"I still don't believe it."

"Of course you do. It was only a matter of time before this sort of thing happened."

"It could be a fluke. This sort of thing usually is."

Seth shook his head with the kind of knowing smirk that meant he thought he'd have her convinced soon. He was almost always wrong, of course, but he was the arrogant sort who always had to be right. Of course, as a low-level financial bureaucrat, he had no reason to be arrogant, but everyone had to have some kind of pride in themselves.

"You would have thought that after all this time," he reasoned, "someone would have caught this kind of mistake, which means that there's some kind of cover-up."

"Of course you would have thought," Keyt teased, "but most people in the Empire don't bother. It's corporate policy."

Seth shrugged. "Probably," he agreed before taking a short drag on his caf, "but knowing them, they'll outlaw thinking just like everything else."

"Of course," she scoffed. "If it's not one thing, it's another."

"My point is, someone should have caught this before," Seth insisted.

"Which means that it's probably all in your head," she countered.

That cut the power to his thrusters, which was a bit of a relief. There was no sense in letting him get carried away.

"Or," he said with a kind of resigned obstinacy, "it means that this is something engineered from on high."

Keyt sighed, but hid the sound by sipping at her cup of hot white chocolate. After all, with Seth, such ideas weren't exactly few and far between. He seemed to have a new one every other day and she supposed it was his way of making conversation until he had something really important to say. He couldn't seem to keep his mouth shut.

If he had a little more ambition, he could have put his conspiracy theories to good use. He might have made a good journalist or an even better lawyer. Instead, he was working in a cubicle on the nine hundredth sub-basement and hadn't had an office in ten years.

"Look," she said indulgingly, "with something like this, there are usually precedents. There's a flimsi trail or something."

And then, again, he got that look again. Gods, it was going to take three weeks and a bottle of strong Alderaanian green wine to get him out of this mindset.

"But there is," he said triumphantly. "The reason why this caught my attention was precisely because there was a trail. One running back to the beginning days of the Empire."

The timer on her chrono began beeping and she took another swig of her chocolate, grateful for a reprieve.

"I have to get back," she said.

"But you believe me?" he pressed on.

"I don't have to," she said with a laugh. "You haven't given me a single shred of concrete evidence."

"But if I could..."

"Seth."

That came out more sharply than she'd intended, but it shut him up, at least for now.

"We're not supposed to be talking about clients outside of the work environment as it is," she said more gently. "As a supe, I can take a look at it for you, but it's not my jurisdiction in the first place."

"Fine, fine," Seth said dismissively, "but you'll take a look at it anyways?"

"I will," she promised him, patting his hand. "Just send me the file and we'll get all of this worked out in due time."

Nearly an hour later, when she'd gotten back to the never-ending stack of datacards on her desk and when her hot chocolate had gone cold, a message came through.

MEMO
To: Keyt Cimelonti
From: Seth Chaaks
Re: Customer in question

Attachment:
A. Skywalker personal ID record
A. Skywalker account history
Summary of discrepancies, form 1991b She didn't get to speak to him until two days later and even then it was on their usual lunch break. Even then, she told him conversationally and around a bite of bruallki.

"You're crazy, you know that, don't you?" she asked.

Seth just grinned. "You saw it, too," he said triumphantly.

"I saw what you'd expect of this sort of file."

"This sort of file?" Seth challenged. "It's a Jedi file. There aren't supposed to be this sort of file."

"They all had public accounts, set up through the Senate's Public Services Disbursement Committee," Keyt reminded calmly. "When the Empire was founded, the accounts were dissolved by Imperial Disbursements."

"With good reason," Seth muttered. "'Dissolving' is the polite word for what happened to the Jedi accounts."

"Yes, I remember," Keyt said in kind. "We had to register three thousand 'dissolution due to decease' forms for their accounts in the first week alone. What a nightmare."

It was not permitted to speak with any more sorrow or sympathy than that. It might be interpreted as Rebel sympathies and that could end badly. Still, those three thousand forms still made her gorge rise. She just couldn't mention it more concretely than that.

"But someone's been using his accounts," Seth said.

"Of course," she said patronizingly. "The Empire liquidated the Jedi assets and they've been used for everything from emergency rations to birth control pills for officers' wives."

"That's not what I mean," Seth protested. "You took a look at the accounts. What kind of Imperial sends funds to charities on Tatooine? Orphanages on Malastare? It doesn't make any kind of sense."

"It's Darth Vader," Keyt murmured in a low voice. "I don't care if he's paying off Hutts on Hoth. We're not going after him."

"Why not?" Seth challenged. "No Imperial should be exempt from the law. If we take him down for something as significant as identity theft and embezzlement, we can prove that the system works, even at the highest levels."

"We're not out to prove that," Keyt snapped. "We're not out to prove anything except that we take care of the Empire's funds the way we're supposed to. That means taking care of what's our business and keeping our noses out of what's not."

"Keyt," he blurted, "there was never any record of Anakin Skywalker's death."

"There was never any record of a Jedi death," she said flatly. "It would have attracted too much attention."

"But he was a hero of the Clone Wars," Seth shot back. "He would have gone down fighting if he went down at all."

Keyt rolled her eyes, but that was the polite response. She didn't even bother to argue with him.

"For all we know, he has every right to this money as the rest of our clients."

"Right?" she challenged. "He is a Jedi and an enemy of the Empire. We can reassign the assets to the proper Imperial authorities, but if we leave the account as is, we'll be enemies of the Empire as well."

"And what about Darth Vader?" he demanded.

He wasn't going to let this one go. It was worse than he thought. What she'd have to do now was to nip this in the bud herself.

"I'll handle a discreet inquiry," she promised, "and if something comes up, we'll let you know."

He looked at least mollified by that, even somewhat happy. "Thanks, Keyt. I knew I could trust you."

And with that, they headed to their respective cubicles for another day's work.

She could just see it now.

Dear Lord Vader,

Hate to bother you, but we have noticed that you have been accessing the funds of one Anakin Skywalker for the last five years. As you are not an authorized account manager, we have no choice but to investigate this matter. If you have been accessing these accounts in a fraudulent manner, be assured that we will prosecute you.

Please send proof of authorization to make withdrawals from this account or a DNA sample proving that you, yourself, are Anakin Skywalker...

It was too crazy to be true. There was nothing else to say about it.