by Matt Doyle
Walking across the floor, I count six banks of log-in chairs, two of which are fully occupied. Alongside these, various groups of desks house bustling, laughing staff as they go about their daily tasks. Towards the end of the floor is a corridor that we are told leads to the toilets, the relaxation areas, and the various print and comms rooms with their printers and e-fax machines. That the faxes are still needed surprises me. E-fax machines were created as a way to replace aging paper-dependent fax machines by combining them with internal e-mail systems. This meant that you could take a paper print if needed, but would not be reliant on owning hard copies of the files if you needed to send a lot; you just required a memory stick or a wireless link-up. The thinking is that, while the more recent technological developments encompass the preferred methods of doing pretty much everything, there is a tendency for a lot of these newer systems to be a little unstable. Things like the e-faxes are slower, but sturdier and less prone to the issues prevalent in their modern counterparts. As a result, most successful businesses still have some older machines in their offices, just in case.
Finally, we reach the elevator at the end of the sports-field-sized room, and Mr. Ghoul lets Dean Hollister know that we have arrived. Within seconds, our escort has ushered us inside, said his good-byes, and sent us on our merry way to the highest floor of the building.
Twenty
HOLLISTER’S SANCTUARY ON the top floor is about as close as an office can get to “stunning” for me. The room is circular and surrounded by thick-looking glass. Through the windows, an expanse of grass stretches to the guardrails that surround the outermost edges of the building. From here, I can see that the floor below extends a lot further than I thought it did, placing this particular office in the centre of the building. Glancing to my left, I can see the flag on the high-rise parking structure at the top of Northern Main Street fluttering in the breeze, which means that the top floor is higher up than it appeared too.
In the middle of the room sits a large desk, and behind this sits a man struggling to maintain a vaguely relaxed smile. He waits for us to finish taking everything in and walk towards him before he rises to meet us.
“It is a beautiful view, isn’t it? The greenery was my idea. I enjoy the mix, you see. Nature looking out over where we are now as a species. I find it helps to remind me of the things that we shouldn’t leave behind. Dean Hollister.”
“Cassandra Tam,” I say, taking his outstretched hand. His skin is clammy. That combined with the clear tenseness in his face adds up to nervousness. “And this is Lori Redwood. Is the grass real?”
“One hundred percent real, yes,” he replies, offering his hand to Lori now. His suit jacket is open, and the tightness of the work shirt beneath it betrays that when he bought it, he was probably a little slimmer than he is now. Well, that or he’s either deluded or just really bad at picking sizes. “Please, sit down.” He waves his arm towards the two chairs at the front of his desk, then walks immediately back to his seat without waiting to see if we will do as he asks and starts sliding his computer monitor out of the way so that he can see us more easily.
“I see a monitor, but no keyboard,” I say, making sure that I keep my voice conversational.
Dean Hollister sinks back into his chair and smiles, the rudimentary ice-breaking seeming to have the desired effect. He pushes his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose and flicks a section of the desk open to reveal a keyboard. “I like to keep my desk fairly clear in case a mass of paperwork comes in. I’d use a holo-monitor and keyboard, but I’m not fond of the way that they flicker. As much as I hate to admit it, at fifty-three, my eyesight is that of a seventy-odd-year-old. The flickering could be fixed fairly easily, of course, but that would invalidate our warranties and go against the terms of the deal that we have with Sun Burst LLC. I keep trying to tell their design team that simply switching to some of our light bars would create a much more stable image, but they won’t have it. They just state some nonsense about breaching the barrier between customer and business partner. It’s all rather silly if you ask me. Mutual back-scratching makes the world go round, or so I say.”
“Cooperation,” I reply. “It makes things far easier.”
“Exactly. Which is why, when I heard who it was that you wished to speak about, I was so eager to speak to you. To be frank, I am surprised that the police didn’t come to me before they made their decision on the case.”
I shrug, noting that both Joe and L3G3ND had the same reaction when I visited them yesterday. “They took the case for what it looked like. Another VJ Addict accidentally overdosing on Flash7.”
“But you don’t believe that, do you, Miss Tam?”
I nod to Lori and say, “My client does not believe that. My thoughts on the case are fairly immaterial unless we find substantiating evidence to prove things one way or the other.”
“Ah, but if you’ve come to me, then that means you know Mr. Redwood and I were holding discussions, yes?”
“Eddie said that he had a job interview with a Pro company,” Lori replies. “He didn’t say who with, though, so it took a while to figure out who we should speak to.”
“You checked with the Monitoring Office, no doubt. Am I remembering correctly, Miss Redwood, that you are the deceased’s sister?” Lori nods, and he continues, “That surprises me. Perhaps I should begin with how I came to be interviewing Mr. Redwood in the first place?”
“I think that would be best,” I reply, adding the phrase “that surprises me” to my mental notebook. “It’s pretty unusual for an Addict to even be considered by a Pro company, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is. Though, when I first spoke to Mr. Redwood, I was unaware that he was an Addict. You see, most people like to separate their work and private lives. For me, I am aware how much we rely on spaces such as the virtual world for business, and so I like to find ways to separate my work and private life while in the work area.”
“Like you do with the grass here?”
“Exactly. There are plenty of places, even in the business-centric areas of the virtual world, where you can go to relax. Libraries, for example, or viewing bars.”
“Viewing bars…That sounds familiar,” I say.
“They are much like bars that you would find out here, but instead of serving drinks, they provide access to viewing screens where you can watch films, play games, or just study clips of wildlife, both current and extinct. Mr. Redwood happened to come across me in one such bar, and recognised me from a seminar that I’d run several months prior.”
“May I ask what the seminar was on?”
“Joint working through multisource engagement. From what he said that first day, it really inspired him to keep pushing ahead with his goals of achieving success in the programming market. He was suitably brazen for that end of things, and wondered if I would be interested in seeing something he had been working on in relation to my own SnapDragon Suite. Are you aware of this system at all?”
“We are, yes,” I reply.
“Eddie’s house was full of books about SnapDragon,” Lori adds. “It looked like he was reading one when he…” Her voice cracks, and tears well up again. Hollister nods solemnly, and produces a handful of tissues from his drawer, handing them straight to the grateful Lori.
“That does not surprise me,” he says. “He seemed like the sort of person who would do his research before he tinkered with anything. In all honesty, despite his positive attitude, I wasn’t certain that he would be able to offer me much I hadn’t either seen before or already had in the pipeline. Still, I remember the frustration of not being given a shot when I was just trying to make a name for myself. It wasn’t until after I’d suffered many rejections that one sympathetic entrepreneur finally gave me the opportunity to show him what I could do, purely on the off-chance that he’d stumble across something special. Knowing that was all it took to make both him and me a lot of money, I would be foolish not to allow others the same opportunities. Had he been useless, wh
at would I have lost, really? An hour of my day? Time can be made up, missed chances cannot. So I invited him to our offices to give me a demonstration of his work.”
“You say that you met Mr. Redwood in a bar, but the logs that we obtained from the Monitoring office show that all the meetings you held with him in the month prior to his death were at the virtual site of your Hollister and Holtz offices. Can I assume, therefore, that the bar meeting was before that?”
Hollister sits back into his chair and drums his fingers on the desk. “I suppose it must have been. I can certainly find the precise date for you if you wish. I take the liberty of recording all conversations I have online, so the transcript of that and all the others will be stored on our servers.” He pauses for a moment, then says, “I don’t believe there is anything in the transcripts that would contravene either the running of this business or data protection. Once we’re done, I would be happy for you to take copies of the files if that would be of assistance?”
I raise a curious eyebrow Hollister’s way and say, “It would be, yes. Mr. Hollister, I’m sorry if this seems a little untoward, but you seem far too ready to offer assistance. Now, I’m sure that you are banking on the transcripts showing that you had no part in Mr. Redwood’s death, but in my experience, people with nothing to hide tend to be a bit cagier than you have been.”
Hollister sighs. He stands up, removes his suit jacket, hangs it on the back of his chair, and sits down again, then uses the sleeve of his work shirt to wipe the sweat from his brow.
“Miss Tam, Miss Redwood, I can assure you that I have nothing to hide. As I said before, I was surprised that the police did not come to speak to me already. It would have been a rather simple task to find out, as you have, that I spoke with Mr. Redwood, and again, as you have pointed out, it is unusual for an Addict to be in a position where employment by a Pro company is possible. Had I said I could have found the date and not explained how, you would have no doubt asked. When I mentioned the transcripts, you would have asked for copies. Had I then refused, you would likely slap a warrant on me and take them anyway. Though I can understand your suspicion, I simply wish to offer as much cooperation as I can in order to clear any suspicion that may feasibly hang over me.”
“What you’re saying makes sense,” I reply, keeping my face neutral. “But I would not be doing my job properly if I did not consider every possibility and question things that seem odd. It may well be that everything you’re telling us is true, but without the full story, we won’t know that for sure.”
“I understand, of course. It is much the same when testing a new product or considering a business proposal. Please try to understand my position here too, though. Regardless, shall I continue?”
“Please do.”
“Mr. Redwood came to the offices as requested and brought with him a copy of his modified SnapDragon system. He told me that he had considered the possibility of it being used by law enforcement agencies, but when he had researched this, he found that no such agencies were licensed users. I asked him why he thought that might be and his response was that the systems they were known to use were able to work covertly. He had wondered why they had this feature but SnapDragon did not, and the only thing that he could come up with was that the enforcement systems tended to be less complex in nature, and so easier to work with, in terms of masking their presence.
“He was correct. The SnapDragon Suite goes far more in depth than anything the law enforcement agencies use, but it is a bulky system that would be very difficult to hide. Mr. Redwood claimed to have been able to create a masking tool that would allow SnapDragon to run undetected without losing functionality. I was, needless to say, intrigued. We set up a test whereby I installed his masking tool and tasked SnapDragon with monitoring a member of staff for five minutes, after which it was to send me a full report. We checked, multiple times, and sure enough, there was no trace of SnapDragon having been running. It was really quite incredible.”
I glance to the side and see Lori smiling proudly. Good. It sounds like Eddie really was as talented as she thought, and regardless of what happens with the investigation, that’s something she should be proud of.
“I agreed to run some more tests on his work,” Hollister continues, “and invited him to come back to view the results. He leaped at the opportunity, of course, but seemed a little nervous. That was to be expected; it was a big step for him, after all. We met up again a few days later, and again a few more times after that. Eventually, I told him I was suitably impressed with his work that I was interested in bringing him on board to develop it as a Hollister and Holtz product, with a view to giving him a cut of the profits if we could convince the law enforcement agencies to take it on. But as I explained to him, there were some formalities that would need to be worked through first.”
“What sort of formalities?” Lori asks, beating me to the question.
“Well, first I wanted to know why he came to me rather than going straight to the agencies themselves. It was entirely possible that he could have gained a better deal for himself by simply offering the product to them and letting them negotiate a low price with me. As it happens, he said that he had considered this but chosen the route that he did because he believed in long-term investments. As he saw it, working directly with us opened more doors and gave him the opportunity to work on other things internally while receiving company support.”
Lori nods. “That’s what I would have done too, I think.”
“You’d be surprised how many don’t,” Hollister replies, shaking his head. “There are a lot of good people out there who are more interested in the next quick hit rather than looking at the future. It’s a shame, really. Anyway, I pointed out that in order for us to consider him for a position we would need to run a full health test on him. I asked if there was anything we should know about, and that was when he mentioned that he was a VJ Addict. He was quick to add that he didn’t use synth stimulants, of course, as his goal had always been Pro employment and he didn’t want to ruin his chances of that. He did mention that he was worried that the amount of time that he spent online may show signs of damage, though.”
“And what did you think when he said that?” I ask.
“I was surprised that he came clean, though pleasantly so. I had hoped that he would. You see, we perform background checks on potential employees as a standard, so once we knew that Mr. Redwood’s work was up to scratch, I set one running before I spoke to him. The initial set of checks flag up any immediate areas for concern, and his virtual world usage levels, combined with his insistence on meeting in the virtual world rather than the real world, was a potential sign of him being an Addict. I didn’t question why he didn’t tell me sooner—his reasoning there would have been obvious—but that he came out with it without direct prompting was a good sign. Had he not, I may have had to terminate the offer.”
“Did he submit himself to the health checks, and would I be able to get a copy of the results?”
“He did, yes, which is another reason why I was expecting the police to call. In terms of the actual results, it would be illegal for me to just hand them out—however, the transcript where we discussed them will give you a rundown. I try to be thorough where appropriate.”
“The transcript may be enough, then. You say that Mr. Redwood submitting to the tests was what made you expect a police call. Can you elaborate on that?”
“It was less that he submitted to them, and more the results themselves. You see, it was public knowledge before the police came to a decision on the case, that he had died with needle in hand.” He spots Lori flinch at that and smiles apologetically. “My apologies, Miss Redwood. My wording was perhaps more blunt than needed. The problem for me was that the tests came back clean. According to what we received, he had never used Flash7 or any other synth stimulant in his life. These were in-house tests too, not some outside agency report that could have been tampered with. After that, the idea that he overdosed was inconceivable
to me. And with what happened next, I knew that I would be, or rather should have been, a suspect.”
“What happened next, Mr. Hollister?”
“The second part of the background checks came through. That’s where we apply to the Monitoring Office for searches based on certain types of activity and, if they arise, certain buzz words.” He turns to look at Lori again, and asks, “Miss Redwood, were you aware that your brother was a regular contributor to a blog site?”
“A blog site? No. Blogging isn’t illegal, though.”
“No, in general terms, it is not. Some types of blogs can border on illegality, however. Others can also fall under the heading of ‘potentially causing damage to the image of the employer. In your brother’s case, he wrote for a site called The Roots of Eden are Rotten under the pseudonym SilverSingsLoudly. Do you know of the site at all?”
“No,” Lori replies, shaking her head.
“I do,” I reply. “It’s a site that hosts a bunch of political and economic conspiracy theories and fallacies. You can tell which pieces on there are built purely to stir trouble and which have a shred of truth to them, though even some of those push it at times. I’m surprised that none of the authors have been held accountable for libel as yet.”
