Rosario Ortiz (reluciente) wrote in nevermore_logs, @ 2021-08-11 16:48:00 |
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When Rosario set her mind to something, she went all in. A problem was really just an opponent to be conquered, and you didn’t go charging into a fight without a strategy, not if you were smart. No, you scoped out the field, you got its measure and you made a plan of attack. And once you’d found the points you needed to hit, you slammed into ‘em full bore till they crumbled. Rosario was going into battle against the mystery that was Archer Goldenhawk II, and she was doing it her way: with exacting lists and organised binders and hours upon obstinate hours of research. Her binder was filling up fast. Lyra had gleaned the names of a couple of AG2’s frat brothers; PhantomTruth’s blog (too useful to ignore, even if it was hopped up on crazy) had given her a few more. They’d been easy to follow up on: high-flying political types and Fortune 500 CEOs and luxury property developers, they were the kind of people who dined out on media attention and searching their names in Google had delivered Rosario a deluge of new stories, feature articles, corporate websites, gossip items, social media accounts and photos, so many photos. It’d taken her a couple of days to work her way through the dozens of browser tabs and condense the information overload down into a single page of salient bullet points for each of the men. To be thorough, she’d also added printouts of PhantomTruth’s blog posts on the Goldenhawks, some info on the Alpha Pi Omicron fraternity and its history, and a recent news article on Archer’s dramatic helicopter rescue. Her binder was filling up fast, but almost none of what she’d found related directly to Archer Goldenhawk II. She’d set out the space for it – three colour-coded divider tabs, one for each of the Goldenhawk men, but so far all she had on AG2 was a half-page of sparse facts, plus the gossip Lyra had managed to pry from Archer and his friends. She had nothing at all on AG1. It had been bothering her, all that nothing. Rosario was a scientist; she knew that the absence of evidence could be just as significant as its presence. The guys who’d known him talked about AG2 like he was a bona fide legend, with power and influence and money to burn. Wikipedia didn’t even know he existed. Well, okay, she’d thought, when you’re richer than God, there are probably people you can pay to get your name scrubbed from Google. That wasn’t evidence either, though, it was just a hypothesis. And the scientific method demanded that hypotheses be tested. So she’d looked into it. Turned out there was a kind of person that specialised in controlling what came up in rich people’s search results. Reputation management firms. Digital fixers, basically. But what they did wasn’t so much about erasing stuff from the internet as it was about manipulating the search results, creating and pumping up positive stories to push down the negative ones. In one article she’d read, the reporter had asked a fixer point-blank, but what if somebody wanted the unflattering searches scrubbed, not just buried? Well, you can’t, the fixer had said. The internet has no delete button. There were caveats to that. Google would de-index search results in certain, specific circumstances. And one of the reputation management websites she’d trawled over had alluded to other, less reputable firms who might advise other, less-than-legitimate techniques to remove searches (albeit with the warning that using said techniques would probably come back to bite you in the ass). So… maybe. Maybe Archer Goldenhawk II was a paranoid recluse who bribed or threatened or bought off anybody who thought of publishing anything about him. But. She had to wonder. Everybody knew that Archer was rich and his daddy was richer. Who was gonna doubt it, when he was flaunting his helicopters and his space-age sports cars. Everybody knew it, but where was the proof in black and white? Absence of evidence could mean she was looking in the wrong places. It could mean what should be there was being purposefully buried. It could also mean that it had never been there at all. Rosario wasn’t gonna say it. If she said it, she’d sound crazy, like PhantomTruth. But it was another hypothesis to test, and it wouldn’t be the first or the last time a charismatic fake had convinced a bunch of rich New Yorkers they came from money. After striking out on Google and at the public library, Rosario had turned to the college archives. In retrospect, that was where she should have started, since Columbia was the one place she knew definitively that AG2 had been. She’d set aside a full day, steeling herself for another needle-in-a-haystack search. She’d been set up at the microfilm reader for no more than ten minutes before she struck Goldenhawk. It was an article in the Columbia Daily Spectator, the college newspaper. The date on it was October 2, 1996, when AG2 would’ve been a freshman, and it was so quintessentially goddamn Archer that Rosario could’ve screamed.
She made a copy of the article and kept going. And was almost immediately stopped again by a familiar name. These days he might be keeping a low profile, but at Columbia in ’96 and ’97, Archer Goldenhawk II was everywhere. Parties, barbecues, rush weeks, charity drives, archery competitions— any time Alpha Pi Omicron got a mention in the paper, the name Goldenhawk was never far behind. He was even in photos. In April 1997, she found a shot of him holding an enormous longbow, face in shadow, arrow drawn back in readiness to fire. In September, he showed up in a grainy group photo in the Alpha Pi Omicron fraternity house, all four of the faces too small to be easily distinguishable. And in November— Rosario swore aloud. What’s-a happenin', hot stuff? read the headline above the photo. Below it, a caption: Students could barely contain their excitement at the semi-annual Hot Jazz, Cool Champagne formal at the Alpha Pi Omicron fraternity house on Saturday night. Archer Goldenhawk II, SEAS ’99, hit the dance floor with Brooke Newhouse, BC ’00. Rosario brought her phone up close to the screen of the microfilm reader, snapped a picture, and began tapping out a furious text to Lyra.
WHAT. WHAT.
Nov 9 1997. No wonder mom freaked when she saw Archer
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