Detective services also discovered that the cab in question was not a cab at all. It was a police pursuit vehicle that had been signed out for public use. First of all, when I was working with the SWAT team, they all swore that we couldn't get approval to use their pursuit vehicles for AcMo testing purposes. AcMo has "donated" a large amount of funds to the local police department, primarily in the form of non-moving violations, but I sense the disturbing symptoms that correspond with an aggressive case of preferential treatment.
I had described the driver in great detail in my written statement after the incident. He had a head with some hair underneath his beige cap, and he had arms and legs. I think he was wearing some sort of jacket and he had a pen in his right pocket. I never saw his face, but he spoke with a distinct New York accent. I would guess he was about 5'8" tall by the distance from his head to the headliner. He also had excellent posture, but seemed kind of wooden in his movements.
It turns out that my eyewitness testimony is just as faulty as everyone else's. The surveillance footage revealed that the driver was a cardboard cutout of Robert De Niro. You would think someone as observant and intelligent as I would have noticed the driver wasn't real, and under any other circumstances I would have figured it out by the time we had crashed into something. This situation was quite different because I had been gassed.
The footage shows the cutout getting out of the car and throwing me to the ground. There was something familiar about his slow, methodical and almost robot-like movement. The cutout then secured my money bags with the seatbelts before returning to the driver's seat. What really angers me is that the cutout then turned on the emergency lights for the duration of the 1/2 mile trip to Omnicron Corp. I had been told on each occasion I had the opportunity to ride in the back seat of a patrol car that the emergency lights can only be used for actual emergencies. It appears I was lied to again. It's like Omnicron Corp. wanted me to know they were behind the theft. The strange thing is that the cutout seemed so familiar. There was a brief moment it looked directly at the camera and I could see its cold, dead stare that seemed to barely contain its disdain for humanity. What have we ever done to cardboard cutouts to engender such hatred? I pinged my lead detective to let her know we needed to focus on this cardboard cutout because there was more to this caper than Omnicron Corp.
I don't need a plethora of hard evidence before deciding that this means war. Omnicron Corp. is never going to know what hit them when I teleport into their building to take back my property. This is assuming we can have the teleporters operational by the strike date. I may have to fake the teleportation by using an invisibility cloak (also in beta).
What I can't figure out is how Omnicron Corp. has the technology to animate cardboard cutouts. We had been developing that tech for years before we had to abandon the project when we discovered that cardboard was a fire hazard. Our insurance premiums are already too high based on the nature of our testing, and increasing both our coverage and premiums was the opposite of fiscal responsibility. I refuse to believe that Omnicron's engineers are smarter than AcMo's and solved a problem we couldn't.
I wonder if what they've actually done is figured out a way to install photoshop on surveillance camera feeds which could allow them to digitally manipulate the footage. That's how I would do it, but usually the Adobe logo is a hint that the footage has been altered. The first thing I always do when viewing images or video is search for any photoshop logos to make sure I'm not being duped. Fool me once, shame on you...
The obvious conclusion here is that this is an elaborate set up by Omnicron Corp. to trap me. They must want what's inside my head. They will have no better luck than those space aliens extracting it. My mind is secure, and I've enabled a remote wiping capability in case a hacker breaches my firewall. I'll be left without sense, but my data will be secure and intact.
I also need to report that the space aliens got back to me, and they were not operating in our area at the time of the theft. According to my translation app, they said they were in Florida dropping off their rejected test subjects, which explains a lot of things about Florida I never understood.
As far as Mondays go, this one wasn't awful. I'm ecstatic that we have moved closer to retrieving our stolen funds. This also brings us closer to war with Omnicron Corp. I have been eager to test the rail gun's new targeting system (also still in beta), and since I accidentally on purpose damaged Omnicron Corp.'s foundation, I think the rail gun can cause a significant amount of structural damage. The biggest issue is that the noise is enough to wake the dead, and since the police are clearly friends of Omnicron's, that could cause some legal issues. I think I'll get a film permit and play it off as a movie production. Yeah, that could work.
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