Chapter One

Police Chief Benjamin Bancker shoved his fingers up the bridge of his nose as the interrogation descended into unintelligible sobbing again. The FBI agent next to him snorted, smirking at the back of the big cop where he sat in the room below them.

“Small town cops are always useless.”

Benjamin didn’t respond. He’d served on the police force in various parts of Chicago for ten years, and another fifteen with the NYPD, but the agent didn’t know that, and the Feds were never much to listen to locals anyway. Giordo and Finn were trying for the good cop/bad cop routine with the young woman, but two minutes with bad cop Giordo and the poor girl was sobbing into a disintegrating tissue, straight, unwashed platinum blonde hair fanning over her blotchy face.

“I don’t know,” she sniffed, the old speakers in the observation room crackling with her voice. “I don’t know how all that stuff got on my laptop!”

“Pathological liar,” the agent said briskly. “Do you mind, Chief?”

Benjamin waved a hand. “Go ahead.”

The agent wouldn’t get anywhere. Benjamin glanced down at his copy of the young woman’s file. Ariel Minster, twenty-six years old, two years out of internationally acclaimed Gryphus University with a degree in computer design, awards for work in digital art and CGI, formerly employed at Sychorax Studios. No family or other connections. Benjamin knew her mostly as the girl Tony liked to try to flirt with at Hank’s Food Mart.

The agent opened the door below them. “Take a coffee break, officer.”

Giordo stood gratefully, and Ariel looked up from her crumpled bundle of tissues. “Could I get a trash can, please, officer?”

The cop pulled one around from the corner and she dropped the trash into it, pulling a few new tissues out of the box and blowing her nose loudly. Giordo left, door thumping behind him. The agent didn’t sit, but rested his hands on the back of the chair.

Dominance posture. Meant to intimidate.

“Good evening, Miss Minster. I’m Agent Thomas Pine, FBI.”

Ariel shrank back into the metal chair, clutching at the sleeves of her bright orange jumpsuit.

“At 3 p.m. yesterday, the police department received an anonymous tip that Sychorax Studios was mining and selling personal data, is that correct?”

“3:04,” Ariel whispered.

The agent moved to continue, then looked down at the papers in his hand. Benjamin thumbed through the file to the text of the call. 3:04:24 exactly.

“Oh?” Agent Pine recovered quickly.

Ariel stared past him at the blank wall of the concrete room. “I made the call.”

“Did you. That’s interesting, since the data mining program was run from - let’s see - your computer. The data is all stored on your computer. The communications with third parties are all with your email account, with funds transferred to a bank account that belongs to you. Do you deny that?”

“N-no. But-”

“So why were you telling Officer Martinez that you didn’t know anything about it?”

“Because I don’t! Someone can put a bank account in someone else’s name, can’t they?”

“And the email?”

“That’s my university email. I never use it.”

“And the data on your computer?”

“It must have been uploaded when I wasn’t looking.”

“And the program, being run off of your computer?”

“Someone else must have put it there.”

“Any idea who that someone else might be?”

“Cal Blackburn.”

“Cal. Your employer’s son who dropped out of school in the third grade and still can’t read or write is running a third-party data mining operation out of his mother’s basement and framed you with it.”

“Her office, but yes!”

Agent Pine shook his head. “You don’t tell a clean cover story, do you, Miss Minster.”

“It’s true, I promise, I swear!”

Benjamin swiveled his chair and stuck his head out of the observation room. “Hey, Finn. Suspect's claiming she’s our anonymous tipper. Get with dispatch; try and trace the call.”

“Yes sir.”

“Do you know what the penalty for perjury is?” Agent Pine asked, voice full of unspoken doom.

Ariel clutched her soggy tissue ball and nodded.

“So, knowing that, let’s start from the beginning. What is MA93?”

“It’s a drug administered by injection on the consent of a gamer to allow them to access a virtual reality video game world.”

“You were involved the development and testing of this drug?”

“Yes.”

“Why was MA93 developed after the WVG unit?”

“It was more effective.”

“How?”

“The WVG unit allows the gamer’s mind access to the virtual world, but it requires their total focus. Users complained of headaches after using it for more than two hours at a time, and had to use it in a soundproof room, since any noises would break their concentration.”

“And MA93 solved this problem?”

“MA93 puts the gamer to sleep, and allows them-” Ariel trailed off, twisting jumpsuit and tissues in her fingers. “It’s like lucid dreaming.”

“But they cannot leave the game at will.”

“No.”

“And if all of this is going on in their heads, how does the game know how to respond?”

“We use data feeds directly from the brain compiled from the WVG unit.”

“What do these data feeds communicate?”

“Movement. Emotion. Speech.”

“Whether or not the gamer is craving Doritos?”

A smile almost crossed Ariel’s face. “Sometimes.”

"Social security numbers? Passwords?"

"Yes."

“What happens to all this data?”

“An algorithm in the mainframe sorts it, using the relevant data to control the game and deleting everything else.”

“Or sending it to your computer?”

“I didn’t know my computer was connected.”

“Let’s consider the facts, Miss Minster. You’re a top designer in a new and booming business, your skills are in high demand, and you are working for a backwater little company in Port Oakwood for eleven thousand dollars a year, consistently turning down offers for six-figure salaries from much bigger companies. Doesn’t make much sense, unless you’ve got a steady flow of advertising information and social security numbers and passwords flowing into your hard drive and plenty of people just slavering to buy them. Can’t make that kind of money working for even Microzone Interactive, could you?”

“I’m a designer, not a hacker.”

“Why don’t you leave Sychorax, then?”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t?”

“Contract.”

“Tidy answer.”

Ariel’s lip quivered, and she gave Agent Pine the look that must have melted Giordo into a puddle - he hadn’t been very hard on her. Benjamin left the observation room. No defense Ariel gave vindicated her. And somehow, that gave him the strongest inclination that she was innocent. The police chief sat in his office and swirled his coffee and put half his mind on the vandalism report before Finn barged into the room.

“We traced it. The anonymous tip.”

“And?”

He held up a plastic bag with a dark rectangle in it. “It came from her phone. She tipped the FBI five minutes after she hung up with our people. I listened to the recording, sir. It has to be her. And she was scared.”

They headed for the interrogation room together, Benjamin reaching to tap on the door just as the knob turned and an uncomfortable-looking Agent Pine looked out. Behind him, Benjamin saw Ariel curled up under the table, hyperventilating into a paper bag, the agent’s jacket tucked under her head.

“You wouldn’t happen to have another tissue box, would you?” the agent said. “And some hot cocoa?”

***

Fifteen minutes and ten tissues later, Ariel was huddled up in a weighted blanket in the corner and sipping a styrofoam cup of Swiss Miss under the eye of the observation room.

“She called in?” Agent Pine folded his arms and shook his head. “That changes things. Unless she was trying to frame someone else.”

“What do you think?” Benjamin asked.

“Her story is pathetic, but consistent.”

“Do you believe it?”

The agent’s mouth twisted. “Yes. Durned if I know why.”

“Her claim that someone put the files on her computer is worth looking into.”

“There’s a fella I can send it to. Name’s Coy. He’s consulted on situations like this before.”

“How long would it take him?”

“Probably four days.”

“What’d you say to her?” Finn asked the agent.

“Huh?”

“I never seen a panic attack during interrogation like that.”

“I thought I, ah, might just need to be stern. Make her understand how serious the situation is.”

“How serious is it?”

“When the charges and the lawsuits all total up? Definitely prison. Probably the permanent end of her career - I can’t see as anyone would employ her with this on her record.”

Finn nodded. “That would do it. She loves her job. My wife got her talking about it exactly once and swore she’d never do it again.”

“Why not?”

“Girl wouldn’t shut up. She wouldn’t risk loosing her work like this.”

“That’s opinion,” Benjamin said, despite privately agreeing.

“She’s refused a lawyer?” Agent Pine asked.

“Yeah.”

“Try and change her mind.”

Benjamin nodded. It would be the responsibility of the district to press charges, but they would wait until they had finished analyzing evidence before choosing who they would press charges against. In a town as small as Port Oakwood, where everyone knew everyone else’s business, Ariel’s reputation was enough to assure the locals that she was not guilty, and Cal…well, if he let it get out that Ariel had accused Cal - and by extension Mrs. Blackburn - the metaphorical lynch mob would prevent any kind of unbiased investigation. “I’d prefer to keep this investigation confidential,” he told the agent.

“The press is already asking for a statement.”

“Personal information has been illegally sold to third parties. We don’t know who did it, and I’m not pointing fingers until I’m sure.”

Agent Pine was in full agreement. A small army of reporters were already filtering into the little town, taking up all the hotel rooms at the Beachside, wandering around, complaining about the lack of a Wal-Mart. Benjamin snorted at his cold coffee cup. If Hank’s Food Mart wasn’t good enough for them, they could pack up their little cameras and notebooks and get out of town.