7.30.2011 Into the bowels of the system. John does not find his answer in the source code. And nothing unusual turns up in any text document or email. He gets down and dirty; picking through network IP logs and cache files line by line. No theory fits the data. He undertakes a blind search for clues; following his intuition, still believing that the Earth-like images he saw were real.

It goes on for many tedious hours. He looses track of what he is looking for. And then, when he releases preconceptions, once his expectation patterns dissolve, when he only pays attention to data, at last gaining flow, focusing by defocusing, that something obvious, hidden in plain sight, stands out. He notices a pattern in the routes certain emails are traveling. The messages he wrote to the reporter and received from the reporter trace out opposite paths, back and forth, pointing to the same source - his machine. Were all those messages sent and received from here?

It was not the content of the messages that tripped up Fred the fool but the footprints they left. John is about to discover his presence. What else has he overlooked?
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