Eventually, Matheson explained, Duncan grew bored with programming. The punchcards and rooms full of vacuum tubes couldn't keep up with her ideas, and she occupied her mind reading about other fields while the government's top engineers attempted to build computers powerful enough to work through her accumulated programs. Biology, in particular, seemed to resonate with her mastery of programming as she leapt from neurons to networks and back again.

The essentially limitless resources and typical discretion of a secret military incubator allowed Duncan room for wide-ranging experiments. After years of showing them up at their own game, the brilliant minds at ARPA were perfectly content to let Duncan sink into progressively more conceptual work in the confines of her own labs. These were the projects I had seen listed without a single collaborator, ending with Elysium.

Matheson found her one day slouched over her desk, malnourished and surrounded by reams of paper and electrical components. Her death was ruled a suicide; among other apparently self-inflicted wounds, the black and red wires of a power supply were found snaking across a cluttered desk into her mouth.

Duncan’s later projects were buried in government archives, as her stockpiled programs fueled years of R&D. As one of her final collaborators, Edwin Matheson was tasked with searching Elysium for marketable results. The punch cards on the table had several thousand siblings, at least until the storage unit they were kept in flooded during a huricane. Matheson had accidentally left one hundred of the cards at home one night, which became the entire collection. His analysis of Duncan's work had continued for years, leading him to pore over the cards at home just as I had.

“But what was on the cards?” I finally exclaimed, “I couldn't make any sense of the data.”

They were encrypted, Matheson explained, with a keyword cipher. With the right keyword, one could determine a new identity for each letter or number and decrypt the contents.

After retrieving a dusty box from upstairs, Matheson produced an index card from a pile of documents and old photographs. A single word in familiar pencil: Edwin.

Matheson didn't even look at the note as he held it up, instead his eyes fell to other scraps in the box. I spotted an old photograph of the two of them and understood why Edwin Matheson had so diligently carried the bundle of cards in the pocket of his blue suit jacket.