Chapter 4 - The Web of Lies
By Wednesday, the atmosphere in my house was thick with the silence of the hunt. I spent the night combing through the data I had extracted from my father’s personal devices during our meeting—a simple packet injection I’d triggered when he touched my smart-door interface.
What I found was worse than money laundering.
My father hadn't just been stealing from the family; he had been systematically selling my personal development data to competing AI firms for years. Every line of code I wrote in my teens, every breakthrough I made while they mocked me in the garage—he had been monetizing my intellectual labor without my knowledge, framing it as "company research."
I was sitting in my dark study, the glow of the monitors casting long, jagged shadows against the wall, when a notification pinged: Police at the front gate.
I checked the security feed. Two officers stood there, looking uncomfortable.
My mother had filed a police report, claiming I had "stolen proprietary family property" and that I had "threatened her with violence" during the brunch incident. She had even doctored a few audio clips to make it sound like I was the aggressor.
They were playing dirty, hoping to bury me in a legal nightmare before the public could fully turn on them. But they had made a fatal error: they had forgotten that I was the one who designed the security infrastructure for the entire county’s smart-grid system.
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I hit a key on my keyboard. A localized EMP burst disabled their body cams, and then I broadcasted a high-resolution, unedited, 360-degree holographic reconstruction of the brunch incident directly to the police captain’s tablet at the front gate.
The look on the officers' faces as they watched the video—my mother pouring the coffee, the laughter of my siblings, the sheer malice of their actions—was the most satisfying thing I had ever seen. The tables hadn't just turned; they had been smashed to pieces.
