Late in a cold dark night, in front of a small computer screen lies this human figure, meddling with his new piece of software he has just created. His wife is asleep soundly in a soft bed nearby. He would love to turn on the lamp to brighten the darken room but he loves not to arouse a sleeping beauty more. The brightness of the computer screen is high enough to allow one to notice a strange computer program running but low enough not to wake her up. The software looks not any extraordinary than any other software, yet the concept behind it is out of this world. He formulates the secret recipe of data folding onto itself recursively. Maybe for the first time in history, it has folded a megabyte file into a mere ten-kilobyte. A large file has shrunk into a tiny file, a hundred times smaller. This is the world's first that such an amazing feat has been achieved.

From this small bedroom he calls home office, he carefully analyzes the results. The small file is successfully unfolded back into the large original file with every byte and bit fully intact. So exciting he is, for he has invented the ultimate data compression software. Such software could fetch him millions just by selling the license to some large corporations. He would buy himself, his wife and family a big house maybe on his private, heaven island. It is the last promise out of many broken ones he could keep for his girl and his family. The clock hanging low on the white-painted wall has just hit twelve midnight, somehow reminding him not to daydream while daylight was at the other side of the world. Tonight finally he gets the sweetest, good-night sleep he has ever had in his life.

The sun is now up near the horizon, casting its warm orange light into the two-doored bedroom through the open window. One door leads to the outside world; the other leads to nowhere but the lone living room of his small apartment that he rents. Dara is already awake by his bed. He would quickly jump to his workstation but today the electricity is out cold. "Maybe I forgot to pay the bill, or maybe the city is just too poor to afford electricity around the clock," he murmurs to himself. His first love is now too wide awake. Fleur-de-Lys would usually cry for him even before her eyes are fully open, for she loves to have her hubby by her side when she wakes up. Spiritually lonely she has gone through before she met Dara. With cool gentle morning breeze touching their bodies, they hug like it was the first time. "Honey, what would you do if you had one million dollar?" he whispered in a low voice. This is possibly the millionth time he asks the question that Lys has grown tired to answer. They kiss on cheeks and off they go, to their workplace five kilometers away.

It is now twelve post meridiem, a perfect time for daydreaming. Back home they are and soaked wet by the rain while traveling home on this old red second-handed motorbike imported from Korea. The two-hundred-volt electricity is back online. No wonder the city has to cut it for some hours to save the petroleum consumed by those huge generators. After all, they live in one of the poorest countries in the world. Without hesitation Dara boots up old Lucy his lone personal computer. The Pentium III central processor running at six-hundred megahertz takes her forever to boot up.

"An internet service provider could use such software to significantly reduce the traffic," he ponders about the applications of such software while Lucy's black screen is prompting same ol' jumble commands and her storage belly screaming loud. He does not need a calculator to compute how much companies would save on data storage and traffic by his software. It could save them about ninety nine percent. "Right! They could lower the price of a one-hundred-dollar internet connection to merely one dollar. Nice!"

Now that Lucy has completely booted up, he still in disbelief continues to analyze the results and double checks his new software. Apparently, it ceases to work all of a sudden. It is as if somebody sneaked in and changed the algorithm code last night while everybody was asleep. That is not the case because it is exactly the same code, same algorithm; nothing has changed. "Maybe I'm changing the variables. Maybe I accidentally did something unplanned for and now I forgot it. That can't be right!" he thought. "Or maybe, just maybe, it did work but in a dream which I don't recall having."

It wasn't long that he has listed down all possible culprits. He slowly rules them out one by one until none left. "The file did successfully decompress, and it is here in this folder as a hard proof, or maybe, just maybe, I accidentally copied it here." He was kind of confused. It is like a train has collapsed and then its track mysteriously disappeared. Maybe it was off the track for too long before it collapsed far away from its track. He will never know. He codes everything from scratch if it were for some kind of bugs. Nothing works. All that remains is the memory of an unsolved mystery.