“Hang. Up.” I kept my voice low, but there was steel in it. “Right fucking now.”
He stared at me for another second, then spoke into the phone. “Hey, Marcus, I gotta go. Yeah. Talk later.” He ended the call and tossed the phone onto the desk. “What’s your problem?”
My problem? Myproblem? I wanted to scream at him, to grab him by his expensive collar and shake him until his brain rattled.Instead, I forced myself to speak slowly, clearly, like I was explaining basic arithmetic to a child.
“Selecta owns the telecom infrastructure of the entire planet, Leo. They monitor everything. Voice calls, data packets, encrypted messages—all of it. And you just told your idiot friend, over an open line, that we’re about to launch a ransomware attack on one of their subsidiaries.”
The color drained from his face, but his jaw set in that stubborn way that meant he was about to double down on his stupidity. “Marcus wouldn’t?—”
“It doesn’t matter what Marcus would or wouldn’t do. Selecta’s AI flags keywords automatically. Ransomware. Houseworks. Custom job. You might as well have filed a fucking incident report.”
“You’re being paranoid.” But his voice wavered. “They can’t monitor everything. There’s too much traffic?—”
“They can and they do. That’s literally their business model. Jesus Christ, Leo, how did you think they built their empire? By respecting people’s privacy?”
He stood up, trying to reclaim some authority through height. “Look, even if they did catch it, which they didn’t, we’re fine. We’re careful. There’s no way to trace it back to?—”
The door exploded inward.
At least they separated Leo and me once they’d gotten us outside to where they had an entire squad of Selecta security goons—empowered by the Corporate Laws to act in a paramilitary capacity—waiting. They put Leo in one car and me in another, and thank God I never saw him again because I would probably have killed him, given the slightest opportunity.
At the time, though, it seemed like a troubling sign.
“Where are you taking me?” I demanded, when I noticed that the car with Leo in it had gone in a different direction from the one in which mine was headed.
One of the goons in the front seat turned to look at me through the metal grille that separated the driver’s seat from the passenger seat, where they had shoved me with my wrists cuffed behind my back. My shoulders already ached.
“Girls like you get special treatment,” he told me, with a leer that made my belly lurch. “Your friend is going to the regular courthouse. You’re on your way to Selecta court.”
I tried to keep my face blank, but my mind was racing through implications. Selecta court. I’d heard rumors about Selecta’s parallel legal system—everyone had. It wasn’t like regular criminal proceedings with public defenders and due process. Selecta handled their own justice for crimes against their interests, and they didn’t fuck around.
“What’s the difference?” I asked, hating how small my voice sounded.
The goon’s leer widened. “You’ll find out.”
The rest of the drive passed in silence. I watched the city lights blur past the tinted windows, trying to calculate angles, possibilities, escape routes. But with my hands cuffed and two armed officers in the front seat, my options were exactly zero.
We pulled up to a sleek corporate building that could have been any Selecta office complex. No signs indicating it was a courthouse. No press waiting outside. Just another anonymous tower in their empire.
They hauled me out of the car and marched me through a side entrance, down a corridor that smelled of industrial cleaner and some disturbing human element—fear, maybe, or despair. We stopped at a set of double doors, and one of the guards pressed his palm to a biometric scanner.
The doors slid open to reveal a courtroom that looked nothing like the ones I’d seen on screens. No jury box. No gallery for spectators. Just a raised platform with a single table and two chairs, one on either side—nothing like a proper judge’s bench. They shoved me into the chair closest to the door where I’d entered.
A woman in a dark suit entered from a side door. Mid-forties, perfectly coiffed blonde hair, the kind of face that suggested she’d never had a moment of doubt in her entire life. She sat down across from me without sparing me a single glance.
“Pamela Nelson,” she said, consulting a tablet. Not a question. “Conspiracy to commit corporate sabotage, attempted deployment of ransomware against Selecta infrastructure, violation of the Computer Crimes Act.” She looked up at me. “How do you plead?”
“I want a lawyer.”
“This is Selecta court, Ms. Nelson. Corporate criminal proceedings. You lost your right to outside legal counsel when you committed crimes against Selecta interests on Selecta-monitored communications infrastructure. How do you plead?”
My throat felt tight. “Not guilty.”
She smiled, thin and cold. “We have your search history, your code repository, your communications with black market contacts. We have biometric data from your arrest that suggests possible forms of rehabilitation for you.” Her eyes flicked down to the tablet. “We know for example that you probably performed fellatio a few minutes before your arrest.”
My face burned. “That’s an invasion of?—”
“You’re in Selecta’s America, Ms. Nelson. Selecta is empowered by the Corporate Laws to dispose of you as we see fit. By definition, we don’t invade privacy, because you don’t have privacy when you break the law. We monitor our infrastructure for threats. You are a threat.” She set down the tablet. “I find you guilty on all counts. Sentencing is immediate. Non-Violent Offenders Program, assignment to be determined by Selecta assessors based on psychobiometric profile.”
