A cup of coffee always signals the start of a new day. A tradition the world follows, with some aspects being traditional. Rico's family is from Puerto Rico, and they have ingrained in him the same mentality that two cups of coffee a day is "cutting back."

  The exhaustion is caused by two things. One is the new "dog" the Internet sent to his house to watch him: Rom, a creature made of pink slime and in the shape of a corgi. Though he is cute, he lets it pass. The second is the endless piles of files stacking on his desk. After doing this job for two weeks, he feels exhausted, mentally drained, and, most of all, isolated.

  He is never alone though. First, there are the roaches in Rico's room. One tries to cling tio the shadows but crosses Rico's path. The brown pleather shoe rises and is about to squish the roach, when he stops. It wasn't due to a sense of compassion, but confusion. He looked down at the insect and swears he was wearing a clown and had a small plastic sword with a chipped piece of a box cutter attached to it on its side.

  The roach scurries into the wall, taking a sigh of relief. His journey almost ended right there, but there wasn't time to waste. The entirety of the building, or even the world, lies in his insect hands. Rico is unaware of all of this. Instead, he focuses on seeing the other person in his office.

  Rico sits at the table, staring at Laurel as she swims in her bowl. The bowl always remains clean. Rico tends to it, making sure his only coworker is comfortable in their workspace. However, on occasion, he finds items in her fish bowl that weren't there before. He once found a candy wrapper, a diffrent wcastle toy, and a functiong underwater cellphone.

  Rico learned that when it comes to the Internet, it is best to leave this curiosity as unanswered questions. Still, there are things that pique Rico's curiosity.

  RICO

  Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

  So what's your deal, Laurel? Can you talk?

  Silence. A series of bubbles come out of her mouth.

  RICO

  Are your bubbles Morse code?

  Silence again, only more bubbles. Rico tries to read the bubbles to test his Morse code theory, but he doesn't know Morse code. To him, they are a bunch of bubbles rising to the surface to be popped.

  RICO

  I'm talking to a fish. God, I sunk low... wow that quick.

  Laurel, you could say I sank like a ship.

  Silence, but there were a few extra bubbles thrown

  in the mix after his joke.

  This went unnoticed by Rico.

  RICO

  Really, water humor doesn't work.

  Wait, Anchor would have worked better.

  Rico picks up the top file while staring at Laurel.

  RICO

  It's time for work, not jokes, Laurel. There's a time and a place.

  Rico flips through the file and reads it.

  RICO

  It looks like this one was gathered from a brain strip.

  Oh, there are a few of them. An agent followed one man,

  the last "survivor" of the town. Wow, this isn't like the last one.

  Rico remembers Brain Strips from filling out reports when he was a field agent. They look familiar to old movie film strips. They are the physical embodiments of someone's memories. The fresher the memory, the more vivid and undistorted it is. Older memories tend to be distorted by the person's personal bias and the person of time.

  The main benefit of technology isn't the archiving of memories. The written word can work just as well for the majority of cases. The reason INTERNET uses Brain Strips is because they work on the dead. Depending on how fresh the deat and how intact the hippocampus is when extracted determines the potentcy of the strip.

  INTERNET can't interview the dead, so this will have to be done. Other methods are being worked on, as both on the mystic floor are dabbling in necromancy magic and spiritual mediums to contact the dead. No concrete results have been found yet.

  The microphone is clicked on, and the recording starts.

  RICO

  This is Agent Rico, head of the 24th division of INTERNET.

  With me, as always, is agent Laurel.

  This Audio recording is of incident B02019822374,

  which took place in Perch, Minnesota, on January 12, 1983.

  Code name, FRESH RED