Page 17 of Chaos Theory

SEVENTEEN

The relief I feel when I see Josh enter the Liffey Room just about outweighs all my other feelings: dread, guilt, general life-regret.

I fully expect him to be angry, but he calmly puts down his tool bag and says, ‘Okay, so what are we looking at here?’ Sometimes you could just kiss an engineer for their unflappability.

He gets to work on Kobi’s parts with a canister of compressed air – relentlessly spraying the aerosol in short bursts, like a hairdresser with an overzealous approach to hairspray. I hold up the pink hairdryer with a small smile. He up-nods his chin, turns his full attention back to Kobi.

‘I didn’t know what to do,’ I say, redundantly. I don’t know what to say either.

He stops his work, straightens up. ‘It’s okay.’ He looks at me properly for the first time. ‘You got the battery out – that was good,’ he says softly.

‘Do… do you think he’s going to be okay?’ I’m afraid to ask but also afraid of not knowing.

‘Too early to tell.’ He doesn’t seem angry. Just highly focused .

‘Well, let’s not give up yet, then?’ I sound more hopeful than I feel.

The briefest of smiles flickers across his face.

‘Do you want to walk me through what you’re doing? Maybe I can learn something.’

‘Sure.’

He shows me his laptop screen and says he’s going to run a data analysis on Kobi’s ‘brain’. Then he removes the battery cradle unit entirely from Kobi’s back and sends in a long, thin cable. Kobi’s brain, it turns out, is carefully shielded and cushioned inside his torso.

Josh tells me he used to have remote access to Kobi’s systems, but now he prefers to only use old-school physical access. He steps back to let me peek in at Kobi’s innards.

‘Whoa,’ I say softly. It’s a mass of colourful wiring embedded in a dark substance that looks…squishy. I want to touch it. ‘What am I looking at here?’ I reach forward.

‘Don’t touch anything! Sorry. Still raw.’

He gives me a guided tour though, shining a torch onto different sections as he explains how Kobi’s brain works.

During the day, Kobi records a vast amount of data about every event and interaction.

At night, he processes everything – imagine it like writing your daily journal before going to sleep, he tells me.

Kobi keeps a record of pertinent factual data like times, locations, people he’s met and so on.

But alongside this he creates Today I Learned (TIL) files through a neural network, assimilating new knowledge and behaviour from the day’s events.

Every time Kobi learns a new ‘lesson’, the network grows and complexifies.

Anything significant makes its ways into his memory core for long-term storage.

The original, raw data files that are no longer of use are sent to the discard depot every night – where they’re scrubbed and then ‘recycled’ to nourish the neural network.

‘It’s a highly efficient system that minimises data storage requirements and maximises energy usage,’ he says proudly .

I don’t know the right terminology, but I need to ask. ‘And what’s that squishy stuff in the middle of it all?’

He smiles. ‘That “squishy stuff” is an experimental bio-composite material with superconductive properties, designed by yours truly. It’s what makes Kobi unique.’

I can tell this is meant to impress me. ‘Bio? That means…organic?’

‘It’s a semi-organic substrate, yeah. Custom-made using additive manufacturing. See how it’s woven and layered to create more space? And because it’s organic, it means it can grow and change as Kobi learns. Oh wow.’

‘What’s up?’

‘See.’ He shows me the laptop, but all I see are lines of code. ‘It looks like Kobi has already made some new memories this week.’

‘Is there any way to know if they’re good memories?’

He laughs gently. ‘Not until I run a full analysis. But this is good, Maeve. It means he’s growing and learning. Well done.’

I could weep at this morsel of praise. Instead I laugh.

A high-pitched, slightly hysterical sound.

‘It’s been a very strange week.’ Then it all comes tumbling out.

‘I’m sorry about tonight. I brought Kobi to Phelan’s.

Against my better judgement. No, it was my decision.

I can’t blame anyone else. It was a stupid thing to do. I don’t know what I was thinking.’

‘Hey, hey.’ He puts down the laptop, places his hands on my shoulders. ‘It’s okay.’

I look up at him. People write books about wild adventures on high seas, or in deep jungles, but you can find yourself in the strangest situations right where you work.

Somehow I’ve landed in the darkest forest, but Josh is here as my guide, with his torch and his shining white teeth. I give in to a moment of calm.

Then I look at Kobi, still nonresponsive. ‘What if he’s not okay?’

He turns away from me, sighs heavily. ‘Maeve, I need to tell you something. On the one hand, it might make you feel better to know this isn’t even the worst thing that has happened to Kobi at work.’

‘It isn’t?’ It does make me feel better. But it’s probably not polite to openly celebrate it. I store it up to celebrate later. ‘Wait. On the other hand?’

‘Let’s sit down,’ he says.

He looks around and I point to the couch in the corner. He sits down heavily, covers his face with his big hands.

It’s only a two-seater couch. I try to leave some space between us, but it’s not easy with Josh’s long legs. I face forward. It’s easier to talk like this anyway.

‘You asked me about Kobi’s last assignment, but I never really gave you an answer,’ he says. ‘There was a reason for that, and I’m sorry. I should have been completely upfront about it. But I’m going to tell you now and it might help you understand Kobi a bit more.’

I brace myself and try to keep an open mind as Josh begins his story.

He’d been working away on Kobi for a couple of years and all was going well.

The robot was tested in a few real-world scenarios and getting good results.

So a few months ago, Kobi was deployed to Precision Health Instruments, or PHI, a manufacturing plant in Ireland’s Midlands where they make medical devices, mostly hip implants 3D-printed in titanium.

Working elbow-to-elbow with his human colleagues, Kobi’s job was to scan each implant after it was newly formed, to ensure it had no defects.

While Kobi has highly sophisticated scanning technology, humans are better able to pick up and quickly rotate an implant 360 degrees.

Defects were rarely detected, but if one was, the entire line would be shut down, pending investigation.

Things at the plant had gone great for about six weeks. Then came The Incident. I can tell Josh is capitalising it. His voice has grown unusually soft and quiet.

Kobi was working the night shift, just him and three human operators on the floor. According to his co-workers, Kobi had clocked up about five hours of part diagnostics when suddenly his behaviour changed.

He stopped mid-scan and, against protocol, he put both his robot hands on the implant.

Then, holding the implant, he started to move backwards, raised the artificial hip over his head and launched it across the room.

It bounced off the casing of a 3D printing machine before hitting the floor.

Then he took another implant from a nearby conveyor belt and did the same thing.

This time it missed an operator’s head by inches.

By the time he reached for another, all the operators were yelling and ducking for cover.

One of them managed to hit an alarm, which momentarily distracted Kobi, so the guys ran for the door, got out and locked it behind them.

Kobi then started collecting implants and putting them all in a pile together.

‘That’s when I got the call,’ he says. ‘Luckily, it was near the end of a shift and Kobi’s batteries ran out of juice soon after.

He had to be taken away and decommissioned.

But the strangest thing was, when I checked his logs, he had zero recollection of The Incident – there was no data recorded.

And there was no explanation for his behaviour. ’

I feel like a machine gone into overload. Does not compute .

That drowning feeling washes over me again. ‘So, what you’re telling me is’ – I try to keep my voice steady – ‘you’ve now placed a robot with a history of violence into an office full of unsuspecting people?’

‘No, no, of course not,’ he says quickly. ‘That happened weeks ago. I’ve spent every waking minute since rebuilding Kobi’s code from scratch. He’s pretty much at factory settings right now.’

‘It sounds like “factory settings” is what caused the problem in the first place!’

How can he sit there and drop a bomb like this – figuratively, and possibly literally as well? I picture Kobi chasing me down the corridors of Go Ireland with a staple gun, or attacking me with the shop’s merch. Even a plush leprechaun could be a weapon in the wrong hands .

Josh turns to face me, using his big hands for emphasis. ‘Maeve, there’s no danger, I promise you. Have you seen any hint of threat in Kobi’s behaviour since you met him? I’ve rewritten and checked every line of his code, shut off any external avenues. He’s a completely closed unit now.’

I’m not convinced. ‘Then how do you explain what happened?’

‘Well, I can’t right now. I’m still trying to figure it out.

For now, I’m sure that it won’t happen again.

Kobi has passed all safety checks. It’s like he’s a new robot, basically.

You have to believe I wouldn’t put anyone at risk.

For a start, that would be a total dick move.

It would also mean the end of my career. ’

I cross my arms, breathing hard. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before? Does JP know?’

‘I mean, Kobi’s history was in the briefing notes that we sent to JP, along with our assessment that Kobi is currently stable. I didn’t tell you before because, A, there was no danger and, B, I didn’t want you to worry.’

‘Then why are you telling me now?’

‘So that you won’t feel so bad about what happened tonight. So that you can understand why Kobi’s communication skills still need a lot of work. And’ – he looks across at Kobi – ‘because it may not matter if he doesn’t wake up.’

I should probably just give up now, quit while I’m…still on the starting block. But what about my promise to Kobi to do my best? Do robot promises need to be kept? Kobi wasn’t even awake when I said those words. It was a silent promise. A promise to myself, I realise.

Josh sighs deeply, once again turns to face me. I notice we’re only inches apart.

‘If Kobi wakes up, it would mean the world to me if you continued to take care of him,’ he says softly.

He meets my eyes and looks at me so earnestly that I have to look away.