Super-Meals: Part Five

There are an astonishing number of applications available for free for your smartphone of choice that scan police frequencies, and a very respectable number of apps that browse news reports. Fewer, however, is the number of apps that scan both news and police feeds, and none of them are free (but the best of them run headlines and reports across your phone screen like a stock ticker, which can be quite entertaining to watch when you have time to kill).

In all the world, however, there was only one app that monitored the internet and airwaves, including police feeds, news feeds, blogs, and social media channels; it perpetually searched these feeds for a single keyword, and displayed the results on the phones of only five men. The app had been programmed to rank mentions of this very specific keyword and display them on these five phones if and only if certain criteria were met.

When these criteria were met and the notifications were sent to these five phones, only three men of the five even bothered to check their phone to see what it was. Only two of them ever recognized the notification for what it was.

But only one of the five men ever paid attention to the notifications.

The app was written by a 19 year old programmer who was headhunted out of his college, given a ludicrous salary, and then sequestered in a room underground, beneath a certain fast-food chain’s corporate headquarters in Illinois, where he was fed a steady diet of pizza and highly caffeinated drinks and allowed to play all the video games he wanted all day, every day, in exchange for creating this one app and keeping it running.

The one men in five who paid attention to it, was Doctor Ralph Quinlan, Head Chef (and chemical engineer) for a massive, worldwide fast-food chain that was putting less and less food in their “food,” and more and more chemicals.

 This time, when the app buzzed his phone, it notified him (and the four other men, one of whom wouldn’t even look at it) that an unidentified transient had been found dead in an underpass and among his few possessions were the remains of a meal purchased at a local branch of the fast-food chain in question, and that the autopsy had revealed several irregularities in his stomach contents.

Doctor Ralph’s brow furrowed at the news. He wasn’t in charge of public relations, that was Tami’s job down on the 14^th floor, but he knew that if this fast-food chain were somehow implicated in a death, Tami would call him and ask him to prepare a statement that she could read to the general public, and Doctor Ralph hated writing statements to be read to the general public.

The general public, in his opinion, couldn’t understand polysyllabic words (like “polysyllabic,” for example), so he typically had to re-write his statements three or four times to dumb them down to the fourth-grade level, as per standard press-release guidelines.

So he called Tami and told her to give him 48-hours before she remarked upon this death at all. She agreed, because he worked on a higher floor than she did, and she knew that it would be at least 48 hours before the death was picked up by local news and mentioned at all by any media outlet other than the app on Doctor Ralph’s phone (Tami secretly hoped that someday she would be given access to the app, and was pretty close to getting it. She had convinced one of the five men who had it to ignore it, and this had not gone unnoticed by the other four app-holders).

After he hung up with Tami, he opened another app on his phone and booked a plane ticket for the next available flight out of Chicago O’Hare airport, destined for the small town where Mimi Spatchcock was about to stumble across Walter Elliot.

He then told his research and development team he would be gone for several days, but while he was away they should continue working on their current projects (after getting approval on the “onion,” they had begun synthesizing various forms of cheese), then he sent a text to the board of directors that simply read “I’m taking care of it. Will update within 48 hours.” Those who bothered to read texts from Doctor Ralph would know what he was referring to, and if they called Tami and got confirmation from her, they would leave it at that.

Doctor Ralph kept a travel bag in the trunk of his car at all times for just such an occasion. He was also a platinum flyer and a gold star member at several hotels, so by the time he reached the executive lounge at the airport, his travel plans were solidified. While he waited for his flight, he reviewed the police report.