Untitled, 2018

Chapter 72: Backfire and Fire Back

Kang and Wang looked at each other with an indiscernable expression, and I threw a frustrated glance at Hanna. So she'd realized it, huh?

I pulled up my own inbox and showed them the emails I'd forwarded myself. "This was the email address. I forwarded myself all these files when I recovered them, just about a week ago." I handed the laptop to Wang for her to see, and she looked through the emails.

"If this isn't your own account, why didn't you tell them as soon as you 'recovered' the files?" Hanna interjected. She looked a little angry. I let out a little laugh of disbelief, but saw that Kang and Wang were looking at me for my response too. 

I sighed. It's because I was worried about Jimin, that's why. "I was dealing with some personal problems and didn't know how to bring it up. And I didn't want to directly snitch on you without understanding why. I probably should have told them sooner." I turned to Kang. "I'm sorry. I don't really have more proof about this. You'll have to believe me. I wouldn't lie about this."

The door slid open and Mateo walked in too. I waited for Kang and Wang to continue questioning, or to say anything, but they didn't. It suddenly reeled me back to the time when I had messed up at the media company and gotten in trouble with Kahn.

I suddenly felt all alone in the room again, under the scrutiny and disappointment from the two mentors I had come to respect the most since my college career had started. I thought I was going to cry again, because yet again, here I was, screwing things up.

But I refused to. I was done feeling like a disappointment when I'd done nothing wrong. Sure, I was distracted by Baek Hee enough that I'd forgotten to deal with this problem, but I had done my best to save the research. I did it without raising Hanna's suspicion until after I'd salvaged all the data and hidden the rest.

"Dr. Kang... don't you believe me...?" I implored slowly. I looked at Wang too, but she looked away, looking troubled too. I turned to look at Mateo, who just looked on, a little confused. I didn't bother asking anything of Hanna.
"So... I guess I'm getting kicked off the team two days before I leave."

Dr. Wang mumbled, "We'll discuss disciplinary action in private..." and I closed my eyes to steady myself and take on what was happening right now.

I stood up and reached into my backpack, rummaging through it for what I was looking for. "Do good news and bad news have some kind of quota in South Korea?" I found the hard drive I was looking for.

"These last two months I realized that the research we were doing was being compromised through sheer dumb luck, but kept quiet so that they wouldn't panic and delete everything they had of ours. I figured it was Hanna due to her... personal connections, but didn't want to accuse her without confirming it first. That's when I started encrypting our actual data and processing it by myself. I was doing double the work this whole time on fake data I had to plant in there. I don't understand what you think my motive for doing all of this could possibly be, but here is one of the hard drives I backed up all the real data and processed it on."

I handed it to Wang and picked up my backpack to leave. But as I passed Hanna, I stopped and told her, "I was so busy looking out for everyone else, including you, that I forgot to watch my own back. The person I was dealing with last week seemed impossible to me, but even she acted more respectably than you." She awkwardly tried to maintain eye contact with me but kept glancing around. I wanted to slap her or something. Even now I didn't want to drag her personal life into the mix, even if she'd outplayed me in this game.

I looked back at Kang and gave him a tight smile. He didn't return it. As I was opening the door to the room, Mateo stopped me by holding the door back.
"Wait. Dr. Kang, Dr. Wang. This is all a little too weird for me. There's no reason Riti would want to compromise our research. And clearly it wasn't an oversight since she has the data."