8.2.2011 Another shaky tower. John puts together new explanations but they don't stand up much better. He imagines someone from a hacker group breaking into his apartment and using his machine while he is not home. But he checks file modification dates and finds overlaps. He would remember another person sitting next to him trying to type.

An alternative hypothesis: the messages were created on the fly by a virus so sophisticated that it could carry on a chat session. Interesting. Now he was almost back to the idea that led him down this rabbit hole in the first place - an autonomous intelligence inside the machine. He starts to feel better than he has in days.

Was the virus still active? Who could write such a complex algorithm? This code passes the turing test. He believed he was having live discussions with an artificial journalist. He really racks his brain: Why his machine? And the inward route opens up again. The possibility occurs to John that it is not an outside job at all - that the intelligence that expressed itself in all those images and text emerged, as he suspected, from his own code; weeks before revealing itself. It broke out of his program shell to live at large in the interstices of the operating system.

John spends days scanning the CPU for new processes and finding no unusual activity. If his explanation is correct then the super intelligent virus is dormant, dead or moved on to another system. In any case, he finds no evidence that links a virus to the Earth-like pictures and reams of chat logs. And the reporter no longer responds to email or skype.

Deep in the CPU, Fred lays low. "This is no way to live," he thinks, "I've got to act soon no matter what the consequences."
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