Jenn parked her car – the one she used for getting to and from work – in the parking lot on the backside of the Office of Legal and Military Operations, the one meant for employees to park their own vehicles, while the morning sun crept up in the ho-rizon. It was a beautiful vintage car, to the extent that a car from the early 21st century could be considered vintage, handed down to her in accordance to her father’s will when he died the year before. A lot of repairs had to be made to the car to make it last this long, including a full replacement of its internals to make it run on something that was actually obtainable in this day and age. And, more importantly, renewable. Earth’s oil reserves had run dry sometime during the Fourth World War – a time Jenn was happy to have missed on account of her not having been born yet – and that had necessitated some fun-damental changes in several systems that kept the world run-ning. Yet car engines had been among the least significant.

She thought about Harashima as she walked through the building’s back entrance and took an elevator up to the police department floor. The man and his companies had played a sig-nificant role in how technology had evolved over the past forty years or so. Especially in the field of cybernetics. Prior to Hara-shima publishing his dissertation on the effects of cybernetic implants on the human brain, the few companies producing cy-bernetics at the time had been battling with some issues that they hadn’t quite been able to figure out. Issues that had caused the implants to cause mental health issues in their bearers or, worse yet, spontaneously kill them. Harashima’s research being published was a lightbulb moment in the industry.

And then the man founded his first company. With his reputation as a genius and every cybernetics student wanting to work for him, the company got ahead of the competition very quickly. Within only two years, his company had generated enough revenue for Harashima to buy out one of the competing companies and merge it into his. The same fate befell the rest in the span of a year. And now, only one company in the field of cybernetics remained in the entire world – DanariTek.

But Harashima wasn’t satisfied with only one monopoly. He wanted more. He tackled several other fields with his cor-porate endeavors during his lifetime – telecommunications, sur-veillance technology, even banking and law – but his attempts at monopolizing every other industry were shut down swiftly when the people in charge caught on to his tactics. There were companies founded by him that still existed in fields beyond cy-bernetics, but they had largely remained relatively small players in the grand scheme of things.

Jenn headed for the cafeteria and found her colleagues in the Harashima team gathered at their usual spot. Devin had re-joined them as well. “Welcome back, Devin,” she chirped to him as she walked past them.

He might have thanked her – she didn’t slow down enough to catch it if he did. Right now, shaking the morning caffeine monkey off her back was a priority.

She joined the rest of them at the table once she had a cup of the sweet toxin in her hand. “No sign of Josh yet?” she inquired as she sat down.

“Nah,” said Goro. “Late enough that it’s only a matter of time, though.”

“Yeah. Josh is nothing if not consistent.”

“Curious to see how the case develops today,” Devin commented. “Especially after yesterday.”

His tone told Jenn he was thinking about the man that’d attacked them at the server hall. And then shot himself. She nodded subtly, then said to Devin: “Wasn’t your fault the guy shot himself. Don’t beat yourself up.”

“I know,” Devin replied with a sigh. “Just a shame we couldn’t interrogate him. Best thing we have on him is a strong suspicion.”

“Even a suspicion is better than nothing,” Shinji piped in. “But yeah, shame about the kid.”

Jenn let out a half-chuckle.

“I know, a 20-year-old isn’t legally a kid,” Shinji said in response to what he figured the gesture meant. And his inter-pretation was correct.

“It’s all good,” Jenn shot back. “But it is too bad we lost a witness. Even if we can safely assume he was behind the cor-rupted file.” She sipped her coffee.

Then Josh appeared. “Alright, team,” he addressed the table while their eyes turned in his direction. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

The morning’s meeting largely amounted to sharing yesterday’s developments with the entire team. Josh felt like it was starting to chug along again, even if it was spreading beyond the scope of what a team of five could realistically handle. He settled into staring at the whiteboard after the rest of the team left the con-ference room, letting his eyes wander over every puzzle piece that was presently on it.

Harashima. Busujima. His two daughters. Enez Harady. Steve Falk. The murderer. The kid at the server hall. The evi-dence about the last piece wasn’t conclusive – with him being dead, the chances were low it would ever be – but Josh couldn’t help but agree that Daisuke Ito was likely behind the corruption in Nichiho Amano’s file.

But why her file specifically? And why had nobody else’s population record been tampered with? Had Mister Ito worked alone or had someone else orchestrated it? Had he been no more than a pawn in a bigger game?

Josh was confident the answer to the last question was an uncontestable “yes”. The coincidences were too numerous to be coincidences. Miss Harady’s history with Harashima, the corrupted population database record, Mister Ito’s intervention at the server hall, the golden lip marks that had been found on both Busujima and Harashima’s bodies…

After venturing across the whole whiteboard, his eyes settled on the image of Enez Harady. He was sure she was in-volved on a deeper level than what their prior knowledge about her had led them to believe. But what Josh couldn’t quite con-vince himself of was the idea that she had orchestrated the leak of DanariTek’s encryption algorithm. She didn’t even work in the neural link development division. Nevertheless, they would need to do a thorough investigation of her background. To Josh’s surprise, Jenn had volunteered to handle it.

The aforementioned slumped back into the otherwise empty conference room, her motions heavy and her gaze glued to the floor.

Josh turned around and asked Jenn: “Wasn’t willing to talk, was she?”

Jenn gave her answer in the form of a shaking of her head and a sigh. “Told me to fuck off as soon as she saw me.”

Josh produced a sigh of his own.

Then Jenn finally lifted her gaze. She looked at him with the kind of intensity she only used when she questioned his judgment. “You don’t seriously think Enez is behind the algo-rithm leak?”

“Well, I do and I don’t. Wish I could give a more defini-tive answer than that. My only reasoning for the suspicion is that she works at DanariTek.”

“Well, yeah, but not the neural link development divi-sion of it. What are the chances she’d even get her hands on it? I’m sure the company has a set of internal non-disclosure regu-lations.”

“Even if they do, she could’ve gotten around ‘em.”

“How? DanariTek doesn’t let its employees just sneak around between divisions. Not without proper clearance.”

“Maybe she got improper clearance.”

Jenn looked off to the side. Raised a finger to her chin. Contemplated. Then eventually muttered: “Right. The one thing I didn’t consider.” She returned her gaze to Josh and continued: “Either way, I still don’t think she was behind the leak.”

“Can you substantiate your claim or is that just a gut feeling?”

Jenn’s expression shifted slightly. She looked offended. “It’s way more than a gut feeling. No offense, Josh, but you underestimate my ability to read people. And I can pretty con-fidently say she’s not the type.”

“What type?”

“To leak sensitive information at the risk of getting fired. She’s smarter than that.”

Josh shrugged. “If you say so.”

“What? Ran out of arguments?” Jenn inquired with the kind of friendly sarcasm she only had with Josh. He didn’t respond.

The two stayed quiet for a moment. When she figured the silence had lasted long enough, Jenn asked: “So, should we get started? Dive into the population database and do some perusing?”

“You can go ahead without me,” Josh said. “I wanna look into something else real quick.”

“Alright, but don’t keep me waiting too long,” Jenn told Josh while marching toward the door of the conference room. A follow-up statement from the other side: “I’ll call you over if you haven’t joined me in an hour.”