Chapter 52: Questioned (1)
Jack was sitting on a metal chair, hands cuffed behind him, staring at a mirror. After being photographed and fingerprinted, the FIS agents had placed him in what looked like an interrogation room, complete with a large one-way mirror filling one wall.
He'd been sitting there for half an hour and would have already gotten bored, except his parallel self was having an interesting conversation with his Gefen clone, learning about his rights and confirming that Federation code 18 dash1030 was the computer fraud and abuse law.
Soul space Madison was scouring her laptop, trying to figure out who might have filed charges against her. She claimed she had been careful to only hack companies with bug bounty programs and had made sure she didn't exceed the limits defined. And because of the soul bond, Jack could tell that she genuinely believed what she claimed. So at worst, this was all because of a mistake on her part. At best, someone had filed charges against the wrong person.
In the interrogation room, Jack closed his eyes and waited. There was nothing else he could do until someone came and talked to him. He lost track of time and fell asleep, but was eventually startled awake by the sound of the door opening.
The younger of the two agents that had arrested him and driven him to FIS building walked in carrying a thick folder, a binder, and a white mug with FIS printed on it in large black letters. The agent pulled out the chair that sat across the table from Jack, set down the folder and mug, then sat. After sitting, the agent carefully arranged folder, binder, and mug. Making sure that everything was square.
As the agent fussed with the items in front of him, Jack couldn't help but think that the scene in front of him seemed familiar somehow. He couldn't place where, but something was telling him this was all a performance. Curious, he created a snapshot that covered just the room, then created a simulation, minus the agent and the handcuffs on his wrists.
His parallel self entered the simulation, grabbed the folder, and opened it, finding that it was the kind where you punched two holes into the top of each piece of paper, then attached them to the inside of the folder with flexible metal leaves. The folder had four attachment points, inside the front and back cover and one on either side of a single internal divider.
The first few pieces of paper anchored to the inside of the front cover contained information about himself. But as he read, he found it was a detailed, if dry, history of his life up to that point. However, when he got to the sixth page, he found gibberish. It was just a bunch of "lorum ipsum" nonsense. He checked and found that, except for those first five pages, everything else, hundreds of pages, were filled with "lorum ipsum" nonsense with an occasional random picture or table of random numbers.
He couldn't remember if it was a T.V. show or something he'd read on the internet, but he was certain this folder, stuffed with nonsense, was intended to convince Jack that they knew everything about him and he should stop wasting their time and confess.
The FIS didn't have anything on him. They probably suspected him of something related to Madison and hoped he would crack. But, jokes on them, he was innocent.
He'd seen the famous video, "Don't talk to the police." But he just couldn't help himself.