Day X Exists - Mission 3:As cynical as I tend to be about such things, I have to admi tthat the online Day X Exists game has me starting to get pretty amped up about the upcoming movie starring Angelina Jolie. She plays CIA agent Evelyn Salt who has been framed as a double agent and is trying to clear her name. In the worldof the online game, only you can help her from inside the CIA, accomplishing anew and different task each week through a mini-game and uncovering hidden codes as well for bonus points.
After last week’s observation of an exchange between Day X agents that I got to surreptitiously photograph, thanks to a heads up from Agent Salt,I got another message from her. This time she was pointing me towards a hidden hard drive left in a university quad by another Day X operative. The man who left it was a janitor named Michael Simms, who apparently used to be a lab tech at the university but had been laid off and stayed on in the maintenance department. There was no explanation for regular money transfers to an account he holds in Bermuda under the name Davidoff Marachenko. He is believed to actually be a Ukrainian national.
My job was to hack into the hard drive wirelessly (using a PSP portable, in case you forgot this was a Sony film). The game itself was similar to Tetris in that different shaped pieces would pop up and I had to line them up from one side of the screen to the other so a signal could go through. In the meantime, a red pulse was slowly creeping up on me so time was indeed a factor. Easily the hardest learning curve of the three games, the secret was to pay attention to what pieces were coming up next so I could plan accordingly,and make sure that any pieces I wanted to discard were placed considerably out of the way of the path I planned on taking. There were three screens, each progressively more difficult until my goal was reached with a sigh of relief!
Uncovered in the files from the hard drive was the chemical formula for a dangerous fertilizer that was developed and discarded by the Soviets in the seventies called Illenium One. Apparently it was causing a series of mysterious illnesses but it’s unclear why the Day X spies are interested in it. Also there was a ciphered message that seems too difficult for the cryptologists at headquarters to know what to do with except that the words “Simms, Connection, 0300, and S.A.” all seem to be key words. Bets that this will have something to do with my mission next Tuesday? I guess I’ll find out then
