I Found A Knife

Willie & Frank--
Shakespeare?
In Nano-Time

Chapter 15 --
I Smell A Rat

Where the hell are Willie and Frank?

“Jake...?” Dr. Kyle asked.

I shook my head and held up both hands. “huh uh,” I said. “I don't have a clue.”

“You were here all night, weren't you?”

“All night. I was in my office from about midnight until five minutes ago. They were safe and sound at eleven.”

“You checked on them?”

“Yes sir, at eleven. After that we.. I.. fell asleep. But they were fine, that is, they were… the same, when we left them.”

“Jennifer?” he asked, looking at her.

“I was here,” she nodded. “We ordered a pizza and stayed here, or in his office, all night.”

And suddenly, I felt better. I didn't know what was going on, but I knew in my bones that Willie and Frank had something to do with it. Their slice of pizza was gone. The only thing left was the outside edge of the crust, just like every time they'd had pizza before. It was on the floor, under a cage. Willie said the crust was too dry and tasteless without the extra cheese on it.

OK, guys. What did you do? And how the hell did you pull it off?

I didn't point it out to anybody. I nudged the piece of crust into the corner with my foot, covering by making another walk around the room. Then I bent over as if I was looking under some tables, and snuck the crust into a pocket.

Doctor Kyle started barking orders and pointing at lab assistants. “You two, third floor, you two, second, you two take this one, and you two take the first and the basement. Split up, one to each end and work your way back to the middle. Search every room, closet and cabinet. If a door is locked, find a key. Pay attention to the small dark places. And do it quietly! You're more likely to hear a mouse than see it. Don't just stand there. Go!”

I started for the door. “I'll go check my office, see if they went back there.”

“I'll go with you,” Jennifer and Doctor Kyle said at the same time.

He looked at me. “We need to talk. Now.”

I looked at Jennifer. Saw the look in her eyes. Then she looked at Doctor Kyle. “I'm coming with you.”

Doctor Kyle led the way.

We made a quick search of my office, but we knew we wouldn't find anything. Then Doctor Kyle sat on one of the stools at my workbench.

“Jake, you’ve been faithful to Willie and Frank from the beginning, maybe more so than to the experiment. I know that. So, look at me and tell me you didn't let the lab animals escape.”

I did what he asked, exactly. “Doctor Kyle, I did not let the lab animals escape. I didn’t take them anywhere either.”

I could see in his face that last line was a point for me.

“Sir, I don’t know what is going on, but we didn't do it. Not even by accident. I couldn’t. I don’t have an access card for the cages.”

And I could see the point get taken back.

“Jennifer does,” he said. He turned to her. “You have access cards to the doors, the cages, everything, don’t you?”

Crap. I forgot about her access card. Hey, wait…

“Doctor Kyle…that’s it, the access cards.... “

“Yes?” he asked.

“Every use of the cards is logged.” I sat on the stool next to him and pulled a keyboard toward me. “Every door opening and closing, lights on, lights off, elevators, everything shows up in the logs. And they are time stamped.”

“We already know it happened sometime last night,” Jennifer said.

“That's not all, though,” I said, my fingers skipping across the keys. “Each time stamp includes a code for which access card was used, that is, whose access card was swiped in order to gain access.” I found the right folder and began mousing down through the files. “Now, if I can find the right log file.... ah ha. Here we go.”

I double clicked the file name and it opened up on the monitor in front of us. Line after line of text entries scrolled down the screen.

'There must be thousands of lines here,” Doctor Kyle said.

“Thousands of lines every hour, every day,” I nodded. “It's easy to forget just how many access cards there are, just for this lab, and how many times they get used every day. Or how many doors there are all over the campus. Fortunately, we just have to look at the logs for our building, and they can be sorted by door, or by chronological order.. Here we are.” I pointed to the lines of text from the overnight hours.

“Here's our building, just after eleven. That's Jennifer's card. That’s when we left the lab. See?” I scrolled down some, “There's the lab door locking when we left.” I scrolled some more. “Here’s where we entered this office.”

Jennifer pointed. “There’s where I went out in the hall and came back in. I was going to go home and.. changed my mind.”

“None of the other doors were accessed during that time,” I said quickly, and kept moving.

“Now,” I did some more clicking. “I can filter this to show us just the doors, to speed the search up some. See? Nothing else from the doors until after two o'clock. Wait a minute... What's this? Who the heck is wsfulton?”

“No idea,” Doctor Kyle said.

“Beats me,” Jennifer said.

Starting about two thirty that morning, and going for the next half hour, was a number of log entries, one after another. Doors opening and closing, opening and closing.

“Jake, unfilter the other access entries for that time frame.”

A couple of clicks and they were back in view.

“Son of a bitch,” Doctor Kyle said. In between doors opening were smaller doors opening, cage doors…another, then another. All of them.

But we knew that already, bozo. Try being helpful… Wait. Not too helpful. How the heck did they do it??

“Wait a sec,” I pointed at the fire emergency map on the wall. “Jennifer, grab that please?”

She got a couple nails under it, pried it off the wall, and brought it over to where we were sitting. Reading the logs, and looking at the map we could almost follow the progress from the front door, up the elevator, down the hall to the lab. Whoever this Fulton guy was, he went around the lab and opened every cage door. He must have taken every one of the lab animals. We could look through the log and see the return trip, back down the elevator and out the doors.

“How the heck did he manage to carry that many animals off,” Jennifer asked.

“Maybe he had crates, or a rolling cage,” I said.

“Yeah, and maybe he had a flute and they followed him down the hall and out the door.” Doctor Kyle said. “It would have taken a lot more than a couple of cages. Maybe he had help,” Doctor Kyle suggested. “But that doesn't tell us who he is. I'll double check the files, but I'm sure he's not on the research staff.”

“He could be just about anyone, here.” I said, wondering. “Well, not anyone. We didn’t do it. I mean, I didn’t and Jennifer didn’t, she was with me. And you didn’t do it, I’m sure.”

“Jake…”

“Sorry Doctor Kyle. What I meant was he.. or she, could be one of the research volunteers, like maybe someone from the gamer project, or one of the other experiments.”

“Those are all shut down. They aren’t around,” Doctor Kyle said.

“But they knew about the lab animals,” Jennifer said. “Most of the campus knows we keep lab animals for experiments. We’ve had protests off and on, right? Whoever did it may not have known about Willie and Frank, but that wouldn’t have mattered.”

I had an idea, and turned back to the keyboard. “If whoever it is was on staff, Doc Marten might know.”

“I'll check with him as soon as he comes in,” Doctor Kyle said.

“May not be necessary,” I said. “Whether they were on staff or a student, whoever they are in real life, in digital life they are still wsfulton, a user account in the university system.” Clickety, clickety, mouse, mouse, mouse. “Somebody set up their account, and, if whoever set it up did it right, their name, address, and other information should be with it.”

“So we can find him or her there?” Doctor Kyle said.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Jake, should you be able to do that?”

“Technically? No. But this is an emergency. I’ll apologize later.”

“There must be thousands of names in the directory,” Jennifer said.

“More like tens of thousands,” I agreed. “Every person who teaches, studies, or works for the school, and probably thousands of others who don't anymore, but haven't been removed yet. Fortunately, there's a search function.” I finished entering my request and hit 'search'.

“It will take a few minutes, but we'll have our answer.”

But, we didn't. At least not the answer I was expecting.

“It didn't find anyone. wsfulton doesn't exist,” I said. “Or at least, he doesn't have an account in the university system.”

“Try it again,” Jennifer said. Not having a better idea, I did.

While we were waiting the human search parties came back. They had managed to collect several rabbits, and a couple of guinea pigs, but not a single mouse or rat.

I went back to my file search and came up empty handed, again. Well, crap.

“How is that possible?” Jennifer asked.

“Someone deleted the account.”

“Maybe the mysterious Mister Fulton,” Doctor Kyle said. He checked his watch. “Doctor Marten should be in his office by now. I'm going to go and tell him about this… mystery in the lab, and then ask him a question that I'm beginning to think I already know the answer to.”

“That there's no wsfulton on staff here at the lab?” I asked.

“No,” Doctor Kyle said. “That someone, on the laboratory staff, who would also have had an interest in keeping the mice out of the lab, and had the necessary technical skills to invent an invisible man to do his dirty work, just destroyed our experiment?”

He was gone, out the door, by the time I had deciphered his sentence. Wait a minute...

“He thinks we did it,” Jennifer said.

“No, he thinks I did it.”

“What, he doesn’t think I helped? He already knows I spent the night here.”

“Yeah, but he said he, as in him, meaning me.”

“And he just saw you hack the school system.”

“Yeah.” Dumbass.

“But you didn't do it.”

“I know that.”

“No, We know that,” she said.

I smiled at her. My whole day brightened up. “Thanks. That does make me feel better.”

“So, who did it? And, how do we convince Doctor Kyle that we didn't?”

Hmmm. “Well, we know who did it, or at least what he called himself. So, to start with, let's prove that Mr. Fulton existed.”

“How do we do that, time travel?”

“Sort of. We need to see yesterday's logs. We can do that by hacking into the university's backup system, finding the account logging and looking for everything there is on Mr. Fulton's account.”

“Wait a minute,” Jennifer said. “You're suggesting that you further break into and manipulate the university computer systems in order to prove to Doctor Kyle that you didn't break into and manipulate the university's computer systems. Is that about right?”

“Umm, yeah,” I said weakly. “Guess that's not such a good plan. I guess we could ask some one over at the university tech office to do it. But it would be so much faster if I just...”

“Never mind faster,” she said. “Who do you know over in university tech support?”

“Same person you do.”

“Ken, ” we said together, and she reached for the phone.

~~~~~~~~~

An hour later we were knocking on Doctor Marten's office door, but it was opened by Doctor Kyle.

“Jake, now is not the best time...”

“Doctor Kyle, there's someone on hold I need the two of you to talk to.” I pushed past him into the room and hit the speaker button on the phone on Doctor Marten's desk.

“Ken, you there?” I asked.

“Yes, I'm here, Jake. Doctor Kyle? This is Doctor Ken Meyers, Director of University System Support. Jake tells me you folks have a phantom user on your hands.”

Doctor Kyle looked at me with some curiosity. “Yes, Doctor Meyers, we do seem to have something of a mystery on our hands. Can you, by chance, shed any light on our problem?”

“I'm afraid the only light I have to shed, thus far, only casts more shadows. The user account in question did not exist a week ago. It appears the account was created three days ago, from a machine in the student center. It deleted itself just before three o'clock this morning. We are searching for the account name in backups going back the last two years, to see if it appears anywhere in the recent past, but I doubt it.”

“The account deleted itself?” Doctor Marten asked. “How does that work?”

“It was created with an expiration date. We do that sometimes, creating day passes, or short term user accounts for temporary employees, contractors, and such. It saves us man hours by not having to go back and delete the accounts manually.”

“And this was such an account,” Doctor Kyle said. “And it deleted itself at three this morning.”

“Not three. Two minutes before three,” Ken pointed out. “It's a pretty important difference. The system's logs are backed up and flushed at three o'clock every morning. If the account had been deleted at, say a minute after three, the deletion, and all of the account information would have shown up in today's logs. Jake would have seen it the first time he tapped into our system.”

oops. Ever heard a voice that could actually stare at you through a phone. Who knew Ken had one of those?

“Ken, uh.. Doctor Meyers..., I told you I was sorry,” I said. “It was an emergency. It won't happen again.”

“Yeah, and I'll never wear heels again,” he said. (Shaun and Jamey would have just loved the confused looks on Doctor Kyle and Doctor Marten's faces.) “On the other hand, if you hadn't thought to look at the logs, we wouldn't know as much as we do. Which still isn't much, I'm afraid.”

“So, what do we know?” Doctor Kyle said.

“Wsfulton is not a student, staff, or faculty member, at least not by that name. My guess is it is an alias. It was created and accessed only from one of the public machines in the student center. It was the same machine, each time, and the hours of access, but were usually during the center's slow times and overnight. That may be a break for us. I've sent a request over to campus security to get the video files from the student center security cameras that correspond with those times. We should get a look at the magical Mister Fulton later this morning. If we get a good enough look, maybe campus security, or someone in the administration or admissions office will be able to identify him... or her.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Whoever it is thought to shut down the cameras here when he took Willie and Frank.”

“So, you think this individual is a student?” Doctor Marten asked.

“I didn't say that,” Ken cautioned. “Although it does sound like the kind of prank that students tend to play from time to time.”

“This is way beyond a prank, I'm afraid,” Doctor Kyle said. “We are out a large amount of research investment, time, money, and a large amount of valuable data.”

“Data,” I asked. “What data?”

“All of the files from Willie and Frank are gone. Everything they input is gone. Dozens, hundreds of files, erased.”

I shook my head. “They aren't gone. Just the most recent versions of them. We do backups, too, on the same schedule as the university. Three a.m. It’s stored on tapes that are off the system. I don't know what happened to Willie and Frank, but I should be able to get everything up to the last twenty four hours, back on line.”

Ken's voice came from the phone, “We're searching through the daily logs. If I find out anything else on our mystery user, I'll let you know, or pass it on through Jake, if that is all right?”

“That will be fine,” Doctor Kyle said. “For now. Doctor Meyers, thank you for your assistance on this.”

“Wish I could help more.” he answered.

“So do we,” Doctor Marten added.

“Hey wait,” I said. “One more thing, Dr. Meyers. Was there any other information connected to the account? An address, even if it was bogus, might give us a lead. Like, what did the 'ws' in wsfulton stand for, anyway?”

“Good point, Jake,” he said. “But there wasn't any database information with the account, besides the name; no address, no grade or department information. Once we find out when and where the account was created, we should know more. In the meantime, we just have this odd account name, and a mysterious bad guy with a sense of humor. Wsfulton is, or at least is pretending to be, William Steamboat Fulton.”

“Steamboat?” Doctor Kyle said. “Who makes up a middle name like 'Steamboat'?”

“A Disney fan,” Doctor Marten said. “And it isn't really William, either. The name is reversed. It's Willie; Steamboat Willie.”

“Who?” Doctor Kyle said.

“Mickey Mouse.”

~~~~~~~~~~

“Doctor Marten, I'd like permission to go over to the computer support center and help them search through the logs,” I said.

Doctor Kyle answered first. “Jake, I want to be fair, but this is a serious concern. There isn't anything that we've found so far to prove you aren't responsible for all this.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I know. But the only thing that says I didn’t do it, is the same thing that says I need to help find them.” I looked from one to the other of them. “They are my friends, and they are in danger.”

“Doctor Marten?” Ken said from the phone, “For what it may be worth, I'll vouch for Jake.”

If he had been there in person I'd have kissed him.

Then he added, “He's squirrelly, but it's an honest squirrelly.” OK, maybe not.

Kyle and Marten looked at each other across the desk, and then back at me.

I could almost see the “click” in Kyle's face as he decided. He nodded, just once.

“All right, Jake,” Marten said. “Go find our mice.”

Up Next: Squeeks in the Dark