"You built this?" Daniel asked from the doorway.
"The first version," Silas said. "I maintained the scoring fields. Other teams connected it to the vendor system."
"You knew what the scores were doing?"
Silas looked down. "Not every consequence. But enough. I told myself it was Warren's policy, not mine."
Rory compared entries with the photographs she had taken from Therese's notebook. She found Emeka Okoye in the visitor profile, marked with a high score and the P flag on the same date Therese had recorded his failed bid meeting. Teresa Delgado appeared with another P flag. Minh Tran's first-day denial was documented in the system, although his HR record showed that he had been hired and expected.
Forty-seven names matched during that first review. The connection was not merely a resemblance between people's recollections; the dates, visitor destinations, screening codes, and denial notes aligned. When Rory opened the vendor records, she found several contracts that had received no competitive invitations despite meeting the published qualification rules. She took copies for a controlled forensic review and told Silas not to alter anything further without consulting his lawyer.
"This isn't one man's bad morning," Daniel said.
"No," Silas whispered. "It's a machine. We built it so the person pressing the button could say the computer made the decision."
Daniel thought of the scanner displaying ACCESS DENIED after Benjamin obeyed Warren's order. The machine had not invented a judgment; it had made someone's prejudice appear technical and objective. He had seen similar systems before in loan approvals and hiring software, where a poorly chosen rule could quietly multiply a human bias across thousands of decisions. But there was a particular cruelty in a company that had turned its skill with engineering into a method of telling strangers they did not belong.
The federal contracting consequences were serious. Summit could face reviews of procurement fairness, repayment disputes, exclusion from future competitions, or other penalties if the allegations were substantiated. Four thousand jobs depended on the company's ability to remain a credible supplier, and Daniel could not allow the investigation to become a public spectacle in which workers paid for executives' choices. He directed Rory to arrange an independent examination of the screening system and to preserve the original records without disrupting active contracts unless safety or legality required it.
"If we're wrong about a supplier, we tell them," he said. "If we've denied someone a fair opportunity, we investigate how to remedy that. And if our work is good enough to win contracts fairly, we stop pretending we need an invisible list to protect us."
Silas nodded, then looked toward the glass corridor. Warren was standing outside the executive suite, watching the three of them through a partition. He did not wave or shout. He walked toward the side door and waited there as Silas left, then leaned close enough to say something Daniel could not hear.
Silas froze. His chin dipped, and he nodded once before continuing down the hall. Daniel watched the exchange with a tight feeling beneath his ribs. He had hoped the evidence would make Warren careful, but Warren seemed more interested in identifying who had begun talking.
"Make another secured copy," Daniel told Rory. "And document exactly when Silas delivered the drive."
"Already doing it," she replied.