Deposition#

Editorial note: Rank: B+. The institutional blindness is well executed — they ask about encryption keys and foreign nationals while the actual harm (a man’s death) goes unexamined. Jeff knowing the camera’s focal length from the interrogation room ceiling is a perfect character beat. “Negligence is messy. Conspiracy is clean.” is a top-five line in the manuscript. Weakness: the ending — Jeff deciding to let them have their villain — feels slightly too knowing, too self-aware for this character at this stage. Consider whether he’d be more confused than strategic here. The scene could also expand: give Walsh or the DA a moment of almost-understanding that slips away.

The room they put him in had one of those mismatched ceiling tiles that had been replaced after a leak. Off-white surrounded by beige. It drew the eye, which was (he supposed) the point. An aluminum table. Two chairs bolted to the floor. A camera in the corner behind tinted Plexiglas. He suspected he knew the focal length just by looking at the distortion.

Detective Walsh came in first, wearing a tie loosened as a sign of informality. A deputy district attorney followed, legal pad in hand. They introduced themselves, slid a recorder across the table, pressed a red button, recited the date and case number.

“We’re trying to understand your role in what happened,” Walsh said. “We have evidence you operated drones without a license. We have evidence you installed unauthorized devices on city property. We have evidence you accessed protected systems. Do you want to tell us why?”

“No drones,” he said automatically. It was the one accusation that genuinely irritated him. “I never flew anything off the ground.”

Walsh looked surprised. “We have footage,” he said. “People saw flying objects following them.”

“Those were cameras,” he said. “They were already there.”

The deputy DA flipped a page. “We’re not interested in debating definitions,” she said. “What we need to know is, were you working alone? Were you paid by anyone? How did you learn to do this?”

He tried to explain. He said “mesh network” and “edge filtering” and “publicly available documentation.” He mentioned that the City’s own IT department had left default credentials on half the devices. He said, “Nobody asked me to. Nobody paid me. I was angry and curious.” He waited for them to ask about motive, about consequences, about whether he felt responsible for a man’s death on Willow Street. They didn’t.

They asked about encryption keys. They asked about vendor names. They asked if he had ever traveled out of the country. They asked if he had ever met with foreign nationals. They asked about drones again.

At some point—somewhere around the question about foreign nationals, or thereabouts—he realized they thought this was an act of espionage. They thought there must be a sponsor. A directive. A reason beyond boredom, grievance, and the eerie thrill of seeing everything. The harm he’d done—unintentionally, indirectly, and (one might argue) inevitably—didn’t fit in their outline. Negligence is messy. Conspiracy is clean.

He considered clarifying. Tried twice, actually, to explain that nobody had told him to do anything. They wrote something down. He stopped talking. They didn’t seem to want the version of events where a lonely man had simply watched too much, and watching had consequences nobody planned.