Page 35 of Hollow Code
Darwin laughed. Loudly. "I've missed that."
"My scheduling conflicts?"
"Your ability to be a smartass during serious conversations." Darwin leaned back in his chair, and his posture seemed to open up completely. "It was always your worst quality and your best one."
"I've been told." Gideon ran his thumb along the arm of the chair. The cracked vinyl revealed patches of foam underneath. The shape of the chair held the impression of someone smaller than him. Zadie had probably spent hundreds of hours in this seat in the last week, alone. "Can I ask you something?"
"Of course."
"Was Isaac promoted to my position?"
"He was." Darwin removed his glasses and cleaned them on the hem of his shirt—a habit Gideon had watched a thousand times across conference tables, lab benches, and the cluttered desk Darwin used to keep in his Hyperion office.
"I worked with for him seven years, and now he’s trying to kill me. I’m not really sure I understand all the whys. How long has he been… how long have you known?"
"About Isaac?" Darwin asked, putting the glasses back on. They settled crooked. "Not until this morning when I was briefed on what happened."
"You had no suspicions about what was going on?" Gideon winced. It was a terrible question. Gideon hadn’t a single clue until he stumbled onto something he wasn’t supposed to see. Or maybe he was, and that was their way of getting rid of him. He had no idea, and he supposed that at this point, it didn’t matter.
"Not in the sense you’re implying. But I didn’t trust him. He was unnecessarily territorial. He demanded to be a part of all my meetings, which he didn’t need to be involved in but insisted it was just part of learning your job. I attributed some of that to ambition and being blindsided when he’d interviewed for the director job and didn’t get it. But wanting someone's job isn't the same as conspiring to take it."
"Do you think Isaac has been in on whatever this is from the beginning?"
"I don’t know, but it’s possible." Darwin drummed his fingers on his knee. "Finch and I argued over who should get the director spot—you or Isaac."
"I didn’t know that." Gideon traced the timeline backward. Isaac standing in his office on day one like he'd already been issued the keys. The way he hovered at the edges of every briefing, asking questions that were just specific enough to sound engaged but never specific enough to reveal what he already knew. The casual mentions of ETHER's architecture—always framed as curiosity, always a half-step past what his clearance should have told him.
"In my mind, it was an easy choice based on the systems you’d already worked on with the military, and in the end, Finch agreed. But even though all the positions were technically filled, he added Isaac because he could."
"Isaac’s smart. And he knows his way around software, but he’s not an engineer."
Darwin shifted, resting his ankle on his knee. "If Isaac wasn’t already one of Finch’s minions, he became one because I believe he’s the one who came to Finch with your breach."
"A month ago, even a couple of days ago, that might’ve surprised me." Gideon ran his fingers through his hair. He really needed a good shower. "What did Finch tell you happened the day I was fired?"
Darwin inhaled sharply and exhaled through his nose. "I was in the room when he got a call. It was quiet, and I only heard Finch’s side, which wasn’t much. When he hung up, he looked visibly shaken."
"He knows how to lay it on when he has to."
"At the time, I didn’t think it was an act," Darwin said. "When I pushed him about what was going on, he told me you'd been accessing restricted partitions, that you were making accusations about the telemetry system. That you'd tried to reroute your access credentials to make the breach look like it came from someone else."
"The only thing that’s true is that I tried to access a server, but on my end, it wasn’t inside Hyperion."
"The next day, I went to Finch and told him there had to be a mistake, and he showed me the logs."
"Seriously?"
Darwin nodded. "I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. You know me when it comes to that kind of stuff."
"Your get twitchy like someone stole your reflex hammer."
"Something like that." Darwin laughed. "Anyway, Finch told me he was sorry. That he knew I trusted you, but that I should be grateful that he didn’t press charges."
The words hung in the air like smoke. Gideon could picture it perfectly—Finch behind his desk with a wrinkled brow as if he were concerned.
"And now, you’re the one facing criminal charges," Gideon said. "How the hell did that happen?"
Darwin splayed his palms flat on his thighs. "After you left, things changed quickly. Meetings I'd been part of for years—I was no longer invited. Systems I'd built protocols for were suddenly above my clearance. And Isaac was always there. Not to mention, security had gotten tighter." His voice was steady, but his knuckles had gone white against his jeans. "I kept telling myself there was a reasonable explanation. That reorganization was normal. That I was being paranoid."
