Evelyn was reviewing files while Linda adjusted parameters for an atmospheric-dynamics simulation. She stopped suddenly.
“Linda,” she said.
Linda looked up. Evelyn’s voice was too careful.
“Do you check the system-access logs often?”
Linda frowned. “Occasionally. The university has good security. Why?”
Evelyn rotated the monitor so Linda could see. “Because somebody is taking pieces of your model.”
Linda moved closer. At first, the activity looked ordinary: small file accesses at different times, incomplete downloads, harmless-looking transfers mixed into routine system use. But Evelyn had noticed a pattern in the timing.
“They’re not copying whole folders,” Evelyn explained. “They’re taking small sections from different places. Enough to reconstruct the work later, but not enough at any one time to look like a major breach.”
Linda stared at the screen. “Could it be a student or technician?”
Evelyn shook her head. “The pattern is too patient. Whoever is doing this understands how people review logs. They know how to disappear into normal activity.”
The statement chilled Linda. She began checking older logs, and what initially looked like an isolated irregularity stretched backward across months.
Strange internal addresses appeared during lunch breaks and late at night. Files were opened, fragments downloaded, and traces quickly buried in normal traffic. The theft had been happening long before Evelyn entered the research room.
For the first time, Linda looked frightened rather than intellectually challenged. The climate models were not ordinary classroom work. They contained advanced analytical methods for understanding atmospheric behavior, energy exchange, and environmental dynamics.
“Who would steal this?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Evelyn said. “But whoever it is has been watching this project for a long time.”
Linda sat back slowly. The lecture hall now seemed very far away.
She had invited Evelyn into the project because Evelyn could see mathematical possibilities Linda had missed. Now the woman Linda once regarded as invisible had noticed something far more dangerous: someone inside the institution was quietly stealing their research.