Error: User Not Found

[Narrator]

At approximately 12:18 AM, the Danger Room spat out an error, as someone had apparently attempted to access the room with a faculty code that didn't exist.

Video footage did not show anyone at the terminal at that point in time.

[Ashlie Minamida]

Finding the terminal without anybody using it, Ashlie fully turns her attention to it, rolling security footage back an hour or so while looking through all the adjacent feeds. Hallways, observation room, and so on.

At the same time she pulls up the code that was input and runs a diagnostic on the terminal.

[Narrator]

There was nothing there. No one had attempted to access the terminal, as far as the video feed was concerned. The terminal also seemed to be working properly.

There was, however, a faint discrepancy in the audio of the Danger Room; just for a moment. A slight glitch; nearly inaudible -- like the echo of an echo, on bands that wouldn't fall into the range of normal human hearing.

The terminal seemed to be working fine -- it just registered not one, but two incorrect codes. The data, however, was scrambled -- like when you try to open a file in the wrong program, and garbage data spits out.

[Ashlie Minamida]

Ashlie isolates the audio glitch and tries to clear it up enough to try and make sense of the noise and where it might have originated from. Just in case she checks to make sure the Danger Room was in fact off and did not generate the noise itself.

Two codes. She copies them over into a quarantined environment and checks to see if she can find any indication as to their structure that might tell her something about them.

[Narrator]

The sound was garbled, but running it through processes to slow it down and clean it up, optimizing for speech, got something. The fraction-of-a-microsecond sound slowed down into a (garbled) conversation, although it was unclear as to just who the voices belonged to.

Code: Select all

...ike?"

"**n't m*** me, I'm just k**ping you from blowing out the psi-dampeners."

"I'm sorry.  I didn't think it would b* * ***blem..."

The voices died out there.


The codes structure was unfamiliar, yet not -- not entirely different from how she constructed the campus' security logins, but different enough to throw up error codes. She could see herself creating this data structure, had she started with a different set of instructions.

With a little bit of effort, then, she could un-scramble some of the codes. The code that had triggered the error message was "DAUGHTRY", and was apparently trying to override the lock on a previously running program. There was, of course, no DAUGHTRY in the system, nor had a program been running when the code had been entered. Either would have been enough to pop open an error.

[Ashlie Minamida]

Psi-dampeners? She runs a quick scan of the room's log files to see who had engaged that particular functionality. As far as she remembered it hadn't seen a lot of use and the voices sounded like someone being instructed.

The code too seemed to provide more questions than answers. Too specific for a glitch but otherwise nonsensical. The room wasn't even running so why try to override it and the code itself made little sense either. She runs a diagnostic on the console to try and determine the origin of the signal, since it clearly wasn't the keypad, with nobody there to physically input it.

[Narrator]

No one recently had engaged the psi-dampeners. They were quite firmly in the "off" position.

The code was nonsensical (though, after a little bit of searching, it looked like "DAUGHTRY' was part of the UserID; perhaps in some way randomized and/or anonymized?). You don't turn off something that wasn't on, nor can you unlock something that was already unlocked. Yet that's what the command had tried to do.


The console itself claimed, as indignantly as an inanimate object could, that the command had come from the keypad itself, video evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

[Ashlie Minamida]

Just to double-check she zooms in on the keypad, just to see if she can spot signs of someone invisible pushing anything.

Daughtry doesn't seem to match anything she can find in the school's database. Neither does D. Aughtry or any other kind of combination she can bruteforce. It can't be something that was accidentally buffered, since she'd have a record of the original code. Plus it would be in the correct format. The Point had been the site of a massive temporal event when it had blown up, so it's possible it could be a displaced command from the future, however unlikely. Either way it's clearly connected to the audio blip from inside the room. Somebody overriding it to keep the psi-dampeners from being blown. The number of people capable of that is pretty low. She takes the audio clip and separates the two voices to run them individually and compare them against everyone she knows, within some margin of error to account for the loss of quality from having to slow them down significantly.

[Narrator]

The second voice -- the one talking about the psi-dampeners -- does not match anyone at the university, or anyone ASHLIE has come into contact with. She could run it through a larger database if she so chose, but that would take time, and the file isn't of great quality as it is.

If she spreads out the margin of error enough, however, she is able to come up with a match for the first voice -- Samantha McManus, with a 62% certainty rating.

[Ashlie Minamida]

62% isn't exactly great, even accounting for the bad quality. Still. She sets up an algorithm to slowly go through the databases she has access to and run comparisons to the second voice, setting aside any that come in at 60% or above.

Just after midnight is a little too late to bother Samantha, but she does shoot her a quick email.

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To: smcmanus@xu.edu

Samantha, give me a call once you have a moment
Not very urgent

[Narrator]

Trying to identify the second voice will take...some time. Best not to think about that right now.