Regenesis (Book 1): Impact by Harrison Pierce

ranged back as far as recorded television’s
origin and full length movies. REFOIA offered complete libraries of both
fictitious and factual books in every language, including audio versions of
almost everything within the library. The program also offered live streaming
news articles from across the world as well as archived news pieces that dated
back to the mid-nineteenth century in some instances. But above all, REFOIA was
a massive and ever expanding multilingual encyclopedia that stored information
on everything from political figures lives to differing methods for lawn care.
It also had a biography for nearly every single person on the earth, although
some of these were brief and contained little more than a photograph and
information surrounding their birth and any possible marital status. REFOIA was
open-ended in regard to the possibility for anyone to update and submit
additional data or photographs or videos about any matter or any one, though
the submissions were always subject to the higher powers of the program.
    Sho
saw that he had quite a few messages and notifications from his contacts,
though he ignored them and asked Drake for the murdered man’s name.
    “Victor
Jacobs.”
    “You
don’t happen to know his middle name, do you?”
    “No,
but is that really needed?”
    Sho
let out a small sigh, “Well yes and no. You see, the system searches through
billions, possibly hundreds of billions of names to gather anything remotely
close to that, so it’ll bring up all of the Victor Jacobs that are out there,
including anyone who might have the middle name of Victor and the last name of
Jacobs…so we could be looking at tens of thousands of entries. I can narrow it
down to the Seattle area, but that could still render a couple hundred
options.”
    “He
wrote a book called Origins ,” Drake told him, “So that should help
target what we’re looking for.”
    Sho
grinned, “Well then…” he entered his search terms into REFOIA and immediately
produced a few dozen results about the man. He sifted through and added that he
wanted information about the death of Victor Jacobs and it produced only two
items, the first being a brief paragraph written by one of the enigmatic
masterminds behind REFOIA, who tended to write a brief line in anyone’s
biography unless someone else beat them to it. It merely read: ‘Victor Jacobs.
Shot dead in main entrance of Bothell Senior High School, Bothell Washington,
on August sixteenth, twenty-twenty-nine.’
    Beyond
that brief sentence it gave the link to the main article about Victor Jacobs,
which Sho opted out of and instead selected the second gathered search result,
which was a detailed police report of the case behind the death of Victor
Jacobs.
    He
opened it and skimmed through the notes and information, which he relayed to
Drake, “It says here he was shot twice, once in the heart and in the stomach.
They don’t mention any witnesses, though there was another death on the scene–”
    “Yes,”
Drake interrupted him, “What else?”
    “Ah,”
he read on and frowned, “There aren’t any suspects or theories of motive,
though they’re questioning whether a disgruntled student killed him and the
principal over possible expulsion or a failing grade.”
    “But
there isn’t any mention of who that could have been?”
    “No,
sorry.”
    Drake
told him it was fine. “How did you manage to find all of this anyway Sho? In
fact, how the hell do you get confidential police reports without any effort?”
    “It’s
all through REFOIA,” he told him.
    “REFOIA?”
    Sho
stopped typing. “REFOIA. The Realistic Entirety of the Freedom of Information
Act, established in twenty-eighteen by a radical group of the same name. They
have over one-hundred fifty websites devoted to streaming free information
about everything. A majority of the sites are shut down every day, but most are
reactivated under cover sites within minutes of them being closed. They exist
to one;