Rachel shook her head.
"Not from the information available in our ordinary records. We need help from someone who understands the server logs."
Marcus suggested contacting the initiative's technical adviser. Rachel agreed and sent a request to an independent information-technology specialist who had volunteered to help establish the workshop's security procedures.
They also notified the initiative's board. No one was accused, and no private account was accessed without authorization. The goal was to preserve evidence, restore the missing work if possible, and prevent the same incident from happening again.
At nine fifteen, Olivia arrived with two members of her team.
She looked relieved to see Marcus.
"Did you find anything?"
"Not yet. But we're checking the records properly."
Olivia placed a notebook on the table.
"I remembered something else about Martin Cole. He asked whether we planned to publish our calibration method."
"What did you tell him?"
"That we hoped to publish the results after the project was finished. He said that was a good idea because early publication could establish who developed the technology."
Marcus frowned.
"Did he ask you to sign anything?"
"No. He said he could introduce us to people who might help us."
The conversation gave Marcus another question to investigate, but it did not establish that Cole had anything to do with the missing files.
He asked Olivia to write down everything she remembered about the visit, including the date, the questions asked, and the man's appearance. She did so carefully.
Then Marcus noticed a detail in the notebook.
"You wrote that he arrived on a Tuesday. Was that the same day the team demonstrated the device?"
"Yes. We showed him the dashboard, but only with sample data. We hadn't connected it to the latest calibration tables."
"Did he see the project name?"
Olivia nodded.
"We called it ClearCurrent."
The name had been printed on a small card beside the prototype.
Marcus added it to the timeline.
By lunchtime, the information-technology specialist, a woman named Priya Shah, had joined them remotely. Rachel provided the system records, and Priya examined the sequence of events.
After an hour, she identified an important distinction.
The files had not simply vanished from the shared folder. The recorded activity suggested that an older project version had been restored after the latest version was removed.
"That could explain why the folder looks normal at first glance," Priya said. "But it doesn't tell us whether the missing material still exists elsewhere."
"Can you recover it?" Marcus asked.
"I can attempt to recover the versions stored by the system. We should avoid changing the affected storage until we've preserved a copy of its current state."
Rachel approved the procedure.
Priya began the recovery process, while Marcus helped Olivia's team locate the original notes and handwritten calibration records. They reconstructed the project's latest configuration from their own notebooks, but they deliberately avoided claiming that the reconstructed version was identical to the missing one.
That distinction mattered. They needed to know whether they were restoring their actual work or rebuilding an approximation.
At three in the afternoon, Priya sent a message to Rachel.
She had recovered several fragments of the missing project, including part of the calibration table and a copy of the dashboard code. The recovery was incomplete, but it established that at least some of the deleted material had existed on the system after Thursday afternoon.
More importantly, the recovered records contained a project identifier that did not belong to ClearCurrent.
It belonged to a directory associated with an external organization.
Rachel read the identifier aloud.
"Northstar Energy Solutions."
Marcus recognized the name.
Northstar was a private energy-technology company that had recently announced a new monitoring platform for commercial buildings. Its promotional material claimed that the platform could identify inefficient power usage and help organizations reduce unnecessary costs.
The description sounded remarkably similar to ClearCurrent's purpose.
"Does this prove Northstar took the files?" Rachel asked.
"No," Priya answered. "It proves that the recovered records contain a reference associated with Northstar. We still need to determine how it got there and what the reference means."
Marcus agreed. He did not want to make the same mistake he had warned others against: treating an unexplained detail as a final answer.
Rachel contacted the initiative's legal adviser, who recommended preserving the recovered records and sending a formal inquiry to Northstar through the appropriate channels.
Before the inquiry could be completed, Marcus received an email from an unfamiliar address.
The subject line read: About ClearCurrent.
The sender claimed to be Martin Cole.
The message was brief.
Marcus, I understand that you're asking questions about a visit I made to the Open Bench Initiative. I would prefer to explain the situation before incorrect assumptions cause unnecessary damage.
I did not remove your team's files. However, I believe someone has used your project to support a commercial proposal, and I may know how that happened.
If you're willing to meet, I can provide information that should help you understand what you're dealing with.
There was no company logo, no job title, and no contact number beyond the email address.
Marcus showed the message to Rachel.
"We shouldn't meet him alone," she said.
"I agree."
They forwarded the email to the initiative's legal adviser and asked Cole to identify the company he represented, explain the basis of his claims, and provide any supporting documentation before arranging a meeting.
For several hours, no reply arrived.
Then Cole sent a second message.
This time, he included a document.
It was a screenshot of a presentation slide from a commercial proposal. The slide described a low-cost monitoring system with a calibration process that appeared similar to ClearCurrent's design.
The presentation was dated two weeks earlier.
At the bottom was the name of the company preparing the proposal.
Northstar Energy Solutions.
Marcus studied the image carefully.
The document did not prove that Northstar had copied ClearCurrent. Similar systems could be developed independently, and the screenshot did not reveal where the technical details had originated.
But it raised a serious question: how could a commercial proposal dated two weeks earlier contain a design that Olivia's team had been developing in the workshop?
Marcus called Olivia and asked her to compare the slide with the team's dated notes. She examined the document and immediately pointed to a distinctive feature of their calibration method: a sequence of measurements they had adopted after an early experiment produced inconsistent results.
They had not published that sequence.
They had not presented it to Caldwell Industries.
And they had not shared it with Northstar.
Rachel documented Olivia's observations and sent them to the legal adviser.
For the first time, the initiative had a concrete reason to investigate a possible connection between the missing files and an outside company.
Still, Marcus refused to declare the mystery solved.
The next step was to establish the history of the commercial proposal, identify who had prepared it, and determine whether the similarities could be explained by legitimate independent development.
As evening approached, he returned to the workshop's empty tables.
On one of them sat the original ClearCurrent prototype. Its small sensor board was still connected to the demonstration computer, waiting for a new calibration test.
Marcus picked up his notebook.
He had started the day trying to find out who had removed a collection of files.
Now he was facing a much bigger question.
If a commercial company was presenting a similar technology before the student team had published its work, someone needed to explain where that design had come from.
And if Martin Cole truly knew something about the connection, Marcus needed to discover why he had waited until after the files disappeared to speak.
At 7:42 p.m., Cole finally replied to the formal inquiry.