“Let’s go through this all again, if you don’t mind. From the beginning.”
I suppress the groan. How many times do the Feds need to hear something before they’ll accept the story. At least since I’m just reading it out of my electronic memory I know I’ll stay consistent.
“Do you want me to just tell you what I saw that night? Or everything with the security footage that I saw later?”
Maria Hall, the head investigator assigned from the Critical Technology Task Force, shifts in her seat across the small table from me and flips to a clean page in her notebook. She’s young for her role as the Deputy Chief of the task force, maybe thirty-five according to her biometrics, but the way she wears her dark hair in a severe bun behind her head makes her look older. Her eyes look out over the tops of the small oval lenses of her glasses. “Just tell me everything you know about the night you arrived back in the United States. The night of the alleged theft of your intellectual property.”
I almost regret involving the government authorities, but there really wasn’t any way to avoid it once the ambulance had been called, and that was before I had been here to do anything about it. The police had come in that night and stayed into the next day, trying to look over the whole crime scene. Of course we couldn’t have that because we have some shadowy but crazy powerful multinational cabal after us and our tech. It would have been way too easy for them to plant someone in the County Sheriff's office that has jurisdiction over our little chunk of the Nevada desert and have them steal even more of our gear or plug a thumb drive into one of our servers or something. So we brought in the relevant agency of the federal government to call off the locals, figuring they would have been a little harder to penetrate.
The investigator taps her pen against the table. I’m taking too long to answer her.
“Fine. We’ve been over it three times already, but here it is again. The surveillance video from our security cameras showed two vehicles coming into our campus. One was a pickup truck, a big black thing with one of those hard covers over the back and reinforced bars across the front grill. That’s the one that drove through and wrecked the front gates. The second vehicle was a large passenger van that followed a little bit behind the truck. They both plowed right over the grass of what we call the commons.” I gesture out the window of the office to where we can still see the tire damage to the field below. “Then they pulled up to the big double doors of the Research Center.”
“That building over there?” She points to the shining steel-and-glass structure that the tire marks lead to.
I carefully avoid rolling my eyes. “Yes, that one. Then my brother Jeff got out of the van, along with half a dozen guys wearing masks and holding guns.”
“And how do you know that one of them was your brother?”
“His face was clearly visible in the security footage. He looked right at the camera. I think he wanted to make sure we knew it was him.”
I look for a moment at the image from that night captured in my index. There was no question it was him, even though his tall, lean frame had moved with a sinewy strength that I had never seen in real life. That face, and that humorless grin, that was all Jeff.
She nods and jots some notes. “And where was your security team when this happened?”
“They were in their office, calling for backup. We kept two on duty at a time, so they saw they were outnumbered. They started making calls within thirty seconds of the intruders breaking down the gate. All according to approved security policies.”
“And keeping two guards on duty was standard procedure here?”
“It was. Which is one more than we’re required to have under section 142A of your agency’s rules for secure storage of sensitive technology. We’ve upped it to six at a time since the break-in until we can finish installing some more reliable countermeasures using our family’s proprietary technology.”
She doesn’t respond, simply scribbles a few more notes before looking up at me over her glasses again.
“So then Jeff led the six men into our Research Center. The two in the truck and the driver of the van stayed outside. He tried the biometric locks on the building, but they had been updated since he was arrested for killing our father, so they didn’t open the doors for him. They used a plasma cutting torch they pulled from the truck instead. You can see the damage from here.” I point out the still-ruined metal of the doors where the two security guards stand now. I or several of my siblings could have fixed that with a few minutes of concentration using our nanobot clouds, but we’ve been waiting for this stupid investigation to end.
She nods.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
“They tried and failed to breach our primary research lab. The door to that was barely scratched by either the cutting torch or the explosive charges they brought, so they raided one of the secondary labs instead. The explosions did make a lot of noise though. That was when several of my younger siblings and members of the Institute staff that live on campus started coming outside to see what was going on. The drivers of the two vehicles held guns through their windows and told them to stay back. After a few minutes, Jeff came out from the building carrying a computer case, a big tower from the secondary lab. He loaded it into the pickup, then the six men came out hauling stacks of servers and other gear out. They loaded all of it into the bed of the truck.”
“And was that when one of your employees attempted to confront them?”
“Yes. Mrs. Hastings.” The image of her from the security cameras that night pops into my overlay. “She’s the principal of the school here. Sort of the caretaker for everyone while the oldest family members were gone. She walked right up to him, still in her plaid bathrobe, ignoring all of those guns pointed at her.”
“And then?”
“He had a knife. A long one with the curved tip, like you see soldiers use in the movies.” I don’t mention that it was a Ka-Bar Marine Corps fighting knife or that the metal residue in the wound that Louise had worked on showed that it had been recently sharpened. She doesn’t need to know how much our own investigations have figured out so far. “And he stabbed her with it. Plunged the blade right into her side. And then they all got in the van and left.”
I try to put on an appropriately emotional face, but after telling this same story several times today to her and the other guy from CTTF, whatever actual feelings I started with are pretty much gone. If the investigator notices my detachment, she doesn’t show it in any of her vital signs or put it into her notes.
“And you arrived shortly afterwards?”
“Correct.”
“And what did you personally witness?”
“We landed about twenty minutes after they left the campus. We must have just missed the ambulance coming by our private airstrip, because they barely beat us there. We landed and the first thing that was off was that our ride back to the campus wasn’t there waiting for us. When we arrived at the Institute, a couple of the nurses from our own medical staff had already performed first aid on Mrs. Hastings, and she was being loaded into the ambulance by the paramedics. My sister Louise left with them to the hospital. The staff were all trying to get the kids back inside, and trying to keep them from seeing what had happened. I’m afraid I can’t add much else to what you’ll get from the security cameras.”
“I see.” She adjusts her glasses. “Is the inventory list you provided to us of the missing equipment full and complete to the best of your knowledge.”
“It is. We keep a tight hold on the technology in the Research Center and we know exactly what was missing.”
“One box of medical nanobots.” She reads it from the list. “That is my agency’s primary concern right now.”
“I understand. As you’ll see in the attached addendum, the medical nanobots are less of a risk than you might think. They don’t have anything like the versatility or power of our standard nanobots. Without one of the proprietary Butler Institute implants connected to them, they can’t replicate. If anyone tried, they would permanently deactivate themselves per Section 17 of the Butler Treaty.”
She nods. “Duly noted. And you have no idea where your brother and the men that were with him might have taken your equipment?”
“No. The last time I saw Jeff was when he was arrested for killing our father. I haven’t spoken to him since. I don’t know who he was with or where they were going.” I leave out my suspicions about whether it was the shadowy cabal represented by Mr. Wu in China, or something outside of that group that Dorothy James had set up before we killed her, or some new friends Jeff had made in his time in the Wallace Hospital. Too many unknowns.
“You never visited your brother in jail? Or in the facility where he was later institutionalized?”
That’s a new question this time around. I shake my head. “It was a complicated family dynamic. I had only known him for about a year. I grew up with my mother in Colorado instead of here with my father’s other children.” I don’t mention that I was probably Jeff’s best friend among all the siblings, or what I did to him, or how sure I am that the knife he carried had been intended for me. Strange. Still no crushing waves of guilt and shame when I think of Jeff, even though in all my recorded memories that’s the thing that stands out the most about thinking of him. Maybe my new brain damage isn’t all that bad.
She nods and silently finalizes some more notes. Nothing in what she writes down makes me think she has any suspicions that she shouldn’t have. After an interminable minute and fifty-three seconds, she gets up. “I’m satisfied with this. Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Kimball. The information you and your family have provided will be invaluable in our investigation. My supervisors at the agency may require some of your time later on, but we’re done for now.”
I thank her and see her out of the small room of the Residence where we’ve been meeting. As I walk her to the front doors, she slows and turns to me.
“On a personal note, I was so sorry to hear that this happened to your family. Especially so soon after you lost your father and your brother Chad.” Her professional facade of cool impartiality fades as she looks me in the eyes. “Just know that you guys have a lot of fans at our agency and we’re going to do everything we can to help you.” She slips a card into my hand with her contact information. “If there’s anything you need, or if you think of anything else, please, give me a call.”
My polygraph on her indicates sincerity, or I might have suspected that this was some kind of trick to put me off guard. I don’t want any more intrusion from the authorities than we have to have at this point, but who knows? Maybe having a friendly contact on the task force could be useful later. I create an index entry for her in my silicon mind’s database and scan in her contact information with my metal eyes before pocketing the card.
“Thanks, Maria. I appreciate it.”