Untitled, 2018

Chapter 40: Sabotage

That night, Riti
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I couldn't sleep comfortably, no matter how I tossed or turned. On one hand I hadn't felt like I was friends friends with Jimin till that day, if you just put aside my feelings and admiration for him... but on the other hand as a friend I knew his girlfriend was cheating on him, I knew who it was with, and I could just smell something fishy about the whole situation. Should I tell? Am I supposed to? He hugged me. Doesn't he deserve to know? Will it make him sad? He told me he trusts me. Will me telling him ruin our friendship? Would he even believe me? My heart and mind were singing different tunes and I didn't want to dance to either one.

I picked up my phone to check the time. 2:30 am.
tick-tock-tick-tock...
ARgH.

Slowly rolling off my bed to fetch my laptop, I tried to distract myself with work instead. Mistake Number One. Though I didn't realize it at the time.

I was caught up with my own work, so decided to check out Wang's side of things, so I went through the interviews with my program to analyze patterns. When the program crashed on the last file, I sighed and went to examine it. That's when I noticed the first thing amiss.
"Huh?" Several files within the last three interviews and physical tests being conducted were missing. As I stared at it in confusion, I realized then that some files were, slowly but surely, being deleted in real time. On purpose. "Who on earth is awake right now and is this insane?" I panicked and rushed to pull out a blank flash drive, and I immediately cloned the results we've had so far onto it so no further files would be lost. I broke out into a cold sweat as I started analyzing and seeing what the damage was so far, but thankfully only the last two days' tests had information missing.

Angry, I turned my attention back to the files that were continuing to be deleted. Clever, only a few files here and there would raise minimal suspicion. If anything, the blame would fall on Kang or me for any data deleted by our code. Who? Why??

My mind wandered to Hanna, and I cooled and hardened on an idea. I couldn't see who was changing things in the files from my end, but I could maybe look for why. I took the hotel pen and paper from the nightstand and started jotting down the names of the disappearing files, so I could double check my archive to see what was so damn special about them.

By the end of the hour, the entire month's database had been sifted through with random files deleted. I slammed my laptop shut angrily. I could tell Kang privately in the morning. I tried to sleep for the next few hours, re-energize. As soon as I could, I got ready, shoved my face with food, and got to our lab.
Diligently as always, Dr. Wang stood over unwrapping and opening some new heart rate testing equipment she was using. She barely lifted her head from her task as she greeted me. "Oh? You're here early. Did you have something you needed to do?"
I stopped in front of her. "Um, no not quite. Sort of? Can I help you open these?"
She smiled and moved so I could work next to her. "By the way, Wang, do you keep any other records of the interviews you do?"
"Hm? I put them into the database you run... which is backed up every month. It should be scheduled for backup..." she thought about it for moment, "today, actually. At 5."

My ears perked up. "Oh, really." So that's why, last night...
"Why do you ask?"
Right then, Mateo and Hanna walked into the lab together, laughing about something, and I gulped. Should I tell her now... ah, whatever. Here goes.

"Dr. Wang," I said somewhat softly, but I could tell that the other two heard me, because they turned to me too. "Um, I was looking through some files earlier and, I swear I thought some were missing..."
She stopped moving and looked at me with her eyebrows scrunched.
I put my backpack down and fumbled through it for my laptop. "Here, look?" I pulled up a folder with a few deleted files from last night. She put her reading glasses on and scrolled through the folder before sighing.
"Where?"