnoticed.
"Hello?" She seemed a little flustered by Charlie's sudden and unexplained appearance at her door, and Charlie felt a surge of guilt for having interrupted her.
"I'm so sorry for interrupting you, I know how much I hate it when other people do that to me."
"Don't worry about it. I was almost done anyway. Can I help you? If you're looking for a computer lab, there's one down the hall-"
"No, no." Charlie paused, for a moment unsure how to continue. "Um, I should introduce myself. My name is Charles Eppes, I'm a professor in the Math department."
"Andrea Gajewski," she replied, shaking his proffered hand with a respectable grip. "I'm visiting from UCLA's linguistics department. What can I do for you, Dr. Eppes?" Whatever she had in her mouth didn't seem to be affecting her speech, but Charlie found it incredibly distracting. Again, he had to think a moment before he was able to answer her. I must look like some sort of idiot, he thought.
"Well, um, I was actually wondering if I could beg a favour. I'm looking for a lab with the equipment to make a good-quality recording and give me some readings - you know, frequency, waveforms, some spectrograms, that kind of thing. I tried the physics department's lab, but they're all booked through the week."
She thought for a moment, obviously reluctant. "I don't know. How much do you have to record?"
"Not much, about a minute's worth of playback."
She considered this; then an idea seemed to come to her, and a crafty expression stole over her face. "I might be persuaded - if you'd be willing to do me a favour in return."
A favour? What kind of favour? Charlie thought. He had enough equations on his plate without being drawn into speech synthesis/recognition software logarithms. "Um, what kind of favour?" he said aloud, and she smiled at his obvious discomfiture.
"Don't worry, nothing too onerous or invasive. My work requires that we get speech samples from a wide range of subjects, in order to improve the computer's recognition and decoding capabilities. Basically you'd just be making a few recordings for me, speaking into a microphone. An hour of your time, tops."
Charlie thought about it. His time was precious, but he needed this recording. The pink wires still dangled, distracting him.
"Ah, may I ask..." Charlie started.
"Yes?"
"What do you have in your mouth?"
She looked surprised, then blushed deeply, and turned her head briefly to discretely remove the object and wipe it with a handkerchief from the pocket of her lab coat. When she turned back to him, she showed it to him: a plastic form of her upper teeth and the roof of her mouth, studded all over its concave surface with tiny metal electrodes. It reminded Charlie of the orthodontal appliance he'd had to wear through his teens - minus the electrodes, of course.
"It's an artificial palate. We use them for electropalatography - recording the position of the tongue relative to the palate during speech. I'm sorry, I forgot I was wearing it." She looked profoundly embarrassed, which Charlie found oddly attractive. "Oh God, I look ridiculous with that thing in," she laughed softly.
Charlie grinned back. "I don't think you looked ridiculous at all. Actually, I'm intrigued."
If she had asked him to clarify by what exactly he was intrigued, he would have been hard pressed to answer.
End Chapter 4.
Again, huge thanks go out to my beta-readers. You guys rock.
For a fascinating (to me anyway, but then again I'm rather odd) look into electropalatography, the world of acoustic phonetics and the various devices used by linguists and speech pathologists to measure various aspects of speech, have a look at the UCLA Phonetics lab web site at ht tp/ ww w. linguistics. ucla. edu / faciliti / uclaplab. ht ml (click on 'facilities'). This link is also in my author profile. The artificial palate they picture doesn't have pink wires, but the one in the picture in my Encyclopedia of Language does, and that was my original model. :)
Special thanks to dedletrbox, sammac, pkw, SD, Zubeneschamali, Stealth Dragon, CrystalMak, Alamo Girl, and D. Lerious for your reviews! They make me happy. :D
