Chapter 6: FRIDAY's Four-Minute Gap

The request went through Carol.

I had not expected it to go any other way. FRIDAY's cooperation with civilian personnel operates on a tiered authorization model — I have spent enough time in the building to understand approximately where I fall in that hierarchy, which is somewhere between a catered event and a potted plant. Useful, in the right context. Not independently mobile.

I composed the request at six forty-three in the morning, sitting on my office floor with the last of the correspondence stacked in its folder and a cup of coffee that had been hot approximately once. The language I used was deliberate: I asked for full sensor log access pertaining to the forty-seventh floor and adjacent transit zones for a fourteen-hour window bracketing the estimated time of death, framed as documentation support for an ongoing internal review. I did not use the word investigation. I did not use my name in the subject line. I addressed it to the building systems administration queue, which is the closest equivalent FRIDAY has to an inbox nobody monitors closely.