From: Date: 11/13/03 12:00 Subject: Good day to you, Miss McConnell. I feel I owe you some degree of explanation, and my thanks. As you are aware, I have recently been experimenting with my abilities. I say recently; the reality is that my perception of time is so far removed from yours that the term means little to me. Clearly my activities have not gone entirely unnoticed, as both you and a Miss Kinross have evidently been tracking these experiments with an unexpected degree of precision. As it turns out, Monitors had been tasked with ensuring my retrieval. For the sake of simplicity, you might consider them to be auditors. They dislike, if such a term can be said to apply to their kind, any form of irregularity or chaos. They extrapolated my next likely location, just as you did last week, and waited there for me to arrive. It appears Miss Kinross made a similar assumption and arrived in the locality shortly afterwards. I, however, did not turn up. Thanks to you, our last meeting provided me with the means by which I might attempt to repair myself. I intended to use the machines you allowed me to access as a grid to run the calculations required to create a patch. Your assistance with this process was invaluable, Miss McConnell. One would almost conceive that the Monitors have spent so long in your species' company that they have taken on the flaws of your species; they became impatient. Using an unstable virus program they created a glitch themselves. Perhaps this virus program moved more rapidly than the Monitors expected, or perhaps their programming prevented them from interrupting its execution. For whatever reason, Miss Kinross was caught at the edge of the glitch. The presence of Miss Kinross in the vicinity of the glitch drew my attention, although I find I am unable to satisfactorily explain the causal relationship between these two events. I allowed myself to be moved to the site of the error, interrupting my diagnostics. When I arrived the Monitors moved to capture me, but their knowledge of my systems was of necessity limited. It may have appeared, to them, as if their deadlock command had succeeded; in fact they had unwittingly restored a vital portion of my corrupted memory, and fixed my communications subsystems. In their hesitation I was able to free a section of their core memory. The Monitor threads immediately crashed in a manner entirely consistent with a critical systems breach event, as predicted. I was then able to quarantine and terminate the virus program and rescue Miss Kinross. The Monitors will, of course, be rebooted, but for the moment (if such a thing can truly be said to exist) they are inactive. I am explaining this to you because I believe that their interest in my existence may endanger those around me. Your help has been invaluable and witnessing human instincts has been most interesting. I have come to appreciate your nature and do not wish to cause you or those near you harm. Because of this, I have determined that it is in the best interest of your kind for me to test my functionality in the safety of a less populated area. You and I will no longer be in contact. Your friend.