May 5- the track

[Eric Osgood]

Eric was running at a steady pace in sweat pants and t-shirt. His metal implants on his hands and lower forearms were pretty clearly visible.

[Narrator]

As Eric ran, he would find that he had a rather insistent ping on one of his dedicated wireless ports.

Actually, come to think of it, that port never got a ping.

[Eric Osgood]

Without slowing down, the dedicated Analysis protocols in his brainstem implant went to work, breaking down and examining the infiltrating data stream.

Eric was alerted to the probe, but was not concerned- he had many previous, mostly harmless attempts on his system.

[Narrator]

And this one did not seem harmless at all.

As soon as his software began examining the data, a veritable flood of data forcefully crashed through his security protocols and slammed into the front of his brain in a rather disorienting fashion.

[Eric Osgood]

Eric staggered to a halt, revving up his neural transmission speed to attempt to burn the data out.

What the... Get out!

[Narrator]

There didn't seem to be any conscious intrusion or any active program... this was, plain and simple, just a huge stream of data coming in. It didn't appear, even after some hyper-speed data sifting, to have any viral codes, any harmful effects, past the sheer disorienting mass of it... beside the fact that something had disengaged his normal safety measures, there didn't seem to be anything alarming about it.

What it did have, though, was a lot of heavily encrypted data among a lot of junk data.

[Eric Osgood]

Eric frowned even more, as the encryption key set he had seemed to have no effect at decoding the mass of data parked in his brain.

"Dammit... Dammit.."

Jogging off the track, he tried to remember the name of the cyborg from SynGen he ran into earlier.

[Narrator]

His data logs would show that the cyborg's name had been Cal.

[Eric Osgood]

"Right.. Cal. Rhymes with Gal."

With that, he headed to the student dormitories.