The inspection reports he'd submitted through official channels, 14 months of them. Each one noting degraded performance in the balance system under simulated field conditions. Each one timestamped. Each one with a digital receipt confirming delivery to the engineering department. Victoria read through them.
She didn't rush. She didn't look up. She read each one with the focused absorptive attention of someone who is learning in real time just how badly they have misread a situation. When she finally looked up, she turned to Richard. "You receive these reports," she said.
"It wasn't a question. Richard's control was starting to show its edges. I receive dozens of reports from dozens of sources. My team makes triage decisions every day about what requires immediate action and what." 14 reports. Victoria said, "Over 14 months from the same person about the same system that is now failing in front of a room full of investors." She paused.
"That's not a triage decision, Richard. That's a choice." Richard took his hands out of his pockets. He squared his shoulders, and when he spoke, his voice dropped into something harder and more honest than anything he'd said so far. The voice of a man who has decided that the performance is over. "I made a judgment call," he said.
Daniel's original protocols were overengineered. They slowed the systems response time by 11% under normal operating conditions. 11%. In a competitive demonstration environment, that difference is visible. I made a call to optimize for performance because that was what the company needed.
That was what you needed. He looked directly at Victoria. If we'd walked into this demonstration with Daniel's original code, running the robot would have looked slower than our competitor's systems. And you would have lost the contract before you ever started the pitch. The silence that followed was a different kind of silence because he wasn't entirely wrong and everyone in the room who understood the industry knew it.
Daniel let that sit for 3 seconds. Then he said, "You removed a fail safe to make the machine look better in a rescue robot, a machine that's going to be deployed in collapsed buildings with people inside them." Richard said nothing. An 11% reduction in response time in a normal operating environment means a 3-second delay at maximum load. That 3-second delay is what keeps a 2,000lb rescue robot from losing balance when a floor gives way under it. Daniel's voice was still level, still controlled.
But there was something underneath it now. Not anger exactly, but the close, dense cousin of it, conviction. You didn't optimize the system, Richard. You made it look safe without making it safe. And you buried the reports of the one person who knew the difference.
Patterson made a sound, not quite a word, just an involuntary exhale, and put his hand over his mouth. One of the senior engineers near the perimeter of the room, a woman named Dr. Sarah Wyn, who had been with the company for 11 years and had always been careful about which hills she chose to stand on, looked at Richard with an expression she had clearly been composing for a long time and had never before had the context to show. Richard looked around the room. He looked at Victoria.