Chapter 5 - The System Diagnosis
The notification on my desk monitor at Revive Tech flashed amber at precisely 9:15 AM on a rainy Tuesday in May.
It wasn't an internal inventory alert. It was a digital subpoena draft forwarded by our corporate compliance officer, Arthur Vance.
Arthur stood over my partition, holding a manila folder with his signature coffee-stained fingers. He looked older than his fifty years, his gray hair perpetually standing on end from a career spent chasing bad serial numbers and compromised motherboard BIOS chips.
"Alice," Arthur said, tapping the edge of the folder against my monitor bezel. "Your family’s little corporate-identity shell game has officially escalated from a family squabble to a federal compliance review."
I didn't look up from the soldering iron I was using to clear bridge connections on a recycled circuit board. "What did Brett do this time?"
"He didn't just default on the secondary HELOC," Arthur sighed, pulling up a chair and sitting down. "The bankruptcy trustee auditing his shell company found three separate commercial equipment loans backed by Revive Tech’s subsidiary vendor identification numbers. To put it simply: your brother used our corporate supply-chain credentials to finance twenty thousand dollars worth of high-end graphics processing units for his fake crypto mining rig, and he listed your internal operations ID as the guarantor."
My hand froze. The soldering iron drifted a millimeter off course, the tip cooling against the green fiberglass substrate.
"My internal ID?" I asked, my voice dropping into that cold, level register I reserved for unrecoverable errors.
"Yep," Arthur nodded, sliding a printed transaction ledger onto my desk. "The signature isn't physical; it’s a digital authorization key pulled from an administrative login. Someone with medium-level access routed it through your terminal's IP address while you were out to lunch three weeks ago."
I stared at the timestamp on the digital log.
March 14th, 12:42 PM.
That was the exact day Brett had shown up unannounced in the Revive Tech customer lobby, claiming he needed to drop off a "recycled laser printer" for our scrap pile while I was in the employee breakroom.
He hadn't been dropping off hardware. He had been stealing my credentials to save his failing crypto operation from a margin call.
"He used my workstation to commit corporate fraud," I said quietly.
"In the state of Ohio, crossing state lines with falsified vendor financing totals over ten thousand dollars is a Class 4 felony," Arthur remarked, adjusting his glasses. "Our legal team is drafting the paperwork now. We can either hand the evidence straight to the local magistrate, or you can handle it however your family dynamics require. But corporate compliance demands an audit trail either way."
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I slowly laid down the soldering iron, wiped my hands on a shop rag, and stood up.
"Don't file it with the magistrate yet, Arthur," I said, grabbing my car keys from the desk drawer. "Give me two hours. Some systems don't just need a software patch. They need to be physically disconnected from the power grid."
