I was standing at the elevator. My investigations were fruitless! This was the hundreth time I had followed an e-mail to it's source and found nothing. I had talked with .hack, the webmaster who holed up on the fitieth floor of EMCORP.

When I pointed out that the mysterious e-mails had come from his server, we opened the log files. Appparantly the e-mails had been generated on his server. It wasn't a case of someone spoofing him, or hijacking his server. We were sure of that. Somehow, the server had "decided" to send the e-mails without any commands.

I had begun to think of another possibility. Maybe there was some kind of a bug in the software. Perhaps as the Internet grew these e-mails were being generated by some line of software that we didn't fully understand in the relationship of a world wide web. I was close, very close at that point to realizing the truth.

It wasn't a coincidence that as the thoughts were forming in my mind I was distracted by a voice behind me. A heavily accented African voice that said "Sir, this meeting may come as a suprise, but I wish to solicit your help knowing you will not betray me."

I turned, thinking .hack was playing a joke on me. These were the words echoed in millions of e-mails blasting around the world every second. I was shocked to see a tall African gentleman, imaculately dressed in a suit that must have cost thousands. He had an aura of power about him. You could tell that he was used to being listened to. He also had a strange threatening presence, masked behind a kind and polite demeanor. I knew, without question who he was.

I was face to face with President Butu.