Story code: ST-000520
Part 2: The More He Listed, The Worse It Sounded
When I asked Derek to name actual costs instead of family favors, he stopped sounding generous and started sounding slippery, and Mina finally looked from him to me instead of just nodding along. The projector kept humming behind us in the hologram bay, Nadia was typing at the side desk, and Grandma’s voice model drive was still under Derek’s hand like he thought touching it gave him the right to invoice me for grief. He cleared his throat and said, “It’s not one line item. It’s accumulated effort.” “Then break down the effort,” I said. “Lauren,” Mina said softly, in that careful tone people use when they want the room calm more than they want the truth. “Maybe don’t get technical.” “It’s already technical,” I said. “He’s using a drive built from files I provided and saying I owe him because he chose to do extra things I didn’t ask for. That’s specific, not emotional.” Derek gave a short laugh through his nose. “You are making this sound ugly in front of staff.” I glanced at Nadia. She kept her face neutral, but her hands stopped moving on the keyboard. I turned back to him. “No, I’m asking you to say what I supposedly owe.” He started with the private seating area. I said, “We’re sitting in a regular family section next to a brochure stand.” He said he had blocked it off. Mina looked around like she was seeing the room for the first time. Then he moved to after-hours coordination. “You mean the calls where you asked me to resend cleaner clips because the first set made the model sound patchy?” I asked. His jaw tightened. “That was part of the process.” “I spent two nights pulling better audio because you said the system needed longer samples with less background noise. I did that at home. You remember that, right?” Mina blinked at me. “You did all that?” “Yes,” I said. “I transferred Grandma’s old cassettes, labeled them, cut out static, and uploaded replacements when Derek told me the first batch wouldn’t build a stable voice.” Derek leaned forward. “Because I told you what would work.” “For the voice model,” I said. “Which is what your showroom is using in the demo.” He didn’t answer right away. That pause mattered. So I kept going while it was still there. “And the ‘custom memory sequence’ you mentioned? Those family stories came from the notes I sent. The church clip was from my phone. The birthday audio was from my cloud folder. Even the clip of Grandma saying all the grandkids’ names came from a recording I found and cleaned up after you asked if I had anything warmer for the demo.” Mina turned to him. “For the demo?” Derek shifted in his chair. “For the memorial package.” I said, “You said demo first.” He waved that away. “It serves both purposes.” There it was. Not full proof, not the whole picture, but enough for the shape of it to stop looking like a favor done for me. Every time he described some extra thing he had managed, I could trace it back to a file I had supplied, a request I had fulfilled, or a piece of labor I had done because he said the system needed it. I pulled up my phone and unlocked the folder with my upload confirmations. “March ninth,” I said. “You texted asking for cleaner speech samples. March tenth, I sent eleven files. March twelfth, you asked for stories without music under them because the model separated voice better that way. March thirteenth, I uploaded six more. March fourteenth, you asked if I had anything with Grandma laughing naturally because it would ‘humanize the render.'” Mina slowly set her coffee down again. Derek said, “You’re reading private work messages out loud like that proves anything.” “It proves I wasn’t just passively receiving your help,” I said. “It proves I was feeding this build.” Nadia stepped away from the terminal then, just enough to be closer without walking into the middle of us. I looked at her and asked the question directly. “When a family voice model gets better after new source audio is uploaded, is that because the system had more material to build from?” Nadia answered carefully. “In general, yes. More clean source material can improve output quality.” Derek cut in. “That’s a broad statement.” She gave a small, professional nod. “It is. I can’t speak to family arrangements. Only process.” That was all she said, but it landed. Process. Material. Output quality. Concrete words. Not family fog. I looked at the black drive case again. The label had Evelyn’s file number, the showroom barcode, and the date of the last update. Yesterday. “When was that updated?” I asked. Derek’s hand moved off the case. “Routine sync.” “With what files?” “Lauren, don’t do this here.” “With what files?” He looked at Mina instead of me. “This is exactly what I mean. I do all the heavy lifting, and now I’m being cross-examined like some criminal because I asked for basic fairness.” But the sentence came out too polished, too ready, and it didn’t answer the question. So I answered it with the only facts I had. “Yesterday morning I got an automated confirmation that my final upload batch had been processed,” I said. “That was a set of Grandma’s voicemail clips from 2019. If the drive was updated yesterday, then that update came from my files, not from some favor you floated out of nowhere.” For the first time since I sat down, Derek didn’t jump in immediately. He looked at my phone, then at the drive, then toward Nadia’s terminal. Mina’s mouth parted slightly. “Wait. So the thing he’s saying he pushed through today only exists because Lauren kept supplying what they needed?” Derek spoke over her. “It exists because I knew how to move it through the system.” But now that sentence sounded different. Not like a rescue. More like an.