Helsinki Odyssey: A Captcha Detective Story

Day 939, 20:40 • Published in USA USA • by Zeutheir

Tonight I volunteered to be part of the effort to get the word out that we're evacuating Karnataka in favor of our sunnier, first-world, curry-less home in California. Part of the fun of mass messaging is that you potentially run across fun combos in the Captcha challenges. I decided to have some fun.

Here are the ground rules I set for myself: I wrote down Captchas as I got them and solicited them from other people MMing in the same IRC channel. I took them all down in a Word document and must use them in this order without modifying any word. My effort will be to use the two-word phrases regularly spread throughout the piece, with the exception of the introduction.

The Captchas are in bold.

This should be fun.

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It's a dark night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets. I got sent on an assignment to check out a murder in a small town in Sweden. I wasn't too happy about it because the victim, Paula, was a girl I used to date. She moved off to that frozen wasteland without saying a word. People told me she had been getting political and radicalized. Regardless, I got put on the case and pulled onto the crime scene -- an old bank -- to meet with local officials. When I walked through the front door, the situation looked tense, and the only thing thicker than the tension in the room was the cigar smoke filling the air.

A gruff older man with a mustache looked to me and said, "You must be Noir. Can I cut the formalities and brief you on the case?"

"Go ahead Chamberlain," I said. "I know we're working against the clock."

"Well," the officer said, "at first we thought this might be a gang killing or just the expected local political assassination, but -- and this is between you and me -- we found Yemen bullets in the victim's body."

The bank essence got even tenser when he said this out loud, causing the other officers to turn their heads slightly to look with an awkward, suspicious gaze in my direction, but I had to ask, "You said expected assassination . . . this woman had enemies?"

"Of course. This new theory of state legalism Paula came up with wasn't going over so well in town." The officer himself even turned up his nose on mention of the theory. "before swerves she made in local government, this was a quiet town, but when she started proposing all these new ordinances, people started to get fed up."

I walked over to Paula's dead body to look it over. Gorgeous as always, I pretended to examine one of her hands (which was, as I supposed chalky ) just so I could hold it one last time. Her latent corpse was stiff already. The wound to her head was deep, and the crevice increased as it went down her neck.

"Looks like someone hit her hard with something sharp and then pulled it down after it was in," Wolfram, the local detective on the scene, said.

I couldn't take it any more, lied and said I needed to look outside for evidence of a break in, even though I knew they had already done it. Hell, they even had an engineer inscribe his signature on an affidavit saying there was no way someone could have broken into this bank.

It was snowing outside, the cold was bitter, and I knew this was going to be one Helsinki odyssey I'd never forget.

Policy would dictate that the next steps would be to call the coroner, get to work interviewing locals and dig into this crime more deeply, but this was no dogmatic matter. I needed to go to the root of the action, and the legalities and ethics of it all would be something for scribes and bureaucrats to debate later.

It was too much for me to stomach to go through the appropriate channels and risk my plan leaking to Paula's enemies. After doing some research on Wikipedia, I knew just where to go...

The construction site was fresh, the ground was covered with rhubarb, the air smelled like wet dirt and grass. It was in the middle of a shopping district, and I knew the locals here were opposed to Paula's politics; I needed to get to the bottom of their operation before they skipped the country or destroyed all the evidence.

Through the window of the construction trailer I could see Emmanuel, the leader of the local Liberty Party. The window was occluded by cheap curtains, but I could tell there were others in the room (said fabrics were thin and flimsy).

I take a deep breath and unsnap the the safety on my Q5 pistol. I creep quietly toward the trailer and upmarket I can hear wind blowing down the narrow sidewalks. I lift up an A/C panel on the back of the trailer and see the three members paint new protest signs, haunched over their placards like Quasimodo clones on a bad day. Three bullets do the job.

Their signs expressed the town's unhappiness with Paula's proposals: apparently this community liked "freedom" more than simple rules, and her petition to expand the community recycling program was too much for them to take.

I could read the Paula hatred loud and clear on the signs and knew I had to catch the next plane back home before they came after me, too.


Just a fun project I decided to try out. Hope you enjoyed it.

Talk to everyone soon.

My best,

Z