Holly's POV part 1

As they sat down to eat, Holly looked over at Brittney.

"By the way, what's that stupid necklace thing you've been wearing?" Holly asked.

"Oh, umm, nothing. It's just a monitoring thingy. For a story I'm doing for the Courier," she replied.

"What kind of story requires wearing a monitor? It looks like some sort of house arrest device."

"Umm, I don't know, it just this story," Brittney nervously replied, not wanting to reveal the real reason to Holly. Thinking of an excuse to get away, Brittney said, "Oh, sorry, I think I need to get the laundry out of the dryer." Brittney abruptly got up and left the kitchen.

Holly was intrigued. Brittney was clearly hiding something. That collar didn't look right and she was determined to figure out what it was about. Although she hung out with simple guys like Billy, Holly was actually extremely smart. With a bachelor's in electrical engineering and a master's in computer science she had to be tough to work in what was still mostly a man's world. At work her department consisted of 8 guys, all white, all younger than 30, plus herself. She worked hard and she didn't take crap from anyone as she figured it was the only way to survive.

Later that evening as Brittney went to her room to try to come up with a basic story line for Mr. Packard, Holly began her investigation. She was familiar with house arrest monitoring devices (she had dated a guy once who had to wear one), so she started there. It didn't take her long to find a unique RF signal nearby, and guessed correctly that it was coming from Brittney's collar. She was surprised at the minimal security controls on the device, and was able to quickly tap into it and monitor traffic.

She captured the IP address and set up a recording program to capture all the I/O communication, which at the moment was very light. She next tried a couple methods to communicate with the device. Once again she was shocked at how easy it was to access it. Once in, however, she was confused by the structure of it. It wasn't like any devices she was familiar with. There was minimal information stored or processed on it, it seemed to be only an interface for something else. "But what?" she asked herself. She decided to download an image copy of everything stored on the device and analyze it later. Satisfied, she moved to her work laptop and began scanning through her e-mails.