WRAITH CASE STUDY AUGUSTA PINE
IDENTITY SECURITY DIVISION
SUPPLEMENTAL FILE INITIAL INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM VALE
[The recording begins with the sound of water being poured into a glass.]
INTERVIEWER
Can I offer you something to drink?
WILLIAM VALE
No, I’m fine. Let’s just get this over with.
INTERVIEWER
Please state your name for the record.
WILLIAM VALE
This is William Vale. Eighteen years old. Here of my own free will.
INTERVIEWER
You understand why we have to do this interview, correct?
WILLIAM VALE
To determine if I’m competent enough to make this decision. Because you wouldn’t want to kill an incompetent person.
INTERVIEWER
We don’t kill people, we—
WILLIAM VALE
I know exactly what you do. You make people disappear.
Then you make them reappear with a different name, a different face, a different social security number, and everything they need to live a whole new life.
I know what it costs, too. My mom did some freelance work for a few of the alphabet agencies.
I’d hear her talking to Dad about felons selling themselves into indentured servitude.
INTERVIEWER
It’s not indentured servitude.
WILLIAM VALE
Then what would you call it?
INTERVIEWER
A fair trade.
WILLIAM VALE
Ah, I get it. And to trade, I need something of value. This isn’t about my mental state at all. You just want to know what I have to offer you.
INTERVIEWER
Well, to be quite honest, we are curious as to why you came to us.
WILLIAM VALE
It starts with a family. It’s your average family. Two parents, a big brother, and a little sister. An apartment in a nice neighborhood, drone-delivered dinners, and the occasional trip out of town.
I’m nothing special. I like playing video games and guitar and I’m on the swim team, and my grades are thoroughly average.
My sister, Persephone—but everyone calls her Percy—is the smart one.
My parents say that she was reading almost before she was toddling about the apartment.
She builds cities out of plastic blocks and reads technical manuals she steals out of Dad’s briefcase.
Dad works for the Department of Transportation. It doesn’t pay the greatest but I hear my parents talk about health care and benefits. Mom does freelance cybersecurity work from home.
Aunt Carla is Mom’s best friend. She visits every few months, bringing gifts and taking us on day trips out of the city.
Mom says they met in college as roommates.
They were both into computers and programming.
But while Mom ends up freelancing as a white hat hacker, Aunt Carla goes in a different direction.
She begins working on stopping environmental disasters—trying to keep corporations accountable and governments aware of the costs.
She founds a collective with other believers—and my mom scoffs at her.
She has other priorities: work, me, my sister, and my dad.
I’m fifteen when it all falls apart.
There’s an incident at Dad’s work. That’s all anyone will tell me. It takes a search on the internet for me to find out what really happened: A gun slipped past security. A man looking to wreak as much pain as he could on the world. Five government employees killed.
Among them, my father.
I know you don’t care about him—because he doesn’t really matter in the grand scope of the world.
He wasn’t vital to national security. He wasn’t a brilliant hacker or master criminal.
He worked in human resources. His name wasn’t even in the news.
But this is being recorded, I know. So I’m going to tell you about him.
What you won’t find in his file or work history is that he was the best at making waffles.
The fancy kind, with the pearls of sugar and the dough that had to sit overnight.
He could braid hair better than Mom, and Percy always demanded that he put her hair in a French braid before school pictures.
He knew how to listen—really listen. He liked hearing from people. And he never judged. Not once.
He was kind. He was warm. And he made everyone around him the better for it.
At first, in the wake of his death, everything is chaos.
There is a funeral to plan, lawyers to speak to, casseroles to be eaten or tossed in the garbage.
It’s easy to lose myself in the bustle of it all.
I try to shield Percy from the worst of it, but she comes home crying from school because another classmate told her about the shooting.
Aunt Carla is there the whole time, organizing the chaos into something manageable.
Mom is pale as a ghost, going through the motions that grief demands.
Mom is many things, but she loved Dad. And when we lost him … it was like something in her died, too.
Weeks pass. The guests trickle away. Aunt Carla flies home.
The casseroles go moldy in the fridge. Mom goes to bed …
and she stays there. At first, I try to gently rouse her.
I burn scrambled eggs and scrape them into the garbage, then ask Mom to help with breakfast. I don’t know how to turn on the washer and end up having to look it up online.
I walk my sister to the bus stop. I learn how to pack her lunch and make sure we both get our homework done.
Then, five months after Dad dies, Mom seems to wake up.
There are days I wish she hadn’t. Because I barely recognize her. She’s thinner, colder, and doesn’t answer questions.
She takes us away from the apartment. She does it at night, makes us leave all our computers and visors and games behind. She puts on clothes that she says will help scramble facial ID cameras, and then we’re paying for bus tickets in cash.
We move to the opposite end of the country.
The place used to belong to some paranoid tech billionaire who bought a ranch near Redding.
It’s off the grid, and it’s where Aunt Carla has founded her little movement.
She and several others are determined to help stop climate change through any means necessary.
A worthy goal and a good group of people.
We spend two years living on that ranch.
At first, it isn’t bad. Percy and I are homeschooled and we learn from the other members of Aunt Carla’s group.
There’s a hacker called Bud who teaches me the basics of programming.
A former professor conducts history lessons in the backyard.
The group brims with idealists driven to drastic action.
Under Carla’s leadership, maybe they could have built something wonderful.
Maybe they could have achieved the change that we so desperately need.
But it isn’t Carla’s movement. Not anymore. Mom takes it over, installs herself as its new unofficial ruler. Like termites creeping into the foundation of a house, by the time anyone notices, it’s too late. She stokes everyone’s anger, takes idealism and hardens it.
My dad made people better. My mom makes people worse.
It takes a year for this fun little vacation to become something stale and monotonous.
I read plenty of books, write practice essays, and even wrangle an SAT study book out of Carla.
Percy retreats into herself. She has always been a quiet kid, but after Dad’s death and our exile, she will sometimes go days without saying a word.
I have to coax her into going outside. I do it with stories of my childhood—about school and classmates and the pranks we pulled on substitute teachers.
These little dramas both entertain and remind us that there is a whole world outside of the bunker.
It’s not right. None of this is how things are supposed to go.
I spend a lot of time eavesdropping. It’s the only way I learn anything of the outside world.
I overhear stories of power grids being brought down, of water redirected, and of companies infiltrated.
Three months before I turn eighteen, everything changes.
Mom and I argue. I snap at her when she asks me to do something, and then her face goes brittle and we end up in a verbal snarl.
“I’m busy studying,” I say, arms crossed. I’m taller than her now, and I know she hates to look up at me. “Take out your own garbage.”
Something dark and thunderous crosses her face. “William.” She drags out every syllable of my name like a threat. “There’s no need for that.”
“Studying?” I tap the book. “Kind of hard to get into college without it.”
Something flickers across her face. It’s there and gone so quickly I almost don’t see it. But I do.
“What?” I say sharply.
“Nothing.” She begins to turn away, but I stand up.
“Mom.” The word is half begging, half accusing. “I am going to college, right?”
The silence is answer enough.
We’re never getting out. She’s never going to let us out. Percy is going to wither away and I—
I can’t do it anymore.
So the next time Mom is out on a job, I break into her safe. It isn’t hard—the passcode is Dad’s birthday. I hope to find something, anything that will convince her to let me and Percy have real lives.
And that’s when I find out the truth.
It’s there in the plane tickets, the false passports, and the fake IDs. For Mom, Percy, and myself. There’s nothing to help the others escape.
Every hack, every mission, every bit of information—it’s not a solution.
It’s a product. And it’s one she is going to sell to the highest bidder.
There are already bidders. Terrorist groups—real ones, not the idealists following Aunt Carla—are already clamoring for the information.
Mom won’t sell, not yet. Not until we’re all safely out of the country.
Mom isn’t with Aunt Carla to help stop climate change. She isn’t there to help at all.
Mom is going to let Carla take the fall. Everyone here, everyone in Ratiocination, will be arrested while we fly away. We’ll be going somewhere that the US can’t extradite us. And then we’ll live like royalty atop a burning planet.
I don’t want that.
I don’t want any of that. Not for myself and especially not for my sister. I don’t want hundreds of people to end up dead. I don’t want Aunt Carla blamed for everything when she was just trying to make the world a better place.
Dad wouldn’t want that.
So I take my sister and we run.
My mom is brilliant. If I go through normal channels and get witness protection, that won’t work.
Even if I cover my electron-ink tattoo and wear long sleeves for the rest of my life, somehow she’ll find me.
She knows her way into government systems, can slip into any security camera, and you’ll never know she was there.
William Vale needs to die.
It’s the only way I can keep my sister safe.
And if you do that … I’ll help you bring my mom down.
I know you need her alive. That’s why you haven’t sniped her or blown up a building where she’s doing a job.
She knows all of those infrastructure holes that you have to patch up.
If one hacker can do what she did, another will figure it out eventually. You need her alive and talking.
I can give her to you. But here’s my price. The moment she’s behind bars, I go my own way. With a new name, a new life, and the means to support my sister.
[Long pause]
INTERVIEWER
I believe we can work with that.
[END RECORDING]