Chapter 2
611 Words
"Well then, Mr. Whitmore, have you given it some thought?"
Martin Crawford, the interrogation specialist. They said no mouth had ever stayed shut once it landed in his hands.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"That's all right. Take a look at this first."
Martin spread a stack of documents in front of me. "The portion of the Mark VII's core code that you developed yourself, the Emotional Simulation Algorithm, was leaked three days ago. The IP trace puts the upload at your home, specifically from the backup machine in your study. If it wasn't you, who was it? Your wife has provided us with a great deal of evidence. Your fingerprints, and yours alone, are on the computer and the safe."
That Evelyn had truly betrayed me was harder to accept than the false charge itself.
"I think you understand your situation now, Mr. Whitmore." Martin braced both hands on the table, his gaze sharp. "If you tell us yourself, we can still..."
"Martin, since when did you get so long-winded?" The short-haired interrogator in the leather jacket who had come in with him shoved him aside, irritated.
Before I could react, a violent pain tore through my chest.
The electric prod drove into my pectoral muscle, and under the surge of current my body arched on its own. My mouth fell open, but no breath would come. I was a skewer over a fire, and the smell of scorched flesh that kept rising was my own.
"How does it feel? Are you going to talk, or aren't you?" the woman asked. She was breathtakingly beautiful, and breathtakingly vicious.
I couldn't speak. I only stared back at her.
"Don't be so stubborn. Either way, your invention was leaked by your wife to your subordinate. Taking the fall for them is only natural. Don't make this difficult for us."
I forced down the pain, gathered what strength I could, and spat in her face. "Never."
She let out a short laugh. "Well, since you love your wife so dearly, why don't we see how much she loves you?"
They set a computer in front of me. Evelyn, on the other end, could see everything happening here in clear detail. What she did not know was that I was watching her too.
*****
The screen showed her home. She and her mother were talking in the bedroom, Lily Langford asleep on the bed. Inside the screen, life was peaceful. Outside it, blood and savagery.
The electric prod was pulled away. They unfastened my cuffs, and I dropped to the floor like a wet rag.
"Mr. Whitmore." The woman's smile carried something poisonous. "Why don't we make a little wager? Will you c***k first, or will your darling wife be the one to call it off?"
As she spoke, her hand tightened on the small axe she was holding, and blood splashed across her face.
A scream tore out of me. The pain rocketed from the soles of my feet straight up through the crown of my head. I curled around the hand that no longer had its little finger, writhing on the floor.
On the screen, the teacup slipped from Evelyn's mother's grasp without her even noticing. She spoke carefully.
"Evelyn, can't you... ask them to stop?"
"No," Evelyn answered, her face untouched, as though she were watching a game.
"But he's lost a finger. If this keeps on, someone is going to die."
"He won't, Mother. The NSB has its own medical staff. Besides, why do you suppose he's the inventor of the Core Algorithm? Because he's a time traveler from the future, the chosen prodigy, one of a kind."
- Writer
