REPORT: FLYER
FILE #: 103

Miss Parker and Sydney are walking through a huge windmill farm in the hills just outside San Francisco. Their guide is telling them that Jarod discovered the spot and told them to build the windmills there because it was a "natural heat vortex" . Heat from the desert collided there with in-coming ocean breezes and created its own wind index, which ran the mills. The windmills, in turn, generated electricity. The guide tells Miss Parker and Sydney that Jarod would sometimes spend entire days, "just eatin' PEZ and takin' in the hawks" , watching the birds fly and hover, and testing air currents and up drafts by throwing sand into the face of the turning windmills. Sydney looks up into the sky at a hawk flying overhead and says, "Jarod. What are you up to now?"

IN ARIZONA Jarod -- as Jarod Wright -- is piloting an F-16 fighter jet. He shouts out a joyful, "Wooooooo-hooooo!" and tells another pilot, Tom "Man-eater" Matthews, who's flying along side him, "This is so cool." Matthews tells Jarod he's passed the gauntlet, and if he wants the job as a Skyvionics test pilot, he can have it. Jarod accepts the job, and celebrates by rolling the jet at a fast pitch.

Later, at the Skyvionics Testing Ground, Jarod meets another test pilot (a hot-shot named Dixon), and a mechanic named Lawson. Matthews brags that his newly developed Scimitar computer chip will make jets and commercial airplanes faster and more efficient than ever before. The chip's stock gained over 13 points recently, and Matthews was on the verge of conducting a test of the chip for the Pentagon. He tells Jarod and Dixon that they're both up for wing-man, and that he'll make his decision later as to which of them it's going to be. In the hanger, the mechanic Lawson also brags to Jarod about how efficient the new chip is: it can make the response time between pilot and machine 10 times faster than it was before. He's interrupted, though, by an Air Force lieutenant, Janice Gant, who's acting as a Special Projects Officer, overseeing the upcoming Pentagon test of the chip. She tells Lawson she wants his specs immediately, and he leaves Jarod to get them for her.

While Lawson is away, Gant walks over to a series of "magic eye" (stereo graphic) posters Lawson has mounted up in the hanger. She tells Jarod she's looked at them dozens of time but can't find the hidden image in them. Jarod points to each poster, one after the other, and says the images are of "a penguin at the sphinx, a penguin on a camel, and a penguin riding a Nile barge. Now there's something you don't see every day." Jarod explains that in order to see the hidden images, she has to look at the posters, while deflecting her "primary eyesight 8 degrees to the left." Jarod then introduces himself to Gant as the replacement for test pilot Ronald "Hammer" Collins who had died in a crash several weeks earlier.

Later that afternoon, Jarod rides a red bicycle over to a nearby avionics cemetery where old wrecks of jets and airplanes lay in pieces in the desert. He goes through the wreckage of Ron Collins' plane, and then opens up the red notebook he's using to keep track of his investigation of the crash. Headlines on the newspaper articles enclosed in the notebook read: TEST CRASH PILOT ERROR? ...and COLLINS FAMILY STRUGGLES ALONE. Collins had died during a test of the Scimitar chip, and the crash was blamed on his error. Although he had time to eject from the jet before it hit the ground, he never did. Since he was blamed for the crash, his pension was revoked, and his family (a wife and young son) were left without the income and security the pension would have given them otherwise.

The next day, in his lair, Jarod is watching a DSA from 01-16-69 which shows images of him as a child, performing an endurance test on a stationary bike. In the background is Sydney talking to a smoking, balding man. The balding man's face is to the camera, but he's too far away for Jarod to hear what he's saying. Adult-Jarod freezes a frame of the image of the balding man, and is setting up a modem to transmit the image, when his landlord, Mr. Hollis comes in snooping around. Mr. Hollis is kindly, but seems to suffer from a form of paranoia. He complains that Skyvionics is conspiring with the government to wreak havoc on civilians; he talks about stalking black helicopters and "grey men" ; and tells Jarod he's made sure that the TV set in the guesthouse where Jarod is staying doesn't have a "reverse imaging device" (so no one will be able to watch Jarod through the TV). Mr. Hollis has also made sure to block any television station transmissions that might be carrying subliminal mind control messages.

Jarod notices that Mr. Hollis has a small black canister in his hands, and Mr. Hollis tells him it's a canister of Halcyon gas that he was able to confiscate from the government. The halcyon (besides being a fire control substance) is a potent hallucinogen that was used, Mr. Hollis tells Jarod, experimentally on local civilians. When the government told people it was spraying the area to get rid of an infestation of med-flies, he says, they were really testing halcyon's effects on the masses. Jarod is concerned that Mr. Hollis has a canister of the stuff, but Hollis tells him his sample has been cut with 50% oxygen so it isn't as potent as the pure stuff the government uses, but it could still make people drowsy and "loopy" if they got a whiff of it.

AT THE CENTRE , Broots shows Sydney and Miss Parker the image of the balding man that Jarod transmitted over the internet. Both Sydney and Miss Parker recognize the man as "Mr. Raines" , and express worry that Jarod may find out too much about him.

IN ARIZONA , Jarod is at the Tail Fin Bar looking at the images of aviators on the walls. When the female bar-tender asks him what his "poison" is, he doesn't understand her; so she asks him what he likes to drinks. He tells her he was raised on "optimized nutritional supplements" of wheat grass, hearts of palm, asparagus and tomatoes... and she tells him he wants a Virgin Mary with celery garnish. Jarod tells the bartender to give him two .

A few moments later Lt. Gant arrives at the bar. She's ready to yell at Jarod for taking his jet out over Clearview Ridge, but he wards her off with the offer of the Virgin Mary drink and the explanation that he was just running a simulation of the flight that killed Ron Collins. He doesn't want the same thing to happen to him, he says. Gant tells him he won't suffer the same fate as Collins as long as he sticks to non-alcoholic drinks. According to Matthews and Lawson, she says, Ron Collins was in the Tail Fin bar drinking it up the night before the accident. He died because the alcohol in his blood caused him to black out when he pulled too many "G's".

Later, Jarod goes to the Collins house and finds Ron's son outside playing with paper airplanes that don't fly very well. Jarod introduces himself, and greets Ron's widow with the gift of a post humus Gulf War Commendation that he'd managed to get from the Air Force (through what means, he didn't say). Pleased by the gift, Mrs. Collins invites Jarod to stay for dinner: hot dogs and macaroni. After dinner, Jarod and Ron's son are lying out in the Collins' front yard looking up at the stars. The boy tells Jarod that he and his father studied the stars a lot, and that they had sneaked out the night before Ron's accident, to go into the desert to star gaze. Jarod asks the boy if he's sure about that, and the boy tells him, yes. Mrs. Collins didn't know about it because the boy had kept it a secret: his mother didn't like him going out in the middle of the night... So, Jarod understands, even though Lawson and Matthews told the authorities that Collins had been in the bar drinking the night before the accident, Collins was actually out star-gazing with his son. Matthews and Lawson were liars... but why?

BACK AT THE CENTRE , Broots informs Sydney that the image of Mr. Raines which Jarod had sent down line also contained an executable file that, when activated, opened up a communication interface. Employing the interface, Sydney would be able to see and talk to Jarod over the computer when Jarod came on-line. Sydney asks Broots not to tell anyone about the interface.

IN ARIZONA , Jarod goes to the Skyvionics hanger looking for Lawson, hoping to confront him, but instead find several people gathered there, including Tom Matthews, who tells Jarod that he's chosen Dixon to fly as wing-man for the Pentagon test. Matthews still wants Jarod to fly as a "bogey" during the test, though, and directs him to another hanger where a Dracon jet is being housed. Needing some flight hours in the Dracon jet, Jarod takes it out for an overnight flight... He lands it at La Grange, a private airstrip owned by The Centre in Virginia , and then takes off three hours later and heads back to Arizona. During the three-hour layover, Jarod goes to Washington, D.C., and steals a packet of Air Force SPO paperwork and videos regarding the Scimitar chip dog-fight simulation test in which Ron Collins was killed.

BACK IN ARIZONA , Jarod watches the videos and reads the materials, then he goes out to the hanger, gets into one of the F-16 fighter jets parked there, and runs a simulation of Ron Collins' last flight through his mind.In his mind, he can hear the crash, feel Collins' terror, and see the flames when the jet exploded on impact.

Jarod then pulls the Scimitar chip out of one of the jets and takes it back to his lair. He puts the chip into the remote control "clicker" for the television set, and runs it through a series of tests to find out how well the chip works. Although all of the specs for the chip stated that it had a failure rate of only 0.4%, Jarod's tests indicate that the chip's failure rate is actually 3.1% Going over schematics of the jet, too, Jarod realizes that the chip was linked to several systems in the jet, so when the chip failed all sorts of key systems failed with it, including altimeter controls, infrared systems, and the ejection unit. He realizes that Ron was unable to eject from the jet, not because he was drunk and had passed out, but because the Scimitar chip in his jet failed and cut off access to ejection systems.

The next day, Jarod goes to the Clearview Institute for the Deaf, and, using American Sign Language and spoken words, requests that the director of the facility give him some help. The director, a young deaf woman, signs-and-says she'll be happy to give Jarod whatever assistance he needs. As part of her assistance, she "speaks" to him from across the table without using vocalizations or sign language, and Jarod has to read her lips in order to understand what she's saying. After several lessons, Jarod is able to read her lips perfectly. In sign language he thanks her for her time, and then returns to his lair.

Watching the DSA of himself from 01-16-69, Jarod zooms in on the image of Mr. Raines in the background of the bicycle experiment. Matching his own lip movements to those of Mr. Raines', Jarod is able to decipher what Raines is saying without having to actually hear him: "...Listen to me, doctor... The kid asks about his father again, tell him daddy loved him very much, and daddy died in a plane crash. That's not exactly a lie. Are we clear?"

Later, Jarod finds Lawson alone in the F-16 hanger, and confronts him with the information he has about Ron Collins' crash and the Scimitar chip's true failure rate. Lawson admits that he knew about the failure rate all along, but kept it a secret because he believed the 3.1% ratio, even though it was much higher than the 0.4% noted in the specs, was still an "acceptable" rate... and he was waiting with Matthews to sell the chip to the government and commercial buyers so he and Matthews could make millions of dollars. "Put yourself in my shoes," Lawson complains to Jarod. And Jarod tells him, "I already have," and leaves the hanger.

Later, Jarod returns to the hanger when no one is there and tampers the jet's systems. He connects some of them to a remote control device, and patches others with Silly Putty. He then calls Lt. Gant on the telephone, tells her what he's found out, and tells her what he's up to now.

Later, Jarod returns to his lair to have his computer-to-computer chat with Sydney. When the interface between Sydney's Centre computer and Jarod's lap-top computer is engaged, the two can see and talk to one another. Jarod shows Sydney a picture of Mr. Raines and demands to know who Raines is and what Raines knows about his (Jarod's) father. Sydney only tells Jarod Mr. Raines' name, but doesn't divulge anymore information about him. He then starts to tell Jarod that Jarod father's "was a aviator who flew with..." Both computer screens go blank as the transmission is cut off by Miss Parker. In his lair, Jarod swears in frustration at the blank screen.

FURIOUS THAT SIDNEY AND BROOTS tried to pass information to Jarod without her approval or knowledge, Miss Parker takes Broots away with her and gives him a sound talking to. He tells her that Sydney forced him to keep quiet about the interface, and she tells him Sydney isn't that good at making threats. She wants a better explanation. Rather than giving her one, Broots tells her that he'll make it all up to her by telling her where Jarod is. He was able to trace Jarod through the interface, he says, and knows precisely from where Jarod was transmitting.

THE NEXT DAY , Tom Matthews is all ready for the Pentagon test of the Scimitar chip, but is furious when the pilot, Dixon, doesn't show up to fly the main jet. (Back at his apartment, Dixon is under the influence of a whiff of halcyon-enhanced oxygen -- thanks to Mr. Hollis -- and can't get out of bed.) Matthews tells Jarod he himself will fly the main jet, if Jarod will still act as the "bogey" in the dog fight simulation. Jarod agrees, and with members of the Pentagon and Lt. Gant watching (and listening over the P.A. system to everything the two pilots say when they're in their jets), he and Matthews start the test of the Scimitar chip. Gant, who was already apprised of what was going to happen, tells the general to watch and listen carefully to the pilots.

Once airborne, Matthews discovers that Jarod isn't interested in the test, and has started a real dog-fight in the air. Matthews is angry that Jarod is up-staging him, and pushes his own jet to a higher speed in order to overtake and out-perform Jarod's jet. As Matthews' jet reaches critical speed, the Scimitar chip in his jet suddenly malfunctions and he loses control.

While Matthews struggles to get his jet level again, Jarod tells him that he'll inform Matthews how to fix the jet if Matthews confesses to the truth about the death of Ron Collins, the true failure rate of the Scimitar chip, the Matthews' falsification of the chip's test records. Believing he'll suffer the same fate as Ron Collins if he doesn't comply, Matthews hysterically confesses to everything, and begs Jarod to save him. On the ground, the general has heard it all.

Jarod, using the remote control device, ejects Matthews from the malfunctioning jet himself before it crashes into the desert. When Matthews parachutes to the ground, he finds the General and Lt. Gant waiting for him. The general yells at him: "Matthews! The government wants a refund!"

Later, Jarod stops off to say his good-byes to his landlord, Mr. Hollis, and thanks him for his help. Mr. Hollis apologizes to Jarod for being such a "weirdo", but Jarod tells him he believes everything Mr. Hollis told him about government conspiracies and secret experiments. He then gives Mr. Hollis a map of The Centre facility in Blue Cove, Delaware, and tells him that this, too, is a secret government-funded installation where illicit experimentation is taking place. "People should be made aware..." Jarod says. "I'll spread the word," Mr. Hollis promises, and Jarod tells him, "I'm counting on it."

THE NEXT DAY , two huge black limousines arrive at the Tail Fin Bar, and Miss Parker and Sam the Sweeper enter to look around for clues about Jarod. They find, among the other photographs of aviators behind the bar, a new color photo of Jarod in a flight suit. When the bar tender realizes who Miss Parker is, she gives Miss Parker Jarod's red notebook and a box filled with Silly Putty. Impressed on the surface of the Silly Putty is a newspaper article which tells about the new discoveries involved with Ron Collins' death, and the fact that his pension has been reinstated, so his wife and son will have the extra income they need to survive.

Unable to locate Jarod himself, Miss Parker walks out of the bar empty-handed, and is faced with the angry image of Mr. Raines glowering out at her from the back seat of his own limousine. Raines complains that she apparently has not developed the "Parker killer instinct" herself, and warns her, "Jarod is not some minor inconvenience for you to pad your Centre expenses with." Raines' limo then drives off, leaving Miss Parker in the desert dust and wind.

The episode closes with images of Jarod conducting a Philharmonic orchestra... after assaulting the stodgy stage manager with a paper airplane and offering him some PEZ.