Chapter 17

- Kristen -

On my way into work again, I thought about how I could have confessed to Master, but I wanted to get a little further before I did so.

Steve stopped by my office and I waved him in and asked him to close the door. He had been digging through the code and it's history and found something very interesting. It looked like someone else had a hand in that mysterious block of code, not just Jeremy. Another leak? Possibly. A sense of dismay grew in my stomach as I considered, did Jeremy have a secret Master? Steve mentioned something thought up by Ken Thompson called "Reflections on Trusting Trust" which implied you can never really tell who is the Master of who in situations like this. We agreed to meet Peter at the University in the afternoon.

Peter and Steve had combined efforts and determined that Jeremy had done some of the coding at the university. Based on the the activity logs, it looked like someone else had read his code and modified it while he was here. There were plenty of examples of poor coding by Jeremy, but he seemed to be doing what he had been asked to do. So now we needed to figure out how to catch this other person and then figure out what the code changes did. Steve pulled out his computer and brought up some programs which he said would tell if the same computer came in the room. Now that we were pretty sure that Jeremy wasn't the one messing around, I felt comfortable giving him a call and asking him to meet on campus. I left the two of them there since I didn't want Jeremy to know about them yet. Jeremy had found us a room that we could have some privacy in.

"Jeremy, I know we went through the Leaks, but do you think there's anyone here who might have accidentally found out about what you were doing? Anyone you asked for help with the program?"

"No Mistress, I worked on the code here, but I did not ask anyone to help out. There isn't anyone here who would know about it who wasn't captured."

"Anyone who expressed an unusual interest, wanted to know what you were doing? Someone who might have had access to your computer, a lab partner, girlfriend?"

"No Mistress, I haven't dated much, which is probably why I went a bit overboard when I first understood what the device could do. My lab partners couldn't keep a secret if they tried."

"Ok, let's keep the computers you work on for us away from the university for now. If you need us to buy a different computer, just let us know. I had no money when I was a grad student so I understand."

"Thank you Mistress, I would need help with that."

When I went back to the lounge, I found Steve had moved to one corner of the room while Peter was in the other corner. He then stood up and moved twenty feet and sat back down while looking around. I headed over to Steve who looked up and smiled at me and motioned me to lean in for him to say something quietly.

"Mistress, I think we have them. They came in the room a few min ago with a crowd of people. I'm about to do something I should not do, but we'll find out who's computer it is in about 10 seconds. I'm going to put a picture of a cat on their screen, can you please look for it?"

"Why don't you just turn on their speaker and Rick Roll them?"

"Mistress, that's an even better idea. Sit back and let's see who this is."

The room was pretty full of people all having conversations, it was a typical college lounge. With a muttered "here goes nothing", Steve hit return.

Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down

Never gonna run around and desert you

The song started blasting from the middle of the room where three people were sitting. The woman in the group grabbed her laptop and was trying to turn the volume down without success. She paused for one second and then hit the power button rebooting her machine. She didn't look like a student, she dressed like a professor, very pretty a little taller than I am. She had obviously taken care with her hairstyle and how it complimented her face. I thought she had struck that fashion balance between "professional serious person" and "you know I'm a sexy woman underneath this if you're lucky enough for me to want to show you" that I always tried to strive for myself. She was nervously talking with her friends and then stood up to leave.

Peter came over and told us that she was Amy Peters, a CS professor who was a nationally known expert on virtual reality. She had been recruited to join the faculty last year. This was starting to make sense so I told them to come with me, I wanted to follow her and see where she went. Peter said this was the direction of her office, apparently he had taken a class with her last year.