Spike Webb had spent the morning researching some of the latest findings in the field of molecular computing when he took a break to check his e-mail. His head was full of dry scientific facts and he was almost hoping for a distraction. He found it. The call for assistance from Nancy McGill caught his attention immediately. Spike had been glad Nancy was getting out of town for a couple days. She was definitely on the cranky side lately. But between the lines of her request for his help, Spike could read that she wasn't getting the R&R she needed. Spike replied to Nancy telling her he'd get right on it.

Nancy hadn't given him much to go on. All he could do was dig in and hope something sweet would turn up. He started with a cursory look at Heidi's own workstation. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Spike could see, however, that Heidi's Netscape cache had been active during the time she suffered her injury. He pulled copies of the most recent files from the cache and looked at each one carefully. They all looked like normal HTML, GIF, and JPEG files. Spike caught himself being distracted by some of the photographs and the gossip news that Heidi was apparently composing for her Web site.

But when he got to the last image file in the cache, the most recent one, Spike noticed it was different from all the others. The image looked like the snowy static of a television channel where no station existed. Spike couldn't help but wonder why someone would create such a graphic file. On the small chance that it had been incorrectly formatted into the JPEG file definition, Spike tried various conversions and translations. Nothing helped. There was something else unusual about the file. According to Spike's calculations, it was at least twice, maybe three times the size it should be. And after close examination of the digital content, Spike found the hidden key. The image was masking compiled content of some sort. It resembled assembly code instructions, but the operators were like none Spike had ever seen before.

Spike had taken up too much time looking at the one file and he knew that it was probably just an encoding error. Maybe Heidi's image editor had accidentally included an executable file when she last saved the graphic. That was probably it. But Spike decided he'd risk a little more time to look at the image source on the server Heidi worked from. Using the location from the cache reference, he made an anonymous FTP request to the server. It returned a "File not found" message. The image source was gone and the HTML reference had also been eliminated. According to the time stamp on the file, it had been edited while Heidi was in the hospital! Did Heidi have a partner that worked with her on the Web site or had someone made the change to cover their own tracks?

Now it was too weird to ignore. Spike had to follow this lead. He made a list of UCSC campus servers. It was a long list. They had been sprouting like mushrooms over the past couple years. Spike then spawned search programs to rifle through the contents of each server. He gave the programs criteria from the operator set he got out of the strange file on Heidi's workstation. Now he would see how thoroughly the tracks had been covered.

Within minutes, Spike got a hit. He quickly raced to the location of the matching content. What he found there was not the original program, but a technical description of the operators and their functions within the human brain! It was like the programmer's manual for the unknown command syntax. The document's author was listed as Dr. Roy Donaldson. It was time to talk to Nancy. The phone would have to do, for now.

It was 7:45 PM when Spike connected with Nancy and Tom for the update. Molly had gone to the weekly meeting of the Ethernaut Club. She said it was private, no guests allowed, club rules. Spike gave the two of them a quick summary of how he tracked down the professor and the file he had found. But what to do about it?

Spike: ...So I checked the UCSC faculty listing and found Dr. Donaldson's profile. It says he conducts psycho-physiological research on the functioning of the human brain. Been doing it for years. He's considered one of the top men in his field.

Nancy: I can't believe he intentionally...

Tom: Hold on there. We can't jump to any conclusions about this guy. We're going to have to find something more conclusive than these computer file similarities before we can turn him over to the police.

Spike: I agree, Tom. Where do you want to go from here?

Tom: Let's check the guy out personally. See if he feels like the type that might try some risky experiment.

Nancy: And hide from the results when it goes wrong!

Tom: Exactly. Let's give him a call and see if we can drop by for a talk. That may be enough to scare him out of hiding. If it does, we call the cops and let them sort it out. Case closed.



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