Dinah pressed her fingers into the back of her neck, massaging the soft spot at the base of her skull as she walked. All around her, the building slowly came to life. Tiny trails of delicate LED lights, clinging like vines to two-hundred-year-old marble arches, began to glow above her. Massive heating units - discreetly hidden behind antique filigree panels - brought the ambient temperature up from a temperature cold enough for machines to a temperature just barely tolerable for humans. And in the building's small, bright break room the entire Newberry Campus Testing Team was crowded together: some standing, others leaning against the narrow kitchen counter. All of them were staring, transfixed, at the wall-sized monitor across from them.
One of the two senior project managers was leaning in the doorway. Like all the other programmers, she was wrapped in layers of Novatech-branded fleece; the embroidered name-tag on her outer vest read "Ione Adeosun". Her long, black fingers nervously twirled a metal pen. The bright blue polish on her fingernails looked as if it had been bitten away.
Dinah approached Ione. "What's going on?", she asked, her voice low.
Ione nodded toward the monitor, and Dinah turned to look. "ROGUE ROBOT KILLS KRAUSECORP CEO" filled the lower half of the screen. The upper half was split between a newscaster's earnest face and a breakout box showing some grainy, indistinct black-and-white video.
The newscaster touched one hand to her ear, and then nodded lightly. "We're going now to the Albany County Sheriff's Department, where Sheriff Villareal is about to make a public statement."
The video cut to the snowy steps of a municipal police station, where, a willowy woman in a dark blue police uniform stepped up to a microphone on a stalk, holding a few index cards in one hand.
"Good evening. At this point we don't have many more details than we did a few hours ago. As best we can tell, at approximately 5:15PM, an autonomous, AI-enabled personal services unit belonging to Albany resident Gerrard Krause caused the death of Martin Koots, an Ithaca-based AI and parts retrieval technician. There's some indication that Koots may have been at the house for a routine decommissioning appointment." The sheriff glanced down at her notes. "Approximately five minutes later, the same unit caused the death of Krause himself. We're still reviewing closed-circuit footage from the scene, in order to determine what exactly happened." She took a breath. "That's all I've got at this point, folks. But I'll take questions."
"Jesus," muttered one of Dinah's coworkers - a round-faced young man with a black goatee and bright blue eyes.
"'Caused the death'?", scoffed a woman in a gray jumpsuit. "What the fuck? It's murder, right? Why doesn't she call it murder?"
"Whose bot was it?", asked an older man with wire-frame glasses, sitting near the galley's one, small window.
"Leyland," said Isaac quietly. He had been preparing coffee a few feet away, and was still staring down into his mug as he spoke. "Not ours."
"Heh. That's a relief," said blue-eyes with a smile.
"Not it's not, shit-for-brains," Ione snapped. "If it happened to theirs, it can happen to ours."
"It doesn't just 'happen', you know that," said blue-eyes as he jabbed a thumb toward the television monitor. "Leyland fucked up. That bot had a primary value for preserving its own life."
Gray jumpsuit shook her head. "Noone would be that stupid. That's one of the unbreakables for a reason."
Blue-eyes shrugged. "I'm telling you guys, Leyland fucked up. That bot didn't just get a primary for self-preservation on its own."
Ione's voice went cold - flat. "Unless it did."
Low, nervous mutterings filled the room.
Then Dinah's phone rang.
A moment later, so did everyone else's.
