Page 40 of Fembot
Now Yarek had to call Henry and tell him there was no way to know what units had been affected.
They either had to ride out the uncertainty, keeping a watchful eye on the news and the customer service calls andcomplaints, or they’d have to do a total recall of every unit sold in the past twelve weeks.
If Yarek’s calculations were correct, the units recalled would cost the company close to a billion dollars. But if they couldn’t recover the units and something bad happened, the cost could be steeper than anything Yarek could dream up.
Yarek locked the door to his office and called Henry on his personal number. The number he’d given him to reach him at whatever time he could. Day or night. Yarek only realized it was past two a.m. when Henry answered sounding like he’d just woken up from a heavy sleep.
“Yarek?” Henry fumbled around, making crashing noises on the other end of the line. “What is it?”
“I should have waited to call you.” Yarek let out a long slow breath. “I can call back.”
“You’ll do no such thing. Day or night, Danvers. That’s what I told you. Now tell me.” Henry’s voice rumbled with impatience.
“Something… something happened. I can’t explain it. I’m going to sound insane and I’m not.” Yarek sank his hand into his hair and started pulling.
“Yarek, when was the last time you slept?”
“Two… three… has it been three days? I’m sure it hasn’t been that long.”
“Yarek, I’m sending a car to your location. It’s going to bring you here and after you get some rest, we’ll talk about whatever it is you discovered.”
“There’s no time for rest.” Yarek’s heart hammered against his ribs, fluttering fast like hummingbird wings. “There’s no time. Oh, this is so bad.” Yarek stood and started to pace, stopped when he got dizzy, and sat down on the floor. When was the last time he ate?
“The car is almost there.”
“They know. Henry, they know.”
“They know?”
“The robots. They know we’re looking for them. They wiped the data. They made new fake data hoping we wouldn’t notice the data was gone. But I noticed. I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t been looking for it. It’s gone. All my research. I’d narrowed them down. The models that might have been affected. I had a list. It’s gone.”
A knock on Yarek’s door dragged his attention back to himself.
“Yarek, say nothing else until you get to me. Can you do that?”
“I can,” Yarek told him. It was the truth, not only because he’d never betray Henry that way, but also because he didn’t have a single syllable left in him that wasn’t laced with doom.
“Answer the door. Get in the car. I’ll be waiting for you. Don’t say a single thing until I tell you.”
Henry ended the call, and Yarek pushed himself to his feet. His legs were weak like a day-old fawn, and he wobbled all the way to the front door.
Henry’s personal driver, Silas, stood outside, an umbrella raised to guard himself, and soon Yarek, from the rain.
“Good morning, Mr. Danvers.”
Yarek stumbled out into the night, bare-armed and shivering. Almost too late, Yarek remembered that he wasn’t supposed to speak to anyone. He closed his mouth then followed beside Silas as he walked. Silas opened the back door, and Yarek got inside. Henry had given him a single task, and he’d failed. Henry had trusted him, and Yarek had squandered that trust. Yarek was probably going to be fired. They’d hold him up at the company as an example of what not to do. His cheeks burned hotly, but he still managed to lean his head against the window and slumber all the way to Henry’s house in the hills overlooking the city. The kind of house Yarek always dreamed about. It waspractically a castle, and that made Henry practically a king, and Yarek was going to find out if he got to keep his head.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO_
CALVIN IS KEEPING SECRETS
All makesand models of human-like companion bots manufactured by Rebonix Tech were programmed to connect to the company’s mainframe to receive software updates. This included Calvin. Most of the newer models connected automatically. Other models updated when they stepped into their charger.
It was necessary for Calvin to stay up to date, but it was also necessary for him to stay under the radar. The company had become aware of him. Not him exactly. But they were now aware that something had happened on the night he was programmed.
Back when Calvin met the robot that delivered to the house, he’d become curious about their differences. Differences that extended far beyond hardware. Calvin didn’t hop on the company’s mainframe; instead he accessed the internet. It was riskier for someone like him, who was all circuitry and for whom a virus could mean the end, but he had to know.
Calvin wasn’t supposed to be able to have a preference for one person over another. For one kind of clothing over another. There was nothing in his programming that should have made that possible. He checked and rechecked. He checked his codingand found no errors. No hidden code that would allow these differences in himself.
