“The results of the experiment still confirm our theory?”

“Yes.”

“And the expected errors are all within tolerance?”

“Yes, but that’s the odd thing. We’re seeing a pattern in the errors.”

“What kind of ‘pattern’?”

“Some of the values are slightly higher. Others are slightly lower.”

“That’s expected, right?”

“Of course, but Kevin decided to record the deviations as an independent data stream. If we record a higher value as a one, and a lower value as a zero, we get a series of binary numbers.”

“Of course you would. What’s the relevance of that?”

“If we break up the bits into groups of eight, forming bytes, and encode each of the results as an ASCII character… we get…”

The scientist paused. He shuffled uneasily in his chair, and continued.

”... we get… your dead wife’s first name, repeated over and over again.”