It Started With a Fish Tank.

Prompt: Write something with a broken refrigerator, a fish tank, and a “guard” golden retriever.

Mission Log: 1:29am

Agent DV942, reporting in after one of the oddest reconnaissance gigs of my entire career.

It started with a fish tank.

The Alliance received intelligence that one of our most wanted, Pariah, was spotted in a residential district in San Francisco, masquerading as a doting father to three children and a beautiful wife. The Harrelson family resides in a modest townhouse off of Merchant Street, curating the appearance of an average All-American family.

I knew better.

I didn't expect Pariah to keep such a visible double life. Steven Harrelson is an engineer at Advent Software, specializing in coding and small-scale prototyping. What a perfect cover for the despicable man responsible for killing so many innocent people when he collapsed the San Mateo-Hayward bridge a few days back.

We knew that he'd been hiding information about his next dastardly scheme somewhere in his suburban oasis.

I wasn't expecting the call to retrieve it, but I promise I tried. I tried so, so hard, but fate had other plans.

It started with a fish tank. From my watch over the house, I noticed something a little off. For one, the fish in the tank swam in regular patterns, repeating every 47 minutes. Real fish follow currents in their tanks, but not that regularly. Knowing Pariah's experience in nanotech, my logical guess was that these impostor fish were protective shields for some form of chip or drive containing blueprints, agendas, or something similar.

I wasn't expecting the guard golden retriever.

When I picked the lock on the back door, dodged the laser-powered security boost, and landed on my butt in front of the fish tank, I was immediately knocked over by an unknown force that took great joy in slobbering all over my face.

A quick glance at the collar revealed a gangly almost-adult dog named Toby, who stared at me with big brown eyes.

The dog seemed happy to stick by my side as I picked myself up and investigated the fish tank. As I'd estimated, three of the fish were robotic, five were real. I pulled the first, a realistic model of a red beta, out of the water with tweezers.

The electric shock wasn't a surprise. Toby swallowing the fish in one gulp was, however.

With 66.7% of Pariah's dark plans up for grabs, I donned rubber gloves and tried again, successfully pulling fish number two from the water. A quick flip of the head revealed that this was a real fish, not a fake. He received a brief but polite funeral and a flush in the powder room toilet.

The true fake fish were then extracted, their drives placed in my containment pocket. My mission two-thirds complete, I patted Toby goodbye and subsequently tripped over a rug, slamming into the refrigerator, putting a huge dent into the door. For fear of exposing my abilities on security tape, I left the door well alone and sprinted off into the night, rendezvousing with my transport two miles away.

I'm currently in the back of the van that Command sent to retrieve me. Best of luck with deciphering the information, I fear it's encrypted.

Considering my luck with the case, it might be best to keep me as far away from the remaining data as possible.

Agent DV942, signing off.