Who Killed Captain Crunch? by Steve Schlarman copyright 2015 Act One It was hot. Not the kind of hot that feels good. Not the sun on your face, your skin warm to the touch, the full force Vitamin D enriched heat that you dream of on a cold, winter day. It was sweat dripping down your back hot. It was armpit stain through your suit coat hot. It was that unbearable, wrap you in stinky, humid arms and squeeze until you couldn't breathe hot. I walked to the window of my office in hopes of a slight breeze. The old wooden floor was damp with humidity; papers of my old cases were wrinkling on my desk. I had spent the last hour watching the fan slowly turn, counting each revolution. With the smart grid in full effect, electricity was regulated to all devices on my P-net - my personal network in my office where every switch, outlet, appliance and electrical device communicated back to central systems and were slaves to the whims and rules of the powers that be. I wiggled my wrist, hoping the action might trigger something in my iHealthometer. Maybe it would register some health emergency. Dehydration? Heat stroke? Heart attack? At this point I would take anything. Anything that might trigger a small surge of electricity that would speed my fan up. I never expected the air conditioner to kick on. I mean, I do believe there is a God. But even He isn't able to flip enough switches, navigate the quadrillions of lines of if-then-else code and phrack the stars to give me that much juice. I looked at my fan again. It was still rotating at 60 RPMs - the same rate it had for the last hour. I wiped my brow. There was a knock at the door. Emergency services to come take me to the hospital for overheating? My luck wasn't that good. I never expected it to change. I looked at the door heralding "Stan Houser - Cyber Detective" under my office number - 414. That's me. The type emblazoned on the frosted glass door had faded over the years. To the untrained eye, the door stated "St n Hous r - Cy r Dete ive". I had it on my list to fill in the blanks. I just never got around to it. The second knock cleared me from my reverie. I positioned myself behind my mahogany desk - a vestige of a simpler, hard-boiled, non-digi-time. I felt it gave my office a bit of old world style. I flung my arm in the air sweeping my visi-sphere off the desk. I blew one last ring of vapor and clicked of my vita-vape. Due to my sedentary lifestyle, the Health Enforcement Agency mandated puffing on the vitamin enhanced pseudo-cigarette a minimum of 15 minutes a day, 30 on the weekend. It was a pain in the keister but I was tired of paying the fines for non-compliance. I called wearily to the door "Come in." An elderly gentleman entered. Let me be a bit more descriptive - an impeccably dressed, well-tanned, athletically built and lean man entered, his age betrayed only by his silver hair. Even with his advanced age, he was the penultimate type of freak you would see jogging in the park on the motion-mills. Since the park in the city was 20 foot by 20 foot, with the only two trees in a twenty five mile radius, joggers had to schedule weeks in advance to get one of the three motion-mills. He was that kind of guy. No Health Police fines for him. I immediately felt my physical inferiority complex kick into first gear. He was dressed in a perfectly tailored black pin stripe suit. A rich looking fedora, with a red feather stuck in the authentic leather band, adorned his head. Not a bead of sweat rolled down his face. He must have built in AC in the suit keeping him comfortably cool. He had money - lots of it - I could just feel it. I pushed my rolled up sleeves a bit higher, hoping to embody the hard working detective type, and tried to hide the yellow stains under my arms on my otherwise, crisply wrinkled white shirt. Strike two on the inferiority complex. He looked at me with disdain immediately. "Stan Houser?" the man asked slowly. "Yes, sir. What can I do for you?" The man paused, then must have decided to continue despite his better judgment. He stepped over the threshold of the door and closed it behind himself. He eyed the pair of worn leather chairs in front of my desk wishing the least contaminated chair would magically beckon him. The man dejectedly realized that both were equally grimy and gingerly sat down in the one nearest my desk. He removed his fedora, placing it gently on his knee. "My name is Nicholas Feebler. I want you to investigate a missing person." I leaned back in my chair, putting my hands behind my head, and immediately knew I extinguished any hope of respectability as a whiff of my own BO crept across my nose. "Missing person? You did read the sign right?" I asked. "I am a cyber detective. Do you mean an avatar? A game character? Did someone hijack one of your level 85 wizard-gnome-warrior-kings?" I didn't read the guy immediately as a gamer - most have a much more indoorsy look - but these days even I was surprised every once in a while. "No. It is not like that." He responded. "I want you to find Captain Crunch." "Is that the character's name? Which MMORPG is it in?" I grabbed my pencil to take down the details. This was going to be a slam dunk. "No, you still don't understand, Mr. Houser." “Captain Crunch - oh, is that a relative? You need someone to cull through the ancestry logs, find some ancient great-great-great-ad nauseum grandfather. What was he? Sounds like a pirate? Is there buried treasure involved? I may have to charge extra for a finder's fee if that is the case." My eyes briefly saw dollar signs and I heard a few cha-chings in my head The man sighed heavily and shook his head. He pulled a picture out of his jacket pocket and laid it on the desk. I reached forward, praying my odor didn't overwhelm him, and picked up the glossy paper. The picture was the face of a cute chubby boy - probably 6 or 7 years old - sitting at a table. A large white bowl and spoon sat in front of the cherub-ish child. "Who's this?" I asked confused. "I still don't think you understand. I am a CYBER detective. I don't work the meatspace." "That is me." Mr. Feebler retorted. "70 years ago." Now I was really confused. "Mr. Feebler, what do you want?" The money wouldn't be worth getting hooked up with a crack pot. Why couldn't this be a simple avatar jacking? Or, even better, an adulterous affair? A few database inquiries, some quick hacks into an email account, perusing a FaceTwitGramGoog account or two and the case would be over. Trust me, cheaters were never masters of deception. "Let me explain, Mr. Houser. This is me when I was a boy. See the bowl sitting in front of me? When this picture was taken, there was only one thing in my life I truly enjoyed. A bowl of Captain Crunch cereal. Ever eat it?" My jaw dropped and I could feel my head shaking "No." "I didn't think so. Have you ever heard of Captain Crunch cereal, Mr. Houser?" Again, my head shook "no". My brain was stuck in gear trying to register the conversation. "Captain Crunch cereal, Mr. Houser, was the epitome of goodness. It was the most wonderful thing in the world. And it has completely disappeared." The old man paused for gravity. I nodded, bewildered. "Mr. Houser, I have had a long, luxurious life. I have made loads of money. But now, as I reach my final days, I desperately want to eat my favorite food again but I can no longer find it. I want you to determine what happened to this cereal. I want to know what happened to Captain Crunch?" Act Two After negotiating my daily rate plus expenses (adding a small premium due to the ludicrous focus of the case), I started my investigation with a series of deep dives into some of the larger data stores at my fingertips. Given the data crawling power I needed, the regulated power flow into my office was diverted completely to the heads-up display of my visi-sphere, my terabytes of storage arrays, my super cooled, diamond-silica quintuple processors and my coffee machine. Hence, my fan rotated at exactly 18.7 RPMs and the sweat pooled at the base of my chair. I had just filled my second thermos with ice and coffee (you seriously didn't think I was drinking hot coffee did you?) when the phone rang. I tapped my earpiece and the greasy coiffed portrait of my keen, yet smarmy, informant Jesper popped onto my visi-sphere. "What ya' got for me, J?" "Hey Stan. How's it going?" Jesper snorted, hacked and then blew his bulbous nose into a handkerchief. "Don't give me that small talk, Jesper. I don't have the patience for it." I growled. It always helped Jesper focus when I put on the mean tough guy persona. Jesper was too lonely and desperate for attention. Any leeway and I would spend an hour on the phone listening to him describe how he had to help his mother at the dress shop or what her quasi-tofu brisket tasted like the evening before. "Sheesh, Stan. What's got you in such a huff? Was the guy's coin invalid?" "No Jesper. His coin was legit. I banked it, took a little hit on the exchange rate and got my rent paid off in time. So -- back to my original question - what you got for me?" "Alright, alright. I am sending all I could find on this Captain Crunch stuff. Seems it was a pretty popular food item in the old days." A picture of an elderly, cartoon figure flashed into my visi-sphere, I grabbed the image with my hand and spun it around to get the full view. What a ridiculously childish image. Blue hat, white hair, some type of old timey sailor outfit. "What's this J?" "This was the mascot of the food." "Mascot? What kind of people cared about the mascot for a food product? They were bat-crap crazy in those days." "Tell me about it. This stuff had a bit of a cult following. There's more. Apparently you mixed the stuff with milk." "Milk? What kind of milk?" "Cow milk." "You have got to be kidding me.” This thing just got weirder and weirder. "Apparently mixing it was a tricky deal too. Too much milk or if you didn't eat it fast enough and the mixture would become some mushy, pasty slop. Apparently people didn't like that." "I can't imagine why," I said putting a nice sarcastic swish in my voice. "It gets worse. Not enough milk or if you ate it too quickly and it appears the food could cut through the roof of your mouth. This was some serious stuff." "Ok. Cult. Cows. It's probably good the thing is dead. I can't take anymore. Just send me the rest of the data. Anything else I should know?" "Nope. But my guess is that it was deemed military or something. The stuff just went black about four decades ago. Hush hush type of deal. The only other lead that came up is check into the insurance racket." "The insurance racket? Hmmm...that's a deep hole to look into. Thanks." **** A few more days of significant data mining and I had paid for my office rent and a new white shirt (which lasted two days before it had yellow sweat stains). I had gotten some more info on this food stuff. The lethal mouth cutting potential had me leaning toward military usage. I figured somehow the military had found a way to weaponize whatever made the cereal so sharp. My guess was that it turned into some favorite method of assassination. I could picture it easily. Some spy slips the stuff into your food, it mixes with a small about of liquid and zap! instantaneous hemorrhaging from the mouth. What a vicious way to go. Maybe it even waited until you swallowed it and it worked on your insides. I couldn't bear to think of it any longer. I was thinking of just going with this story to get Rich Nick off my back. (Rich Nick was my pet name for him. It was better than Feeble Feebler. I gave all my clients pet names to amuse myself.) Anyway, I had run all of my leads to the ground and was running out of options. Better to just pull up short and make a happy customer than spend all my days going nowhere and end up with an unhappy reference. I started to pick the phone up. Military use, classified project...I could make up the rest. The phone rang. I tapped my earpiece fully expecting Jesper again. Instead, a shadowy figure flipped into my visi-sphere. I flinched at the sight. "You, Houser?" the distorted, hidden face asked in a gruff voice. "Of course I am. You called me, remember?" I was about to hit the 'End Call' button - dang telemarketers. Around after all these years and still never a way to block them. "Look, see." The man rumbled. "You stop all this Captain Crunch business, see. There's people that you are pissing off and you don't wanna cross them. See?" "What the heck are you talking about?" I retorted. "Look, Bud. I am warning you. You keep looking for Crunch, you will be the one that ends up crunched." The screen went black. "Oh no you didn't!" I exclaimed. Military black ops, secret super spy agency, insurance syndicates - whoever you are, you just done pissed me off, I thought. Time for some real mining. I ripped off my tie and threw my damp shirt to the corner. Stripped down to my DefCon 75th anniversary t-shirt, a relic emblazoned with an homage to the legacy of the L0pht, I felt a surge through my blood. With reenergized zeal, I ran over to my data pods and started frantically fingering out query sequences. The power surged again to my processors. My fan stopped completely. Act Three Feeble Feebler (I got bored thinking of him as Rich Nick) entered my office. It was night (not that it cooled off much) and I had spent the last 48 hours running up and down the information highway in my Lamborghini of data analytics. I didn't have all of the best stuff but I knew how to use it. I called in a few favors and the picture finally started coming together. I told Feebler to sit down. It was going to take a bit to unravel the story. I took a deep breath and started: "It all started with the refrigerators. In the early days of the Internet of Things (as the P-Nets used to be called), refrigerators were one of the first things that were dropped on the Net. Initially it was pretty straightforward functionality. You bought a fridge, hooked it up and it tracked your inventory of food." "Mr. Houser, remember I am 50 years older than you. I was alive when this started." "Well, you don't know the whole story." I continued. "Then the grocery stores started providing the refrigerators. It was a subscription service and the refrigerators started monitoring what you ate and auto-ordered your groceries for you. Then it was expanded into the full pantry monitors that watched all food consumption. It was a big convenience that your grocery list was auto-generated and drone-delivered." "I see." Feebler stated. "What do you see?" I asked. "Since the grocery stores knew exactly the rate the cereal was eaten, they could track their profits down to the product. Captain Crunch lost market share and they dropped it." "Yeah - right. It's that simple." My voice dripped with sarcasm. "Just sit there and listen. What you didn't know was what was going on behind the scenes. The grocery stores - or rather the multi-national conglomerates behind the good old Piggly Wiggly - started selling your eating habits data to the insurance companies. They started factoring in not only your medical history into insurance rates but every morsel of every meal you put in your mouth. They could then share the data and start noticing things - like you eating an alarming amount of red meat - or food with high sugar content. They could then quickly adjust health insurance premiums." "So the insurance companies determined Captain Crunch was bad for people due to its sugar content and forced its demise." Feebler interjected. "Or was it people realized that eating the cereal was affecting their insurance premiums, demand plummeted and the manufacturer stopped making Captain Crunch." "Oh - I'm sorry. Are you the cyber detective now?" I volleyed hard at my client. "Um...No." "Then, let me finish." I pushed my sleeves up and started back in. "The next thing that happened was when smart-plumbing started to go vogue. After the Water War of '65, and the fact the electric companies had the whole smart grid thing going on for decades, the water companies implemented the same infrastructure. But most people thought that the smart-plumbing focused merely on water consumption. Au contraire, it was much deeper and insidious than that. "The plumping had analysis capabilities eventually. It started monitoring waste products. That data was being fed on the surface to your health care provider. You know what I mean... It's your birthday, you go your favorite Indian buffet for lunch. An hour later, you find yourself in the bathroom with - let's just say - some gastrointestinal issues. But good news, your toilet now contacts your Calendar and re-arranges your afternoon meetings so you don't have to sweat anymore than you are already. Even better, your toilet contacts your doctor's office with a quick analysis of your - ummm - output and it verifies that you didn't get food poisoning. You just hit the curry a little too hard." "What does curry have to do with Captain Crunch? Was consumption of Captain Crunch linked to excessive bowel movements forcing the water commissions to step in and shut it down?" "Listen, Feebler. This isn't just a simple paint by numbers picture. It's got multiple dimensions. Quit grabbing at one-side of the story. There is a lot of data to mudge through here. What wasn't revealed though was that the smart-plumbing syndicate piggy backed off people's acceptance of sharing this data to their doctor's office and, where do you think it ended up?" Feebler was on the edge of his seat by this time. I had reeled him in and he gasped. "Of course," I stated emphatically. "The health insurance companies. The health insurance company would run a quick analysis using Big Data techniques of course, and note that not only has your toilet been reporting quite a few events like your Curry incident. They would also correlate your increased purchase of toilet paper and Wham!" I slammed my hand on my desk. "You are diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome - guilty in their eyes and your health insurance goes up again." "Fascinating," Feebler said. "So we are back to the insurance companies. They tracked unhealthy foods and due to the fiber content AND the sugar content, Captain Crunch ended up on this list and they forced the manufacturer to stop making it." "Oh, I wish it was that simple but I am just getting started." I smiled smugly. "Now, where was I at? Oh yes, Irritable bowel syndrome. This is where this case took a dark tangent." I popped out of my chair and leaned over the desk. "Do you know of the many rumors that one could be harmed by eating Captain Crunch? The tears to the roof of the mouth, the horrible damage if one ate it too quickly, or without enough milk..." My voice rose in accusatory tones. "They were all poppycock," Feebler cried. "Never once did I have that happen." "Of course the allegations were false!" I punctuated the statement with a firm pointing of my index finger. "I searched every medical record - don't ask me how I did it - for the last decade before Captain Crunch disappeared. And not once did I find an incident where the cause of lacerations to the mouth was Captain Crunch. Yet the rumor persisted. I found evidence of search after search, post after social media post perpetuating this accusation." "So the health department stopped them from making Captain Crunch for safety reasons?" "Wrong!" I was on a roll now. I stood and paced the room like a caged lion. "People stopped buying the cereal because of the rumors?" "INCORRECT!" I yelled. Feebler was now a writhing puddle of a man. His composure completely lost, his vision blurred. He stumbled out of his chair and bounced off the wall, landing on his knees. "I don't understand!" The old man screamed, weeping into his hands. I suddenly realized the gravity of the situation. I was riding high from data mining, creeping into databases long since archived. I had weaved my way through side streets, back alleys, suburban neighborhoods, slums, and the gated communities of the digital universe. I was data drunk. I had lost what this case was about. It wasn't about mounds and mounds of data. It wasn't about the analytics. It wasn't about the conspiracies. It wasn't about connecting digital device after digital device – regardless of whether or not it was a good idea. It wasn't about the manipulation of the masses. The loss of privacy. It all coalesced in my head all too clearly but it overwhelmed and crushed the poor old man who just wanted a bowl of his favorite cereal. It was about the desire for a cherished reminder of a spent youth. It was about a final attempt to relive a simpler time when a bowl of milk and a processed, sugar infused nugget of goodness took all his troubles away. This case was about a man. A man who was whimpering quietly at my feet. He turned his anguished face up to me. "Please." He said. "I am begging. Just tell me the truth. Who killed Captain Crunch?" I took pity on him. "The Internet." I said. "The Internet killed Captain Crunch." He grasped my ankle and sobbed. "I am sorry, Mr. Feebler." He looked up at me again. A single tear rolled down his face. He said in a quiet voice, "It all makes sense now."