Chapter 10 · Continued
Back to the Factory
“Yeah,” he muttered. “There it is.”
“What?” Jane asked.
Chris pointed toward the upper edge of the lens. A thin fracture ran diagonally across its surface, barely visible unless the light struck it correctly.
“There’s a hairline crack in the lens. Looks like he took a direct hit to the front during the wreck.”
Cam observed the damage. “That would explain the corrupted visual data.”
“Exactly.”
Chris connected the diagnostic cable to Chester’s service port.
The little bot chirped.
“MOO MART THANKS YOU FOR CHOOSING PREMIUM SUPPORT SERVICES.”
Chris smirked. “You are literally held together with scratches and yogurt right now.”
Jane curled into the corner of the couch, keeping Seymour away from the exposed machinery while she watched the screen.
“What are you looking for?”
“First, I want to recover enough of his navigation data to get him home.” Chris opened several diagnostic windows. “Second, I want to make damn sure he didn’t record anything that could create a problem for Cam.”
The room grew quiet.
Cam stood beside the couch while lines of cached data scrolled across the laptop screen.
Several corrupted image thumbnails appeared.
Dark pavement. Blurred headlights. Static. Road glare smeared sideways through the cracked lens.
Then one clearer frame appeared.
The image was tilted sharply, but it showed the damaged rear of the RCAM truck. Near the open cargo compartment, part of Cam’s lower leg was visible as he stepped onto the sagging lift platform.
Jane sat forward. “Oh, shit.”
Chris stared at the screen.
The cracked lens distorted half the image with fractured streaks of light, but the white exterior paneling was unmistakably Cam’s.
“Well,” Chris said carefully. “That answers that question.”
“But RCAM already knew Cam was inside the truck,” Jane said. She leaned closer to the screen. “Does it show him walking away?”
Chris continued through the corrupted image cache.
“No. That’s the only recognizable frame.”
More damaged thumbnails flickered past: twisted light streaks, broken compression blocks, random flashes of pavement, and then complete visual nonsense.
Chris nodded toward the screen. “Whatever impact Chester took caused the camera assembly to fail almost immediately.”
Jane exhaled. “So nobody is going to discover secret robot-conspiracy footage.”
“Not from this thing.”
Chris crouched beside Chester and shone a small flashlight into the open camera housing.
Then he laughed.
“What?” Jane asked.
“Here it is.”
The internal camera assembly sat crooked at nearly a ninety-degree angle inside its damaged mount. One side had partially snapped loose.
“The entire camera rotated sideways during the crash.”
Jane blinked. “What has it been recording since then?”