The offices were well polished, clean and neatly rounded edges everywhere, like everything was carved out of one solid block of aluminum or plastic. It looks like a fire could go through here, burning us all, and they'd just have to hose down the room to put it back to normal. Not sure why I always jump to the worst, but I couldn't shake that image. The half-tables people worked at were covered with displays, showing various outputs of charges, events, locations, or whatever was relevant to the investigation at hand. That so many people were already in the office, I figured I got pinged because we were short staffed and they needed some eyes on it quick. Usually that meant monetary fraud. Money was primarily the important thing to Novost. Corpses were pretty low down, unless it was someone like me and qualified as an investment. Nothing like the cold analytical valuation that a company provides to give you that warm and fuzzy feeling.
I hadn't had time to change since the bar with the others, but my ripplesuit had already swapped from leisure to business apparel. My uniform white with gray trim, and name stenciled along the back and shoulders, like a walking advertisement. I'm surprised we didn't have other logos swimming across us beyond Novost's. But I wasn't a field agent, so maybe they did. At least Vanessa's was the same as mine, and she went out occasionally to assess. Maybe it just displayed when she was out on business.
Approaching my desk, my display synced up with the terminals, bringing everything into my augmented view. Seamless displayed now wrapped around me, some controlled by my nerve endings, other by physical gestures on my hands. I poured through the digital file which provided the latest on this case. Case adJjche45Hn. The unique identifier was some hash of the initial investigation and some other important identifiers they chose to store, and tagged with an obscenely-long creation timestamp. Logging for everything, I suppose. It does make my job easier.
Case "adjective," which was now my shorthand for the identifier, was as I suspected related to money. It seems there had been several identical charges against the same billing account from several locations at nearly the same time. Likely trying to exploit some race condition by hitting local transaction clusters in hopes it would be passed successfully before it was caught. Well, they were half right. We caught it after it succeeded. Now the question was if this was intentional or accidental.
Pulling up everything I could from the account used and the destinations, as well as the transactional systems it interacted with, I put together a quick timeline of the events. It showed nearly concurrent requests, but with a few oddities. Digging further in, they were nearly identical save for a few odd fields, which may have been tampered with. I requested additional resources for comparing related transactions, and even to nanoseconds everything else was uniform aside from these requests.
I grinned, and stretched my arms. This was the part of the job I loved. Time to figure out the motivations and the cause. See what the person hoped to gain from this transaction and where they all exfiled to. The first tier accounts were usually pointers to some other bank, that were dropped as soon as the credits cleared.
A few hours later and after some rounds of information requisition, I had a good fix on the terminus account and who was behind the attempt. It was well structured, and the suspect was former finance worker for Novost, before accepting a new role with ShinKyo, a megacorp bank in a different federacy. Considering the heavy trading between nJuku and Novost, I would hate to be him when the enforcement teams come knocking. I closed and locked the case file, hashed with my identifier and submitted "adjective" for review and enforcement, then powered down my workstation. First shift was about to start, but I'd worked nearly all of third shift, and needed a break. They could adrenal me if they really needed me back, but for now, I was going to crash hard after a very long day.
Dragging my tired self back to the glass conveyor, Phirenaius intersected me. He was the manager for our department, and my overseer. "Felix. A word." He was terse, with a faint hint of displeasure. In some, that may be concerning, but I'd grown numb to Phirenaius' tone. He was a hulking mass of human, who somehow looked like he was flexing and bored at the same time. His jaw was wide, atop a thick neck, like someone made a caricature of a body-builder. He squeezed his shoulders through his narrow doorway to his half-office, and little divider panels slid in place over the frames, sealing us in.
"Yes, sir?" It always helped to give difference to Phirenaius. He may be here to tell me I'm totally debt free, or that I was to be executed. His bored face was inscrutable.
"Felix. Good work on the case just now. I know you need sleep, so I'll keep this short. You've done great work since joining, but it's mostly been single-instance investigations. I have a lower priority task that could use your expertise, but I feel you ought to know a bit more about the situation before you accept it."
Huh. This was new. I've never been asked my opinion about a case before. In the almost 5 years I've been working here, I have just been assigned work to do, and either critiqued afterwards or commended on a good job. Sometimes I'd get new access, sometimes I'd get collaborative investigators. But never in that time have I ever had a choice. This was... well, strange.
"Uh, sir, I'm unsure what to say. I guess give me the information and I'll see whether I can handle the task."
He sighed, and pushed his hefty frame up from the table. "It's not a matter of handling the task, Felix. It's managing yourself during the investigation. Even reviewing the material requires your NDA. No one can know you've read this, nor that you're working on it. Even Jason and Vanessa." I blinked. I was surprised he even knew I interacted with other people. "I know it sounds ominous, but I want to put the severity forward first. You should know how thorough we are in case it leaks." He gestured with his knuckles to the other investigators outside the walls. "So. Do you want to open it?" He swiped the terminal desk open, a thumbprint signature box rotated around to me with all the legally binding information first. I had no sense of the depth of the files, but one thing stuck out to me from my reconstructive report. I could see it in my head, as fresh as the terminal view, as my thumb hovered above the box.
Subject Novost_Unknown_5096_jjKeRnn7djfhna8o
Mental assessment of subject:
- Shows high cognitive prowess and pattern recognition, recommended for investigation work.
- High proclivity towards curiosity and questioning, likely unable to resist puzzles or riddles.
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