Christian Sinclair, 3/16/09 10:00 PM

“The current time is 22:00 CDT,” The female voice chimes in as always. When MJ agreed to marry me she told me I’d have to divorce to clock first. I have yet to make good on that.

My fiance is probably just now boarding her flight to New York, and I sure don’t envy her. I can never sleep on planes, and it’s dangerous for me to connect to cell networks while flying. I hate being cut off from the web. I feel so isolated anymore when it happens. It’s just so… quiet.

I lean back in my well cushioned computer chair and allow myself to stretch and yawn. Long day today, I’ll sleep soon, once I finish up this line of code. I’ll give AMZ1337-man, a hacker I used to work with back when I was a teenager, a preview of the current build and see what he thinks in the morning. If this thing works I’ll be able to accomplish so much more at once, it will almost be like having a second…

Something odd on camera 13 breaks my train of thought. The camera is part of my dorm’s security grid. I’d been monitoring the dorm’s security feeds like I always do when I’m working on questionable software and hacking databases, just incase someone traces something back to me. Some may think of it as paranoia, but I say it’s being careful. 13 is located within the parking garage. it’s the camera I always park my bike under.

With a thought the video feed of camera 13 fills my monitor. I watch carefully as a young man dressed in a black overcoat leans over my bike. I can’t tell what he is doing and I get ready to call security with the Bluetooth headset over my left ear. I will the camera to zoom in on the scene, and it does, the man starts to look strangely familiar. He stands up strait and turns around showing me his face.

That nose! It’s the man from the comic shop, the one I held the door for. The one who… smelled me? He holds his head up high now and looks about. I notice his nostrils flair and contract as he smells the air. I can almost hear the loud sniffs echo in the car park despite the lack of audio. He looks almost like a dog trying to find a trail, or better yet a lab rat sniffing out the cheese at the end of the maze.

After 27 seconds he walks out of view of camera 13. I shrink the screen and scan the other camera feeds to see where he ends up next. He’s standing in a blind spot. Lousy campus security networks! They need more cameras; I begin wishing this were my warehouse, I’ve made sure there are no blind spots in my network.

Suddenly the kid reappears, but not where he should. I have no idea how, but he is now on camera 47, the mailroom. I make the stream full screen to be sure and it’s him alright, big nose and all, he is examining the PO boxes for each dorm. How the hell did he get there with out passing by any of the other cameras, not to mention past the RA, who by checking the lobby cam is sitting talking into a cell phone as if nothing is going on.

The black clad strange leans in close to the boxes and slowly moves along them, running his nose over each one. He stops when he reaches my box. He holds his nose against it for about 10 seconds before stand up right and producing a pad of paper and a pen from his inside coat pocket. He writes something down and then tucks the pen and pad back inside. He then causally walks off camera again.


I watch camera 45 now to see if the door to the mailroom ever opens, but it never does. After another 15 seconds of searching I find him again, this time on Camera 16 back in the parking garage. Who is this guy? I pull 16 into full screen mode and wait for his next move. He simply stand there and waits. After 32 seconds a dark sedan pulls into view and stops in front of the man. He reaches down, opens the passenger door and gets inside. The car speeds off I watch it work its way out of the parking lot.

"The current time is 22:30 CDT," the atomic clock chimes as the car races out of the lot and thus out of my visual range.

I lean back in my chair. Someone is on to me; this is not good. I pull up the camera feeds on my screen. No time for sleep just yet, I need to figure this out. I start rewinding the feeds in hopes of finding something useful.