Page 25 of Chaos Theory

I feel a bit bad for Kobi. He just wanted to learn, to help.

To learn how to help. I decide to give Sam a moment to wallow in memories of how great work was back in the good old days.

He’s clearly no fan of Kobi’s. Was probably glad to see him taken away.

Could he have had anything to do with the malfunction?

I want to dig a little, but not head-on.

‘Can I ask you a question? Why don’t you refer to Kobi as “he”? Laura does.’

‘Yeah, well, she’s…’ He stops himself mid-sentence. ‘That’s her choice. I think we should remember it’s a machine and act accordingly. It’s not “one of us”.’

Josh goes to speak, but I make a subtle hand gesture and he stops. He’s too attached to Kobi to be objective.

‘Are you worried that machines like Kobi might replace you one day?’ I ask Sam.

He laughs again and sits up straight. ‘No way. A machine can’t do what I do.

We shouldn’t even be talking about that.

Why can’t machines just be machines and people just be people?

Why do we always have to be pushing the envelope?

The envelope is pretty perfect as it is – a simple yet elegant solution for sending letters.

Do we really need to be reinventing envelopes? ’

I smile. ‘I agree, we don’t need to improve on envelopes. But the messaging system as a whole has been reinvented – many times over.’

‘And is it any better?’ He smiles back at me.

‘Well, that depends on how far back you want to go. It’s better than never again hearing from someone who emigrated. On the downside, we now expect 24/7 access to each other. I suppose we still need to figure out the happy medium.’

‘Exactly,’ says Sam. ‘And who gets to decide that?’ I get the sense that he’s enjoying the debate.

I sip my fancy tea, which has finally reached the perfect temperature. ‘Decide what?’

‘Who decided that 24/7 messaging was what we wanted? Because I don’t remember voting for that.’

‘You know that’s not how it works,’ says Josh, a little too sharply. ‘If you’d asked people, before we had cars, what they wanted, most of them would have said a faster horse. So that’s not exactly a great way to make technological progress, is it?’

‘But why are we adapting to it ?’ says Sam. ‘It – the tech, I mean – should be adapting to us. ’

‘Sam has a point – the technology always comes first,’ I muse.

‘Exactly,’ says Sam. ‘She gets it.’ He clunks his water bottle against my cup as if we’re three pints deep on a night out.

I clear my throat. ‘Anyway. Let’s bring this back to Kobi. Tell us about the night of the incident.’

‘There’s not much to tell. I’m sure you’ve seen the footage.’ I wonder if he’s being evasive.

‘It would really help us to hear it in your own words,’ I say. ‘Were you surprised by what happened?’

‘Was I surprised?’ echoes Sam. ‘Was I surprised? I’ll bring it back to technology. It’s always doing weird stuff, yeah? It can work fine for days, weeks – then one day it suddenly glitches and no one really seems to know why. I wasn’t expecting it that night though, no.’

‘Were you scared?’ I can’t imagine the Kobi I know being scary – but maybe I’m being na?ve .

‘I think I was too surprised to be scared, actually. Everything was going fine. Because it was the night shift, I’d asked Kobi not to talk to me too much.

It seemed okay about that. Sorry, he, if you prefer.

He seemed fine. Everything was normal, we were just getting through the work.

Then suddenly, around three a.m., he started acting weird.

It felt like he was being instructed, but not by me, if you know what I mean.

He was handling implants when he shouldn’t have been.

It looked like he was collecting them or something – putting them in a pile. ’

I look at Josh, who’s clearly suffering through the retelling of events. ‘Go on.’

‘I tried to get control over him. He didn’t respond to voice commands, and then when I tried to do a manual intervention, I couldn’t get near him – he kept moving away.

I knew we were in trouble when he threw the first implant.

Those things are light, but they’re made out of titanium. They’re not meant to go airborne.’

I nod along. ‘What happened next?’

‘Well, that was it, really. I hit the alarm, yelled at the others to get out of there, then ran for the door. One of the implants bounced off my foot as I was sounding the alarm.’

‘Did it hurt?’

‘I felt it all right; it landed right on my big toe.’

‘Weren’t you wearing steel-capped boots?’ I ask, remembering our conversation with Laura.

Sam goes to take a swig from his water bottle, then stops and looks down at the table instead. ‘I should have been. I went through all this with Laura. I know it’s company policy. To be honest I didn’t see the need for them until that night. I do now though, I can tell you that for nothing.’

He extends a booted foot out to the side as evidence. A passing colleague with a tray pulls up short and scowls at us.

‘Well,’ says Sam, standing up suddenly. ‘My break is ending soon. So unless you’ve any more questions, I’m going to get going.’

‘Wait,’ I say. ‘Will you contact us if you think of anything else?’

Sam grins, sits back down. ‘I will, Sherlock. Can I have your number?’ He’s very confident for someone who might be hiding something.

‘Let me give you my card,’ I say. ‘Oh wait, I don’t have a card. I mean, I don’t have any cards with me. Josh, could you give Sam your card instead?’

Josh widens his eyes, raises his eyebrows. Nobody says anything for a moment. Then he sighs. ‘Sure.’

He fishes a card out of his wallet and slides it across the table to Sam.

The card sweeps sugar granules before it like a snowplough.

Sam places one finger on the card and slides it back across the table towards me, cutting an alternate path through the sugar.

He retrieves a pen from the front pocket of his overall.

‘Could you write your number on there?’

‘Sure,’ I say.

I realise I’m enjoying myself. I glance sideways at Josh while I write down my number. He does not look he’s enjoying himself at all.

Sam smiles as he pockets the card. ‘Well, better get back to it. No rest for the wicked.’