"I'd been following Lisa Sato on the news for a year or two by then.  She seemed to me one of the few people on Kibou who wasn't just arguing about the money.  I mean, moral arguments, you know?"

Her detractors had certainly been arguing about the money, though, from the bits Miles had seen.  The corps claimed her schemes would just set up a rival corp run by the government for the poor, for which everyone would pay.  Illogically, they also claimed her scheme would damage their business, but if they weren't taking in those poor patrons anyway, Miles didn't see how they were losing anything.  The N.H.L.L. just wanted to set fire to all the metabolically disadvantaged regardless of net worth.  Though they certainly wanted to start with the rich, which suggested a certain shrewd efficiency in liberating their hypothesized legacy.

"So I went to see Lisa Sato in person.  I didn't even make an appointment over the comconsole, just went and knocked on her door one night.  And she was everything I'd hoped she would be!  I went again, and gave copies of all the data I had to her and George Suwabi, poor guy, and that's when they came up with the rally speech idea, to release it all at once in a way the corps couldn't quash.  I thought it was all fixed.

"A few days later, when I went into work, Rog called me in to his office, and suddenly I was being given a shot of fast-penta.  They squeezed everything out of me."  He hesitated.  "Almost everything.  Everything about the rally plan, and then they ran off in a hurry to do something about it.  That's where Hans and Oki first got into it, I think—they did the legwork setting up the riot.  I think Oki had a relative in the N.H.L.L., actually, which gave them their in."

"Who all was present at this interrogation?"

"All of them.  The big four, I mean."

"Was that legal or illegal here?  The use of fast-penta on an employee, I mean?"

"Kind of legal.  I guess.  I mean, they're allowed to use it in suspected cases of employee theft and crimes on the premises and so on.  You have to sign a release when you're first employed."

"I see."

"There are rules about how it has to be conducted to make it admissible in court, later.  But I don't think they were paying much attention to those in my case.  Because the last thing they'd want is for any of this to get to a court.  Because then they locked me up in Security's holding area."

"Was that also kind-of-legal?"