"Welcome to POWERS! I am very pleased that you have found time to see me at such an early hour. I hope it wasn't too inconvenient for you, but it's always easiest for me to make these appointments at this time of day, before the day's business really gets going. Please have a seat." Dr. Kelly Malcom was definitely not the person you would expect to see sitting in the CEO chair of the city's largest utility. She was about 35 years old, petite in stature, and had an easy-going, friendly demeanor. She wore an elegant, shoulder-hugging black and white suit with large round earrings and subtle makeup. Her straight, dark hair was pulled back in a long braid, making her look even younger. Abigail watched her with fascination for a few moments after she entered. She vaguely remembered seeing Ms. Malcom once before in a short TV report. However, she hadn't noticed then how immensely likeable she seemed, how warm and cordial her aura was. She glanced at Harry, who seemed to be equally taken aback by this first impression, frozen in his previously so determined movement.

"Thank you so much for making time for us," Yanny was the first to respond, walking over to the chairs offered. The other two followed. After they were all seated, there was an awkward silence for a few seconds, during which the TRAP agents exchanged a few quizzical looks. Kelly Malcom looked at the three of them expectantly and finally laughed.

"Ladies and gentlemen, you may begin your questions. I'm really ready for this, I promise. You must have taken some notes before, right?" she tried to start the interview. However, she directed her words more to Abigail, who was sitting in the middle and looked a bit embarrassed. What was going on here? A few minutes ago they had been convinced that they were going to eliminate the head of the company, and now they were sitting across from this sympathetic person and their plan was in complete disarray. Harry closed his eyes for a moment, opened them again and spoke in a serious voice:

"Dr. Malcom, as you know, we have come to ask you some questions. However, they are not the questions you might have expected. We are here for a different reason. It has nothing to do with a newspaper interview. I would like to ask you to place both of your hands on the table in front of you with your palms facing up. If you make a wrong move and try to call security, you will die the next moment. If you cooperate, you will not be harmed. You have my word on that." His voice was calm and collected. As he spoke, Abigail reached inside her jacket and pulled out her handy little Colt, placing it demonstratively on the table in front of her, within easy reach, never taking her eyes off the target. The color drained from Kelly Malcom's face and she began to tremble with fear, but she promptly did as Harry had asked. She placed both hands palms up on the table in front of her and said in a trembling voice:

"I... please don't hurt me... the money... behind me in the closet is the safe, I'll give you the combination right now... please, please don't kill me..."

"We're not interested in your money," Harry replied, shaking his head gently. Then he stood up and climbed onto the table, sitting cross-legged across from the company president, whose hands were now directly in front of him. She looked at him, slightly crouched, with anxious eyes. Yanny and Abigail's eyes darted back and forth between the two. "Do you know where POWERS disposes of its nuclear waste?" Harry asked his first question.

"Y-yes...at the Glowing Springs repository. It's a salt dome about 50 kilometers from the southern border of Elysium. The truckloads are shipped there by special transporters over the highway," she explained quietly. She spoke slowly and clearly, as if she didn't want to upset Harry in any way. He thought for a moment and nodded.

"You know that's not true, don't you?" Abigail interjected. But she was very careful not to sound threatening or intimidating. She felt sincerely sorry for the woman at that moment and wanted to stand up and give her a hug. The next moment, however, she was surprised by this disturbing thought and wondered what was wrong with her.

"What... what do you mean? Why should that not be true? I have no other information," Malcom said. The answer seemed honest. Harry looked at Yanny and she nodded again. The cyborg was already scanning the businesswoman's bodily functions, confirming that she was not lying.

"POWERS is dumping radioactive waste right under the city. There is a hole in the ground here where they dump contaminated water, fuel rods, and other toxic materials underground. We went down there and saw for ourselves," Harry began to explain what they had witnessed over the past few days.

"Impossible," Malcolm blurted out. Now the last color drained from her face.

"It's true," Abigail nodded. "But that's not all. There is another city beneath Elysium that is... or was... populated by a race previously unknown to us. They call themselves Aon-I. They are the descendants of colonists who reached 86 a few thousand years before us humans. The contaminated waste from POWERS caused a large number of them to mutate and eventually become the crawlers. The crawlers that have been killing more and more people in the city for some time now, making the subway network almost impassable." Malcolm looked at Abigail with a mixture of disbelief and utter confusion. On the one hand, she really couldn't believe what she was hearing. On the other hand, this was the first time anyone had come up with an explanation, no matter how absurd it sounded, for the origins of the city's crawler problem, which she was of course well aware of from the media. Her mind raced. Was it all... maybe not as absurd as it had sounded at first? The story would be an explanation for the humanoid killers who had suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

"But that's not the only thing you have to answer for," Harry continued. "Your company also hired a group of mercenaries to crush the Aon-I resistance. They massacred civilians down there and repeatedly looted the underground city." Malcolm gasped.

"Do you have any proof of this?" she asked in a thin voice.

"We can take you there if you like. Then you're welcome to see the decaying piles of corpses for yourself," Harry said coldly, and the company president jumped. Whoever these three people were, they made this case with complete conviction.

Abigail opened her bag and took out the cute blonde doll with the two braided pigtails and the blue dress they had found in Gwyneran. She then placed the doll on the table, right between Malcolm's hands.

"The doll is from the underground city, we found it under the rubble of one of the destroyed houses," Abigail explained, looking into Kelly's eyes for a moment. Of course, they could all still see the woman's fear clearly.

"D-Do you mind if I take a look?" Malcolm asked hesitantly, looking back at Harry.

"Go ahead," he nodded in confirmation. Malcom took the doll and examined it more closely. Pushing her blonde hair to the side, she spotted the three unfamiliar but artfully painted characters on the right side of her face.

"That's their writing," Abigail said softly. "It looks very pretty, doesn't it?"

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"Yes, it does," Malcolm replied. What could have happened to the child who once owned this doll?

"If you want a quick proof, I can give you one right now," Yanny finally interjected. The others looked at her questioningly.

"How?" Malcolm croaked in confusion.

"Do you have a computer here with a teletext connection?" Yanny asked back.

"Yes, it's also in the cabinet behind me on the right. The safe is on the left," she replied. Harry stood up, hopped down from the tabletop and walked over to the wall. Then he carefully opened one of the larger doors, then another, and another. A total of six screens, a large gray calculator tower and a keyboard appeared. Abigail's eyes began to light up with excitement.

"Wow, this is a great system! Awesome! Is that a Vector Megaflop?" she asked excitedly. Then she shyly cleared her throat when she realized that Kelly was looking her straight in the eye. For a second, she smiled, too.

"Yeah, the latest generation," she explained quietly.

"How come you don't have a computer on your desk?" Harry asked, confused.

"To be honest, I can concentrate better if there's no computer on the desk. Otherwise I'm just fiddling with it all the time," Malcom replied. "Most of my work is more strategic, where big decisions need to be made. I work better when I'm not distracted. With the computer built into the cabinet, I only use it when I really need it.

"Perfect..." Yanny agreed, setting her camera down on the desk and walking over to the system. Then she looked at the tangle of cables running behind the equipment and pulled out one of them. She brought the end of the cable with the plug to the back of her head and threaded it through her tied hair into the jack built right into her head.

"What are you doing?" Malcom asked, her eyes widening.

"Just quickly hacking into your system to connect the security cameras at the hole underground to your monitors here," she explained, smiling. "Then you can get an idea of what's really going on."

"What do you mean, just hack into our system...?! No human can just..." Malcolm interjected.

"That's right," Abigail interrupted. "No human can just do that." The corporate executive didn't understand what the agent was implying.

"May I turn around?" she asked. She still had her hands on the table.

"Yes," Harry replied. He knew she certainly wouldn't do anything to endanger them now. As Malcom turned around in her large office chair, she saw numbers and inputs racing across all the screens at once. Yanny was using a brute-force technique controlled by her brain, running tens of thousands of password variations per second through trial and error, effortlessly pushing the Vector Megaflop to its limits. The supercomputer's fans went into overdrive to keep the processors from overheating. Malcolm's mouth dropped open. What was happening was completely impossible; this young woman could not be a normal human. She was familiar with the technology of implanted jacks, which some people used to control various machines or descend into cyberspace. However, what she had just seen was far beyond her imagination of what was technically possible. No one could process or generate that amount of data at that speed. And no computer had the kind of power this young woman was demonstrating. At least not a modern computer. Was it possible that...?

"Got it," Yanny said suddenly, pulling Malcom out of her thoughts. The feeds stopped immediately. Moments later, images appeared on the monitors. They were the images from the surveillance cameras inside the hole. Images of leaking barrels being loaded by workers. Images of patrolling mercenaries with heavy weapons. When the camera finally panned to the large container containing the bodies of dead workers and crawlers, Kelly Malcom's eyes began to cloud over. Then tears streamed down her cheeks. She stared thunderstruck at the screens, understanding that these people were right. She had recognized some of the workers in the broadcast, and they were all wearing company uniforms. Finally, Yanny projected some written instructions and corresponding excerpts from electronic mail onto one of the screens, providing the final proof of the disaster.

"Spencer..." Malcom said in a hoarse voice as she recognized the signature on the instructions and sniffled. Abigail pulled a fresh handkerchief from her pocket and handed it to Kelly, who looked at Harry first.

"Please take it," he said. "And move freely again. Now that you know the truth, will you cooperate with us?"

Malcolm nodded wordlessly and gratefully took the handkerchief, wiping her nose and drying the tears that had smeared her makeup.

"Who is Spencer?" Yanny asked as she adjusted the head of the cable connector. Actually, she already knew the answer from the network, but she wanted to distract with this question. In the background she made copies of various internal data and stored them in her own memory. They would need tangible evidence for the police to complete their mission. They could not lose sight of that goal, despite all the unforeseen developments.

"Flavio Spencer is my deputy. He is a close friend of my late father. I trusted him completely. One of the things he's in charge of is waste management and disposal issues. You know, POWERS is a third-generation family business. Flavio is a close friend of my family... and he shares in the company's profits. The lower the cost of disposal, the higher the company's profit, and therefore his bonus. It's... actually quite simple to deduce... it's..." tears filled her eyes again, "... it's treason against the company and against me. It goes against everything I've ordered. Nuclear power creates waste that must be stored in a safe place so as not to cause more damage to the environment. We all know that this waste is not to be trifled with, that it must be handled responsibly. That's why I have always put part of the company's profits into social projects and urban environmental protection, to give something back to society. .... I... I didn't know what was going on.... I trusted the wrong person... I am fully responsible for this...how could I have been so blind...? I..." she stammered in despair and then sobbed, burying her face in her hands and crying bitterly. Abigail's heart clenched at the sight and her eyes watered as well. Why did she feel so strongly with this woman?

"Where is this Spencer now?" Harry asked. His expression had gone dark again.

"Across the hall, next to the elevator on the right, room 3... what...?" Malcom replied.

"Is there a way for him to call security?" was Harry's next question.

"Yes, but I just deactivated the switch," came the prompt reply from Yanny, who had now also connected to the building's systems.

"Much obliged," Harry nodded to her and headed for the door.

"Harry?" Abigail and Yanny asked almost simultaneously.

"I'll take care of him," he explained curtly.

"You can't, he's protected by his mastiff Tyras, it never leaves his side..." Malcom interjected in horror. Harry ran a hand through his hair and thought for a moment.

"Of course he has a dog. I can imagine why," he said snidely and continued on his way into the hallway.

"Harry... please be careful..." Yanny whispered, watching him with an extremely worried look. Once again she feared for him. He heard her voice, softly. Heard it through the deafening roar of his hot blood.