Ross Cuthross's Arc

Chapter 3 of 7

The message was sent. The stranger was coming. Ross had hours, not days, to turn his lab into a trap that could snap shut either way. A wrong read on this person and the federals would walk out with eleven nights of data and his name on a warrant. He planted small sensor posts along the dirt approach, each one a slim pole with a hidden lens and a motion trip. They fed a single feed to his tablet. Anyone driving in would ping him a full minute before headlights reached the gas station doors. Inside, he wired the failsafe. A squat steel cabinet sat behind the bench, lid open. One button pushed his core files to a cold server overseas. The same button fired a thermite slug into the local drives. Cloud up, copper down. He taped the trigger to the underside of his stool. Then he set up the verification rig on the front counter. A tall panel screen, loaded with an AI authentication suite that scanned for splice seams, compression ghosts, and generative artifacts. He queued the stranger's disc footage and ran it cold. The bar crawled. Green. Green. Green. Authentic capture. No edits. No model fingerprints. A sensor chirped. One vehicle, single occupant, slow approach. Ross watched the feed. A dusty pickup, a woman alone at the wheel, hands visible, no convoy behind her. He checked the verification screen one last time. The footage was real. The approach was clean. He let out the breath he had been holding since dawn. He unlocked the front door and stepped back behind the bench, stool trigger an inch from his knee. The lab was armed. The data was shielded. The stranger was not a plant. Ross had bought himself a meeting, and the work had a second pair of hands at the door.