The Last Riddle of the Sphinx

The bear head mounted above his desk had been watching Elena for forty-five minutes. Its glass eyes seemed to know she was lying.

"So," Marcus said, steeping his fingers. "Tell me again why you need access to the Sphinx server room at 3 AM."

Elena crossed her legs, adjusted her blazer. She'd practiced this. "System diagnostics. The AI's been glitching during peak hours. I need to run stress tests when traffic is minimal."

A spy for twelve years, and still her palms sweated. She'd infiltrated three corporations, exposed two embezzlement schemes, once posed as a temp for six months to catch a data thief. But this was different. Marcus wasn't just her boss—he was the man she'd been seeing for four months. The man who'd told her, three nights ago, that he thought she was the first honest person he'd met in this industry.

The bear's glass eyes seemed to mock her.

"Elena." Marcus's voice softened. "I know you've been accessing files you shouldn't. I know you've been sending encrypted transmissions to external servers. What I don't know is why."

Her heart hammered. "Marcus, I—"

"I'm not firing you." He stood up, walked to the window overlooking the city. "I'm asking because the Sphinx project isn't what you think it is. It's not corporate espionage, it's not embezzlement. It's something worse."

He turned back to face her. "My predecessor built an AI designed to predict human behavior. Not for marketing—for control. Government contracts, black budgets. The Sphinx doesn't just predict. It shapes. And now someone on my board wants to sell it to the highest bidder."

Elena's mind raced. "You hired me to find the leak?"

"I didn't hire you. Your agency did. I requested their best spy because I needed someone I could trust to be untrustworthy." A sad smile. "Irony's been bearing down on me lately."

"So what now?"

"Now we have a choice." He pressed a button on his desk. The bear's eyes flickered—tiny cameras. "We can expose everything, destroy the Sphinx, and probably both disappear. Or we can pretend this conversation never happened."

Elena looked at the bear, at Marcus, at the city beyond the window. She thought about the encryption key in her pocket, the data she'd already stolen, the report she was supposed to file tonight.

She stood up. "I never did like riddles," she said, and deleted the file.