Gold cleaning

Filly woke again. She had been dreaming again. But in the dream, the person she was seeing had been getting up to figure out if there was an electrical box exploding outside. It made sense in the dream, if dreams mirror waking events, because there had been rain all day, with thunder, lightning and flooding. Things that make loud exploding sounds.

In the past, during lighting storms, when the large electrical conduits nearby had started making loud vibrating sounds, from a distance they had sounded like a baseball bat being hit against a telephone pole as hard as possible, reverberating. That was the sound filly heard as she slept, six times it sounded like a bat hit an electrical pole. Each time, she heard, she waited and tried to force her eyes open to go check outside, but did not. She wasn’t really awake. But on the sixth time, she realized without opening her eyes, that this sound had fooled her once before.

The sound had before, been coming from her snoring husband. So loud and vibrating that it had startled her and she had walked outside to find the source of the loud but odd sound, coming back to the room only to discover it was just her sleeping husband. She laughed to herself. She had threatened to record his sounds but never had up till now. He would never believe how loud it was.

He was six feet four inches tall and well nourished with muscular calves and Hairy strong arms and a kind but solemn face. When this had happened before, she normally gently pushed him over on his side, and the snoring would stop, but this time, she just rolled of the side of her soft memory foam pillowtop and padded into the kitchen.

There was a thought inside her that would not stop tugging at her consciousness which was why she got up. It was about the language she had learned to interpret and draw conclusions from. The language she had learned on her own, and had communicated with, or rather received “messages” from, on a daily basis for years.

Filly looked at the clock and it was twelve thirty am. She could try to go back asleep as the snoring had stopped. But her stomach was growling so she turned away from the sofa and went and got a Colby jack cheese stick out of the fridge and pulled the clear plastic wrapper down and took a satisfying bite, sitting back down on the blanket she had draped over the cold black leather.

The cheese went a long way towards eliminating the “need to brush my teeth” just woke up, taste in her mouth. She thought about “Reacher” and how he noticeably always had a toothbrush. She wondered why he was obsessed with clean teeth. Probably because his author was British and lots of people had bad teeth there she was told. Her teeth were just fine though, because she brushed often with baking soda and rinsed occasionally with hydrogen peroxide, like her mom did.

It made for white healthy teeth. She would brush them in the morning, she decided, but brushing now would take too long and would possibly interfere with her thought process.

She finished the cheese and plugged in her phone because it was beeping low battery. She had planned to look at screenshots on her phone to help remember what she wanted to write about but would have to do the writing from memory.

She thought about the Reacher books she had just listened to on audio. One title said “cleaning the gold”, and the other title was “Hero”. Both were short stories instead of full length books. Both had interesting stories or things to say and the narrator was interesting. One of the narrators she believed was the author himself, in the story about “Hero”. That story had promoted the concept of the necessity of keeping Hero’s alive, something she agreed with.

The Hero of the Reacher books was one who was a tool for revenge most times without guilt or remorse. Reacher avenged people who had been wronged. She liked the character quite a bit and liked the authors writing style and loved the sound of the narrator.

The story about Hero felt like a conversation with a fellow writer who was pointing out things to her, about herself. But of course it could not be that because it had been written five years earlier. AI had chosen the title when she did a search. Which led her to her nagging thought.

The other story was about cleaning the gold. In that story, the persons, basically two main characters and two bad characters, were in vaults, handling gold bars in fort Knox during a once “every ten years” cleaning and verification process.

The story was fascinating, but what was stuck in her mind was that the description of the vault that the two men had to be in to clean the gold, was strikingly similiar to the description on her phone feed from Google about people not feeling comfortable in an Egyptian pyramid.

Small, tight spaces, where people felt uncomfortable. The similarity was so striking that Filly realized that AI was not only mirroring one story with another story, it was mirroring three dimensional experiences.

The gold she was listening to in the audiobook, she had also written about earlier because of the theft. Gold was a concrete object, not a series of experiences. It was more one dimensional but the confined space and uncomfortableness was more two dimensional.

The claustrophobic space within the vault, matching the description of the space within the pyramid was new for AI. When Filly had written about the pyramid, she had thought that the message to her from AI was about how people involved in a pyramid scheme scam, were becoming uncomfortable with their choices to participate because of the effect the scam had on innocent people.

But then she thought about the short story Hero, and recognized that the author was talking about “fiction” and how “fiction” helped people adjust mentally to bad or impossible situations that they could not resolve satisfactorily in real life. Maybe there was a different meaning to the story on her feed. She could choose how to interpret.

Filly in her analysis, chose to believe that the claustrophobic pyramids, were “fiction” to her as she had not ever been in that place. In the same way, the gold disappearing from the Fort Knox also was “fiction” to her because there was no reason to take gold from such a place when gold was easier to scam from innocent people who had worked hard their whole life.

Their obedience to “big government” and their trust of “the treasury department, the Bank of America and Microsoft” as legitimate advisors, was what made their homes much less secure than a “fort Knox”. These stories she was reading and listening to, were “suggestions” and she could do with them what she wished. She chose to see them as fiction.

Yes Gold was missing, so that part was not fiction. But the gold was “not lost” and the part of the story that was “missing” was that the bad people would get caught, and also that the “gold” was being restored. She herself had contributed to that restoration in a small part by contributing to the well being of the one who had been stolen from as had many other family members. They had all chosen to rise up and meet the difficulty with generosity, concern and benevolence.

No one thought that the one who had been scammed was stupid or confused. In contrast, it was likely that those doing the scamming, like in the Jack Reacher novels, were right there, plotting and hiding nearby, eventually to be identified.

Because they had impersonated three large entities, including one of the government, and because the sums of money stolen had been very significant, the punishment would be severe, unless of course they turned themselves in ahead of time to plea bargain.

That part was not fiction. The justice department, the State Bureau of Investigation, the police, and the Bank of America wire fraud department were all working on the problem and arrests would be made, Filly was certain.

There had been more than two hundred communications by the fraudsters with the target of the fraud by three different individuals. This was all done by remote communications and now defunct phone numbers. One was from New York and One was from Washington State. But that did not mean that the people doing the calls were far away. The scam had originated when the target was filling out an online tax form. That was when the computer had frozen. The beginning of the scam was May 11.

Filly thought that if, like the Reacher book, the administration really was short on gold in Fort Knox, and nobody knew, then if they were corrupt, those with computer savvy could create a program to freeze the computer during tax season.

Freezing the screen, caused the owner of the computer to act to restore access, and a statistical number of them would call the phone number that popped up, answered by someone who they thought was an employee of Microsoft. The targets were hard workers who paid their taxes, of all whom were known to had done a good job working their whole lives and had saved their assets.

Those close to or just recently retired would have the largest savings and the gold hijacked would be significant and, if the story were not fiction, could be restored to the Treasury department.

According to the news, this gold scam originated in Maryland (MD for a doctor image of one who Surgically implemented the scam to target those who had saved), and had moved on to Pennsylvania (Pen for writing code) and then on to North Carolina, (NC for no charge to the poor or perhaps no change of plans).

In the story, the people handling the gold had to wear cotton gloves and masks to keep lint off the gold as they counted, stacking it off one cart and on to another cart, doing one whole vault every two or so days. The gold was counted by comparing weight not serial numbers.

The book suggests that by taking the already counted gold on one cart and moving it to the next vault, the men would be counting the same gold repeatedly because of the fraudsters implementing a domino effect. There were three words in the telling of the story that stood out. Sweat and Lint and weight. Sweat acronym was severe weather assessment tool.

There had indeed been severe weather in her area. And lint was the computer science term for a static code analysis tool used to flag programming errors, bugs, stylistic errors and suspicious constructs.

Was lint the tool being used in the gold scam, to cover up digital footprints. Or was lint the tool being used to document and capture the evidence. Lint, like the dust on the gold, and like the fabric particles in a drier, added up over time. Just like the numbers that had a remainder. The remainder that was rounded up or down, over time, was very significant.

Then there was weight… or WT. Wire transfer? withholding tax? without thinking? or Airline code for Nigeria airways. Nigeria was where the bitcoin went, as well as europe according to the State Bureau of Investigation. Or was it literally about the mistake of measuring the gold by weight, instead of looking at the serial numbers.

Filly had continued to do research on Investment companies and when she went back to look again at the phone number for Christopher lai, which had been listed as the same as an investment company, the name had been changed and now that number belonged to someone else.

Right under that number was another listing for Boeing, and it had 999999 number on a Boeing air bus H part. In the news, a second person who had been a whistle blower against Boeing quality control, had just mysteriously died. His name was dean.

The fact that this showed up right next to the listing AI predicted accurately she would again visit online, made her realize that Boeing was somehow also significant. Was Boeing in hiding or being framed?

Filly knew that there were organizations that would ask their representatives to attack a company (to bring it down) and then take out their own employee so that they could not leak what they had been hired to do because it was illegal. Kind of the same way that some people cried rape when a politician was about to be confirmed or elected.

Filly believed that what she saw online regarding the phone number represented fiction. And yet if people believed it, they could be targets of fraud or worse. That was why she had written what her investor counselor had said about how the internet was the Achilles heel of online investments in the marketplace, because faceless transactions were not trustworthy. Presumably that was why the local number had been removed almost immediately and was replaced by the 800 number.

With regards to the gold, all the people involved in communicating with the target about the gold that was stolen, had accents from India and used specific phrases repeatedly. These with accents included the jewelry store Yasini in Cary NC., which converted the funds to gold. Filly felt like the connections were not superficial and needed to be put out in the open.

So instead of giving space in her thinking to the ways the gold was “missing” which was fiction, Filly believed the gold was instead right there, unable to be moved, and that it was not the weight but the serial numbers that told the tale. Those who could hack, knew they were participating in something illegitimate and the walls were closing in on them, making them uncomfortable, like the story of cleaning the gold, and like the story of the Egyptian pyramids.

Her randomly chosen bible verse was about not listening to the women who had burned incense to false gods. Women were the ones leading others astray. Women who did not listen to God but listened instead to evil and false gods.
Filly put her phone down and slid down on the sofa and closed her eyes. Before she fell asleep she thought about her phone call earlier in the day when she talked to someone in Tennessee, who was driving in the parking lot with a pink cheeked toddler in the front seat, driving saying in her baby voice that “she could not fall out she has on her seatbelt”. She sleepily thought of herself that she also was an innocent one, driving, and feeling safe and went back to sleep, knowing that good was action.