THE GHOST INVENTOR SON-IN-LAW

Chapter 1: Water for the Parasite

"Owen, my glass is empty. Again."

I stepped forward and filled Helena Tan's water glass, slowly, the way I'd filled it every month for two years. She didn't look at me. She never did, unless she wanted the guests to see me.

My name is Owen Ward. I'm thirty-five years old, I work the night shift at the IT helpdesk of Tan Dynamics, and at the monthly Tan family dinner, I don't sit at the table. I stand behind my mother-in-law's chair with a crystal jug in my hands, because Helena likes her friends to see that her son-in-law "earns his keep."

"You'll love this," Jason said, leaning back in his chair. He was thirty-one, Bernard's son and head of sales, with slicked hair and a watch that cost more than my yearly pay. "This afternoon, the printer on the fourth floor jammed. Guess who they sent?"

"Not him," Helena said, already smiling.

"Him. One full hour, Aunt Helena. He took the whole thing apart, put it back together, and it still printed everything upside down."

The table laughed. Bernard laughed loudest, his heavy shoulders shaking. Even Philip, my father-in-law, gave a tired little smile into his soup.

I smiled too, and said nothing.

That printer had a cracked roller, and I could have fixed it in four minutes. But a man who fixes printers in four minutes gets noticed, and a man who gets noticed gets remembered. So I took an hour, and I printed everything upside down.

At the far end of the table, Grandma Grace sat straight-backed in her chair, her white hair in a neat bun and her jade walking stick resting against her knee. She didn't laugh. She rarely did.

Beside her sat my wife.

Sophia was twenty-nine, slim, with straight black hair cut to her shoulders and a silver watch on her wrist that had belonged to her grandfather. She was reading something on her phone with a small frown. She hadn't looked up once since I came in.

"Philip," Helena said, tapping her husband's arm. "Tell them. Tell them the good news before I burst."

Philip set down his spoon. He was fifty-eight, thin and grey, and lately his worried eyes looked even more worried than usual.

"It isn't all good news," he said quietly. "Tan Dynamics owes fifty million dollars to our creditors. The payment is due in fourteen days, and we can't pay it."

The table went still. Bernard stopped laughing.

"Fourteen days?" Jason said. "Uncle Philip, why didn't you..."

"But," Helena cut in brightly, "there's a way out. Ryan, darling, show them."

Ryan Sato stood up from his seat beside Sophia. He was the company's chief technology officer, handsome and charming, with a smile that made the older ladies at charity dinners forget their own names. He opened a leather folder.

"A government-linked security firm called Sentinel Systems has offered us a contract," Ryan said. "Eighty million dollars. We'll help them install AURA in hospitals across Crestport."

AURA. The name rippled through the room like warm water. Everyone in the world knew AURA, the AI from Blackwell Systems that ran our traffic lights, our street cameras and half the power grid.

I kept my face still. I was very good at that.

"Eighty million," Bernard breathed. "That saves us. That saves everything."

"Ryan found this deal all by himself," Helena said, beaming at him across the table. Then she turned and looked straight at Sophia, and her voice carried to every corner of the room. "A man like Ryan builds a family's future. Honestly, darling, sometimes I think you married the wrong man."

Sophia didn't look up from her phone.

"The first agreement is right here," Ryan said, laying a page in front of Philip with a gold pen. "The final signing will be at a gala at the Crestport Grand Hotel in ten days. This page just tells Sentinel we're serious."

Philip hesitated for only a second. Then he signed his name.

The guests clapped. Helena kissed his cheek.

Ryan set the folder down on the table beside my hand while he poured himself more wine. The second page lay open in front of me. I read it while I refilled Bernard's glass.

Condition Four: before work begins, every Tan family member and every employee of Tan Dynamics must complete a full biometric and brain-pattern scan, to be stored by Sentinel Systems for security purposes.

I stopped pouring.

I knew that scan. I knew the exact name of the machine printed at the bottom of the page, and the small symbol beside it, a grey square with a line through it. I'd seen that machine every month for ten years in a place that doesn't exist on any map. It read the patterns in a person's memory like a book.

If I sat in that chair, it would read me in seconds. It would find every memory that was supposed to be gone.

Water spilled over the edge of Bernard's glass and onto his trousers.

"Hey!" He jumped up. "Watch it, you idiot!"

"Sorry," I said. Then, before I could stop myself, I said something I hadn't said in two years at this table. "Dad, I don't think we should go through with this."

The room went silent.

Jason laughed first. "Oh, wow. The printer man has an opinion on government contracts!"

"Owen," Philip said wearily, "this isn't your..."

"The scan on page two," I said. "Who stores the data? Where does it go? We don't know anything about Sentinel."

Helena stood up slowly. She was fifty-five, glamorous, with dyed red hair and diamond earrings that caught the candlelight. She picked up her glass of red wine, walked around her chair and stopped in front of me.

Then she threw it in my face.

The wine was cold. It ran into my eyes, down my glasses, into the collar of my grey hoodie and onto the white tablecloth.

"A parasite," Helena said, very clearly, "has no voice in this house."

Somebody gasped. Somebody else giggled.

"Philip, enough is enough," Bernard said, still dabbing his trousers. "Two years we've fed him. Make Sophia divorce him. Tonight."

I wiped the wine from my glasses and looked at my wife.

For a moment, Sophia finally lifted her eyes from her phone. They were sharp and dark and cold, and they rested on me the way you'd look at a stain on a carpet.

"Go clean yourself up, Owen," she said.

That was all.

I set down the jug on the sideboard and walked out of the dining room with wine dripping from my hair. Nobody followed. Behind me, the conversation started again, louder and happier than before, as if a window had been opened to let out a bad smell.

My room was a small space beside the garage, with a cot, a desk and a window that faced the garden wall. I sat down on the cot in the dark and stared at my hands.

They were shaking.

Not because of Helena. I'd stopped feeling Helena a long time ago. They were shaking because of a grey square with a line through it, printed on a contract my father-in-law had just signed.

On the desk beside me, my cheap phone buzzed.

I picked it up. The screen showed a message from a number I didn't know, a number with no name and no area code at all.

It was a photo of a single news headline. Under it were five words.