Lincoln exhales a small laugh. “It’s a multi-modal reinforcement loop built on top of a 4.2-trillion-parameter foundational model. We ran continuous immersive sessions, sometimes twelve, fourteen hours at a stretch. Sarah and I would wear full motion-capture rigs, facial trackers, galvanic skin response, heart-rate variability, the whole stack. Every micro-gesture, every hesitation before answering a loaded question… every time, uh, one of usreachedfor an item or gestured to one another without thinking; it all got timestamped, vectorized, and injected directly into the coherence dataset.”
Kira’s eyes widen just enough for the camera. “So you were literallyactingout domestic life while the system watched?”
“Sometimes, yeah,” he says, grinning now. “And not just us; hundreds of volunteer families too. But the highest-weight data came from unscripted, longitudinal captures. We’d have couples wearing the rigs for weeks at a time in the simulated apartments downstairs. Arguments, just regular human responses based on varied interactions, those are the moments the reward model learned to look for. So, essentially, monkey see, monkey do. Like a child.”
Sarah nods in agreement.
Kira tilts her head, teasing. “Be honest. How much of the training corpus is just old sitcoms and reality shows?”
Lincoln laughs softly outright.. “Ehhhh,sometimes. Early on we did use curated clips; Curb for verbal sparring, some Korean family dramas for non-verbal reconciliation cues; but the model overfit hard on laugh tracks, even though we trained her on many without it. We had to scrub all of that and go back to raw, unlabeled human data. Turns out real empathy doesn’t come with a studio audience. Who would have thought?”
Sarah jumps in, beaming up at him. “The breakthrough was when we started piping our own late-night lab sessions straight into the live fine-tune loop. Lincoln would get stubborn about an empathy curve, I’d push back, we’d hash it out for hours; and Auralis would update in real time. Her conflict-resolution scores jumped 38% overnight. Our… dynamic kinda became the gold standard.”
Lincoln glances down at her, the corner of his mouth lifting. “She’s underselling it. Sarah’s the one who figured out how to weight implicit forgiveness signals. I just provided the arguments.”
“Alotof them,” Sarah beams.
Kira tilts the mic back to Lincoln. “So how hands-on does it actually get? Are you basicallyparentinga robot in real time?”
Lincoln nods. “More than people think. A lot of the highest-value training is literally just…beinghuman in the same room as her and reinforcing whatever feels right.”
He glances at Sarah , the professional but homely look. “Those long cycles in the simulated residence wing: sixteen-, 18-hour days running interaction batches. We’d finish a session, just… take our rigs off, and just… stay in the test apartment to cool down. We ordered food from the canteen drone, and probably argue about whose turn it was to do whatever… or… crash on the sectional because neither of us felt like walking back to our own desks. Auralis was always there, kinda passive observation mode with her full sensor suite running quiet. Honestly, at first it wasn't even the intention.”
Sarah picks it up without missing a beat, smiling at the memory.
“We’d be half-dead, reviewing logs on the wall display, and she’d learn from whatever we did. It was crazy because one time, one of us yawned and she scared themessout of us because she’d brought over a blanket without being asked; positive reward pulse.”
“Yep. Initiation,” Lincoln cuts in as he nods, his speech alongside Sarah's just easy as though they've been living with each other for decades.
“Mmhm. We’d start debating some parameter at 2 a.m. and she’d dim the lights and queue soft music because she’d learned it de-escalates us;biggerreward. If she hovered too close during a tense moment between me and Lincoln, we’d tag it for aversion,” Sarah says with her chipper voice, always referring back to Lincoln.
“Yeah, it’s not like there were scripts… it was just…” Lincoln pauses.
Sarah catches his trail. “... consistent reinforcement of what actually helps tired humans feel safe.”
Lincoln shrugs. “Turns out the fastest way to teach contextual empathy is to let the system watch two exhausted technicians try to be decent to each other after a brutal shift. Everything else; the micro-expressions, the timing, and the whole, catching the hint-”
“Reading the room,” Sarah and Lincoln say at the same time before chuckling.
“Yeah, basically, and knowing when to disappear; it grew out of that,” Lincoln finishes.
Kira’s grin turns mischievous. “Chat is on fire. Half the viewers want preorder links, the other half want to know… haha… when you two are getting married.”
Lincoln chuckles and glances down at Sarah. She blushes rose-pink but leans in closer, cheek grazing his sleeve before she buries her bright face into it.
“Mmmm no comment,” Sarah says brightly.
Cut back to Nadia in the atrium, one eyebrow arched like she’s in on the joke.
“Move over power tools. Meet tech’s new power couple. The entire internet is already rooting for Lincoln Arnoldson and Sarah Asoine to be more than colleagues, and honestly? We’re all invested.”
The chyron slams across the bottom in stark white::
HELION AURALIS · PRE-ORDERS LIVE NOW · FIRST RUN: 40,000 UNITS · $179,000
Then the promo rolls: Auralis the robot in warm afternoon light, folding tiny shirts while a little girl reads beside her on the couch. Without looking, the robot reaches over and tucks a stray curl behind the child’s ear.
“Well… you finally did it, Link. I’m proud of you.”
