“How are they treating you in here, son?”

The old man looked over his silver spectacles at Viral with the same warmth he’d shown him since he’d first held the boy in his lap on his 3rd birthday.

“I’m a little thirsty,” Viral said, scratching at the back of his head.

Gerry Noogle smiled. He leaned back in the blue, plastic chair whose curved bucket-seat, along with the robin’s egg ceiling and egg-shell wall-coating, distinguished this interrogation room, Viral surmised, from the shabbier ones not used to hold federal suspects. Mr. Noogle spread his hands expansively across the gray table-top and rapped twice with the ring that read Ohio State class of ‘91.

“Can we get my client a cup of water, please?” he called toward the surveillance camera mounted at the ceiling’s edge.

“Chamomile tea if they have it,” Viral added.

“Let’s see if they bring the water first,” Mr. Noogle said with a wink.

Viral wiggled his bottom on the chair searching for the sweet spot in the khaki jumpsuit into which the authorities who handled his intake fit him. His high from Tyler’s THC gummies had subsided into a broad weariness across his forehead and a deep, dire craving for Cool Ranch Doritos. Mr. Noogle said cooperating would be the quickest way to snacks. If his tenure from the age of 9 to 14 as a youth soccer referee taught him anything about himself it was that he could count as one of his few natural gifts an uncommon eagerness to snitch. The only problem was he had no idea how to give the Feds any information about the crimes for which they held him.

Mr. Noogle clicked the plunger of a pen he pulled from his breast pocket and smoothed the paper of his legal pad with the back of his hand. “The timing could be better, huh?” he said.

Viral shrugged.

“You know, the right to remain silent doesn’t need to apply to your attorney.”

Viral lifted his cuffed hands from his lap and pointed toward the security camera.

“Sorry, kiddo,” Mr. Noogle said, “This ain’t Law & Order. FISA says your life from here on out is an open book.”

“FISA?” Viral asked.

“Wooo boy,” Mr. Noogle said. There was a knock on the peach-colored, steel-plated door. A young man in a light-green short sleeve shirt, olive pants, and a tightly cropped haircut entered holding a bottle of Aquafina. Over his shoulder, Mr. Noogle said to the officer, “The kid just asked me ‘What is FISA?’”.

The officer cracked his dour appearance with a wide grin and said, “Woooo boy.” He and Mr. Noogle shared a bump of elbows and a laugh before the officer left, locking the door behind him. Mr. Noogle cracked the seal on the Aquafina and pulled two heavy gulps from the bottle. He poured a bit into a styrofoam cup that sat in front of Viral before downing the rest and smacking his lips with satisfaction.

“FISA is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” Mr. Noodle said, wiping his hands with a wet-nap from his briefcase. “It basically says your ass is grass if you pal around with terrorists.”

“I don’t understand.”

Mr. Noogle belched. "I know, Viral,” he said. “It’s all one big misunderstanding. I spoke to your father early this morning --”

“My dad knows?”

Mr. Noogle chuckled. “Oh yeah, he knows. How do you think I got the scratch to fly to Providence on the red eye?”

Viral’s chest tightened.

Mr. Noogle saw the color seep from Viral’s cheeks. He reached across the table-top to put his hand on Viral’s chained wrists before pulling away. Instead, he lightly tapped his knuckles on Viral’s thumb. “It’s going to be okay, buddy. All you have to do is tell the agents what they need to know.” He sat back, crossed his legs and straightened his tie. He always enjoyed the feeling of a silk-cotton blend between his fingers after a good wet-nap.

“Well, that’s the thing, Mr. Noogle. I don’t know anything.”

Mr. Noogle waved his hand dismissively. “That doesn’t matter. Just tell them what you do know. That your roommate took advantage of your Midwestern innocence after you learned your father was sick and lured you to the lair of a foreign actor who drugged you with the aim of likely pleasuring himself with your comatose body.” Mr. Noogle shook the Aquafina bottle, which was empty. He held it up to the surveillance camera and pointed.

“No, Lron was helping me. He wasn’t trafficking me,” Viral said.

“It’s 2020, Viral. There’s a virus out there that’s sweeping the world and the government’s got its hands full trying to make sure Citigroup can make its rent. They couldn’t care less about the motives of your roommate. All that matters is they want this dope-pusher named Osterhauf, and until they get him they got your name and likeness connected to an address that matches dozens of subpoenas for network routers, hard drive caches, cloud credits, Ethereum hash tables, and a fraudulent Zelle account on the hook for nearly one hundred times the legally allowable amount to a super PAC called ‘It’s Tulsi, Bitch.’”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Viral felt his sweaty palms begin to chill. He hoped that there was a small chance he was so high that he was back in Tyler’s living room hallucinating everything around him. He tried blinking quickly to wake himself up, but Mr. Noogle was snapping his fingers in his face.

“Viral! Viral!” he shouted. “Make a sound if you’re not having an eppileptic episode.”

“I’m fine!” Viral said. “I was just checking to see if this was real.”

“Oh, it’s very real,” Mr. Noogle said. He put his elbows on the table and sighed. Viral squinted to keep the shine of the florescent lights off Mr. Noogle’s bald patte out of his eyes.

Mr. Noogle removed his glasses and circled his palm two inches from the bridge of his nose. “You know, they say touching your face is one of the ways this new virus can spread,” Mr. Noogle said. “You know how many times a day the average person touches their face?”

“Three thousand,” Viral said.

Mr. Noogle looked at Viral. “How did you know that?”

Viral brought his cuffed hands to the side of his face to better scratch the patch of psoriasis spreading behind his right ear. “I don’t know,” he said. “24 hours in a day, eight of which we spend sleeping. 16 hours broken into seconds is about 57,000 seconds...1,000 minutes. The standard deviation of a sample set of 1,000 is about 16, so 16 into 57 is, like, 3.5, and factor into account that babies sleep significantly more than eight hours a day, multiply by a thousand, and you get, yeah, three thousand.”

Mr. Noogle’s mouth hung open, and Viral couldn’t tell if he was breathing. When Mr. Noogle’s face began to turn red and his pupils shrunk to the size of poppy seeds, Viral got the feeling that his attorney was not well.

“You know, I always hated you, you little cow,” Mr. Noogle said.

“What?” Viral asked.

Mr. Noogle leaned in closer to Viral and stood his briefcase on its side to shield his mouth from the surveillance camera. He kept his voice low enough that Viral had to tilt his ear to listen, but the vitriol in the whisper was clear as a fog horn at sea.

“For damn near twenty years I’ve had to watch you fritter away every advantage your father has served to you on a silver platter. While I wait on him hand and foot, afraid to fall asleep at night in case I miss his call, for a measly retainer that’s barely enough to keep my second wife in a studio apartment, you -- you! -- disappoint your way upward toward a trust fund in the millions.”

Viral pulled his head away, shocked. Mr. Noogle continued:

“You perform probability distributions and long division to three decimal points in your head like it’s just another thing that people do. People don’t do that. Normal people don't do that. And the fact that you can is simply the lottery ticket you inherited by being born to a brilliant, brilliant man. You didn’t earn anything you have. You were gifted it. And here you sit in federal holding because you’re too clueless and spoiled to see the only thing of value here is your father’s name. Not your principles. So if you don’t give these agents the information they’re asking for, or at the very least sell your fairy roommate up the river, then, oh, I’ve got news for you, boy.”

Viral had never seen a man bare his teeth before. The deep furrow of Mr. Noogle’s brow in concert with his underbite gave him a demonic air at odds with the jovial consigliere Viral had known growing up.

A knock came from the door, and the heavy lock slid out of place as the handle turned. Mr. Noogle pulled his elbows from the table, replaced his glasses on the edge of his nose, and leaned back into his chair. Lowering his shoulder blades to stretch, he dabbed at the sweat on his invisible hairline with the back of his tie. He pulled his scowl into a grin and chuckled as the officer entered with a second bottle of Aquafina.

“Thank goodness, I was about to have a heat stroke,” Mr. Noogle said to the officer.

Pointing at the surveillance camera, the officer told Mr. Noogle to make sure his briefcase didn’t occlude his and his client’s faces. Mr. Noogle apologized profusely as the officer pointed to his watch, held up five fingers, and left.

Mr. Noogle caught his breath while Viral held his in the sudden silence. The attorney removed his glasses once more and polished their lenses with the sleeve of his sport coat. “As you know, your father still harbors resentment for the way you treated his offer to continue his legacy at the University of Illinois,” he said. “While he gave me broad instructions from his hospital bed late last night to get you safely to a condo he’s leased for you near your college, he did leave it to my discretion regarding how to encourage you to comply.”

Mr. Noogle tried poorly to stifle a laugh.

“It’s my expert opinion that you’ve chosen loyalty to a roommate over loyalty to a father. You have my advice about how I believe you should proceed. The decision is, of course, up to you.”

Mr. Noogle pushed his chair out from beneath him, stood, and closed the button on his sportcoat. Viral stood, too, mindful for the first time of the shackles that tethered his ankles to a hook in the concrete floor. “Wait,” he said, “What am I supposed to do?”

Mr. Noogle snapped his briefcase shut. “I don’t know, Viral,” he said. “You’re a smart guy. Why don’t you figure it out?”

Mr. Noogle walked to the door of the interrogation room and knocked twice on the ballistic glass with his class ring. He stared coldly at Viral over the rim of his glasses and licked the thin lips he curled into a smirk. The officer opened the door, a heavy, foreboding sound compared to the soft scuff of Mr. Noogle’s dress shoes on the smooth cement of the cell.

Halfway out the door, Mr. Noogle paused. He held his finger up to the officer and turned back to face Viral. He walked with the predatory gait of a leopard toward the table behind which Viral stood, joined wrists hanging plaintively near his nethers. Mr. Noogle locked his calculating glare on Viral as he swiped the unopened bottle of Aquafina from the table, turned back toward the exit, and marched into the hallway with the finality of a cancer. The steel door closed behind him, and the lock groaned over its gears before landing in place with a clang.

Viral looked at the empty space around him and realized it was the first furnished room with a door he had ever had to call his own. Independence, he realized, was going to be awfully lonely.