Chapter 56: Framed
Jack slowly climbed back to consciousness from a deep sleep. The familiarity of his bed left him with the feeling that all his recent experiences had just been a bad dream. But when he opened his eyes and saw that he was in his room in his soul space. The tension that had left him returned, and he was once again suffused with an arctic rage.
Checking his Interface, he and found that Madison had lowered the time ratio to 2:1 and was using her parallel self. He got up and headed towards Madison's office. But stopped when he felt the typical morning pressure in his bladder.
He didn't have a bathroom in his soul space, so he exported all his physical changes to his physical-world self, then left his soul space before enabling parallel self. While his physical self went in search of food, his parallel self headed towards Madison's office. He found her furiously typing on her keyboard and glaring at a monitor.
"Hey," he said. "What's the news?"
"The bastards are trying to frame me!" she declared angrily.
"How?"
"They wiped one of the servers I could have accessed."
"Could have?"
"Yes. I provided them with proof that there was a vulnerability that would grant me remote code execution on several of their servers. The proof of concept I sent them didn't actually access those servers, it just proved that it was possible."
"The bastards wiped one of their own servers and are now claiming that I did it on purpose!"
"If you could do it, so could someone else. What proof do they have that it was you?"