The video quality marked this as at least five years old—the slightly grainy texture and occasional digital artifacts typical of the department's older recording system. Through the lens, the boy in the jacket fidgeted to life, despondent and slumped, off-set shoulders resembling Saint Sebastian, waiting for God to finally make his presence known and rapture him away from this place.

  A man walked between the table and camera, the movement briefly disrupting the auto-focus. His gray slacks and white dress shirt caught the harsh overhead lighting, the occupied holster at his waist casting a sharp shadow against the fabric. The significance of having a gun in an interrogation room stood out immediately. Beyond the obvious, the presence of a firearm immediately cast the legitimacy of the interrogation into doubt, opening up the prosecution to coercion claims. But having watched this before, I knew it had very little to do with a court of law.

  Miles—at least five years younger, though judging from the accumulated wrinkles and wealth of gray absent in this footage, it could have easily been twenty—bent over beside the boy, his face briefly passing through the fluorescent glare before vanishing from frame. The camera's fixed angle caught only the rigid line of his back, hands planted on the table, a coiling tension visible even through his shirt.

  The microphone caught his whispered words, though barely: "... okay?"

  "It doesn't matter." The boy's voice came through clearer, aimed more directly at the recording equipment.

  "...Hungry, thirsty?"

  "I'm fine, Miles."

  The emphasis on first name and avoidance of his familial title was the opening backhand. And from the way Miles stepped away, retreating from the initial niceties and slipping back into his professional presence, he'd received it that way. He took his place at the opposite side of the table, his face obscured from the camera's view.

  "State your full name for the record, please." The room's acoustics made his words bounce hollowly off the bare walls.

  The boy rolled his eyes, the gesture exaggerated enough to be visible even under the poor lighting. "Do we really have to do this?"

  "State your full name, Jim."

  "Dad—"

  "It’d be in your best interest to stop acting like being picked up holding a backpack loaded to the zippers with a Schedule 1 substance is a mild inconvenience." Miles cut in harshly, showing edge. The microphone peaked slightly at his raised volume. "It's possession with intent to distribute. The sentencing guidelines scale up by quantity, and just from looking at it, you'd be out-at-fifty kinds of fucked. If a friend in the PD hadn't caught wind and ran interference long enough for me to get here, this would be the beginning of a very different night. And let's not pretend like this is the first time. State your name for the damn cameras." He tossed a folder on the table where it landed with a slap that briefly distorted the audio.

  "James... Regius... Dempsey." The boy dragged out, glaring daggers as Miles passed through frame again.

  "What kind of middle name is Regius?" Miles asked.

  "Ask my dickhead father. Maybe you can stop by and hold a conversation with my mother while you're at it."

  "Touche," Miles’ reply carried a hint of mirth that immediately vanished when he spoke again. "I'm going to ask you a question, James."

  The boy cringed. "I've lost my legal right to Jim?"

  "No. Your rights are fully intact. But this is my interrogation room, and on this hallowed ground, I'll call you whatever I like."

  "Now we see the fascist attempt to establish his authority, using obvious methods to destabilize and goad the victim." James said, taking on a sarcastic version of the narrator in a nature documentary.

  "Oh, we'll talk about victims. There's plenty of time to get to that." Miles paced to the other side of the room. "Should I go ahead, or do you wanna keep cracking wise?"

  The mention of victims seemed to mollify James, whose jaw was set, skin slightly paler under the fluorescent lights. "I'm listening."

  "A perfectly reflective mirror is falling at relativistic speeds. What color would a red laser appear if reflected off the mirror's surface, observed from a stationary position?" Miles asked, his voice casual against the room's hollow acoustics.

  James blinked slowly, the movement captured clearly as he leaned forward into the light. "Now you want to help me study?"

  "Just answer—"

  "It's a shit question because the answer is relative. If the mirror falls perpendicular, the reflected laser would appear the same color." James spat out with annoyance. "That changes if there's motion. If the mirror is moving toward the observer, it'd be blue-shifted, if it's moving away, it'd be red-shifted. It involves two Doppler shifts, one when the light hits the mirror, another when it's reflected. Now do you want the formula for observed frequency, or are we fucking done here?"

  "Quick." Miles nodded as he paced, his shadow stretching across the wall with each pass. "Always were, even before you could walk. Top of your class in highschool, locked down one hell of a scholarship. The world is your oyster. Or at least, it should be."

  "Haven’t you heard? A degree isn’t worth shit anymore, regardless of what school it’s from." James murmured, slumping down further in his chair, the dark fabric of his jacket nearly disappearing into the video's poor contrast.

  Miles made a not-quite gesture. "Depends on the job, depends on the school. I’ve said it before, the drug use? Not that much of a surprise. People with high IQs often partake recreationally, specifically around young adulthood. You're smart, curious about the world around you, and open to new experiences. It's a natural pipeline." Miles leaned forward on the table again, his expression cold where it caught the light. "What I'd like an explanation for, is why your privileged, comfortably middle-class, self-righteous ass is slinging on campus for the most prolific repeated offender in the metroplex."

  "Come on." James scoffed, the audio catching the slight tremor in his voice.

  "It's true." Miles shook his head, crossing back through the frame. "Roderick’s the subject of an open RICO case. DPD wants him bad. Local office wants him more. When they come down on him—not if, but when—they will rain down hell on anyone and everyone in the crossfire. His entire chain of operations."

  "It’s not like I’m friends with the guy. He’s just a supplier. And a reliable one, at that." James shrugged indifferently, though the camera caught the slight tensing of his shoulders.

  The microphone picked up the subtle grind of Miles' teeth as he pulled a plastic baggy from his pocket containing a brown vial. The fluorescent lights caught the glass, creating a brief lens flare as he held it up. "Recognize this?"

  "Really?" James reached for it.

  Miles pulled it back. "Hands off, sticky fingers. Describe it for me."

  "2C-L." James sighed, pulling back his hood and scratching the back of his head vigorously, the movement jerky and agitated. "Designer drug, basically synthetic, high-potency psilocybin that sidesteps the tolerance issue of LSD and mushrooms."

  "Skip the ad read." Miles growled, voice dropping low enough that the microphone barely caught it. "One-hundred times the potency of mushrooms, ten times the potency of LSD. 'Solving' the tolerance issue only opens it up for abuse. Instead of tripping and waiting a month for a similar experience, you can have the exact same experience the same day. There's been countless instances of drug-induced psychosis stemming from this exact substance and its precursor."

  "Because of the motherfuckers who don't listen. They think they're tough shit and take the whole dropper instead of a drop. An overdose of practically anything is liable to fuck you up." James leaned forward, his face catching the harsh overhead light, emphasizing the sweat now visible on his brow. "Do you want to know who my clients are? Who I sell this shit to?"

  "I can get some paper and a pen, if you want to make a list."

  "Fuck you." James growled, the words distorting slightly as they peaked the microphone. "They're not hardened criminals. They're just people. Most with severe depression or anxiety, who don't interact well with pharmacological anti-depressants. People who can't afford to go to therapy. Random-ass twenty-six-year-olds who just got kicked off their parents’ medical insurance. Grad students who are just now discovering that it's hard enough to find a decent paying job, let alone one that actually covers everything."

  "The anti-depressants were that rough on you. Really?" Miles' voice carried the derision of a tired parent, though the camera angle missed his expression.

  "You want a list? Prozac made me feel like a zombie. Zoloft gave me the perpetual shits, Lexapro murdered my libido, and Wellbutrin made me so ridiculously angry it felt like I was going to explode. But the first time I took a drop of 2C-L, it was like the fog from all that other shit just... blew over. Like I was finally clear again." James dabbed his forehead with the end of his sleeve. "So yeah, helping other people get the same clarity, for reasonable prices, seemed kind of humanitarian."

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  "Humanitarian." Miles repeated. He stepped closer to the table, his shadow falling across James' face. "You're sweating."

  "It's hot in here."

  "Why are you doing this, Jim?" Miles asked, then cut his son off before he could speak, his voice dropping to a level that barely registered on the recording. "If it's just chemical, that's okay, you don't have to have a reason. Sometimes depression doesn't make sense." Vulnerability crept into his voice. "You were doing better before you moved out. A lot better. Things between your mother and I haven't been great lately. Nothing official’s happened, though we’re living separately now. But if you’d feel more comfortable having at least one of us around, you’re always welcome–"

  "It's not moving out." James grimaced, massaging his temples, his movements increasingly erratic. "It's the world."

  "The whole world, huh?" Miles tried to sound sympathetic, the attempt falling flat against the room's hollow acoustics.

  "What the fuck would you know." James snapped, his voice sharp enough to cause the audio to clip. "You came up in the best socioeconomic period possible. Plenty of work to go around, wages and prices that made sense. Now, it’s a miracle for someone in my generation to even afford a house. Corporations keep buying up everything on the market and driving up prices only to whore the properties they own out to Airbnb. Politicians jerk money out of the corporate cock all the while pretending to represent us, shaking the rattle of the day about shit that doesn't matter, debating tax rebates, or whether your home collection of AR's can have a fucking pistol grip while people die and they get fat on human suffering."

  "Take a couple steps down from the soapbox. You're being melodramatic."

  "Am I? Really?" James scowled, leaning forward into the harsh light. "Just look around. We're in multiple wars at any given time, but that's nothing new. We’re supposedly in this new, technologically sophisticated era, and a fifth of us still can’t even read. The internet is becoming increasingly commodified, access to information and education eroding as it gets sold off piece by piece, what little culture we have stems from the social media addled perception of how we should live, all adding up to a cluttered, soulless nothing. Our leaders are just letting us die, and suffer, because as long as our knives are pointed at each other instead of them, the status quo is maintained, and they get to drain every lucrative drop from the world while it dies. What's the point of living? Finding someone to love and having children, when those children are doomed to inherit this shithole?"

  Miles looked down as he took a moment to formulate a response, the silence stretching on for several seconds. "Corruption’s a bureaucratic pastime. Not saying it’s right, or that it should be ignored, but to some extent it’s always been that way. Eventually, things do change for the better. World events and global turmoil always feel more significant at the time than they do in the rearview. Wrongs are eventually righted."

  The camera caught James wiping more sweat from his face, the sleeve of his jacket visibly damp where it passed through the light.

  "Haven't dosed since they brought you in." Miles said, a statement rather than a question.

  "Huh?" James started, the movement sharp and jerky. He shook his head. "No, I guess not."

  "This is going to be difficult to hear." Miles loosened the collar of his shirt, the rustle of fabric picked up by the sensitive microphone. Then he rolled up his sleeves, stepping partially out of frame. "I've been debating whether to even bring it up, but as you're already experiencing symptoms—"

  "Symptoms?" James stared, snapping a second later, his voice rising. "What symptoms?"

  Slowly, Miles reached out and picked up the plastic bag with the vial, the brown glass catching the light as it swung from side to side. "Here's the problem with designer crap. Even if you know the exact chemical compound, you never really know exactly what you're getting. For the most part, you're right. 2C-L is a synthetic hallucinogenic. Funny thing, hallucinogenics. Unpopular. The fact that most of them are schedule 1 and lack addictive properties make them pretty cold product in the trade. Plenty of people try mushrooms or acid once, have a decent—or not so decent—experience, and never touch them again with no issue. Unfortunately, this isn’t just that. According to the labs, there's a reason Roderick's been hocking this crap all over the metroplex.” He tucked the bag back into his jacket pocket.

  "Bullshit." James hissed, his face catching the light as he leaned forward.

  "Afraid not. With regular use, it’s around thirty times more addictive than heroin. Not quite fentanyl levels. But not far from them, either."

  "Bullshit!" The camera caught the color draining from his face, creating a stark contrast under the harsh lighting. "I used it carefully for months. Kept an eye on my dose. Even skipped a day every once in a while."

  "It's all in the research." Miles passed the folder across the table. With a trembling hand that blurred slightly in the frame rate, James snatched it up and started skimming the contents. "Takes a while to shift your brain chemistry, and by the time it does, if you're taking it daily, you won't know the difference."

  A long, pained silence passed between them, marked only by the sound of papers rustling as James' expression traveled through the turbulent stages of grief, ending with depression. The video’s progress bar continued its steady advance.

  "How many people have you sold to?" Miles asked.

  "Too many." James' voice was so quiet the microphone barely registered it.

  "You didn't know."

  "I should have known."

  "It's okay, Jim. It's gonna be okay."

  "For me—" He cut off.

  Not for them.

  I rewound this section several times, watching Miles' body language, the way he missed the importance of the cut-off statement. If he'd picked up on why, exactly, James was so horrified, the entire chain of events that followed might have gone far differently. Instead, he took his son's hand, gesture partially obscured by the camera angle. "We're gonna get you back in AA. Same group as before. You know the people there, they love you, and you love them. You'll have plenty of time to get clean before college."

  "I sold to some of them."

  "Then they'll be easier to find when it's time to make amends." Miles paused, and the burgeoning sense of dread grew, almost insufferable even through the years-old footage. "For now, there's still some unpleasantness to deal with."

  James' face was in his hands. His response was inaudible even after multiple replays.

  "When they picked you up, DPD seized a considerable amount of product. This get out of jail free card doesn't come with a return of illegitimate assets, which means, as far as Roderick's concerned, you're in the hole for at least that much, depending on the vig." Miles deflated as he spoke, his shadow seeming to shrink against the wall. "Silver lining. They want to move on him soon, and the local office needs someone at your level for that."

  Suddenly, James' head shot up. He swiped at tears that caught the fluorescent glare running down his face. "Do they... want me to testify?"

  "Hell no." Miles snapped, then repeated it again, more quietly as the audio normalized. "The shitshow that follows a witness in a RICO case is no joke. I won't let them put you through that. Not happening. I need you to give me someone else. You know the schedule, you know when they'll be loaded. Just need a name and the right place and time. We move on them, and your role in this is over."

  The camera caught the slow horror dawning on James' face as he absorbed what his father was saying. "The only other dealers I know of are literally like me. Kids who think they're doing the world a favor and have no idea what they're really selling. Most of them are still in highschool."

  "Yeah, Roderick loves kids. Especially kids from the suburbs." Miles stood, his head vanishing from frame. His hands were in his pockets, but they were visibly protruding, tightening into fists. "Young, first-time offenders of certain persuasions get lighter sentences. Quick turnaround. Like you said before, the world isn't fair. You have certain advantages they don't. It's unfortunate, but that's life. This is how a RICO case is prosecuted. You start flipping at the bottom, and keep flipping upwards, until everyone culpable is caught in the net."

  "Let me testify. I did this shit, let me own it." James insisted, his voice cracking slightly in the recording.

  Miles snorted. "Your name would leak, your scholarship would be gone, and this shit would follow you for the rest of your life. For once, we're doing this my way. 2C-L has already fucked up enough lives. It doesn't need to ruin yours."

  "This is my fault."

  "Less than a fraction of a percentile of this is your fault."

  "You have to let me help. Let me do something. I won't fuck it up."

  "Stop." Miles roared, his voice loud enough that it peaked the audio into distortion. "Haven't you done enough? We'll do everything we can to protect them, but you're staying out of the crossfire. One more person is a drop in the bucket. Do you fucking understand me—" The camera caught him grabbing James by his collar when a knock at the door interrupted, the sound sharp in the room's acoustics.

  Through the audio, I could hear the door opening, and Hawkins' voice called out. "Miles."

  "What?"

  "Talk to you for a minute?"

  Miles seemed to deflate, taking a step away from James and studying him, unsteady on his feet. He paused, just on the verge of being out of frame. "Want that name when I come back."

  James nodded, his face betraying nothing as he came into clearer focus. The complete absence of emotion. Unburdened. At peace. The Moment of Clarity. I'd replayed this section countless times, the digital artifacts growing more maddening with each viewing.

  Once the door closed, the audio picking up the muffled sound of Hawkins undoubtedly laying into Miles for losing his temper, James slowly looked around, panning the room. He looked up in the corner first—checking the interrogation room's CCTV cam, looking for its recording light. His gaze moved deliberately back towards this camera, examining it in detail, and for the last few seconds of footage, his eyes pierced the lens, forming a connection across time that made my skin crawl.

  "It was never about the money. I really thought I was doing something good. Something worthwhile. Road to hell, good intentions, blah, blah, blah. But this is just one more in a long line of messes I made for you. All this time you’ve refused to give up. But it’s different now. It’s hard to even wrap my head around how many people I’ve hurt. How many lives I’ve ruined. This isn’t your fault. You gave me a way out. I just… can’t take it.”

  James turned his head to the side and pressed a fist to his mouth, as if to cough. Only the slightest, outermost edge of the glass vial was visible at the edge of his fist. Easy to spot, now that I knew what to look for, clear enough that he’d removed the bag beneath the table, but I still had yet to catch the exact moment that he’d made the lift. He swallowed, shuddering. “Mom… I’ll always love you. And Dad–”

  There was the sound of a door opening and closing again. Miles’ shadow entered the frame, he murmured something inaudible, then the video went black.

  I scrolled the file backward and watched it again.

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