Chapter 8 - The Digital Trap
The boardroom descended into absolute, chaotic noise.
Board members sprang from their chairs, shouting questions, while Bryce stood paralyzed behind his chair, his hands shaking visibly as he stared at Audrey as if she were a ghost.
"Security!" Bryce suddenly screamed, pointing a trembling finger at Travis. "Security, arrest this man! He compromised the prototype! He’s the contractor who caused the fire!"
Two armed corporate security guards stepped into the room, drawing their tasers.
"Stand down!" Audrey commanded, her voice cutting through the noise like a razor blade. "Touch him, and you are fired on the spot!"
Travis didn't flinch. He walked straight to the center of the conference table, unhitched the primary display cable from the wall projector, and plugged it directly into his industrial laptop.
The massive high-definition screen at the front of the room flickered to life.
"What you are looking at," Travis announced, his calm, mechanical voice taking over the room, "is the real-time telemetry log pulled directly from the Asterion 900’s encrypted avionics drive thirty minutes ago."
A complex series of digital code, timestamps, and signal routes appeared on the screen.
"At 2:17 AM this morning," Travis explained, pointing to a highlighted line of red code, "an unauthorized diagnostic module was physically spliced into the primary flight control architecture inside Hangar 4. That module contained a hard-coded satellite kill switch."
The board members leaned forward, staring at the data.
"When the aircraft reached nine thousand feet," Travis continued, "a remote signal was sent to that module, overriding the cockpit switches and manually shutting off fuel flow to both engines simultaneously."
"This is technical nonsense!" Russell Keane yelled from the back, his voice shrill with panic. "That data could have been fabricated by anyone with basic programming knowledge!"
"I didn't fabricate the satellite route, Russell," Travis said softly.
He tapped a key on his laptop. The screen shifted, displaying a geographic IP mapping interface.
"The kill signal wasn't sent from an unknown hacker," Travis revealed, tracing a glowing red line on the map. "It was routed through an encrypted satellite link originating from terminal ID 88-Alpha—a private terminal registered to Russell Keane, paid for by a shell corporation owned by Bryce Callaway."
The room went completely dead silent.
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Bryce turned his head slowly toward Russell, his eyes wide with pure, murderous rage. "You idiot..."
"He didn't just try to sabotage a demonstration, ladies and gentlemen," Audrey said, stepping up beside Travis and looking around the table at her directors. "Bryce Callaway and Russell Keane attempted to murder me in cold blood to execute an illegal hostile takeover of this corporation."
