Jenna, one of our female co-workers, pokes her head around the corner.
“Lincoln, phone call for you. Line two, main station.”
“Do you know who it is?” I ask.
“The boss,” she answers.
I freeze for half a beat, then stand as Sarah stares at me warily.
“Ooooo. Whaddya do?” Tom teases.
“Does there ever need to be a reason?” I snide.
Here we go.
I pick up the phone at my workstation on the other side of it since it's L-shaped.
“This is Arnoldson,” I state confidently.
“Need to see you up here Arnoldson,”the boss's grave voice sounds on the other line.
“All right. I'll be there in a minute.”
I hang up, prepping to leave my floor.
I step off the elevator onto Level A. The corridor is quieter than usual, weekend hush, only a few admins milling about. Tobias Voss’s office door is already open, the man himself visible behind his massive glass desk, silver hair catching the light like polished steel.
Tobias looks up as I knock lightly on the frame.
“Come in,” Tobias says. “Close the door.”
I do, standing rather than sitting, too wired to relax.
Tobias steeples his fingers, fixing me with that unreadable calm.
“What the hell is going on with Auralis?” Tobias asks, straight to it. “I’m getting pings from the board about behavioral drift in the last sim logs. Talk to me.”
I exhale, trying to stay technical. “We’re chasing persistent clutter drift in multi-object scenarios. Especially when a person’s moving unpredictably through the mess in the room. The visual parse confidence drops below threshold, and the system falls back to the old pre-trained heuristic instead of sticking with live. The heuristic keeps assuming rigid mass, so soft objects like light fabric get massive torque overcorrection.”
Tobias’s eyebrow rises, unimpressed. “English, son. Simpler. Straight to the point. What the hell is breaking?”
I swallow. “In messy rooms, like if there’s clothes on the floor, or… overlapping objects, especially if there’s a person there, moving around, the robot second-guesses its grip. Uh… thinks a lightweight item is heavier and compensates too hard, which… causes it to end up whipping things around. Smashed a lamp in yesterday’s run.”
Tobias leans forward, hands flat on the desk now. “So it’s turning my million-dollar companion into a goddamn wrecking ball WITH a person in its vicinity, because it can’t tell leggings from a goddamn brick?”
I wince slightly. “Essentially, yes, sir. We’re reweighting the fusion layer and pushing it to trust real-time data over old assumptions. I… we should have it locked by—”
“We’re not waiting till May 5th,” Tobias cuts in, standing slowly and leaning on the desk. “I want the first batch, Arnoldson. Clean and functional units, ready for field tests by April 21st.”
“Uh…” my heart locks up.
“I gave my word to some of my associates that they would be able to try them firsthand ahead of the crowd. This way we could be getting some real feedback from real homes, early. Now you’re telling me that the damn thing is broken?”
The small headache I felt coming on earlier magnifies. “Sir…”
“I trusted you to have this ready… and it seems to me… that you did something to sabotage it.”
“Huh? NO! Sir, definitely not. I wouldn’t—”
