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Then Pharaoh sent and called Joseph, and they brought him hastily out of the dungeon: and he shaved himself, and changed his raiment, and came in unto Pharaoh.
— Genesis 41:14
Project Coral Sound
Badr City, Egypt
Solomon looked up from his notes at Joyce. He had just finished reviewing the footage she'd cut together for publication approval, and aside from a few minor nit-picks there were no real issues with the video itself. She seemed to have taken the need for discretion to heart, and he was glad for it.
"Ok, so the video content itself meets the public disclosure requirements."
"Great! I'm clear to upload then?"
"Not so fast. There's still the matter of the publication platforms and any metadata, and we also need to discuss revenue. You indicated you intend to use your existing accounts with YouTube, FloatPlane, and Patreon."
"Yes, that'll —" Joyce began, before Solomon put up his hand to stop her.
"I understand and agree with the reasoning for doing it that way, but it does add some complications. Revenue itself is one thing — we do need to avoid the first-quarter deep audit — but that's not the only factor, and if it looks like we might be co-mingling funds we'll be audited regardless. As such, we're going to need a formal agreement regarding revenue disbursement bef—"
Solomon broke off as an ear-splittingly-loud horn sounded from the workshop area.
Mideple's ears continued ringing for several seconds as he sat there, momentarily stunned, as he pulled the air blow gun away from the end of the rubber tube running to one of the pod's instruments.
He and Jack had arrived at the conclusion that the majority of the control panel was likely pneumatically controlled, and they'd been examining some of the different instruments and controls to determine their function, so they could hopefully start matching things up with the schematics and figure out how it actually worked.
The device at the other end of the tube — a nondescript box with a slotted grill and no apparent controls — was apparently some sort of air whistle or horn.
Mideple cautiously held the end of the tube at an angle a few centimeters from the blowgun and directed a blast of air toward it, resulting in a much quieter and lower but still high-pitched two-tone whistle sound. ^([kinda like this])
At this point the rest of the team had all come to see what the noise was, and he stepped out of the pod to explain.
"Pneumatic?" Kat asked incredulously as Jack and Mideple explained what they'd figured out. "I understand the principle, at least, but ... why? I would expect there to be significant differences, but I would expect something more advanced, this practically stone age stuff."
"It's not that weird," Mideple responded. "There are aircraft that are still in production that use pneumatics, heck I've even worked on a spacecraft that used high-pressure air for some of the engine plumbing. It's extremely reliable if you do it right."
"That's just for driving actuators and stuff, that's much more limited in scope than what you're proposing here." Kat was still not convinced. "I seriously doubt the actual control logic inside the flight computer is fully pneumatic, even if all of the connections are."
"One other odd thing I've noticed," Jack spoke up. "So, aside from the air hoses behind the main control panel and a number of o-ring gaskets in a few places, there's hardly any actual plastics anywhere in the pod; even the air lines all transition to thin metal tubing elsewhere, and if you notice even the seat and the parachute appear to be natural textiles rather than synthetic." Jack pointed to the cigarette burns on the pod's seat; while the upholstery was charred, it hadn't melted at all. "Which to be honest makes the plastic tubing behind the control panel even weirder."
"In any case though, it looks like the air was all supplied from this pair of gas cylinders." Mideple indicated a pair of gas bottles about the size of paintball tanks located behind a cover he'd taken off, connected up with metal piping to a large circular pressure gauge.
"They're both empty, but more importantly we should be able to use the gauge to figure out how much pressure this thing is expecting. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what the different colored segments on the scale mean."
Mideple paused, for a moment. "Once we've done that, I think we should try powering it up."
Lockheed-Martin Skunkworks Division
Palmdale, California
Mike sat at his desk, feeling useless. He'd spent most of the last week going over every facet of the Coral Sound predicament with the legal team, to try to come up with whatever options they had.
Currently it looked like the only real option was to try and turn this project into an actual government program, but there were a host of issues and problems that came along with that.
Doing it as a classified program would incur a host of practical disadvantages, as anything even touching classified information would automatically take three times as long and cost ten times as much, and this would severely impede their ability to monetize the sigil technology once this was all over.
But the other option, trying to make it a public government program, had even more downsides. 4chan and the internet had largely already forgotten about hunting down Angela by this point, but if someone managed to put two and two together and decided to make a FOIA request, they could have a serious situation on their hands. And the efficiency hit, while less than for a classified program, would still be significant, as would the impact on their ability to monetize sigil technology.
Either way though, there would be no way to back out once they went ahead with that, and it still wasn't guaranteed to entirely solve the problem: there were a handful of critical details about how Coral Sound was incorporated that they wouldn't be able to learn until they went ahead, and if they happened to be the wrong details it would mean they still wouldn't be legally able to contact them. On top of that they'd have to deal with added accountability that came with all that, meaning just ignoring the law to contact them illegally would then be even less of an option.
When Robert K. Ransdell Esq. had been assigned to them as the project's general counsel, Mike had initially had the perception that he was there solely to act as gatekeeper to ensure nobody got Lockheed in trouble, and that he'd be nothing but a problem moving forward.
Despite these difficulties, however, this was no longer Mike's opinion. There were potentially some very serious penalties if they messed this up — not just fines but actual jail time — and while it was true that the legal team acted as a gatekeeper, this wasn't their only or even main role. When some issue came up, they'd often be the first to begin working the problem, spending hours poring over documents and discussing possible interpretations to try to find a solution. It wasn't their fault this problem was such a difficult one, and Mike couldn't blame them for it.
The only person to blame — the one who got them in this mess with this partnership — was himself.