text: "Dr. Ahuja, it's Valery. How are you? I'm afraid I have some bad news," her familiar monotone voice droned at me.
  
  "I know."
  
  "Oh… okay. Who told you?"
  
  Right. "Doesn't matter who told me. The question is why you didn't."
  
  "My apologies. We all got caught up in the events. I couldn't find the time to call you."
  
  "You had time to organize a board meeting."
  
  "We had to act fast. Reaching you would have delayed us even more."
  
  "Not good enough, Valery," I said, my voice rising. "I—"
  
  "We can either argue about this or talk about what happened," she said, cutting me off. "Jimmy Troy is in a web call waiting for us."
  
  Troy was the board Chair and Martinez's boss. He headed North America and Asia Operations, which was more than eighty percent of Halicom's manufacturing, effectively making him the company's Chief Operating Officer (the position had been unfilled for some time, after Dean Brokaw, the former COO had died under tragic circumstances). If rumors were to be believed, he was going to be formalized into the role that April, after Halicom's annual product launch event. You didn't keep someone like Troy waiting, not if you wanted to keep your job.
  
  Martinez didn't wait for my reply. "I am texting you the conference ID. See you there."
  
  Jane stared at me from the dining area, where she was nibbling at her ice-cream. "Now they want to talk," I said loudly. "Do you mind getting me my phone? It's in the bedroom on your right."
  
  Her face was pensive as she returned with the phone. "I was thinking maybe there's a reason why they left you out of the board meeting today. Same reason why they didn't talk about the tapes. They must have briefed the others separately, after I was gone."
  
  I paused my fingers on the phone, waiting for her to finish her thought.
  
  "They are playing CYA. I have a feeling they are gonna try to pin this on you."
  
  "That's the second time today someone's said that."
  
  "Then you have been warned. Don't let them bait you. Especially Valery—that uptight little bitch."
  
  "Even if you are right, I can't worry about it now. Finding out who took Raphael takes priority. Everything else is secondary."
  
  She flicked her head towards the TV. "Is it a video call? I'm not here."
  
  I connected to Halicom's secure conferencing facility with my phone and then cast the screen on the TV. I tossed the phone to Jane so that she could watch from where she was sitting, on one of the side couches, outside the viewing angle of the TV camera. I logged into the room Martinez had texted me.
  
  I was greeted with a split screen. In the right panel was an unhappy-looking Troy, squeezed into a chair several sizes too small; on the left, cleavage, framed by a dark blouse and a pinstripe suit.
  
  Martinez was bent over the camera, adjusting it. She was in the large conference room at the lab.
  
  "Jimmy is joining us from Head Office," she said, straightening. Behind her, the gleaming cherry-wood table stretched to the far end of the room. When she moved away to walk back to her chair, I saw there was another person in the room: a bespectacled, diminutive-looking Dan, assiduously studying the grain on the table. He was wearing a sweatshirt instead of his usual jacket sans tie attire; perhaps he had intended to return back home and change for work when he first got the call from Sheng. He didn't look too pleased to be there.
  
  Troy grunted by way of greeting. "We are screwed, buddy," he said. There was an edge to his voice that seemed to clarify—Actually, you are. "Homer Simpson here doesn't have a clue. I sure hope you do." Dan shrunk into himself even more. Given half a chance, I suspected he would have crawled under the table and dug a tunnel out of there.
  
  "You want me to explain how someone broke into the lab?" I said, an askance look on my face.
  
  "I want you to explain your goddamn robot!"
  
  "Jimmy, I don't know what you are talking about."
  
  "C'mon man, do I have to spell it out for you? Don't you know what happened?"
  
  "I know that the core was stolen. That's about it."
  
  Troy stabbed an angry finger at the camera. "I thought you were taking care of briefing him." To Martinez. She mumbled another apology, this time to Troy. She didn't look like she was going to lose any sleep over it though.
  
  "What's going on guys?" I said.
  
  He sneered. "Oh, you're gonna love this. Valery? Will you tell him or shall I?"
  
  "It's better if Dr. Ahuja sees the tapes for himself. Dan has extracted all the important parts." After a pause, she asked him, "Since you haven't seen them yet, perhaps you'd like to watch too?"
  
  "Sure, why not?" he growled. "It's not like I have other shit to take care of."
  
  Martinez nodded at Dan, who had now gathered enough courage to stand up. "While Dan sets it up, I have a few questions for you, Dr. Ahuja. First, I want to know what Mirall has been doing with the AI recently. Say in the last three to four weeks."
  
  I knew her question was purely for Troy's benefit. She already knew the answer—very little happened at Mirall without her knowing about it.
  
  "The last few weeks? Not much, actually. Except for running him through the occasional test, we've left him pretty much to himself."
  
  "Heh? What kind of an answer is that, not much?" Troy demanded. "You have an asset that's cost us the moon and you say you are not doing much with it?"
  
  "We talked about this, Jimmy. All our resources have been diverted to the new iteration. Design, Connectome Mapping, Heuristics, Programming, Analytics… even most of the support staff. Everyone is focused on Titian. We've even stopped doing scans on the Raphael core for some time now. No one has a minute to spare. This is what Halicom wanted, isn't it: to bet on the roulette wheel instead of letting us do proper research?"
  
  "Alright, alright, no need to drive it home," Troy said, brushing aside a lock of his unkempt hair.
  
  "What kind of records do we keep on Raphael? If I wanted an account of all his time last week, for example, do you have it?" Another question she already knew the answer to. I had a feeling all of them were going to be like that.
  
  "We log everything. All interactions with Raphael, formal and informal, are recorded on video. In addition, verbal tests and research-related talks are transcribed into plaintext files—makes it easier to search for specific content."
  
  "What about the time he is not interacting with anyone, where he is by himself? Do we keep an eye on him?"
  
  "CCTV cameras monitor the crèche area round the clock; the recordings go back to the time of his conception. There's always at least one person present with him during waking hours, which is Monday morning through Friday evening. We also run a night shift with a skeleton crew just to watch over him."
  
  "Computer usage? Does he have free access to the internet?"
  
  "Of course not. His PC is a standalone device. No wireless, no LAN, cannot connect to anything. He is only allowed offline media that's been pre-vetted by us: books, video games, movies and such."
  
  "Could he have accessed the internet some other way?"
  
  "No. The core doesn't have wireless capabilities either." I leaned forward. "Let me save you some trouble, because I see where you are going with this. I know Raphael was found in the server room. You obviously want to find out how he got there. The short answer is, not on his own."
  
  "I like your confidence buddy," Troy snickered.
  
  That didn't stop Martinez's questioning. "What happens on the weekends? Do we have staff coming in to work?"
  
  "No. If there's something super critical, people usually log in from home and get it done. Many have company-provided laptops."
  
  "Who looks after Raphael then?"
  
  "No one. We put him to sleep Friday night. Sleep, as in, shut him down completely. On Monday, we wake him up again."
  
  "Did you shut him down last Friday?"
  
  I spread out my palms in a gesture of exasperation. "Valery, do we really need to go through this?"
  
  "Answer the question, Andy," Troy said.
  
  "Yes, we shut him down last Friday. I personally checked the shutdown sequence log today, after I heard the news."
  
  "Can someone tell me why the bloody robot needs to sleep? The ones Halicom makes don't require nappy nap time," he asked.
  
  "It isn't technically sleep. More like a coma or death, actually. And Raphael's far more complex than any robot in existence. We use the downtime to run maintenance and push upgrades. Then there's cost. With him shut down, we don't have to staff the lab on the weekends."
  
  "Can he bring himself back online if he's shut down?" Martinez said.
  
  "No."
  
  "You sure of that?"
  
  I sighed, loud enough for them to hear. "It'd be like a computer starting itself up after it's been powered down and unplugged—can't happen. Moreover, the code that starts him up is not in him—it's on a different machine: a laptop. The core—Raphael's brain—can be booted only if it is physically connected to the laptop running the startup code. And as I said, the core doesn't have wireless capability, so there's no question of someone remotely starting him up."
  
  "Where do you keep this laptop?" Troy said.
  
  "The lab safe when not in use. On the off-chance someone forgot to lock it up, you'll still need the right fingerprint to access the machine. Even then, one can't simply run the startup sequence. The core is write-protected with encryption. You'll need authentication keys to remove the write protection. The keys are stored on smartcards. Only four copies of these smartcards exist. Kathy Schulz and I have one each, as does Sheng and another person from his team. For Raphael to wake himself up, he'd have to retrieve the laptop from the safe, login to the laptop with a valid fingerprint, then somehow get hold of a smart card, insert it into the laptop, connect the laptop to a port on his body, and finally, run the boot sequence. To do all of which he'd have to be awake in the first place. It's a catch-22 situation. Now, if you can just stop with the inquisition and tell me what really happened, I'll be able to h—"
  
  "See for yourself," Martinez said, cutting me short.