Sealed for good measure (Close w/Lifexhacker)
Mordecai tilted his head looking down at the young man, face quickly going from curiosity to something a little darker.
"Get to the point" he muttered.
The former ranger listened on, all but hanging on to every word that fell out of the young mans mouth. Something boiled in him. The files were out there and somehow he, this young man, managed to get into them.
Thirty-Four Gigabytes? That was no small file, even Mordecai knew that, if it were a physical file it would have been a binder large enough to cause injury.
"Look, I haven’t even seen that damn file" he retorted vehemently. "and you just managed to swing this with out putting up any sort of red flag?" Mordecai asked looking around.
"Alex, I have to see that file." The older man practically demanded. "I have to see everything on it. Whatever you found, like, now"
Maybe now he’d finally get some closure, put a face and name to a shadow in his memories, figure out who that faceless ghost was in his dreams and just see how tragically wrong everything went for the duo.
Alex visibly cringed as Mordecai's expression grew dark, the engineer bracing himself for a verbal beating that never took place; one that was, instead, replaced with a concerning demand to see the files.
But wait, how could Mordecai -- one of only three main subjects of the entire project -- not have seen the file before? Was the PPDC trying to hide something from the former Ranger? Was it for his own good? Even if so, what right did the PPDC have to keep something like that away from, of all people, a chosen participant for the project? And, above all else, why did Mordecai even need to see the file -- was he not there?
None of the pieces were fitting together; but, instead of interrogating the man, Alex took it one problem at a time -- starting with his own.
"Whoa, okay, hold on, dude." Alex put his hands up as he further explained his situation. "I got into the file during a system update, most of the security was already down. When everything came back online, my IP was traced and blocked; there's no way I'd be able to get back into it now. It'd take me a day, at least, to come up with an IP encrypted enough to slip past the system." he shrugged. "So, I mean, unless you got another computer lying around I could use, I'm gonna have to put you on a waiting list, dude."
