Chapter 19: Discovery

With the economic bubble burst still showing no sign of lessening, many people were beginning to feel the effects as the non-essential items that people normally bought were becoming harder to buy due to the inflation that had now hit the market hard.

Jena sat in her cramped office which only had room for a desk, a hover chair, and an ancient file cabinet.

She stood up and stretched after deciding to take a break from her grueling work.

Living on the top floor with the politicians and lawyers as well as dealing with things at her former job she had learned quite a lot about paperwork and contracts, mainly how to spot bad contracts that screwed you over. Because of this, she was put in charge of taking care of the paperwork for her uncle's Mechanical repair garage / spare part shop.

Shockingly enough her uncle had been keeping all his records on paper!

“Ughh, just remembering that first week makes me want to smack someone,” said Jena as she rubbed her eyes.

This office had been filled to the brim with paper files stacked on top of each other. There was no order to the mess and whoever had been in charge of the files before had just randomly shoved the files inside the office.

During that first week, she had spent the entire time sitting outside the small office in the narrow winding path that cut through the towering piles of junk, while she digitized the documents from the office and tried to sort them.

When she had finally cleared the small office several months ago her uncle had informed her that the office was only the assistance's office. His office was on the other side of the garage and was even a bigger mess.

Now that she had finished digitizing the last of the documents, a large blue holo-screen hovered over the desk neatly displaying all the files going back several years.

Jena sat back down in her hoverchair and continued reading, sorting, and inspecting all aspects of the Mechanical repair garage / spare part shop.

Her brows behind her thick reading glasses furrowed into a frown.

If she had been looking at everything just using the paper documents she would have probably not noticed it, but now that the accounting system had worked its magic, she could see there were several discrepancies marked in red that were being pointed out by the system.

The documents showed that the shop had been losing money for some time now but it was not that noticeable. But now with the bubble burst affecting everything the loss of credits was far more noticeable.

Someone was stealing money from the shop!

Not directly from the business bank account, but by using the spare part purchase scam.

How It worked was when the shop needed to buy a part or parts for a project, the paperwork would always list the parts at a higher cost than they were and the difference was pocketed by the scammer.

As she continued to read through the information, she found that whenever her uncle found a part he had to have in his collection of junk, he sent someone to buy it and the same thing seemed to happen.

Jena opened a blank holo doc and started to type out the names of the people that kept popping up.

When she was sure that she had found all the culprits, she had the system flag all mentions of their names in the system.

“How is this possible?” muttered Jena as she looked at the new information.

The number of mentions was staggering... they had been doing this for years. Each person had already scammed several hundred thousand credits from the shop.

She scanned through the work logs and found that all those that had been flagged also came to work several hours late and left an hour or two early.

Jena's frown grew even deeper.

What was her uncle doing allowing for such poor behavior and still paying them as if they had worked full time.

With this and the part price scamming the shop was losing more money than they could take in from their current projects.

Soon the business would go bankrupt which would heavily affect her uncle's social credit score.

Not only that if anyone declared bankruptcy the [Office of Reason] would put a black mark on their record and bar them from reopening or starting another business. Failure was not rewarded by the party of Mother and Father.

If you failed they would view you as being a risky gamble as well as an unreliable person who would not be able to properly pay taxes. It was better to give the land, or building to another person to test their luck. More often than not the person receiving the land or business had some connections to the party of Mother and Father or they had done some meritorious deed for the party and were being rewarded with the chance to make money for the party.

With a swipe of her hand, the floating documents on the big blue holoscreen were replaced with a few rows of floating heads showing the faces and information under each one of the shop's employees.

All but two of the pictures had a red X covering their faces. Meaning they were the only two who had not been part of the scamming and they came to work on time and worked their full shift.

She read the information in their profiles as well as the notes that had been left by her uncle.

William, age 19. Good mechanic, very dense. He seems to like hiding in the corner of the shop everyday even when not on the clock.

Julia, age 18. SUPER CLUTZ! DO NOT GIVE HER ANY TOOLS! She cut my Rare 'Blue Unicorn chip' in half! Given the task of being Williams’s assistant.

She swiped up and the screen changed to the multiple security cameras placed inside the building. After a short time searching she found both William and Julia the only other two people currently inside the shop at such an early hour. They were both working in one of the cleared corner workspaces.

Due to the cheap security system package, there was no sound but she could see that the two were diligently working on an old Hovercar.

Jena exited her office and made her way through the maze of parts before stopping at the corner of one of the junk piles near the workstation that the two were working at.

She silently watched the two from her perfect hiding spot.

Will was currently laying on a hoverboard under the jacked-up hovercar trying to replace or fix several of the old rusted and cracked parts, while Julia stood nearby and would hand him whatever part or tool he needed.

“Umm... Will...” said Julia in a soft hesitant voice.

Will's grease-smudged face popped out from under the Hover car and he looked over to her with a confused look and asked, “Yeah?”

Julia's face flushed red and her eyes fluttered around the area trying to regain control. “N... it's nothing....” she said as she looked at the ground.

“Oh...Okay...” said Will as his head disappeared back under the Hover car.

Ten minutes later...

“...Will...”

“Is something wrong? Is it your stomach? I know we have been working for a few hours, we can take a break if you need to eat a snack,” said Will sincerely.

“N... No, I'm fine... I can still keep working...” said the rosy pink-faced Julia.

“Okay... Just let me know if anything comes up.”

“I will...”

This went on for the entire time Jena watched the two. Making her want to smack the two idiots and tell them to just go on a date already!

She walked away with a better understanding of the two. Although they had their quirks they seemed to be good workers. As for the others... she would have to talk to her uncle about them. Which was where she was going right now.

Her uncle was now leisurely sipping his extremely bitter coffee in his recently cleared and cleaned office. He was reading the morning's E-newspaper before he had to start working on one of the many commissions.

Bam! The door to his office slammed open.

Looking up he saw the irritated and strained look on his niece's face.

“What's gotten to you so early this morning? You Constipated? Got some medicine for that over there.”