Briscoe Jenkins was concealed in the Force. If the universe were different, and others were aware of his Force aptitude and how he chose to keep himself so heavily concealed, they would likely consider him paranoid. And they would be correct. Briscoe was paranoid. Everywhere, the Empire was seeking out the last vestiges of Force sensitivity. He was among the hunters. He knew how reasonable his paranoia was.
As the newly appointed Director of the Imperial Bureau of Starports and Orbital Platforms in the Imperial Department of Discovery, Space and Travel, Briscoe's responsibilities had vastly increased. He now over saw every starport and platform in the Galaxy. The benefit of this was that now, nothing could travel in the Galaxy without him being aware of it, or being able to become aware of it. But every hill had an upside and a downside, and the downside to this was that he could not finely control the goings on of all of the starports under his jurisdiction.
He could no longer pay as much attention as he once did to Brentaal IV. While he maintained direct administration over the space stations, his responsibilities were such that he had to dedicate an enormous amount of time to his inter-stellar responsibilities as well.
That was his current preoccupation. He stared at a screen filled with rapidly moving data, taking as much in as he could. He did not have an eidetic memory and, as such, he was not expecting to retain even a fraction of what he was reading. All he was doing was getting a feel for patterns. The numbers scrolling past his eyes was the gross expenditure for each space station sorted by region. Patterns were easy to recognize and memorize, and he was already getting the picture that, in general, the space stations closer to the core had higher amounts of expenditures than those in the Mid Rim and Expansion Regions, but those in the Outer Rim had a larger amount than the aforementioned two as well.
He had spent the past few hours noticing similar trends. Amount of incoming traffic, amount of outgoing traffic, amount of income, employee turnover, all of them followed a similar trend: Deep Core was less than Core was greater than Colonies was greater than Inner Rim was greater than Expansion Region was greater than Mid Rim was less than Outer Rim. With some notable outliers and some suspected falsities in the numbers, such as with all worlds in Hutt Space.
Briscoe shut down his computer and rubbed his eyes. He would sleep on the patterns and form a plan of attack in the morning. "Mimsy, clean up." he said as he rose and headed to his shower. While he washed himself, his protocol droid disconnected the computer from the power supply and took it over to a mechanical safe, which she opened and stored it inside. After locking the safe, she generated a two hundred and fifty six randomly generated encryption key and wrote it down on a piece of paper.
After his shower, Briscoe took the paper and read it repeatedly while dressing for bed and taking his medicine. He wrote it down himself five times until he was rather certain he had it memorized, and then he drank half a glass of ice water before laying down. Mimsy had the sheets of paper incinerated before going about her more standard nightly duties. In the morning, she would re-write the key as Briscoe woke up, he would finish his glass of water and finish memorizing the encryption key before Mimsy set up the computer again and re-encrypted all of the information with the new key. While the computer was never connected to any network, not even the closed circuit, internal network to Briscoe's personal quarters, no one could ever access the information without the key. One invalid decryption attempt and the hard drive would wipe itself.
It was these, along with other, security measures that allowed Briscoe to sleep at night.
As the newly appointed Director of the Imperial Bureau of Starports and Orbital Platforms in the Imperial Department of Discovery, Space and Travel, Briscoe's responsibilities had vastly increased. He now over saw every starport and platform in the Galaxy. The benefit of this was that now, nothing could travel in the Galaxy without him being aware of it, or being able to become aware of it. But every hill had an upside and a downside, and the downside to this was that he could not finely control the goings on of all of the starports under his jurisdiction.
He could no longer pay as much attention as he once did to Brentaal IV. While he maintained direct administration over the space stations, his responsibilities were such that he had to dedicate an enormous amount of time to his inter-stellar responsibilities as well.
That was his current preoccupation. He stared at a screen filled with rapidly moving data, taking as much in as he could. He did not have an eidetic memory and, as such, he was not expecting to retain even a fraction of what he was reading. All he was doing was getting a feel for patterns. The numbers scrolling past his eyes was the gross expenditure for each space station sorted by region. Patterns were easy to recognize and memorize, and he was already getting the picture that, in general, the space stations closer to the core had higher amounts of expenditures than those in the Mid Rim and Expansion Regions, but those in the Outer Rim had a larger amount than the aforementioned two as well.
He had spent the past few hours noticing similar trends. Amount of incoming traffic, amount of outgoing traffic, amount of income, employee turnover, all of them followed a similar trend: Deep Core was less than Core was greater than Colonies was greater than Inner Rim was greater than Expansion Region was greater than Mid Rim was less than Outer Rim. With some notable outliers and some suspected falsities in the numbers, such as with all worlds in Hutt Space.
Briscoe shut down his computer and rubbed his eyes. He would sleep on the patterns and form a plan of attack in the morning. "Mimsy, clean up." he said as he rose and headed to his shower. While he washed himself, his protocol droid disconnected the computer from the power supply and took it over to a mechanical safe, which she opened and stored it inside. After locking the safe, she generated a two hundred and fifty six randomly generated encryption key and wrote it down on a piece of paper.
After his shower, Briscoe took the paper and read it repeatedly while dressing for bed and taking his medicine. He wrote it down himself five times until he was rather certain he had it memorized, and then he drank half a glass of ice water before laying down. Mimsy had the sheets of paper incinerated before going about her more standard nightly duties. In the morning, she would re-write the key as Briscoe woke up, he would finish his glass of water and finish memorizing the encryption key before Mimsy set up the computer again and re-encrypted all of the information with the new key. While the computer was never connected to any network, not even the closed circuit, internal network to Briscoe's personal quarters, no one could ever access the information without the key. One invalid decryption attempt and the hard drive would wipe itself.
It was these, along with other, security measures that allowed Briscoe to sleep at night.