Page 94 of Chaos Theory
‘Hello, Josh,’ says Kobi as the robot bay doors swish open. ‘I did not expect to see you so soon after we said goodbye.’
‘I know,’ says Josh. ‘Did you miss me?’
‘No,’ says Kobi.
Josh laughs, but I hear a strain in his voice. He looks a bit sweaty and I wonder if he also walked up – maybe even ran up – the flour flights of stairs to get here faster. He’s touching his hair a lot. He tries to take me to one side, but I refuse to move.
‘What’s going on?’ I ask him.
‘This is bad. I mean – this could be bad. I don’t know for sure.’
‘Well, how can we find out for sure?’
‘Let’s listen to the audio again for a start.’
He perches on the edge of a stool as I cue up the clip, pump up the volume. It’s only thirty seconds and most of it is fragmented sounds and unidentifiable noises. There’s some shouting and swearing. But then there’s Kobi’s voice. Now that I know what to listen out for, it sounds clearer. There it is on the tape – three words in a row, with a little pause between each word:
‘Initiating… embed… protocol.’
Josh is pressing his fingers to both sides of his head. ‘Oh God,’ he says.
I turn to him.
‘Do you know what it means?’
He sighs loudly. ‘I think so.’
He stands, walks over to the wall of glass cases. With his back to us, he speaks very quietly.
‘Project Embed was just a rumour.’
I can barely hear him. ‘What did you say?’
He turns around but doesn’t look at me. He speaks slowly, like someone explaining a dream they’ve just woken up from. ‘Embedded Machines Built for Extraordinary Defence, aka EMBED.’
‘Defence?’ I repeat. My mind whirs to process what this means. ‘Defence, as in…military?’
‘I mean, I’d heard rumours about it,’ he continues, still in a dreamlike state. ‘Supposed to be a pet project of Ron’s. AI robots for the military. But I didn’t know anyone was actually working on it.’
An avalanche of implications rolls towards me like boulders down a mountainside. I look around for something, anything, to throw at Josh’s head. I grab a stress ball. It misses him by inches.
‘Josh,youwere working on it!’ I slam my hand down on the workbench. ‘You thought Kobi was a manufacturing robot, but really he was military? How could you not know this?Thisis what I mean about asking questions!’
Kobi steps between us. ‘May I interrupt to ask what all this means?’
‘It means…’ says Josh. ‘It means we are going to Ron right now for some answers.’
FIFTY-ONE
9:55am
Josh strides along the sixth-floor corridor at such speed I can barely keep up. Kobi rolls along behind us. Ron’s PA, Grace, looks up from her screen as we approach, her face registering alarm.
‘Call you right back,’ she chirps as she stands and removes her headset. She rushes to intercept us but Josh brushes right past her, bursting open Ron’s door.
‘What the—’ I hear Ron’s voice from within.
‘You can’t go in there,’ Grace is saying at the same time. ‘Ron, I’m sorry. He just?—’
