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While Spike and Talisent were exchanging questions and answers, Roger was busy tracing Talisent's call point. His friend at the phone company linked Roger's workstation into his domain after Roger called with the addressing codes. He could now operate his friend's system as if it were his own. Roger started by opening a window on his screen that showed a map of the San Francisco Bay Area. He then selected the "trace active call" option. The screen prompted him for the number of the known call point. Roger typed in the specific line he'd gotten from the Internet Service Provider's modem pool. Nancy held her breath as the system processed the number lookup query. A moment later a green circle blinked on the ISP's modem location in San Jose. Another dot highlighted the phone company's central office switching location for that exchange. The two points were connected by a dashed green line. A blue label flashed the word "Linking" next to the second green dot. Nancy was breathing again. The trace was working. Data displays on the screen showed active call volume statistics and updated them every two seconds. The trace function display cycled through call network nodes as it queried each for a connection on the designated circuit. Fuzzy logic in the search algorithm attempted to optimize search success. The searching continued until suddenly the map expanded to show the entire state. A new end-point was displayed and the dashed line had been extended to Los Angeles. The "Linking" label hovered above where Santa Monica would be. The search cycle started again and fifteen long seconds later, the map expanded twice in rapid succession. First a full North America view, then a jump which extended it east to include Europe. The dashed line had been drawn through Newark, New Jersey and was now looking for a link from its end-point in London. Roger slammed his fist onto the table and leaned back from the console. Nancy knew that meant bad news. The call was in danger of being lost in the maze of European telephone technologies. Talisent, or more probably the Ambassador, had gone to some trouble to reroute this call. But just as the search function was almost out of node identifiers to try, the map displayed another new end-point. The call path had returned to the US linked via Bermuda and Charlotte, North Carolina. Another path extension was quickly added bringing the known end-point to Colorado Springs, Colorado. Now they only needed time to finish the trace. Over the next 30 seconds, the map clicked in connections to Sacramento, San Francisco, and finally Cupertino. The full path was traversing more than 12,000 miles in order to end up less than 20 miles from where it started. Roger selected a zoom area on the map as the trace function displayed the originating phone number and designated address: 755 West Highland Road, Suite 225, Cupertino, California.
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