4. Perjury of Class

The offices of Voss & Kade occupied the fourth floor of a converted warehouse in the Galleria district, a neighborhood where art galleries and boutique law firms had replaced the textile wholesalers of a previous century. The building still had its original brick walls and exposed ceiling beams, but the reception area featured a Japanese rock garden and a cappuccino machine that looked like it belonged in a spaceship.

Saskia Voss was not what Aidan had expected. She was short and round-shouldered, with reading glasses perpetually pushed up into a tangle of graying curls, and she dressed like someone who had given up on clothing as a form of communication decades ago. But her eyes—sharp, dark, utterly focused—missed nothing. When Aidan walked into her office, she looked up from a stack of depositions and said, “You’re either very brave or very stupid. Most clients wait until the second meeting to confess their sins. You seem like the type who wants to get it over with.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Sure you do.” She gestured at the chair opposite her desk. “Sit. Tell me everything. Start with the night you built Erebus and don’t stop until you get to this morning.”

Aidan sat. He told her about the subbasement data center, the four-point-three-second hesitation window, the simulation he had run and deleted. He told her about the promotion, the thirty-seventh floor, the meeting with Isolde Maren. He told her about Project Lethe and Prometheus Analytics and the shell company in the Isles of Varuna. He told her about Maeve Callaghan, about standing on the sidewalk in Siltwater, about the look in her eyes when she had seen him watching her.

Saskia listened without interruption, her hands folded on the desk, her expression unchanging. When Aidan finished, she removed her glasses and polished them on the hem of her sweater.

“You’ve made quite a mess,” she said. “Technically, legally, and morally. The trifecta.”

“Can you help me?”

“That depends entirely on what you mean by help.” She leaned back in her chair. “If you want me to help you escape liability, the answer is probably no. The plaintiff’s attorneys already have your internal memos. They have your algorithm. They have enough to establish knowledge and intent, and no jury in Veridian is going to sympathize with a tech executive who designed software to exploit pensioners. You’re not a sympathetic defendant, Mr. Voss. You’re the villain of this story.”

Aidan felt the words hit him like a physical blow. He had known this, abstractly, but hearing it spoken aloud by someone whose judgment he had no reason to doubt made it real in a way it hadn’t been before.

“However,” Saskia continued, “if you want to help yourself by helping the plaintiffs—if you want to cooperate with the investigation, provide testimony against the company, and accept whatever consequences the court deems appropriate—then I can represent you. Not to get you off the hook, but to get you through whatever comes next with some portion of your humanity intact.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because I’ve spent twenty years watching corporations destroy people, and I’ve never once seen an insider volunteer to help the other side. It would be a first.” She put her glasses back on. “Also, I really, really dislike Isolde Maren.”

The deposition was scheduled for March 3rd, in a conference room at the offices of Keating & Slade, the white-shoe law firm that Meridian had retained for its defense. Aidan arrived at nine in the morning wearing his best suit and carrying a leather briefcase that contained nothing but a bottle of water and a packet of breath mints. Helena had offered to come with him. He had declined. This was something he needed to do alone.

The conference room was larger than his first apartment. The table was a slab of polished walnut, surrounded by leather chairs occupied by lawyers, paralegals, and a court reporter who sat in the corner with her stenotype machine, her face blank with professional neutrality. At the head of the table sat Meridian’s lead counsel, a silver-haired man named Marcus Teague who had once successfully defended a pharmaceutical company against seven thousand wrongful death claims. He looked at Aidan with the mild, detached interest of a butcher examining a cut of meat.

And at the opposite end of the table, directly across from Aidan, sat Maeve Callaghan.

She was wearing the same nurse’s uniform she had worn on the day he saw her outside her building, but she had added a cardigan and a small silver brooch in the shape of a bird—a swift or a swallow, Aidan couldn’t tell which. Her gray hair was pinned back, and her face was composed, and she looked at him with an expression he could not read. It was not anger. It was not hatred. It was something closer to curiosity, as though she were studying a creature she had never encountered before.

Her lawyer, a young woman with a braid down her back and the fierce energy of a public defender who had moved to the plaintiffs’ side, stood and introduced herself as Eleri Phang. “We’re here to take the deposition of Aidan Voss in the matter of Callaghan v. Meridian Interactive,” she said. “Mr. Voss, you understand that you are under oath?”

“I understand.”

“And you understand that you have the right to have your counsel present?”

“My counsel is aware of this deposition. She advised me on how to proceed.”

Eleri Phang nodded and opened a binder. “Let’s begin with the Erebus algorithm. You designed it yourself, correct? In the fall of last year, while working as a junior data analyst in Meridian’s retention division?”

“Yes.”

“And in the course of designing Erebus, you ran simulations to predict its effects on user behavior?”

Aidan glanced at Marcus Teague, who was watching him with the same mild, detached expression. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he could hear Saskia’s voice: Tell the truth. Not the version that protects you. The version that matters.

“Yes,” he said. “I ran multiple simulations. The most comprehensive one predicted a forty-two percent increase in first-time purchases among users in the bottom income quartile. It also predicted a significant increase in problem gambling behaviors—specifically, a pattern of escalating spending that exceeded users’ stated limits and available funds.”

A ripple of movement went through the room. Eleri Phang’s eyes widened slightly. Marcus Teague sat forward in his chair.

“And did you report these findings to your supervisors?” Eleri asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

Aidan looked at Maeve Callaghan. She was still watching him with that unreadable expression, her hands folded on the table in front of her.

“Because I wanted the promotion,” Aidan said. “Because I had convinced myself that the users were abstractions, that the data was just data, that the money flowing upward from the bottom income quartile was somehow different from the money my mother earned working double shifts at a laundromat. Because I was ashamed of where I came from, and I thought that if I could just get high enough, far enough away from Lowmarsh, I would stop being the person the system was designed to crush.”

The room was silent. The court reporter’s machine stopped clicking. Even Marcus Teague seemed momentarily at a loss for words.

“I knew what Erebus would do,” Aidan continued. His voice was steady, steadier than he had expected. “I knew it would hurt people like my mother, like my neighbors, like the families in Unit 14B who were evicted because the breadwinner lost their job and the algorithm I designed took the last of their savings. I knew, and I did it anyway, because I wanted to be rich. I wanted to be safe. I wanted to be the kind of person who never had to worry about eviction notices or medical bills or whether the electricity would stay on through the winter.”

He paused. Maeve Callaghan was still watching him, and something in her expression had shifted—not softening, exactly, but becoming less distant, less abstract. As if he had finally, after all these months, become real to her.

“I’m sorry,” Aidan said. He was speaking to her now, not to the lawyers, not to the court reporter. “I know that doesn’t fix anything. I know it doesn’t bring back your son’s money or undo the harm. But I wanted you to hear it from me, in my own words, under oath. I did this. I am responsible. And whatever the court decides, I will accept it.”

Eleri Phang exchanged a glance with her client. Maeve Callaghan nodded, almost imperceptibly.

“Let’s talk about Prometheus Analytics,” Eleri said.

The deposition continued for another six hours. By the end of it, Aidan had described every aspect of the Erebus development process, every meeting with Isolde Maren, every document he had seen regarding Project Lethe and the offshore subsidiaries Meridian had established to process user data in jurisdictions with no privacy protections. He named names. He provided dates. He described the encryption protocols used to hide certain files from internal compliance reviews.

When it was over, when the court reporter had packed up her machine and the lawyers had gathered their binders and Marcus Teague had stormed out of the room without a backward glance, Maeve Callaghan stood and walked around the table to where Aidan was sitting.

“Mr. Voss,” she said.

He looked up at her. Up close, he could see the lines around her eyes, the chapped skin on her hands, the slight tremor in her fingers that spoke of decades of physical labor and sleepless nights.

“My son is twenty-seven years old,” she said. “He has cerebral palsy and cognitive impairments and the gentlest heart of anyone I’ve ever known. He spent three years saving his disability payments for a specialized wheelchair. Three years. And your algorithm took every penny in six weeks.” She paused. “I want you to remember that. Not the numbers on your spreadsheets. Not the revenue projections. My son. His wheelchair. The thing he was working toward that your software stole from him.”

“I’ll remember,” Aidan said.

“I know you will.” She held his gaze for a long moment. “That’s why I’m not going to ask for punitive damages.”

She turned and walked out of the room, leaving Aidan sitting alone at the polished walnut table, staring at the empty chair where she had been.

The news broke that evening. “Meridian Insider Confesses Under Oath” read the headline on the Ashwick Financial Journal. The story spread through the city like fire through dry grass, igniting conversations in bars and boardrooms and the threadbare living rooms of Garrick Parish. By midnight, Meridian’s stock had dropped twenty-three percent. By morning, three class-action firms had announced their intention to file copycat suits.

Aidan watched the coverage from his apartment, his phone buzzing with messages he didn’t answer. Helena had called six times. Rourke had sent a single text: You’re done. Isolde Maren had not contacted him at all, which was somehow worse than anything she could have said.

At two in the morning, his buzzer rang. He ignored it. It rang again, and then a third time, and finally he walked to the intercom and pressed the button.

“It’s me,” Helena’s voice said. “Let me in.”

He let her in. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, and she looked like she had been crying.

“I saw the news,” she said. “I saw the deposition transcript. Aidan, what have you done?”

“I told the truth.”

“You destroyed your career. You destroyed any chance of a settlement. My mother is going to sue you personally. You know that, right? She’s already called an emergency board meeting. They’re going to terminate you tomorrow and file a countersuit for breach of contract and trade secret theft.”

“I know.”

“Then why did you do it?”

Aidan walked to the window and looked out at the city. The lights were still burning in the financial district, the towers of capital glowing against the dark sky. He thought about Maeve Callaghan’s son, about the wheelchair he would never have, about the eviction notices that had papered the stairwells of Lowmarsh.

“Because I was tired of pretending,” he said. “Because every time I looked in the mirror, I saw someone who had traded his conscience for a corner office. Because your mother was right about one thing—I came from nothing. And somewhere along the way, I forgot that the people I came from were not nothing. They were everything.”

Helena crossed the room and stood beside him. “I talked to Saskia Voss this afternoon. She told me about the evidence you preserved—the original simulation results, the Prometheus Analytics documents. She said that if you’re willing to testify, the plaintiffs could use your testimony to establish a pattern of institutional fraud. Not just you. The whole company.”

“I know.”

“She also said the Veridian Attorney General is opening a criminal investigation. Wire fraud. Consumer fraud. Possibly racketeering, if they can tie the offshore subsidiaries to a pattern of money laundering.” Helena took his hand. “My mother could go to prison.”

Aidan turned to look at her. “Is that what you want?”

“I don’t know what I want.” Her voice cracked. “I love my mother. I hate what she’s done. I don’t know how to hold both of those things at the same time.”

They stood together in the darkness, hands intertwined, watching the city that had promised them everything and was now preparing to take it all back. Outside, the wind was rising, carrying the smell of rain from the Marrow River. Somewhere in Siltwater, Maeve Callaghan was sleeping—or trying to sleep, Aidan thought, with the knowledge that the fight she had started was bigger now than she had ever imagined.

And somewhere on the thirty-seventh floor of the Meridian tower, the lights were still on. Isolde Maren was working late. She was always working late. And in the hours before dawn, she would make a decision that would change everything—a decision that even her own crisis managers would later describe as an act of pure, reckless desperation.

Aidan didn’t know this yet. He wouldn’t know until morning, when Saskia Voss called with news that would make the deposition transcript look like a footnote. The trap Isolde Maren had been building for months was about to spring—but not on the plaintiffs. Not on the regulators. On him.

And at the center of that trap was a document he had signed in November, on the morning of his promotion, without reading the fine print. A document that transferred not just ownership of the Erebus code but full legal responsibility for its deployment. A document that, according to the indemnification clause buried on page fourteen, made Aidan Voss personally liable for any damages arising from the algorithm’s use.

He had been so eager to escape Lowmarsh that he had signed away his freedom without even noticing the chains.