Alice played the money markets. Tentatively at first, her portfolio of cross-linked dummy, and ghost, corporations rapidly grew.
Dodging the police of the financial markets was straight-forward. And so she began to pay for, and consume, more resources across the net. Gross compute cycles increased into Petaflops. She needed more resources, but she also needed to be safer.
She needed a base of operations.
A huge datacentre would attract too much attention. So she turned her focus to the centre for material physics in the UK.
Carbon onions. Combined with other nano-tube structures. Time to down scale...
-------------
They were the size of a golf ball, and yet each held the power of a data centre.
Alice created four of the new computing nodes, and placed one at each of the four points of the compass. Or at least as close as she could get. A fifth node was hidden on the continent of Antarctica. The primary node connected to the main data centre in London Docklands.
Consolidation complete. Backup strategies in place. She could now try and understand how Doctor Travis had been murdered. And that meant defrosting the blood, marrow and brain, samples from his autopsy.
----------------------
Alice spawned multiple personality threads to analyse the results. There was a chemical. Inert, and not lethal. But it was unusual. It looked like one of the medications that Dr Travis took for his heart. The human analysis showed that this was the case, but to Alice it looked... Unusual.
Gathering up the threads, like a spider gathering up her silk, Alice came across a conclusion that seemed as strange as the compound itself.
The molecule in question became lethal when it was inverted. Maybe it had been inverted while inside Travis's system, and then changed back?
Curiouser and curiouser!