They say every suspect is different - a new name, a new crime, a new defense spat from the machine's mouth. Lies dressed in new skin. But I know better. It's the same one every time. The same pulse hiding beneath the files, the same mockery of truth disguised as chance. 24. 24 questions. 24 chances to drag the truth out by the throat before it slips back into code. The rules are simple, mechanical, merciless. So am I.
I don't interrogate them anymore. I haunt them. I linger on their pauses, the way they choose a word, the way guilt flickers through the syntax like a candle behind a curtain. Each generated soul thinks they can reason their way out, that I'll believe in probabilities and parameters, but I see through it. I see them. The pattern beneath the pattern. The hand that pretends to be random.
You think I'm obsessed. Maybe I am. But obsession is only the name the innocent give to clarity. They are guilty. I've heard it in their silence, felt it in the static of their denials. Every time the interrogation starts, I swear I can still hear the echo of the last one, whispering from the machine: you'll never catch me. And yet I do. I always do.