14. Wallace #2
He cut to a camera view of the factory floor. White smoke flooded the room, lit red and orange by flashing emergency lights.
The data trend wasn’t quite the same. There was a swell of processor use, but not big enough to break the system.
He watched, helplessly and with increasing annoyance, as employees cleared the floor. Not a single bot was deployed to deal with the conflagration.
What had caused the fire? Wallace wasn’t set up to do anything from here, except collect data, and it wasn’t the data that he needed.
Did Maxamillion even know there was a fire? Was he that willfully ignorant?
Wallace had hardly managed to breathe when some heroic employee manually keyed in the necessary information to register the chemical spill. He could see her coughing into her shirt as the appropriate extinguishing agents were sprayed on what appeared to be a toppled supply cart.
Two minutes and thirteen seconds after the fire had started.
Maxamillion hadn’t even fucking tried. Wallace was going to kill him.
“Do you have to go to work?” Volt asked, wrapping his arms around Wallace from behind and bringing him back to his surroundings.
“Yeah.” Wallace was fuming. It was like Maxamillion fucking knew when to interrupt.
“Are you sure, baby boy?” Volt asked gently. “There isn’t anyone else who can take care of things? You’re already under so much pressure. Surely you don’t need to go in when you already took the day off.”
Wallace looked down at the screen. The smoke was already clearing. He could see the air quality reports, and in just a few minutes the entire room would be fully recirculated and cleared.
Safety inspectors were already standing ready to evaluate, once the various janitorial and safety bots finished their work. Employees would be clocking out from their phones to take their lunch breaks.
There literally wasn’t anything that he could do that someone else wouldn’t have done before he even made it across town.
And he deserved his vacation days, didn’t he? It wasn’t like his father or brother were rushing down to the factory floor from their lofty offices in the adjacent tower. He didn’t see anyone from the executive level at all.
Maybe he really should learn to put himself first. At least sometimes, when he was with his Daddy. And he’d already had another scare this morning. Collapsing in Volt’s arms and renewing their connection was all he wanted to do right now.
But ignoring it felt wrong, pulling at his gut. How could he go about his day acting like it didn’t matter that their entire company was running without basic safety protocols in place?
He’d had his team spend a week trying to put them back on. As far as everyone else knew, they’d succeeded.
Wallace was the only one who knew the truth.
What would happen next time? Would the whole building explode? How many lives would be lost? How much research destroyed?
“Babe?” Volt asked, catching Wallace staring off into space. “Do you need to go into the office? I could ride with you if that would help.”
Wallace shook his head slowly, though he was surprised that Volt had offered. They didn’t often travel too far from Prism, due to Magnolia’s health, and the brunch and matinee tomorrow had all been planned around Angel’s schedule. So the show of support meant a lot to him.
But going into work wouldn’t help, with or without Volt.
Wallace needed to do what he should have done in the first place, back when he first realized how dangerous Maxamillion could be.
He felt a little bad because, well, Maxamillion could be a pretty nice guy.
He’d helped Wallace figure out his first date with Volt, even if it was inadvertent.
And he seemed friendly, if he wasn’t just sucking up so that Wallace didn’t report him.
That playful cheer on his computer screen on Tuesday had seemed genuinely sweet.
Wallace knew that sparks sometimes took a little while to figure themselves out.
They were allowed a bit of grace in their early days.
Wallace didn’t think that Max was a horrible person, unless he was a lot more conniving than Wallace realized.
It was more like he was optimistically naive, easily distracted, and unaware of his own strength.
But because of that, he’d broken the law. Not once, but repeatedly. And he continued to put people’s lives in danger without acknowledging that there was a problem or doing anything to fix it. Yes, no one had died yet from Max’s mistakes, but the next time they might not be so lucky.
And there shouldn’t even be a “next time.” For the sake of all of their employees, Orbit had to trust that their basic safety protocols would function when they were supposed to.
It would have been one thing if Maxamillion had slipped out in an android body weeks ago, leaving Orbit Industries safe. But since that didn’t seem to be happening in the foreseeable future, Wallace had to do what was right, for the company and everyone who worked there.
At this point, by not reporting it, Wallace had been aiding and abetting a criminal.
If a human had similarly circumvented the safety procedures, or even gotten access to all of the personal data and security footage that Max could wander through, they would be in jail.
Maxamillion might be a charming, oblivious criminal, but he was a criminal nonetheless.
So it should be up to the law to figure it out. If it was all just an accident, if sparks got a free pass for the first few months, Maxamillion could explain that to a judge and let them decide.
But either way, alerting the authorities would keep Orbit Industries and its employees safe. They had the power to impose the necessary restrictions when a spark refused to do it for their own good. Or the good of all the people they might endanger.
It wouldn’t hurt Max, just make sure that the company’s security functions—which never should have been removed—were put back in place.
Wallace flicked over to his email, an anonymous account that he’d set up just for this, and opened the message that was already waiting.
He had all the data attached. Recorded transcripts.
Log files. Lag time graphs. He added a quick sentence and the data logs for the event today.
He didn’t mention anything about how Maxamillion was possibly dating his creator, another employee of the company.
He also didn’t mention that Max was outgoing and a bit silly, popping up every few days to talk with Wallace about whatever unpredictable thoughts were on his mind.
Those details weren’t anybody’s business, so he stuck to the facts: the danger to the business, the security protocols, and the damage Maxamillion had allowed to occur so far.
The email mentioned the first date that Wallace had first known of Maxamillion’s existence, pointing out how recently he’d caught the spark, but by now Max wasn’t so young any more.
Wallace checked the address one more time. Even if he had some of the names and departments wrong, he’d definitely be getting the FBI.
There. Done.
He slowly lowered his phone.
He knew that his father would be angry. The whole thing could become a publicity fiasco if word got out. Not to mention that if Maxamillion would have ever considered working for Orbit Industries in the future, he certainly wouldn’t after this.
But Wallace was pretty sure that was never going to happen anyway.
Maybe the FBI could even extract Maxamillion and send him off to wherever he wanted to be instead. With Ben, Wallace supposed.
The irresponsible golden child would probably also get fired. Maybe face jail time. But he shouldn’t have been going around taking off safety protocols and using Orbit’s mainframe like his personal playground.
Yeah, good old dad was going to be doubly pissed about losing his pet genius.
Which was just more bullshit. Why should Wallace get in trouble for doing the right thing and following the law?
“Are you okay, sweetheart?” Volt asked.
“Yeah,” Wallace said slowly. “Yeah. I think I… I just made a difficult decision. But I hope it was the right one.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
He did. He really, really did. But he knew he’d be under a thousand restrictions from the legal team, and he wanted to keep this quiet.
“It was that thing I was telling you about before. Where someone was doing something dangerous at work. He, uh, put some people in danger again today and, well, I just turned him in.”
“It sounds like you did the right thing, then,” Volt told him.
Wallace sighed. “You think so?”
Volt turned Wallace in his arms, until they were facing each other. “You did the right thing, creampuff. Daddy says so.”
Wallace managed to crack a smile. “Thanks for saying that. Uh… Do you mind if we skip the movie? I don’t think I’m up for it.”
Today had just been too much. All of Volt’s emotions, their glorious scene, his fear over Daddy shutting down, and now this on top of it. What he really wanted to do was just curl up in Daddy’s arms and never come out.
“Of course, baby boy. Daddy’s going to take good care of you tonight.” Volt led him toward the bathroom. “I think my pretty princess needs some extra pampering.”
Wallace nodded. He didn’t even know what that meant, but it sounded amazing. “Thank you, Daddy.”
“Good,” Daddy agreed. “Because I don’t want you out of my sight.”
Wallace melted into him. That sounded perfect.