Contact across the Solar System

"They Were Such Sweet Girls"

The anti-espionagers continued their efforts to find out about SSC people's Earthly residencies. But beyond the Adamski flowers and the Amtrak ride, they had very little luck. Of the better-known SSC people, Orthon, Zuhl, Khessini, and Solgonda had apparently not resided very much if at all, Firkon and Ramu last resided some seventy years ago, and Kalna and Ilmuth were the only ones who resided more recently. But despite talking a lot about their residencies and showing off pictures of their adventures, they had revealed remarkably little that gave clues as to their identities. Some anti-espionagers grumbled about how difficult it was to find anything on Kalna's and Ilmuth's Earthly identities and residences, and when Kalna saw some of that grumbling, she said to Ilmuth and Orthon "Look at this. They are grumbling that we were too successful."

But they kept searching for clues, searching in odd places. Tree branching, cracks in sidewalks, bush and flower locations, skyline heights and directions, shadow lengths and directions, and other such clues. This produced numerous identifications that didn't pan out, and the CTIE refused to endorse any identifications that they did not consider very well supported, with several clues being consistent with them.

A CTIE anti-espionager who went under the online name of BeerKeg studied Kalna's cookbook in rather gory detail, in hope of getting an idea of her favorite foods. He proposed that this could give some hints about her Earthly identities.

Another anti-espionager asked "So if you find a lot of tofu recipes, you'd conclude that she liked to shop for tofu?"

"Yeah, that's pretty much it."

But BeerKeg later grumbled "That cookbook has such a broad selection that I can't find any common thread in any of it. And believe me I've tried. When I'm on the umpteenth recipe that calls for this or that genetically engineered vat fungus or vegetable, I have to ask what was on Kalna's mind."

"I never thought that I'd ever have any sympathy with the anti-GMO crowd. But here I am."

An anti-GMO anti-espionager congratulated him for seemingly coming to his side, and he pointed to that cookbook as what the SSC people want to force everybody to eat. "I love beefsteak. It's great food. The mall rats don't know what they are missing."

BeerKeg soon got another idea. "Maybe we can look for someone with a bizarre sense of humor. Like someone who would joke about eating her guests for dinner."

But he conceded that that would be a needle-in-a-haystack search.

BeerKeg then returned to Kalna's and Ilmuth's pictures, and he noticed something that some of his fellow anti-espionagers had noted: a street sign in the distance. It was too far away to read, but he got an idea. He got a database of Los Angeles landmarks and found the street names in it, and he then rendered the streets' names at the resolution of the sign. Not much detail, but he then compared the rendered names to the picture, and he found several candidates. Barely over statistical significance, but still enough. Another CTIE participant, German Shepherd, an inhabitant of Los Angeles, then wandered around the city, looking for places where the view would be much like that picture. He narrowed it down even further, to about 3 or 4 candidates. There were some apartment buildings near some of them, so he tried to get a look inside them, by posing as a prospective tenant. He succeeded with some of them, getting a lot of pictures. He also took lots of pictures of the outsides of all of them.

After careful study of the pictures, GS found some candidates, and he showed the pictures to some others at CTIE. They tended to agree, so he decided on the next step. Ask the candidates' landlords about tenants who looked like Kalna and Ilmuth, or else any former landlords who might have known about them. After some more searching, he came across former landlords Jake and Maude Miller, former landlords who were living in a retirement home in Palm Springs, California. Those two people remembered two tenants that looked like those two SSC women, two tenants who shared an apartment, and they recalled those tenants tutoring their children and doing various maintenance tasks. "I remember when Debbie fixed our sink," said Jake.