"And after the supervisor arrived?"

"I restored it when he asked."

"Without conditions?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

Because the sergeant had reminded me of something I should never have forgotten.

That public systems do not belong to the people who know how to operate them.

They belong to the public.

I said exactly that.

The network-security officer stopped taking notes.

The attorney's pen paused.

Then she asked, "Did you alter, delete, conceal, or attempt to manipulate any logs associated with the command?"

"No."

"Could you have?"

The security officer answered before I did.

"Not the security ledger."

The attorney looked at him.

"I asked him."

I said, "I could have altered some lower-level diagnostic metadata if I'd retained access long enough. Not the authentication record or isolation ledger."

"Did you?"

"No."

"Did you consider it?"

That question bothered me.

Because the truthful answer was not as clean as I wanted.

"For a few seconds after I realized the system had flagged me," I said, "I thought about how the logs worked."

The contract representative closed his eyes.

The attorney remained still.

"That wasn't my question."

"I know."

"Did you consider altering them?"

"I considered that it was technically possible to make parts of the event look less deliberate."

"Did you act on that thought?"

"No."

"Why not?"

I looked at the network-security officer.

"Because if I did, then Brady and I would be arguing about which of us was entitled to misuse a system because we thought we could get away with it."

Nobody spoke.

The attorney closed the folder.

"We'll take ten minutes."

They left me alone.

I sat in the conference room with my hands folded on the table.

I had spent years designing systems that assumed failure.

Redundant links.

Failover servers.

Immutable logs.

Secondary power.

Fallback routing.

We were good at anticipating machines.

People were harder.

A machine rarely tells itself that violating a rule is justified because the other side violated one first.

When they returned, the attorney carried a second folder.

She didn't open it immediately.

"We reviewed the preserved body-camera file this morning."

I waited.

"The recording supports your description of the watch seizure."

The words should have felt like victory.

They didn't.

"What does it show?"

"Officer Brady approaching your vehicle. The discussion of the taillight. His observation of the watch. Your explanation that it was an engineering award. Your statement that your name was engraved on the reverse. He did not inspect the engraving before taking it."

"What about the evidence procedure?"

"No packaging. No field receipt. No property entry before the communications incident."

The contract representative looked down at the table.

The attorney continued.

"More concerning is the camera configuration."

The security officer took over.

"Manual local mode was enabled before the stop."

"By Brady?"

"His credential."

"Could it have been accidental?"

"It requires multiple interface steps."

I thought of the amber light I had seen at the cruiser.

"What happens to locally buffered footage after a shift?"

"Normally it's uploaded at docking."

"Normally?"

He understood.

"An authorized user can mark corrupted local footage for administrative review. It isn't deleted automatically."

"But it becomes easier to lose."

The attorney cut in.

"We are not going to speculate."

"Fair."

She opened the second folder.

"This is not the first recorded instance of local mode being manually enabled on Unit forty-four."

That was the reversal.

Not the watch.

Not the body-camera recording.

The word first.

"How many?"

"I cannot give you a number while the personnel investigation is open."

"More than one."

She didn't answer.

She didn't need to.

I leaned back.

The prosthetic socket pressed against the chair.

"Was he doing this during traffic stops?"

"We are reviewing prior events."

"Did somebody complain?"

"Some prior property-related complaints are being reexamined."

There it was.

My anger returned, but differently.

Not hot.

Heavy.

I thought about Brady touching his pocket without thinking.

About the confidence in his voice when he said I could take it up with the precinct tomorrow.

Not an improvised sentence.

A practiced one.

The attorney watched me.

"Do not jump ahead of the evidence."

"I'm not."

"You look like you are."

"I designed enough audit systems to know patterns matter."

"Patterns matter after they're verified."

She was right.

Again.

I disliked how often that happened during the investigation.

The contract representative finally spoke.

"Your access remains suspended."

"I assumed."

"We'll conduct a separate review of whether your consulting relationship can continue."

"Understood."

"You may face civil liability if the department determines your action created operational risk."

"Understood."

The attorney added, "And if prosecutors decide your access exceeded authorized use under applicable computer-access law, that would be separate."

That landed.

I had known it abstractly.

Hearing the words in a conference room made abstraction physical.

"Do you think that's likely?"

"I don't predict charging decisions."

Another lawyer's answer.

I looked at the watch.

"What happens to Brady?"

"Same answer. Different process."

I stood.

They all looked at the prosthetic for different reasons.

The attorney because she had not seen me stand before.

The contract representative because the chair scraped.

The security officer because engineers notice movement when systems are tense.

I adjusted my jacket.

"Then I guess the record gets to do its job."

The security officer looked at me.

"That's the idea."

At the door, the attorney stopped me.

"One more thing."

I turned.

"The preserved snapshot exists because you triggered the isolation."

"I know."

"If you hadn't, the local buffer still might have synced later."

"Might have."

"Don't make the mistake of turning your misconduct into heroism because it produced useful evidence."

"I won't."

She watched me closely.

I believed she expected an argument.

Instead I said, "That's not the part I'm proud of."

Part V — The Harder Choice

Three months passed before the formal hearing.

By then, summer had thinned into cool mornings.

My city credential remained suspended.

I still worked, but not on live emergency infrastructure. The city shifted me to documentation review and offline architecture planning while the contract board considered whether I should retain operational access.

It was humiliating in small ways.

People stopped forwarding urgent problems to me.

Meetings happened without my name.

The secure terminal remained in evidence.

For the first time in years, no black device sat beside my dinner plate.

I discovered how much of my identity had been built around being needed quickly.

That was not a comfortable discovery.

The investigation into Brady stayed mostly confidential, but pieces reached me through formal disclosures.

The preserved Unit 44 snapshot led investigators backward.

Manual local-camera mode had been activated repeatedly.

Not every time Brady drove the vehicle.

Only on certain stops.

Some of those stops had generated property complaints.

A pair of sunglasses.

Cash that a driver claimed had been inside an envelope.

A bracelet.

A pocketknife legal to possess.

Small things.

The kind people might complain about once and then abandon because pursuing them cost more time than their value.

In several cases, there wasn't enough evidence to prove anything.

In others, the locally buffered footage had eventually uploaded and showed ordinary encounters.

The pattern was not a dramatic criminal empire.

That made it more believable.

And uglier.

Brady wasn't running a conspiracy.

He had learned that small abuses disappear easily when each victim assumes they are alone.