Story code: ST-000644
Part 3: The Drive Could Not Belong to a Team
Nobody answered Mrs. Bell’s question right away.
The hologram pedestal still held Thomas Bell’s image in a patient half-turn, and the directional speakers let out a faint room tone between samples. Dana kept one hand on the control tablet. Leah kept one hand on the open gray hard case. Ray stood with the clipboard lowered against his thigh, his coffee untouched on the family table behind him.
Mrs. Bell repeated herself, slower this time. “When you take my husband’s recordings home tonight, whose drive do they go onto?”
Dana lifted her chin first. “They stay in our memorial system.”
Mrs. Bell did not look at the pedestal when Dana said it. She looked at the foam inserts in Leah’s case, at the handwritten version dates, at the USB cable running from Leah’s module to the tablet.
“That’s not what I asked,” she said.
Evan was standing near the brochure rack with a stack still in his hands. He set them down carefully so the paper would not slap again. From where he stood, he could see the tablet screen reflected in the glass edge of the display wall. A branch name sat open. He could not read all of it, only enough to see that it had changed since Dana’s first attempt. The active profile now carried the new Bell label Leah had entered.
Ray stepped in with the same soft business voice he used on families comparing package tiers. “We keep everything secure. The important thing is the memorial comes out right.”
Mrs. Bell turned the obituary card over in her fingers. “The important thing is knowing who is handling my husband’s voice.”
Leah closed one latch on the case but not the other. “The live training branch is on this drive,” she said. “The permanent archive can be exported after final approval.”
Dana’s head snapped toward her. “Leah.”
It was only one word, but it landed like a warning sounded often enough to be familiar.
Leah did not raise her voice. “She asked whose drive.”
Dana looked back to Mrs. Bell and smiled again, though the smile sat tighter now. “She’s talking about one piece of the workflow. I oversee the memorial builds.”
Mrs. Bell pointed at the tablet. “Then add one more line without her touching it. Use Ris first, then the full name with that pause.”
The room changed shape around that sentence. Even Ray stopped trying to smooth it over. He shifted his weight once and looked at Dana instead of the client.
Dana tapped the tablet. “Of course.”
She disconnected the cable from Leah’s case, laid it aside, and reopened the pacing screen. Evan saw her scroll past several settings quickly, then stop, then back up. The hologram voice spoke too soon on the first try.
“Ris Marissa,” it said in a rushed chain, with no break between the names.
Mrs. Bell’s mouth thinned. Leah stood still, hands lowered at her sides.
Dana tried again. This time the pause landed in the wrong place.
“Ri…s. Marissa.”
The directional speaker carried every mistake cleanly into the room.
Dana gave a short laugh that did not pull anyone else with it. “The imported timing is fighting the blend.”
Leah said, “You changed the branch anchor.”
Dana kept her eyes on the screen. “No, I didn’t.”
Evan could see enough of the reflection to know she was not in the same menu Leah had used. Leah took one step closer but did not touch the tablet.
“The Bell branch was nested under live family pacing,” Leah said. “You moved it back under default male template.”
Mrs. Bell turned to Ray. “Can she fix it or not?”
Ray’s answer took too long. “Dana runs the floor.”
“That isn’t what I asked either,” Mrs. Bell said.
Dana pressed the screen harder, as if pressure might change what the menu did. The hologram flickered, then dropped Thomas Bell’s image entirely. The pedestal threw back only its own light for a second before a generic seated figure came up with no voice at all.
No one spoke.
Then Dana said, without looking away from the tablet, “Leah, reconnect your module.”
She said your module.
Evan heard it as clearly as if someone had struck glass.
Ray heard it too. His head turned sharply. Mrs. Bell looked from Dana’s face to the case at Leah’s feet.
Leah bent, folded the cable neatly, and placed it inside the hard case instead of plugging it back in. Then she lifted out a slim intake sheet from the side pocket and set it on the demo pedestal.
“Before any new family recordings go onto my drive,” she said, “I need my name on the intake and on the build line.”
Dana finally looked at her. “This is not the moment for that.”
Leah rested her palm on the case handle. “It’s the only moment you’ve left me.”
Mrs. Bell took one step back from the pedestal. “I’m not handing over his voice until that gets written down.”
Ray stared at the intake sheet for a long second, then moved to the work counter, opened a drawer, and pulled out the showroom stamp they used for signed package changes. He did not stamp anything yet. He only held it beside the form and said, to no one and everyone in the room, “If we put a builder of record on this, it needs to match every active family file attached to that drive.”
Dana’s hand slipped off the tablet.
The showroom was still open, Mrs. Bell was still watching, and now the next step sat in plain view: either Dana marked Leah as the builder on the records tied to the drive, or she tried one more time to run a memorial voice she could no longer hide behind.