Ficorpio
Chapter 1
The first lie appeared in turquoise.
It occupied most of the screen behind Vivian Mercer: a cheerful map of Westbridge showing flood-risk zones in shades of blue, green, and gold. Arrows curved toward the river. Small icons of umbrellas and houses floated above the streets. In the corner, a white number promised a forty-two percent reduction in urban flood exposure.
The number had no source.
I knew because I had built the spreadsheet it came from, and the spreadsheet had not been validated.
Vivian clicked to the next slide with a gracious smile. The fluorescent lights in Engineering Classroom 4B made everyone look tired except her. She had chosen a cream blouse, gold earrings, and the expression of someone presenting a solution rather than a group assignment. Caleb Reed stood beside the lectern with his hands loosely clasped. Emily Park sat near the front, ready to answer questions about the modeling section she had helped format. I was at the laptop, where the presentation kept trying to turn missing evidence into decorative confidence.
“Our proposal uses a layered mitigation strategy,” Vivian said. “Green roofs, permeable pavement, and a series of smart retention basins along the eastern corridor. The visual model shows how these interventions work together to protect the most vulnerable neighborhoods.”
Professor Ellis watched the screen without taking notes.
That was worse than criticism. Professor Ellis took notes when she expected something worth remembering.
Vivian advanced again. The slide title was COMMUNITY RESILIENCE IN ACTION. Beneath it, three photographs showed a rooftop garden, a rainwater channel, and a smiling family standing beside what appeared to be a newly installed drain. The captions were too small to read. The citations were smaller.
“The eastern corridor was selected because it has the highest combination of surface runoff and population exposure,” Vivian continued. “Our analysis indicates that the proposed system would reduce peak flow by approximately forty-two percent during a ten-year storm event.”
Professor Ellis looked up. “Approximately based on what model?”
Vivian’s smile held. “Based on the combined data set from the municipal drainage survey and the regional rainfall archive.”
“Which municipal survey?”
A pause opened between them. It was only two seconds. Vivian used it well. She lowered her chin, softened her eyes, and looked toward me as though I had been assigned the answer by natural law.
I reached for the keyboard.
“The drainage survey is listed as source seven,” I said. “But source seven is a summary page, not the underlying survey. The rainfall archive is source nine. Its measurement intervals do not match the intervals in our runoff model.”
Chapter 2
Caleb shifted beside the lectern. Emily looked down at her hands.
Vivian turned toward me. Her smile became more careful. “Sloane, I think that is a little technical for the presentation.”
“The question was technical.”
A few students in the back row went very still. Professor Ellis did not intervene. She was giving the room time to reveal who understood the work.
Vivian’s fingers tightened around the presentation remote. “We agreed to keep the explanation accessible.”
“Accessible does not mean unsupported.” I clicked twice and opened the working deck. “The forty-two percent figure is a provisional output. We have not validated the baseline measurements, and the source dates are inconsistent. It should not be presented as a result.”
The turquoise map vanished.
For one clean second, the screen was white.
I had prepared a second version the night before because experience had taught me that a group presentation could fail in at least six ways before anyone noticed. The replacement deck had a white background, black text, one chart per slide, and citations that could be read without squinting. It looked less like a campaign brochure and more like an engineering assessment. That was the point.
Vivian stared at the screen. “You changed the deck.”
“I corrected the claims.”
“Without telling anyone?”
“I told the group in the shared file comments at 8:14 this morning.”
Caleb glanced at Vivian. “We should probably keep moving.”
“We are moving,” I said. “Toward an answer Professor Ellis can evaluate.”
The next slide showed the proposed intervention area as a plain grid. Red marked measured locations. Gray marked estimated locations. Yellow marked gaps. There were more yellow squares than red ones.
Professor Ellis leaned forward. “Explain your acceptance standard for the forty-two percent estimate.”
“There isn’t one yet. The result is not acceptable for the final submission until the baseline dataset is validated against the municipal records and the model is rerun with matching intervals. For today’s presentation, I replaced the figure with a range based on the two scenarios we can currently reproduce.”
“What range?”
“Eighteen to thirty-one percent peak-flow reduction, depending on whether the eastern retention sites meet their stated capacity.”
Vivian inhaled quietly. It was not a dramatic sound. It did not need to be. Her appeal lived in small reactions that invited other people to become protective.
Professor Ellis asked, “And the capacity figures?”
“Two are from the preliminary site report. One is an estimate copied into the spreadsheet without a linked record. I marked that site as unverified.”
“So your proposal is not complete.”
“The proposal remains technically viable. The certainty of some supporting claims is lower than the original slides suggested.”
Chapter 3
Professor Ellis studied me. “That is a distinction many engineers avoid making. Why did you make it here?”
Because somebody had to stop the numbers from becoming theater.
I kept my face still. “Because a mitigation plan should not receive credit for precision it has not earned.”
Behind me, Vivian’s controlled smile did not move. Her eyes did.
The rest of the presentation became a controlled extraction. I answered the questions about runoff coefficients, site selection, and maintenance assumptions. Emily explained the formatting of the survey records when Professor Ellis asked about data organization. Caleb covered the implementation schedule, though he had to pause twice to check which version of the timeline he was using. Vivian returned to the community-impact section and spoke beautifully about public trust, equitable protection, and the human cost of flooding.
All of it was persuasive. Some of it was also true.
That was what made the weak sourcing dangerous. A good intention could carry an unsupported number farther than an obvious error ever would.
At the final slide, the title was simply LIMITATIONS.
Vivian had objected to it when she saw the draft. She said the word sounded negative. I had left it in place because water did not care about presentation mood boards.
Professor Ellis closed her notebook. “The intervention logic is sound. The presentation is now clearer than the original version. However, the grade will depend on the written submission and the validated data, not on whether the slides look finished.”
Vivian’s expression softened into public agreement. “Of course. We all want the strongest submission.”
Professor Ellis looked at the four of us. “Then validate it. You have until nine tomorrow morning. I will grade what is documented, reproducible, and properly sourced. If your final dataset has no validation trail, I will treat those figures as unsupported claims.”
The room began to move again: chairs scraping, laptops closing, conversations restarting at carefully lowered volume.
I wrote the deadline in my notebook even though I had already memorized it.
One night to determine whether our work was defensible.
One night for the group to discover that a polished file was not the same thing as a finished project.
Vivian approached while Caleb packed the laptop.
“You could have handled that more gently,” she said.
“The dataset would not have become stronger if I had used a softer font.”
Her gaze held mine. Deliberate eye contact, steady and bright. “I was only trying to help the presentation feel coherent.”
“Then the visual hierarchy succeeded. The evidence did not.”