Evidence We Drown In

The ethernet cable had been loosened just enough to go unnoticed. I'd been running cable in this building for seven years, and I knew when something had been disturbed. My dog, Buster, sat by my feet as I knelt beside the server rack, his wet nose nudging my ankle — he always knew when I was about to spiral.

I pulled out my iphone and opened the network monitoring app I'd built myself. The traffic logs showed data transfers at 3:17 AM, every night for the past three weeks. Someone was siphoning intellectual property, and they were smart enough to route it through the water treatment facility's redundant servers.

The thought made my stomach churn. I'd recruited Sarah myself two years ago. We'd celebrated her promotion over drinks I'd paid for, laughed when she spilled her water glass all over the quarterly reports. I'd covered for her when she was late, when she made mistakes, when she needed someone to believe she was worth keeping on the team.

I sat on the floor of the server room, the hum of cooling fans filling the silence. Buster rested his head on my knee. The question wasn't whether she was selling our secrets. The question was whether I was the kind of person who turned in someone I'd mentored, someone I'd grown to love like family.

The corporate spy thriller I'd imagined myself starring in suddenly felt like a tragedy instead. The data she'd stolen would get someone killed in the manufacturing plant overseas. I knew that. She probably didn't.

I stood up, my knees popping. Buster scrambled to his feet too, ready to follow me anywhere. I pulled the cable the rest of the way loose and slipped it into my pocket. Evidence.

I walked toward Sarah's office with my hand shaking, knowing that by the end of the day, I'd have to choose between the company that paid my mortgage and the person who'd made this place feel like home. The water cooler was silent as I passed it. Some mornings, you wake up and realize you've been drowning for years, and you never even noticed the water rising.