Cohost writing prompt: @Making-Up-A-Villain — Villain who broke your payroll program
"We've got thousands of city employees with no payslips," Detective Parker sneers across the interrogation room table. "Union threatening to sue the city. Entire system choked to death on an—" he flips open his notebook, checks something— "illegal input character."
"Did you guys get confused into arresting the nearest bystander because of the word illegal?" Internationale says sympathetically. "Could happen to the best of cops."
"Smells like sabotage," Parker says, wrinkling his nose in a conspicuous, contemptuous sniff. "Smells like your MO."
"Wow," Internationale says. "Wow. Who says 70s-style policing is dead? We reckon you dunnit, scum, because you're scum. Fess up before you trip down a flight of stairs a few times, is it?"
"You're known," Detective Falconer says, sitting back in her chair, pen a silently swinging metronome between her fingers, "for cultural awareness activism."
"A lowest-bidder local government IT fuckup sounds like activism, to you?" their suspect says pityingly. "You people enjoy the mayor ringing your boss and telling him to tell you to frame somebody because his corner-cutting came home to roost?"
"Yeah, wise guy? You know IT fuckups, do you?" Parker leans across the table.
"I know you just told me about it," Internationale says, offering an angelic smile. "Somebody typed something in — input — and the software was too goddamn incompetent to either reject it or handle it — illegal. Though, for the cops in the room, still not illegal in the against-the-law sense. Who was the IT contractor? Because it sounds like they took the city for a ride. Substandard product. Corporate negligence. Getting the city sued by labour unions, did you say?"
"You have a little history with software corporations you characterise as incompetent with regard to handling cultural matters," Falconer says coolly. "Non-Western naming conventions. Gender identity markers. Characters outside the standard English alphabet."
"Me and millions of people with, say, Chinese names," Internationale says. "Ooh, maybe it's an act of spooky Chinese cyberwar, officers."
"I kinda doubt that a Chinese cyber warfare battalion sneaked in an employee record with surname—" Falconer checks her own notebook, "Unicode Waving Hand, Hi Pigs, with the two little dots over the first letter I—"
"That's called a diaeresis," Internationale says helpfully.
"And an accent mark over the second one."
"Depends which way it slopes. Downhill from left to right, or uphill?"
Falconer ignores him. "Doesn't sound like a Chinese cyber attack to me."
"That's the quality of the police work here, is it?" Internationale says. "We reckon it was you, not some other guy, because we don't like you?"
"You're a real cocky piece of shit," Parker says.
"Oh look," Internationale says, and points a little at the door. "It's my lawyer. You want to explain to my lawyer that you're charging me with We Don't Like You?"