Chapter 8 - THE SECOND SIGNAL
The green light had remained steady for seven seconds when a second signal appeared.
Owen leaned toward the Meridian Dawn’s control screen.
“That isn’t ours.”
The new alert originated thirty-eight miles south of our position. Its identity field read:
MIRA VALE MERCER
MATERNITY DEPENDENT
PRIORITY: TWO LIVES
Mira stood beside me at the railing.
She was ten years old.
No device registered to her should have described her as an unborn child.
“Is someone in the water?” she asked.
“We don’t know.”
Owen contacted maritime rescue. The Meridian Dawn changed course while a Coast Guard helicopter launched from Monterey.
The signal moved with the current but transmitted no heartbeat, body orientation, or temperature. Only location and the identity copied from the day Marcus kicked me from the yacht.
We found an orange flotation vest drifting alone.
Its beacon flashed beneath the collar.
No boat waited nearby.
No person called for help.
A rescue swimmer recovered the vest as evidence. Its serial number belonged to the original maternity suit now preserved inside Nereid’s secure archive.
That number had never been reused.
By the time we returned to harbor, Mara Singh had activated Black Current for the first time in ten years.
The cloned beacon contained a modern transmitter manufactured six months earlier. Someone had programmed it with my old event credentials, including the field identifying Mira as the second life attached to the rescue.
The device also carried a small metal plate.
VERIFIED BY TIDESURE RESPONSE NETWORK
RESCUE CREDIT 04418
TideSure sold emergency-response coverage to yacht owners, fishing fleets, and offshore employers. Its contracts promised that subscribing vessels received faster signal verification and access to privately funded rescue assets.
Nereid did not prioritize subscribers.
A signal was a signal.
TideSure claimed its network merely supplemented public rescue.
Priya opened the company’s public performance report.
It listed more than four thousand successful emergency responses.
One entry matched the cloned beacon’s time and location.
STATUS: PERSON RECOVERED
IDENTITY: PROTECTED
RESPONSE TIME: EIGHT MINUTES
No person had been there.
TideSure had counted our discovery of an empty vest as a successful rescue.
Mira read the screen twice.
“They used my name to rescue nobody.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“To make their system appear more successful than it was.”
Her expression hardened in a way that reminded me of myself and frightened me for that reason.
“Can they do it again?”
I wanted to tell her no.
Mara answered accurately.
“We do not know yet.”
Nereid’s audit found forty-six distress events carrying duplicated credentials. Twelve used identifiers belonging to people involved in the North Coast recall.
Lucy Sandoval’s failed beacon had supposedly activated twice after she donated it to Nereid’s safety council.
Jonah Reed’s device had transmitted from three different oceans after his death.
Someone had turned the signals of people Nereid failed into proof that another company never failed.
Then Priya found the event that changed the investigation.
Three weeks earlier, a real deckhand named Rafael Ortiz had fallen from a commercial trawler.
His beacon transmitted properly.
TideSure’s system classified it as a duplicate simulation and delayed forwarding the location for eleven minutes.
A fisherman found Rafael by chance.
He survived.
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The cloned signals had not only created rescues that never happened.
They had taught a network to doubt a person who was actually drowning.
