It was a big day for I-DEP, a Chicago-based dot-com startup poised to ignite a new era in conducting remote legal depositions.

I-DEP’s tech team had found a way to seamlessly merge video, audio, real-time court reporter transcript, and secure private chat into a single, easy-to-use service.

This stuff is routine now, but in 2001, amalgamating the technologies to accomplish all this was bleeding-edge.

To show prospective clients how the I-DEP system worked, we’d improvise a brief sample deposition where staffers portrayed attorneys, plaintiffs, and defendants. At the same time, actual court reporters entered the live transcription.

On that day, we were on deck to hit a home run.

I-DEP had been invited to strut our stuff at a meeting in Washington, D.C., before a meeting of state attorneys general and federal prosecutors. I’d penned a script for a mock deposition inspired by Michael Fortier’s testimony in the McVeigh trial. Darkly ironic, it dealt with domestic terrorism. Showtime was close, adrenaline fired up.

I-DEP was ready for our closeup on September 11, 2001.

Then, the world shifted. Twin Towers, Pentagon, United Flight 93. All crashed and burned. A different kind of terror script, one you couldn’t delete or rewrite. Our team en route to D.C.? Uncertainty gripped us. Hours later, we determined they were OK. But we couldn’t say the same for nearly 3,000 others.

In the following days, the media got under my skin. They were already wringing politically correct hands over how to assess this attack. Or claiming that Todd Beamer “reportedly” or “allegedly” declared “Let’s roll!” as doomed passengers heroically prevented Flight 93 from being used as a weapon.

I also forced myself to look at those photos. The ones showing desperate souls leaping from the Twin Towers. Each image was an indictment, a promise from history that we’d forget too soon. Somewhere in those snapshots, the world’s tough questions lurked.

In the years that followed, everyone talked about resilience and heroism. All justified, sure, but what about the questions, the actual interrogation? People compared 9/11 to Pearl Harbor. Remember the Alamo, never forget; catchy slogans that fade into bumper stickers. Meanwhile, the tough questions remain AWOL.

I did my job and hit my PR targets in the aftermath.

But September 11 changed the script and not just the one I wrote. Some things can’t be revised or redacted. Questions remain forever unanswered.

There are no clean edits in real life. And that, as they say, is the hell of it.