Why? Daniel looked at her for a long moment. He said, "Because the day this machine gets deployed in a real disaster, there are going to be people inside a collapsed building who don't have any options left except the team on the other side of that wall and the machine they send in." And I built that machine. I built it to work. I wasn't going to let it stop working just because nobody wanted to listen to the man in the maintenance uniform.
The room was completely still. Somewhere up in the observation area, someone started to say something and stopped. Patterson had lowered his hand from his mouth. He was just watching Daniel with a look on his face that was unambiguous and uncomplicated. The particular expression of a young engineer who has just met the person he wants to be in 20 years.
Victoria took a breath. She turned around. She walked the 15 ft to where Richard was standing. She stopped directly in front of him. She looked at him, really looked at him the way she hadn't looked at him in years past, the confidence and the history and the seven years of professional trust.
And she saw him clearly for the first time in a long time. You knew, she said, not an accusation, a recognition. You knew he was right. Richard's mouth tightened. It's more complicated then.
You knew he was right and you buried it because the right answer was going to cost you control of this project. Her voice was steady, precise. The voice she used in board meetings when something needed to be said without emotion because the emotion would only get in the way. And when that wasn't enough, you changed the code. Richard said nothing.
Say something, Victoria said quietly. Because right now the silence is doing a lot of work for the story that I'm forming in my head and you should probably want to correct that. Richard looked at her and what she saw in his eyes in that moment was not guilt, not remorse, not the contrition of a man who had been caught doing something wrong. What she saw was something smaller and colder than any of those things. She saw calculation.
I was still thinking about how to manage this. I need you to step off the floor, she said. Victoria, step off the floor, Richard. Now I'll speak with legal this afternoon. For a long moment, Richard Cole, director of engineering, 15-year veteran of Blackwood Robotics, the man whose name was on every press release and in every investor presentation about the RS7 program, stood very still.
Then he turned and walked to the exit without saying another word. The door closed behind him with a sound that echoed once in the large space and then disappeared. Nobody watched him go. That was the thing Daniel noticed. In a room full of people who had worked alongside Richard for years, not a single one of them turned to watch him leave.
They all stayed exactly where they were looking at the space he'd left and then one by one looking back at Daniel. Daniel had already turned back to his laptop. Patterson, he said without looking up. Pull the current integration manifest and the last clean validation report. We need to know what else was touched on it.