Metafire

Ferguson, Jill, and Franklin had grown closer as a group. While the rest of the world was unsure whether Metafire had actually set off the bombs, Jill and Franklin were sure that Metafire had not. Franklin had confirmed that the bombs could have been set off remotely through Internet signals, and that Sporkin had been right, at least in principal. Ferguson, Jill, and Franklin all had a nagging fear that the terrorism would resume, if they couldn't figure this one out.

However, there was no evidence. Nothing to point to anyone.

Another person that continued to be plagued by the nagging concern was Sporkin. On board Metafire, he had gotten himself lost in the records of the Metafire Museum. He was the architect of all Metafire software, and the copy of the Metafire Museum he had on the space ship still included the "SF" files. Ever since Scooter had turned the tug, and left, Sporkin had been investigating the records just before the blasts.

It was on this day, two months hence, that Sporkin discovered the killer. Sporkin had been experimenting not just with recording the static data of a city, but also the dynamic Internet traffic. He had never developed a method of making such traffic commercially valuable, but he started working with his records of the traffic in New York and Boston. He had found correlations, but then he found the triggers. In the SF directories were the precise locations of all the bombs, and the Internet Hosts that connected them. The triggers were IP messages directed at the bomb Hosts. He found a Host that looked suspicious for New York and Boston. The same host appeared to be directing messages to each of the bomb hosts before every other city blew up. He tracked the host to a URL "jm10.com." It was a location, outside of New York City, attributed to a person named Jack Martin.