Page 34 - SurprisingTruthSample
P. 34
The Surprising Truth About Lying
sloppy corporate security protocols that prioritized
quarterly budgets over physical integrity.
He spent the next three days living on stale coffee
and pure spite in a rented, windowless office above a
laundromat. He used a ghost terminal and his old,
deep-access credentials to tunnel into the city’s
unmonitored maintenance network.
What he found was worse than he expected. The
power substation, built too close to the rail line, had
been running forty percent over safe capacity for three
years to feed the new luxury condo developments. The
cooling duct the eyewitness saw wasn't "structural
debris." It was a critical pressure valve housing that
had been scheduled for replacement three times, each
repair request denied by the City Council’s budget
committee. The Director of Public Safety, the one who
looked into the camera and lied, had signed off on the
last denial.
Henry had the receipts. But putting them online was
useless. His old self would have known exactly how
the system would handle it: Smeared, branded
"conspiracy," buried under a wave of deep-fake denials
and aggressive SEO.
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