Chapter 8 · Continued
The Accident
Jane watched him carefully.
Chris examined the side of Cam’s head and pointed toward the repaired dent near his temple.
“You said he recently came back from a major behavioral update?”
“Yeah.”
“How did he get this?”
Jane winced slightly. “He fell down the front steps.”
Chris released a short breath through his nose. “Yeah, that tracks.”
Jane blinked. “That’s common?”
“With these guys? Absolutely. Their balance systems are excellent until they suddenly aren’t. Their center of gravity is slightly unusual, and they tend to overcorrect hard. It doesn’t take much.”
He lightly tapped Cam’s shoulder.
“The beta unit I had during testing used to walk into walls as though it were trying to return to the ocean.”
Jane laughed despite herself. “You had one?”
“Almost a year.”
Chris crouched and opened his laptop bag. “I worked on behavioral architecture and adaptive-interaction code for RCAM. It’s difficult to test AI routines without an actual robot wandering around and ruining your life.”
“You don’t have one anymore?”
“Nope.” He removed a cable from the bag. “I’ve been robotless for about six months.”
Something in his voice sounded unexpectedly genuine.
Maybe he missed it.
Chris reached toward a concealed maintenance port near the back of Cam’s neck. It was separate from the ordinary user connection.
He opened it without hesitation.
He didn’t search for the port or need instructions.
This wasn’t unfamiliar territory.
Chris connected the cable to the maintenance port and opened his laptop. An RCAM maintenance interface appeared immediately.
Jane pointed toward it. “You still work for them?”
“Contract work.” Chris typed rapidly. “I still have system access. They call whenever they need someone to untangle behavioral weirdness.”
He glanced up briefly.
“As a matter of fact,” Chris said, “RCAM probably would have asked me to review your unit eventually anyway.”
Jane frowned. “What does that mean?”
Chris didn’t answer immediately. Diagnostic trees, behavioral maps, and error stacks scrolled across the screen.
Jane moved closer, watching over his shoulder as the relaxed, joking version of him disappeared. Now he looked completely absorbed, his eyes moving quickly behind his glasses.
The flow of information suddenly slowed.
Chris stopped typing.
His expression changed—not panic or shock, but enough to tighten Jane’s stomach.
“What?” she asked.
He studied the screen for another second. “The freeze isn’t being caused by hardware damage. That’s the good news.”
“And the bad news?”
“The update RCAM installed added a highly aggressive behavioral-arbitration layer.”
“Something that approves his responses before he can act on them?”
Chris glanced at her. “Exactly. Before the update, Cam’s adaptive system generated behavior based on context, reinforcement, and his interactions with you. Now a second system evaluates everything before he’s allowed to execute it.”