“Iswhathappening again?” He looks genuinely confused, which somehow annoys me more.
“The thing with your ex-wife. Is that happening again?”
Lincoln just stares at me, baffled.
“No, Sarah, everything’s fine.”
“Really?” I say incredulously. “Because you don’tlookfine. And if you’re going to start going downthatroad again, where you’re distracted and the work starts to suffer as a result, then we’re going to need to have a conversation about that.”
Lincoln smiles at me. Something that makes my heart flutter a little bit even though I don’t want to admit it. All I want is for him to be happy.
“I promise everything’s fine,” he says, like he wants to reassure me, but I’m still not convinced.
“Is it anything you want to talk about?” I ask.
“No, I swear I’m here,” he insists, and then shifts straight into work mode.
We get back to it, moving through the final checklist for Auralis’s pre-shipment diagnostics. At this stage the robot is basically done. All that’s left is the routine fine-tuning: making sure the gesture libraries match the human-motion database, recalibrating pressure thresholds, confirming its environmental mapping doesn’t glitch under fluorescent light, and running the last of the safety macros. It’s the tedious part, the part the public will never know about.
Once we finish the static tests, we slip on the mocap suits to run the final movement sync, just to make sure dear Auralis mirrors human motion smoothly before everything gets shipped out next month.
As soon as we step into the tracking grid, the motion sensors sweep over us, scanning and recording the way our bodies shift, correcting any jitter that shows up in the robot’s playback.
Thank God. Because theminutewe start moving, Lincoln’s brain finally seems to come back online. His posture loosens, his voice sounds less drunk, and that drained, far-away look he walked in with slowly fades.
“There are already massive pre-orders,” I tell him while adjusting the sensors around my wrists.
“Yeah, I expected that to happen,” he says.
“Yeah, rich people want their toys,” I say. “I can't even blame them because we're about tobecomethose people.”
Lincoln smiles.
We move into the behavioral room, where one of the interns is running the robot through its environment-mapping tasks. Lincoln is giving them commands through the mic, and the robot’s head turns with each directive.
As the bot starts scanning the mock living room setup, I lean in a little. “Hey, do you think people are going to be okay with the robots knowing the layout of their house?”
“You asked me this before,” he says.
“I know,” I reply. “But now that it’sactuallya reality being made true, I’m curious how we’re going to handle it if people start to get upset about that.”
“I’m guessing that’s what Tobias is going to train us on--the PR, and what to say in case the robot drops an item on someone’s dog or something,” Lincoln says. “There’s also a lot of fine printso the company isn’t held liable for things like that happening. But you never know. People find a way around to sue.”
“Yeah. As long as it’s something indirect and not done due to contact by the unit. Hah, it’s so stupid. Almost like having a gigantic mechanical object in your home that weighs 340 pounds could be potentially dangerous if you tip it over onto your dog,” I quip.
“Yeah, there’s warnings and stuff like that, but anyway—” Lincoln cuts me off, and we finally settle into work mode. Something I’m grateful for.
He seems like his bright old self again, and that makes me happy even though I’m still worried.
Five hours go by with good momentum before things slow down a bit, and we head to the break room. Some of the other employees are in there; some women, some men. Tom sees us walking in together.
“There you are, you lovebirds,” Tom says.
Lincoln and Tom start talking about the next part of the project, and right now is one of the rare moments where I drift off into my own head, feeling half here and half somewhere else where things with Lincoln make sense again.
-??-
Chapter 20
