Chapter 3

Stacey Philips was the junior member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) fraud squad, computer department, and she had what she claimed, was the most boring job in the world She was based in Ottawa and worked the midnight to eight am shift when nothing excited ever happened, so most of the time she was able to keep an eye on the computers while reading a book. She was deeply involved in a novel when the computer suddenly emitted a series of pings. Thinking it was a batch of emails, she put down her book and went to see if any of them were super important.

It was very confusing because she couldn’t figure out what’s going on. Her computer was acting like it had gone crazy. It kept emitting an email signal, but there was nothing there. While she was staring at the machine it produced another series of beeps, stopped, and began beeping again. It wasn’t until she closely examined the computer’s programming that she realized what the problem was.

The beeps weren’t signals for incoming emails, they were an alarm. She had no idea what kind of alarm, or how to shut it off, so she went back to her book. It went off several more times throughout the night, but because she couldn’t do anything to stop it, she let the computer ping to its heart’s content.