The officer could feel his brow furrowing in frustration. Then he realized what he was asking: for the only suspect of a crime to describe how the crime in question could be pulled off. He was supposed to be asking a hypothetical question but he was asking the wrong person. He should be asking another operator, or better yet, an engineer. But he didn’t know any. And since he was just an officer, not an investigator, he had no resources to find any that he could question.

“You have the right to have your lawyer present,” he said, regretting the words as soon as they came out of his mouth. What kind of interrogator tells the suspect his lawyer should be present?

Jax’s mouth scrunched up to one side of his face. “I’ll keep it in mind,” he said. “So far he hasn’t been a whole lot of help. But I hear I’m getting a new lawyer.” He paused, then added, “Off-planet.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” Runstom said, then cursed himself for revealing that he didn’t know that fact already.

“The detectives – they were from B-3, right?” Jax said, keeping the conversation off the subject of safety measures in Life Support systems.

“Yeah, that’s right. Most of the people in my precinct are B-threers.”

“So, if you don’t mind me asking,” Jax said. “Where are you from, Officer … Runstom, was it?”

“Yes. Stanford Runstom.” The ModPol officer glanced self-consciously at the B-fourean officer standing quietly off to the side of the room, observing the conversation with mild interest. “My mother was a detective,” he said. “In ModPol. An undercover detective, actually. She gave birth to me while on assignment, in a transport ship. That’s where I spent the first few years growing up.”

“I see.” Jax looked Runstom up and down briefly. The officer waited for the question that always came next, the one that asked why his skin was green, exactly, but it never came. “Is that why you joined ModPol? Following in your mother’s footsteps?”

Runstom caught himself in the middle of a weary sigh and tried to stifle it with a polite cough. “My mother did great things and made many sacrifices in the pursuit of justice,” he said. “If I accomplish only a fraction of what she did, I’ll be proud.”

Jax’s gaze drifted off to the side of the room as though he were looking into the distance beyond the wall. “Yeah, me too,” he said quietly. Then he blinked and turned back to Runstom. He jabbed the table with a pale finger. “This is an injustice, right here, Officer. If I’m convicted of this crime, an innocent man goes to prison.”

“Call me Stanford.” Runstom watched the prisoner in silence for a moment before continuing. “So you believe this was either an accident, or that you were set up.”

“I was set up,” Jax said firmly. “Accidents like this don’t happen. Plus there was that fake debt – some paper saying I owed money to Milton.”

Runstom flipped through his notebook. “Fake debt?”

The operator eyed him suspiciously and again Runstom cursed himself for showing his ignorance. “The detectives had some piece of paper that said I was in debt to Brandon Milton,” Jax said after a moment. “He was my supervisor.”

“And one of the victims,” Runstom added, finding Milton in the list of names he’d recorded. “Wait a minute,” he said, looking up. “You mean Brutus and Porter had documentation of a debt – of you owing this Brandon Milton money – and you did not actually owe him money?”

“Right.”

“For how much?”

“Ten thousand Alleys.”

“Seems like the kind of thing you would remember. If you owed your supervisor ten grand, that wouldn’t have slipped your mind.”

“Yeah, exactly,” Jax said, nodding.

“But it makes a good motive.” Runstom tapped his pencil against his notebook. “Killing someone because you owe them money, I mean.” Before Jax could object, he continued, “So if someone made this fake document, and did so to set you up, who did it? Who wanted you to take the fall for murder?”

The operator sighed wearily. “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it for three days and I just don’t know.”

“Okay. Maybe it’s someone you know, maybe it’s someone you don’t know. Let’s just say for now that someone out there framed you, and we don’t know who it is. So the next question is, how did they do it?”

“That’s something else I’ve been thinking about non-stop for the past three days. The way I see it, there’s two parts to it.” He raised one finger and then another as he talked. “One, they would have had to figure out a way around the safeties on the doors to open both at the same time. And two, they would have had to make it look like it came from my console, because the commands were in my log file. Which means they either ran the commands directly from my console, while I was sitting at it and logged into it, or they ran the commands somewhere else in the system and managed to write the history to my console logs.”

Runstom quickly jotted down some notes, although he wasn’t entirely sure what the operator was talking about. “So, overriding the safeties …” he started to say.

“That’s the easier one, honestly,” Jax said. “Because it’s mostly theoretical. From my perspective? It’s impossible. But I can tell you what part of the system they would have to break to make something like that work.” He put his elbows on the table and brought his hands together, slowly cracking his long fingers one by one. “The safeties are just checks, right? So when every command is punched into a console, it has to pass a bunch of tests to make sure that it’s okay for the system to run that command.” Jax looked at Runstom, as if trying to read something; as if trying to make sure the officer was keeping up. Runstom put down his pencil to give the other man his full attention.

“Let me give an unrelated example,” Jax continued, his voice picking up speed. “There’s a command called ‘rain’. Now, residents don’t like climate-related surprises, so we have to turn on the rain warning at least twenty minutes before executing the ‘rain’ command.” He grabbed the notebook and pencil from Runstom, who didn’t resist. “So first you punch up a ‘rain-warning’ command. Somewhere in the system, a variable is set. Something like this,” he said as he wrote two phrases on the paper, one below the other. “Then, if you were to run the ‘rain’ command, the system would do a test and see if the current time is at least twenty minutes more than the variable we set with the ‘rain-warning’ command. If it’s not, the ‘rain’ command fails. Otherwise, it starts some subroutine that makes it rain in the dome.”

He finished scribbling and flipped the notebook back over to Runstom. The officer took a look and saw what might have been a series of math formulas. The only words that jumped out were RAIN and WARNING, both written in upper case.

“If I were to punch up RAIN at 10:10AM, it would fail the test,” Jax said, tracing his finger along the jumbled words on the page. “And I’d get this error message. If I were to do it after 10:20AM, it would succeed.”

“What is this?” Runstom asked. “Some kind of code, right?”

“It’s complex.”

“Yeah, I can see that. Goddamn complex.”

“No, I mean it’s COMP-LEX,” Jax said, exaggerating the syllables. “It stands for Computational Lexicon. It’s a common programming language for operational environments.”

“Oh.” Runstom looked at the operator’s scribbled words and symbols carefully. “Okay. So you’re saying that if someone punched in a command that opens the inner doors, then some – variable?” Jax nodded and Runstom continued. “Some variable is set that tells the system the inner doors are open. Then when someone runs a command to open the outer doors, the system would have run some check—”

“Yes, exactly. A check on the state of the inner doors. If they are already open, the command to open the outer doors fails and you get an error message. Same goes for the reverse – if you try to open the outer doors first and then the inner.”