Chapter 2
Access Revoked
By the time Naomi reached the pavement, three reporters had the misconduct allegation and no one had the safety limit.
Gabriel Reed, union counsel and the engineer she had pushed out years earlier, offered his phone. She called Priya from memory.
Priya answered on the fourth ring. Naomi heard traffic, then the clipped silence Priya used when she was deciding whether to be angry. “Tell me you did not take the calibration key.”
“I took the only thing that can prove their test was altered.”
“That is not the same as being allowed to take it.”
Naomi looked through the lobby glass. Northstar’s security director stood beside the revolving doors, speaking to a police officer. The launch screen still carried her face, but someone had changed the caption to INTERNAL INVESTIGATION. Employees filed past without meeting her eyes.
“They revoked my access before I finished the demonstration,” Naomi said. “Then Gabriel showed me a complaint that was filed six minutes before the first alarm.”
Gabriel raised his phone. “The complaint names you as the person who bypassed the safety lock. It also says the prototype was unstable.”
“The prototype was stable.”
“Then we need the raw logs, not your confidence.”
They crossed to a coffee shop opposite the tower. Naomi used the back booth and opened the copy of the launch deck she had saved to a private drive. The load chart showed a clean rise, then a flat line at the exact moment the screen had changed. She had assumed the projector failed. Gabriel zoomed in on the metadata.
“This file was exported at 8:14,” he said. “Your rehearsal ended at 8:30.”
Naomi felt the room narrow. Someone had prepared the replacement before she ever stepped onstage.
Priya arrived carrying two paper bags and the expression of a woman who had already lost a job for telling the truth. She placed a server badge on the table. “I copied the access report before they locked me out. Your badge entered Lab Three at 7:42. It never opened the cabinet.”
“Who did?” Naomi asked.
“A temporary credential issued to the chief operating officer.”
Gabriel stopped the recording on the moment the audience laughed. Behind the stage curtain, a technician’s reflection showed a second operator at the control console. “We need to preserve this before Northstar calls it stolen material,” he said.
Naomi wanted to call the board. She wanted to call every reporter who had repeated the allegation. Instead, she opened a blank message to the company’s compliance address. If she sent the evidence from a personal account, they could call it retaliation. If she waited, the logs could disappear.
“You have one hour before the press cycle resets,” Priya said. “Choose what you can afford to lose.”
Naomi attached the badge report, the altered deck, and a photograph of the calibration key. Then she added one sentence: I am requesting an independent hold on all Northstar prototype records.
Before she pressed send, Gabriel’s phone lit up with a new message from an unknown number. It contained a photograph of Naomi’s apartment door and a warning: Return the key, or the company will make the misconduct allegation permanent.
Naomi sent the packet anyway. The receipt appeared, and immediately her bank app displayed a pending freeze on every account connected to Northstar stock.
She stood, slid the calibration key into the lining of her coat, and looked at the tower. “Then we make the allegation expensive.”
"Do not copy anything," Naomi said. "Preserve the machine where it is."
Compliance officer Simone Brooks joined the call and warned that preservation itself could be called obstruction. Her careful wording told Naomi the company was recording.
Voss offered an internal appeal at nine the next morning. Gabriel read the terms: attending would waive external disclosure until review ended.
"It is a trap," he said.
"It is also the only room where they must state the accusation."
Naomi attended. Voss expanded one allegation into nine, including a claim that she falsified the original patent notebook twelve years earlier.
He slid a photograph across the table. The notebook page bore her signature and a date when she had been in hospital with her mother.
The forgery was obvious to Naomi. To everyone else, it looked like proof.
Gabriel found a witness before they reached the loading dock. A night custodian named Marisol had been assigned to Lab Three during the rehearsal. She had no reason to trust Naomi, and that made her statement useful. Marisol remembered a man in a Northstar jacket entering with the temporary credential and carrying a second control tablet.
“I did not know his name,” Marisol said. “I know he told me to leave the floor.”
Naomi asked whether Marisol would sign an affidavit. The custodian looked at the cardboard box, then at the red access light. “If I sign, they fire me.”
“They may fire you anyway,” Naomi said. “At least let the record show why.”
Marisol agreed, but only after Gabriel arranged an independent recording and a safe address. Naomi felt the shape of the fight change. It was no longer a founder defending a product. It was a line of people deciding whether a company could erase them one by one.
At the dock, the machine's status light blinked green through the glass. Someone had powered it back on.
Naomi pulled on the spare visitor coat Gabriel carried. “We are not stealing the prototype,” she said. “We are making sure it survives the night.”
Then Simone revoked Naomi's building access retroactively to six months before the launch, making every later lab entry appear unauthorized.
Naomi stood outside the lab with her hands empty while the access panel flashed red. The building had been her second address for eleven years. Security had changed the code before she finished the appeal call.
Gabriel arrived carrying a cardboard box from her office. He set it on the pavement and checked the label twice.
"They packed your mother's photograph," he said.
Naomi opened the box. The photograph showed her mother beside the first Northstar prototype, one hand on the housing and the other on a patent folder. The folder was missing.
"What else?"
"Your notebooks. Not the originals. Copies."
The distinction mattered. Someone had removed the pages that recorded the recall test and left the pages that made Naomi look reckless.
Simone came through the lobby with a tablet. "You are required to attend the appeal at nine."
"You revoked access retroactively."
"The audit identified unauthorized entries."
"Entries made by your badge system."
Simone's expression stayed careful. "Bring counsel."
Gabriel waited until she left. "The company drive is mirrored to a compliance server. We can subpoena it."
"If we wait for a subpoena, the license transfers."
He looked toward the boardroom windows. Owen stood behind the glass with Voss. They were watching Naomi decide whether to fight in public.
Naomi called Priya. The call went to voicemail. A minute later, an automated message arrived: EMPLOYEE SUSPENDED PENDING SECURITY REVIEW.
The suspension included Priya's name, her home address, and a warning against contacting Naomi.
Naomi closed the box. "We need the original test."
Gabriel pointed to the loading dock. "The machine is still inside."
"Then we go in before they move it."
He shook his head. "That becomes trespass."
"They have already rewritten the record."
The appeal email arrived as they spoke. Attendance was mandatory, and the first line stated that Naomi's absence would be treated as admission of misconduct.
She opened the message, then looked at the locked door. The company had made both choices dangerous. She chose the one that kept the evidence within reach.
"Find me a witness," she told Gabriel. "I am going back in."
The forgery was obvious to Naomi. To everyone else, it looked like proof.