[tshiggins]

Over on SpaceBattles, I noted you asked for snippets. I came up with one, while I was thinking about this at work, today. (It was a boring day.) I wanted to read the rest of the thread, over at SpaceBattles, before I posted it.

You and some of the other guys, over there, hinted at some of these ideas. It's long, so it'll take several messages. Given that this is the SJ Games GURPS forum, I thought of it more as an adventure seed.
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During the winter, all color vanished and Washington, D.C., became a washed out daguerreotype of gray and white. Dark gray clouds blocked the sunshine on most of the short winter days, and dropped fresh white slush in layers atop the dirty gray remnants of previous storms.

Not that Bill Friedman ever really saw much of that. He spent most of his time, these days, in windowless rooms deep inside a crowded, nondescript office building on the outskirts of the nation's capital. With the onset of war in Europe, the previous September, the Signals Intelligence Service had seen a rapid increase in the size of its staff.

He hoped they got funding for the new digs out in Arlington, soon.

The appearance of four other Earths, actually visible in the daytime sky, meant the SIS budget would probably double (at least), this next fiscal year. Some of his best people already worked day and night as they tried to listen to and decode the radio traffic from two of the other Earths. The traffic from the center Earth had proven the most problematic. That planet's advanced broadcast technology had been a blue-nosed bitch to figure out, and the sheer quantity of the information had proven absolutely overwhelming.

All they initially could hope to do was record as much of it as possible, and devote as much of the little time as they would have, in the war-years to come, sorting through it all.

Then, they got some help.

The broadcasts that began, a month ago, had initially caused serious distress amongst the staff. When Frank Rowlett realized some of the broadcasts were directed to him, personally, and used some of his own private encryption schemes, the young man almost had a coronary. As Friedman walked into the room set up especially for Rowlett, he breathed a sigh of relief. He and his senior cryptanalyst were the only two permitted inside, and it was the quietest room in the building, since it had only the one teleprinter.

That machine currently chattered quietly, to itself. It seldom paused, these days; usually, it only became still when the radio receiver shifted to the predetermined frequency according to the schedule sent during the first transmission received by Rowlett. It was a damned clever innovation, brilliantly simple, and one Friedman kicked himself about; he wished he'd thought of it.

Of course, given what he'd learned about the organization at the other end of the broadcast, Friedman expected to learn a lot more tricks like that, in the very near future.

Frankly, this so-called, "National Security Agency" on the 21C Earth scared the hell out of him, even though he now understood it to be the successor of Friedman's very own SIS.

If anything, that actually made it worse. As quiet as this room was, Friedman had grown to dread opening that door, each morning. All too often, Rowlett looked at him with the same mix of perplexity and foreboding that appeared on his face, now.

"Did the broadcast finish, Frank?"

"Yeah, I got the call about 5 a.m., and came straight in. Couldn't sleep, anyway, knowing it was nearly done."

"Is it as bad as we thought it might be?"

"Well, no, to be honest. Thankfully. I see no threat to the nation from his activities, directly, but the issue still needs to be addressed. It's a real vulnerability, in one of the worst possible places."

"You got it packaged up?"

"Yeah. I finished proof-reading it, just a bit ago. Weirdly, it's not complete. The timeline of the narrative just stops."

"When?"

"This month."

Friedman picked up the bundle of type-written pages, and scanned through them. He'd already read everything received, up through yesterday. There wasn't that much more. He ran his fingers through his hair, before he realized it. Now, he'd have to comb it out, again.

"Alright. I'll take it to the president."

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