John Fitzgerald Byers/Further Investigations

===2000===
In 2000, after the Lone Gunmen became trapped in a malfunctioning digital environment game created by FPS, Byers was shot by one of many adversarial computer generated characters known as "cyberthugs". His stun suit registered the hit by releasing paint onto his chest. Though he later claimed to be okay because his "injury" was only a flesh wound, the suit simulated the injury by giving Byers a small but painful electric shock.
Despite the fact that he had initially described FPS Corporate Headquarters as "the launch pad of a rocket headed for the stars", Byers ultimately helped persuade the game's designers to destroy their faulty creation after a female warrior character from another program input herself into the game and claimed the lives of four victims. Many people, including Mulder and the Lone Gunmen, found the warrioress character to be extremely attractive and, upon first seeing her, Byers exclaimed, "Holy Toledo!" Her victims included Darryl Musashi, who Byers once called, "The boy wonder of virtual mayhem." 
:The parallel that Byers makes between FPS Headquarters and a rocket's launch pad may be a reference to the fact that some of the rooms used to film sections of the building were actually in a facility that once served as a military contractor in which rocket engines were built.
After the Lone Gunmen failed to obtain evidence of the prototype Octium IV's invasive nature, Byers' confidence in his group began to wane; he wondered whether, after eleven years of publishing their newspaper, the Lone Gunmen's efforts had improved the lives of American citizens and if they had really made a difference.
Byers was later told his father had died. He consequently attended a funeral at which Ray Helm, who claimed to have met him years ago, presented a eulogy and Byers launched a rocket supposedly loaded with his father's ashes. While investigating the possibility that his father may have been murdered by the government, Byers discovered that his father was actually alive, having faked his own death after having learned that the government wanted to kill him.
When the two were reunited shortly thereafter, Byers learned from his father that Ray Helm was part of a small governmental faction known as "Overlord", the same group that had tried to murder him and were now conspiring to commit a terrorist act against a domestic airline. Byers boarded the plane that was intended to be involved in the crime, with his father, and realized that Overlord were planning to crash the aircraft using remote navigation.
After the other Lone Gunmen allowed the plane to be landed safely, Byers planned to report Overlord to the FBI or to publicly release news of the faction's existence, hoping that his father would testify against the faction, but his father declined and went back into hiding. Byers realized that there was now no proof of the narrowly averted terrorist attack and truth of the incident consequently remained unreleased. His confidence in his publishing partners was somewhat restored after he discovered that the other Lone Gunmen had managed to obtain an Octium IV, providing proof for their next news story. 
Around this time, Byers first met Yves Adele Harlow and James "Jimmy" Bond, the latter of whom would often join the Lone Gunmen as they continued to fight for lost causes. 
Later that year, Byers wore a sweatshirt and demonstrated a disheveled hairstyle as part of the Lone Gunmen's ridiculous attempt to disguise themselves in the hope of avoiding prosecution after they had been caught hacking into a Department of Defense node. Soon after, Byers first met at the FBI's headquarters, a building he would return to on several subsequent occasions. 
With Jimmy Bond, Byers later interviewed a man who called himself Adam Burgess and claimed he had been brought from a parallel reality by who had abducted him before they had returned him to his current reality, in which no-one recognized him and strangers were living in his house, but Byers was doubtful of the man's extraterrestrial explanation While searching a house that the man claimed to own, Byers was arrested and jailed with the other Lone Gunmen for the first time since 1989 - on this occasion, accompanied by the mysterious man and Jimmy Bond - after the man essentially wrecked the building as a result of destructively examining the property. 
Following the group's release from imprisonment, Byers' doubts regarding the man's story were proved to be justified when it was discovered that the man was actually called Charlie Muckle and was the victim of an unproven virtual reality therapy that had essentially stripped him of his identity, a story that Byers thought was exactly what the American people needed to be warned about. After Charlie Muckle willingly re-entered the virtual reality program, Byers, as with his associates, donned a black suit so that he could be integrated into the program and help persuade Charlie to return to reality; as the only member of the Lone Gunmen not to have been attacked by Charlie, Byers assured him that he could still change in the old-fashioned way - provided he wanted to badly enough. 
On an investigation in which Byers learned a method to detect UFOs, he first met the apparently co-operative and but did not have much of an opportunity to work with them. Byers later accompanied the Lone Gunmen to a bank of large satellite dishes while attempting to relocate Mulder, who had been abducted in Oregon. As Byers told Skinner when he visited the site, however, only UFO activity before Mulder's abduction could be accessed from the satellite dishes. The group ultimately succeeded in tracking Mulder using the same obscure detection method Byers had learned earlier, namely by recognizing inconspicuous microburst activity. Though Scully initially doubted the method's accuracy, Byers defended the group by stating, "We're only trying to find Mulder". 
Byers seemed to know much about Nazis; he was able to immediately recognize the Poisoner of Alsace in an old photograph taken shortly before her disappearance, and he recalled how the Nazi killer had murdered twenty members of the French resistance during World War II. With Langly, Byers later conducted surveillance on a Mrs. Anna Haag, who was suspected of being the Nazi murderer but he and his associate encountered trouble in the form of nosy neighbor Mrs. Louella Everage, who suspected Byers of engaging in lighthearted sexual activity with Langly, who she mistook for a girl, in the Lone Gunmen's van. Byers assured Mrs. Everidge that her suspicions were incorrect and attempted to act as if he were a federal employee after Langly claimed that they were INS officers surveilling Mrs. Haag's maid. Byers later came to the unlikely but correct conclusion that Mrs. Everidge was actually the Poisoner of Alsace. 
As a means of investigation, Byers often visited the Federal File Depository in Owings Mill, Maryland, where he requested the release of files from the Freedom of Information Office, including the CIA's material regarding Lee Harvey Oswald, the FBI's files on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the missing eighteen minutes of the Nixon tapes concerning the Watergate scandal. None of the items that Byers requested were issued to him, until one day in 2000 when he received a large, heavy box that he immediately took to the Lone Gunmen's offices. Believing the box contained every file he had ever requested from the government, Byers opened the box but was disappointed when he found it apparently contained nothing but a cinder block.
Further inspection, however, revealed a file on Stan Mizer, described by Byers as an inventor who, according to legend, had perfected a car that ran on water before the vehicle had disappeared and its inventor had died. The document led Byers and his associates, including Jimmy Bond and Yves Adele Harlow, on a dangerous search for the historic car and, at one point, Byers again wore a black suit - this time, with climbing gear, such as a helmet with a light attached, that he used to infiltrate a silo - as did the other Lone Gunmen. 
Unlike Frohike and Langly, however, Byers managed to escape imprisonment for his part in the hijacking of a televised interview with Senator Richard Jefferson, who was rumoured to have recently done some illegal and immoral actions. After his associates were released, Byers discovered a finger-written message purposefully left on the dirty windscreen glass of their van. As he later recounted, the clue led the Lone Gunmen to Senator Jefferson's illegitimate baby son, who they returned to the senator after he was vindicated. 
Upon a return visit to the FBI's headquarters near the end of the year, Byers protested to the other Lone Gunmen searching through the X-Files, believing those documents to be too private, but his publishing partners continued to do so nevertheless. Byers was the first to notice that Special Agent , who had been assigned to investigate the X-files with Scully, had arrived but the antics of the other Lone Gunmen were interrupted when they also realized that Doggett had entered the X-files office. Byers introduced himself and the others before the group revealed their findings to Doggett regarding a case he was working on, a demonstration process that began with Byers announcing that the Lone Gunmen had reviewed the case as Scully had asked. 
===2001===
In 2001, Byers and the other Lone Gunmen were again disturbed in their sleep by the FBI; AD Skinner and Agent Doggett requested assistance in researching a pattern they had found while searching for Mulder. Dressed in a white bathrobe, Byers told Skinner and Doggett, via live audio and visual transmission sent to their laptop computer straight from the Lone Gunmen's personal computer, that he and his group had learned what they could, even though the request for assistance had come at short notice. He later revealed that the aforementioned pattern was most likely a medicine wheel, a symbol for healing usually associated with North American shaman, adding that the symbol might be placed on a grave as a sign of respect or on a door as a summons to indicate that a sick person, someone in need of the healing gift of a mythological soul eater creature, lived there. 
After Mulder's deceased body was recovered by the FBI, Byers attended his funeral in Raleigh, North Carolina, at which he participated in prayer. Attendees of the ceremony also included FBI Deputy Director and Scully's mother, both of whom Byers had never met before. 
Byers later learned that superintelligent trained Russian chimpanzee assassin Bobo intended to kill the French Minister of State, but he was unaware that the information was misleading and subsequently embarrassed himself by jumping on top of the French politician in an effort to save him. As the assassination attempt did not come to fruition, Byers was considered a risk to security. Consequently, he was punched and kicked by the French minister's bodyguard before being imprisoned with Langly and Jimmy Bond. Fortunately for Byers, he was soon released from custody with his similarly jailed associates. 
As part of an attempt to determine whether a particular Elvis Presley impersonator was the real singer, Byers wore blue coveralls and a baseball hat backwards while helping to infiltrate a cruise ship on which the impersonator worked.
Byers later met Alberta Pfeiffer, an avid reader of The Lone Gunman newspaper who recalled that Byers' remarkably principled and strong words had stirred her soul. After she appealed to the Lone Gunmen to prove her convicted son's innocence, Byers, using the alias J. Wesley, snuck into the Death Row Unit of a Texas prison with Jimmy Bond and angered a fellow inmate into assaulting him so he could access the prison's infirmary, where Douglas Pfeiffer - Alberta's son - was being held. Pfeiffer was guilty of the murder charge against him, however, and Byers was later released by the other Lone Gunmen, earning a slap from Alberta Pfeiffer for failing to free her subsequently executed son. 
Byers became personally involved while he and the other Lone Gunmen were conducting surveillance on a poacher of grizzly bears, which Byers described as "magnificent animals". He recounted his early love of Gentle Ben and his young experience of seeing a real grizzly bear to Frohike and Langly, later supervising their stratagem of luring the poacher away from his cabin to obtain information from within the abandoned building. After the Lone Gunmen followed the information to a meeting point where the poacher met with several purchasers, Byers was caught spying on the proceedings as a result of moving too close to the criminals in the hope of capturing an incriminating photograph. He was taken to the poacher, who threatened to kill him, but, when the poacher asked whether he was alone, Byers claimed that the police knew of the meeting and were waiting outside. As it turned out, Byers' claim was actually true and the poacher, as well as his potential buyers, were arrested during the police raid that followed. 
In an effort to get near criminal millionaire and competitive tango dancer Leonardo Santavos, Byers tried to enter the Florida State Tango Competition, as did Langly and Jimmy Bond. Among other moves, Byers demonstrated unskilled disco dancing; neither he nor his associates were anywhere near good enough to qualify. 
After Mulder was revived and began investigating the recent suspicious death of US Census worker Howard Salt, Byers and the other Lone Gunmen successfully decrypted data found on a computer that had belonged to Salt, discovering that the data was a series of file directories downloaded from the Federal Statistics Center - a source that Byers described to Mulder as "a government information bank used by the US Census Bureau where your Mr. H. Salt worked". As Byers also told Mulder, however, there was no way to acquire the data stored in the FSC without first obtaining a password.
After Mulder managed to acquire a password, Byers, while working within the building with the other Lone Gunmen as they helped Mulder sneak into the facility, told him when to enter the FSC, identified the entrance to the center's databank and devised an effective escape route after Agent Doggett joined Mulder and warned him that armed guards were on their way. 
Shortly thereafter, Byers was reunited with his former college roommate, whose gender had since been altered from male to female and whose name had consequently been changed from Carl to Carol. After she informed Byers that her brother Jeff had been murdered, Byers introduced Carol Strode to his associates. As the Lone Gunmen subsequently investigated her brother's mysterious reported death, Byers kept several details from his publishing partners, who were led to believe that he had been Jeff Strode's roommate and were not informed that Carol had once been male. At one point, the other Lone Gunmen and Yves Adele Harlow suspected that AD Skinner was complicit in the recent murder, but, even though Byers refused to believe that Skinner was guilty, he was still surprised when he and his associates discovered that Jeff Strode was actually alive, his murder having been faked by AD Skinner in order to continue an FBI undercover operation, which the Lone Gunmen had interfered with. Byers was kept in FBI custody with his associates - who learned the facts he had hidden from them - until the undercover operation was successfully completed. 
With Frohike and Langly, Byers later helped vindicate children's television presenter Fred Tabalowski, who was known for playing Cap'n Toby, while the host was under suspicion of murder, and brought a gift to Scully's newborn baby, William, after having learned of the remarkable circumstances in which the child had been born. 
Twelve years after Byers had been threatened with a gun aimed point blank at his head in a Baltimore warehouse, he was similarly threatened again; this time, Jimmy Bond and the other Lone Gunmen were also targeted during their imprisonment by armed military officers after Byers and his associates had faked the abduction of MIB Morris Fletcher for a news story Byers had no memory of having previously encountered Fletcher in 1998, neither did his associates nor Fletcher himself, but the Lone Gunmen and Jimmy Bond were soon released from custody. 
Soon after, Byers and his associates hacked into a Department of Defense website, learning that many historical incidents reported as terrorist attacks - including the assassination of Byers' namesake in 1963 - had apparently really been operations successfully carried out by government sanctioned terrorist group Romeo 61. In order to learn more, the Lone Gunmen crept into the organization's headquarters, fooling the building's facial recognition security system that they were authorized personnel using a method that Byers was instrumental in devising.
Once inside, the group found a large locked safe which Byers believed contained every answer to every question that he and his publishing partners had every asked. After the group accessed the safe, however, they discovered that plans they had of the building were fake, moments before they were again captured by armed soldiers who, this time, were already holding Yves Adele Harlow prisoner - to their discovery, the Lone Gunmen had been set up. 
Category:John Byers