Overview

By Jay Beale as Flir

Flir had screwed up. He had royally dcrewed up. He d stolen over 40,000 social security numbers, names and addresses from his college s class registration system. If that wasen t bad enough, he d been fooled into over-nighting them to the Switzerland address that Knuth had given him. He d sealed their fate yesterday with that damned FedEx envelope!

If only he d known yesterday what he knew now, maybe he d have done the right thing. Flir mulled it over as the panic set in.

Knuth had seemed so legitimate: he had the whole act down to a science. Flir had fallen for it, hook, line and sinker. Yes, there had been Knuth s formal CIA letterhead requesting Flir s service. But, even though Flir hated to admit it, Blain was right. Flir hadn t checked the story. He hadn t even stopped to question the situation. No, Flir had just been so damn caught up in the story Knuth spun that he hadn t questioned a thing.

Flir was a sixteen-year-old sophomore at one of the nation s premier technical schools, Pacific Tech. Only last year, a megalomaniacal professor had recruited Flir to the school. That professor had placed Flir on his ethically-questionable, let alone fraudulent, laser research project. Flir had helped put an end the project, the termination of which began with the famed Popcorn Incident, after which the Regents dismissed the professor from the college. After that, Flir spent a lot more of his spare time playing with computers, where he felt...