They were both staring at his screen as he explained the alert.

'It means that it correlated closely enough, but it doesn't know if it's actionable. Look at the literature index: that's massive, obviously ripped; but, the source is considered low impact. So it's not an automatic referral. Not an existing client, not a high potential, just someone somewhere with a copyright. So...'

'...so somebody copied a piece of text, altered it very slightly, and you don't know if the author is worth ambulance chasing?'

'Um, we don't necessarily like that term.'

'Author?'

'No, ambulan... oh, very funny. But, er... yes.'

She leaned over, tapped his keyboard: a window appeared that he had never seen before.

'How did you do that?', he asked.

'Oh, we have this app at college. But... that's ridiculous.'

He stared at it, feeling slightly stupid. He plucked up the courage to ask her, 'that's the disputed document, isn't it?'

'Of course. But, look at it! And there's the original. Why would you rip off this? Who's the copyright holder?'

He pointed to one of his other screens. 'Church of the Galactic Holy Spirit. Definitely not a client. Not even a company, as far as the system can tell.'

'Probably a charity.' She sipped her coffee. 'Who's the perp?'

'Er, Blazing Path to the Glorious Resurrection.'

'They sound even more nutsack insane!'

'"nutsack"? Nice.'

'Thanks for the informal feedback. What do we do now?'

'Er... OK. In answer to your question, we do a bit of research, make a call on whether it's worth pursuing. In this case it almost certainly won't be, but let's do it anyway because it's good experience. You see what you can find out about them; I'll restart the alert job, tell it to ignore this for the moment.'

She smiled. 'Sure. Can I use your computer?'

'Oh. Sorry. I forgot.'

Leona was good; very good. She was soon downloading charity commission reports, web traffic data, press releases, local news articles. Finally, they went to the two religion's websites. The Church's was just a couple of pages, and tallied with what they had found – some fringe UFO hippy group with a handful of followers all attesting to alien abduction. The Blazing Path, on the other hand...

'Oh my God. That actually hurts my eyes to look at it,' said Marcus.

She squinted. 'I guess they don't want colour-blind members.'

'Go to the browser options and turn off some of the Javascript options, will you? Just while we look at this monster.'

'Sure. People should need a license to use HTML 6. And look at all that Comic Sans...!'

'Oh, I've read about that. Everyone associates Comic Sans with well-meaning, guileless, slightly stupid computer novices. So the really nasty websites cover themselves in the stuff: gives them a sort of wide-eyed innocence while they are busy stealing your card details.'

She leaned back again; now that most of the spinning animations were still, and the text had stopped flashing, it was almost bearable.

'Now this is interesting,' said Marcus, sweeping the mouse across the screen. 'What do you see?'

'Other than the cute cartoon of Jesus peeping his head out of a flying saucer?'

'Other than that.'

She frowned. 'Give up.'

'No links. Look. Here...', he pulled up a window, '...is the page source. Not a single URL anywhere. But if we go back to the main page, and scroll down past the... what is that?'

'It's the pyramid with an eye on top. You know, the one from the dollar bills. Looking through a telescope, or something. It was winking earlier, before we turned all the animations off.'

'Nice. Anyway, down here, we will find... yep. Plain text web addresses, messed about a bit to keep them from being swept up by us. Messed around a lot, actually, with instructions on how to fix them.'

She scanned the list.

'That's a lot of documents they are hiding. Think they are all ripped off?'

Marcus shrugged, 'that's for the bots to find out. We'll patch up the webcrawler, do a special run on this site. But, probably, yes. Otherwise why go to the trouble of hiding them like this?'

'Well, these people are probably pretty paranoid. It might just all be about hiding it from shadowy government agencies. Is there a section on how to make your tinfoil hat stylish yet practical?'

He snorted.

'Those kind of people can't generally do this kind of stuff though, you know? The freedom nuts normally have the best security. Well, after the proper pirates, obviously. This isn't high-tech enough for either of them.'

'Can I look at one of the docs?'

'Sure.'

'Ok. So, let's see, I do this, and then run this, and then swap those letters, add nine to that... there. Wow.'

The document sprang up in all its hyperbolic glory. They read it, and then burst into laughter.

'That's excellent! A space alien landing event, just outside Bristol. That's actually really tempting,' laughed Leona. 'We should go! Fancy it?'

Marcus' heart skipped a beat; trying his best to be nonchalant, desperately wringing his brain to remember if was supposed to be doing something else, he grinned in what he hoped was a casual way.

'Sure, if you've not got anything planned...'

'It's Saturday night, right? Oh, I'll be just listening to my flatmate complain about how she hates men.'

They spent the rest of the day sorting out the paperwork, before going to the pub.