The Geneva Protocol
A forensic audit of a secure Geneva safe house following the death of its senior case handler. The investigation examines a series of logs, personal effects, and system anomalies to reconstruct the final hours of operation.
Initial Crime Scene
The smell of stale ink and ozone hangs in the conditioned air. The constant, low-frequency hum of refrigerated mainframes vibrates through the floor. Ahead, a bank of monochrome CRT terminals glows with green text. To your left, a stack of carbon-copy message logs sits on a laminate desk, the top sheet showing faint, blurred pressure marks from a heavy pen. The sterile fluorescent light above casts flat, shadowless illumination across the linoleum.
Crime Scene Environment
A sterile, climate-controlled institutional space under flat, shadowless fluorescent lighting. The air maintains a consistent, cool temperature with low humidity. The dominant acoustic profile is a layered hum: the cycling of mainframe cooling fans, the buzz of fluorescent fixtures, and the intermittent, distant clatter of a dot-matrix printer.
Investigation Constraints
Late-20th-century analogue and early digital systems. Landline telephones with tapped lines, pneumatic message tubes, typewriters with carbon copies, early magnetic tape recorders, mechanical cipher machines (not yet fully digital), microfilm and microfiche readers, early computer terminals with monochrome displays running batch processing, paper-based access logs with carbon duplicates, simple electronic door locks with magnetic key cards that log swipe times, and early-generation cellular phones with poor signal and no data capability.
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